‘You’re supposed to be gifted,’ I said dryly, tapping the bottom of the screen. What had been dark green in the photographic view had morphed into a dull, pale-green sward, cut through by a thin ribbon of blue.
‘Water,’ Jordan whispered, astonished.
‘Merri Creek,’ I muttered. ‘And a train line runs right through the area.’
I pointed out Rushall Station. And the string of little stations that ran north above it.
‘There are more,’ I said, excitedly pointing to the east of the image. ‘A different train line, that intersects with the other one, once you hit Clifton Hill. They all look like small, unmanned stations. Just like the one I saw. Completely deserted in the dark. You could imagine trains going straight through them in the night—express, no stops.’
Jordan fumbled for the list of Kellys again and peered intently at the address details for lucky contestant number seven.
‘There should be a little marker,’ I reminded him breathlessly, ‘pinpointing the guy’s exact location.’
I broke out in goose bumps when Jordan found it. A narrow grey train track cut straight through the heart of that person’s street and the marker stood right alongside the point of intersection. The Northcote C. Kelly lived in a house next to a railway line.
I hugged myself, feeling chilled. ‘This is the one,’ I muttered. ‘Bring up the house. I want to see it.’
Back in satellite view, we studied the magnified image of a faded blue, single-storey, Victorian timber place with a picket fence in a matching blue and a pocket-sized front garden that faced onto a narrow street packed with houses of a similar condition and calibre. I grabbed control of the mouse off Jordan and angled up and down the street, clicking to bring myself closer to the railway crossing that was just uphill from the front of the property.
As I looked up and down the tracks, mentally overlaying the things I’d seen with the static daylight images on the screen, my body went colder. I zoomed back out and stared at the surrounding area.
‘Any of the streets to the east of that one could take you down to Merri Creek. If it was dark, and you were scared and running, it would be easy to lose your way and forget where the main drags are and get lost in all the bush around there…’
I circled an area at the bottom of the screen with a shaky finger.
Jordan seemed to come to some sort of decision and drew my hands down so that his face was inches from mine. ‘No heroics. It’s almost midnight. We’ll tackle it in daylight, okay? And I’ll tell plenty of people where we’re going in case Carter Kelly turns out to be another one of Eve’s psycho exes.’
He rested his forehead against mine and I closed my eyes.
‘You’re tired and I’m tired,’ he murmured, ‘and we’re not going to start this now when she’s here, muddying everything, watching over us. But we will start it. We have already. Something from nothing. A fricken miracle.’
He gave me a feather-light kiss before pushing himself up out of my chair and leaving my room so quickly and quietly that all I could discern, through my still closed eyelids, was the sound of the door snicking shut behind him.
14
The sound was repetitive, insistent. Electronic? But, still, I refused to let go of sleep.
I’d been dreaming of something that had turned into the sound of this…thing.
It fell silent, and I felt myself relax back down, digging for the remnants of the dream—Dad and me, as a kid. At a lavender farm high on a hill that had every flower you could imagine growing there, with a glimpse of the ocean shining at its boundaries. I’d forgotten that place. He’d been leading me by the hand, wanting to show me something and I’d wanted to see, to see—
But then, a bare second later, the buzzing started again.
Cracking my eyelids open at last, I fell out of bed onto my knees and lunged upwards, feeling for the insistent, buzzing shape on my desk.
The fluorescent face of my alarm clock said it was 2.33am. I found myself holding Jordan’s trembling mobile in my hand because he’d left it in here, along with his beat-up leather jacket, still slung over the back of my chair.
I hadn’t dreamt him up then. He really was right down the hall.
I picked up the call, muttered: ‘Hello?’
‘Sophie?’ The voice on the end of the line was warm. Seductive. Male. Devastating, with a hint of something. French, maybe? I’m no good with accents.
I cleared my throat. ‘Uh, this is Jordan’s phone.’ It struck me a second later, still foggy from sleep. ‘How’d you know my name?’
The stranger laughed, and it sent shivers straight down my spine. ‘Charmian—Jordan’s mother—told me you’d be together. You sound intriguing, Sophie.’
As usual my brain ran ahead of my mouth. ‘I don’t feel intriguing. Do you know what time it is? Want me to get him? He’s asleep.’
The man on the other end chuckled, and I coloured instantly, even though he couldn’t see me.
‘Um, not in here,’ I gabbled. ‘I meant, ah, Jordan’s sleeping, but in another room altogether. Down the hall. I can get him. If you want.’
I sounded like a five-year-old with poor linguistic abilities.
‘Please, Sophie,’ the man drawled, ‘if you would. I need to talk to him. I have a message. I can’t say that I understand it, but it’s very urgent.’
‘Uh, okay.’
I pushed my door open and peered down the hall, feeling the hairs on my body rising at the sight of Room 3 in the distance, the winking jukebox beyond it.
A man had died in that room and was still, by all accounts, residing there. My God, what had my life come to?
