Page 59 of A Home Among the Snow Gums
‘And how sad was she?How sad?’
‘Josh, mate. She was crying, very upset when I found her, but we had a two-hour car ride. She’d calmed down.’
Josh was pacing and barely listening. ‘And you just left her there?’
‘Yeah. I just left her there after she slammed the door in my face because she didn’t want me to hover.’
‘Christ almighty. I’m forty minutes away and she’s got the keys to a goddamn drugs cabinet.’
‘What the fuck are you saying?’
‘She didn’t tell you the whole story, did she?’
Tom’s guts tensed. ‘What didn’t she tell me?’
‘That stupid picture isn’t the reason Hannah hides away here in Hanrahan. It’s what happened later.’
He forced himself to ask the question. ‘What happened later?’
‘Sleeping tablets. A whole stack of them, followed by getting her stomach pumped and a month in the hospital while the Cody family fell apart.’ The break in Josh’s voice was too much.
‘Mate, she’s the strongest, most bloody-minded person I know. She was sad, yes, but she’s not going to do anything foolish.’
‘And how the fuck would you know, Tom?’
Good question. But he had a good answer. ‘Because she asked me to trust her that she wouldn’t.’
Josh was already on his phone. ‘Vera’s at my place, and I’ve a master key to the whole building in the fruit bowl. I’ll ask her to run upstairs to Hannah’s flat.’
‘Let me drive you. Your hands are shaking, mate.’
‘No, I … anyway, what about Buttercup? I—’ Josh held his hand up as his phone connected. ‘Vee, honey, can you go upstairs and check on Han? Something’s upset her, just get yourself in there somehow and make her a hot water bottle or something. Oh, and socks. She loves fluffy socks. I’m on my way but I’ll be forty minutes.’ He was silent for a moment, his brow furrowed. ‘Love you too, Vera.’
Tom caught his eye. ‘I’ll come with you.’
‘Mate. This is family business. She won’t want me dragging you into it.’
Family business. Well, that certainly put him in his place. He wasn’t part of Hannah’s family. He was barely part of his own.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Go.’
As the sound of Josh’s boots faded into the night, Tom slid down the wall to the straw of the stable floor and lay very, very still. Hannah was fine—he had to believe that. No, hedidbelieve that. Hannahwasthe strongest person he knew and she could look after herself.
As for himself? Really, what did it matter?
The stable didn’t smell right.
The hay had turned to ozone and the floorboards had turned to ocean and the temperature had plummeted to ice. The wind was wrong, too—it didn’t have the scent of eucalypts or horses or snow in it; instead it screamed across black waves, turning the rain to salt, and within seconds he was drenched and his heart was pounding and he could barely see through his helmet.
There was a high-speed chase vessel beneath his feet and six sailors—a Turk, a couple of Glaswegians, three blokes from Bahrain—muscled in beside him as the rubber-walled attack craft cut through the ugly swell towards a fully laden Norwegian oil tanker.
Christ. It was the dream again, the one where he got to relive the bullet that struck a bulkhead next to him and drove an inch-long sliver of rusted steel so deep through his hip and back it near cut him in half. He was having it more and more often.
The guy at the helm was yelling over the engine noise: ‘Starboard side’s gonna have us to windward, sir. It’ll be a rough connect while we get the hookup.’
The images were just flashes in Tom’s head: hurtling over rough water; shooting grappling hooks up the steel hull of an oil tanker; he and his men disappearing like dark shadows over the rail and onto the deck below.
A whinny jolted Tom out of the Persian Gulf and back into the present. Those painkillers he’d taken had packed a punch. ‘Easy girl,’ he muttered to Buttercup. ‘I’m right here.’