Thankfully, Jordan had chosen a room down the other way, between my room and Gran’s, and I didn’t have to walk past the Orange Room in the dark.
I still had Jordan’s phone pressed to my ear and was feeling around for my oversized bunny slippers with my toes, when the stranger said again, ‘Sophie?’
I jumped and almost dropped the phone. There was warmth in his voice still, but also a steely edge in his next words.
‘Get him, please? Hurry.’
Flustered, I murmured, ‘Hold on a minute, okay?’ and shuffled out my door.
As I made my way down the cold hallway, I heard the fat, muted blat blat of a Harley moving down the street. Dad had had one to the end, and I recognised the peculiar timbre of its engine, that underlying threat of power. It must have done a U-turn, because I heard it circling outside then go back the way it had come, before the sound faded out of hearing.
I reached Jordan’s door and tapped tentatively. Even though Gran generally slept like a woman in a coma, all that separated his room from hers was a tiled, 1970s-era bathroom redolent of the electric blue of peacock feathers. If I ever did work up enough nerve to put the moves on Jordan Haig, it wasn’t going to happen within spitting distance of Gran, or The Star. Nothing could be less romantic than this place. It was home, but it was falling apart. Dad just saw it through rose-coloured glasses, and when he was alive, we had too.
Nothing stirred behind the door so, still knocking, I pushed it open slowly, hissing in the direction of the lum
p on the bed, ‘Jordan? Jordan? Phone call. Urgent.’
There was a creak of bedsprings at last, and Jordan trailed out of the darkness into the doorway. He was yawning and wearing a white V-necked T-shirt and black boxers and nothing else, his dark hair standing on end like ruffled quills.
I held his phone out to him as if he were mildly contagious, and shuffled back out of reach, just in case Gran had her beady eye planted in the crack of her doorway.
‘Phone,’ I repeated nervously, telling myself to look away, look away from the long, bare, muscular expanse of his legs. It wasn’t helping that I was standing here in a pair of blue flannel pyjamas with pink and purple smiling cats printed on them, a couple of large, stuffed rabbits on my feet, my hair a ginger explosion.
Jordan glanced at the phone in his hand blearily then held it up to his ear.
‘Hello?’ His voice was sleep-roughened and uncertain.
Quite clearly, I heard the man on the line say, ‘Jordan?’
Jordan’s dark eyebrows shot up and he looked at me in concern, every trace of sleepiness gone. ‘Daughtry? What are you doing back? And why are you calling now?’
I saw Jordan’s gaze go to the street-facing windows behind my back, then sharpen. ‘Is it Mum? Is she in trouble? Is that why you’re calling?’
Daughtry’s answering laugh was faintly quizzical. ‘No, no, nothing like that, my friend, she’s very well. We just spoke. No, I called for you. There is a message; it is urgent, I think. You must stay down. Does that make sense? That you must get down, get out of the way?’
There was a sudden mechanical roar; like a jumbo jet was taking off out the front of The Star. A sustained rumbling you could almost feel going up through the walls and floorboards.
Jordan moved towards me, instinctively, still holding the phone to his ear. But I stood stock still, recognising the sound because I’d only just heard it. It was the sound of a Harley; only magnified. There were lots of them, I realised, moving down Sancerre Street in formation, going fast, engines revving.
Jordan’s eyes flew to mine and he dropped the phone, pulling me to him so fiercely that he fell over backwards onto the floor, with me sprawled across his body.
I felt the breath leave him in a whoosh and heard Daughtry’s voice, small and tinny, shouting: ‘Jordan? Jordan!’ a split second before shots rang out.
All the windows along the face of our hotel shattered inwards, filling the air where I’d just been standing with the smell of gunpowder and rain, and the sound of Gran screaming my name.
The police interviews—conducted in the Public Bar with appropriate refreshments—took hours.
‘Daughtry can be our backup when we go see Carter Kelly,’ Jordan had insisted as the police had finished up their search of Sancerre Street and the surrounding neighbourhood and indicated that they wished to speak with me.
‘You think that’s wise?’ I hissed out the side of my mouth, as a large man in dark blue crooked an index finger at me. ‘He’s just one guy.’
‘Who can handle himself and every man, woman or unquiet spirit you could hope to come across,’ Jordan shot back. ‘You have to see Daughtry to understand what I’m talking about. He knows stuff, I’m telling you. He has skills. That sharpened stick he wears in his hair? He knows how to use it on people. I’ve seen him. A couple of drunks took Daughtry and me on one night in the street and he, I dunno, disabled them with it. Smashed the end of it into one man’s collarbone, hit some pressure points in the other dude’s head and neck and he went down and stayed down. I didn’t even have time to react and we were already walking away.’
I shook my head in disbelief.
‘Eve wants it this way,’ Jordan insisted. ‘Us handling it. She came to you. She didn’t go to them.’ He nodded at the waiting police officers who were finishing up with Gran and her take on events.
‘I’m betting that when she was alive,’ Jordan added, ‘Eve wouldn’t have gone near the police if she could help it. We “gathered” the shirt, just as she wanted, and now we hand it over to Carter Kelly. That’s all the orders we have. If there’s anything else, Daughtry’s back in town. He can handle Eve, and the cops can do the rest, and we bow out, having done all we humanly can.’
‘And if the drop-off goes bad?’ I’d said sourly, ‘we’ll either be dead or need witness protection from the Reavers and their associates. The Reavers drink at the Maximus Lounge, Roman said as much. Which means that Roman must have told O’Loughlin we paid a visit, and this is the way they return a favour.’
‘At least we’ll be together,’ Jordan had murmured with a crooked smile as I took a seat beside Gran. ‘Look at the positives.’
Jordan adjusted the sleeves on his leather jacket carefully, so that his arms were covered up past his wrists, before taking the seat beside mine on the other side. ‘Boyfriend,’ he responded so confidently to the officers’ looks of enquiry that the word did terrible things to my heart.
‘We’ll get to you later, chief,’ said the officer who’d introduced himself to me earlier as Senior Constable Ben Ferguson. He was tall, square-shouldered and square-jawed, clean-shaven with cropped curly brown hair and blue eyes. If he wasn’t a policeman, and kind of old, I would have described him as fairly hot. The other one was a ranga like me, lean-built, with bad acne scars all over his narrow face and watchful brown eyes. He looked like a fifteen-year-old who’d stolen someone’s uniform as a joke.
The two men made me go back through the Crime Stoppers stuff, everything: what I was doing out at all those places, how I could even have known about them. They even called the cops I’d spoken with each of the other times, trying to link it all together with what had gone down overnight at The Star.
Of course, any idiot could tell you none of it was remotely believable; even though it was all true.
And the whole time, Jordan held my hand, tight, and I never breathed a word about what he could do. Or about Eve, who was the link.
I just kept insisting it was visions. I’d just suddenly started having visions. I even told them the date and the time when it all began, what song I’d been listening to. I even tumbled to the ghostly visitation when I was five: the man in the plaid shirt, jeans and boots, gleaming in the darkness. I’d felt Jordan’s shock in the sudden crushing pressure he’d applied to my hand. It was the first time I’d told the story to anyone.
‘You’ve been holding out on me,’ he said in a low, strained voice.
‘Nothing normal about me,’ I’d murmured in agreement as the police concluded that the common link was me—not Eve, no mention made of dead strippers—the way I meant them to.
Jordan and I hadn’t had much time to talk since we’d hit the decks and gotten showered in a tonne of glass. But we had no proof Keith O’Loughlin and the Reavers had been behind tonight’s drive by aeration of The Star’s 142-year-old façade. We’d hastily agreed that pointing fingers in his direction would only get us definitively killed, as opposed to nearly. Because tonight had been a warning: to stop digging around in the business of a deranged man, and walk away.
After I was done talking, Ferguson leaned back in his chair, folding his arms across his big, broad chest, and told Gran without a hint of irony: ‘You’ve got a special girl, here. And excep
ting the childhood…incident, she’s had no history of these, eh, visions until about a month ago, you say?’
Gran nodded, confounded.
‘I had no idea,’ she said, flustered, ‘truly. She never said. But it explains a lot.’
She turned and looked at me, her heart in her eyes, sitting there so tense it looked like she might snap in half.
The two police officers gazed around the Public Bar. ‘Bit of a pile to run, I imagine,’ said Constable Watts, the ranga, staring up at the ceiling. ‘But it’s got a solid rep, this place. A few drunk and disorderlies from time to time. But nothing like this has ever happened before…?’
Gran shook her head, face crumpling. ‘It was my late husband’s dream,’ she said. ‘And we honour dreams in this family, even if it means getting shot up. Keeping this place going…he wouldn’t have wanted to be remembered any other way. It’s how I keep him close.’
Jordan squeezed my hand and I squeezed Gran’s and she nodded, still staring at her knees sightlessly. She’d put her dingy grey and pink tracksuit on over her short yellow nightie, and her blonde, spiky hair looked like a rat’s nest. But her posture was stiff and straight, like a queen’s.
Both officers cleared their throats, turning back to me.
Constable Watts narrowed his dark eyes shrewdly. ‘Working on anything now? Anything, say, that would get up the noses of an outlaw bikie gang?’
I felt sick as Gran clutched my fingers tight enough to cut off my circulation. ‘Soph?’ she breathed.
I turned and looked at her—could see her thinking about Dad and his past connections, the troubles, as she called the period preceding Joss’ hasty return to the fold with a ready-made family.
But after a moment she let go of my hand and sat on, saying nothing. All I knew, from what I’d ever managed to get out of Mum, was that no man ever ‘left’ the Reavers. It’s the brotherhood you take to your grave, she had laughed once, almost giddy with relief. But your dad managed to get out. And it was bad, the getting out, but he did it and here we are!