She twisted the dress in her hands and stretched her arms to the floor, covering the cotton knickers she had exposed and had also been wearing for days. She screwed her nose up, and in spite of herself and ongoing predicament, she smiled.
“Bloody nightmares,” she told herself. “I only have them after I’ve eaten too much.”
She got up slowly and stepped carefully through the glass. After a quick peek, she opened the cabin door and walked to the adjacent ensuite. Surprisingly the door was unlocked, and she speedily relieved herself, then stripped her stained and soiled garments. She put her underware into hot soapy water in the hand basin, and took her dress into the little fibreglass shower unit of the compact bathroom. She hoped the lateness of the hour would render the little noise she made as insignificant as the waves she could vaguely hear lapping at the beach over the road. She scrubbed at her dress, and stood for a time allowing the water to cascade through her hair and down her body. The thought crossed her mind that she would soon run out of hot water. She reached out to turn off the hot water – it wouldn’t move. But the water flow totally ceased when she turned off the cold tap. She stood still, feeling the warm droplets sliding down her body and dripping to the cold tiles beneath her feet, then placed her palms against her own bare belly. The warmth immediately transferred itself through her hands and up her arms and shoulders. She shook her head, her hair almost totally dry. She wrung out her dress and was sure there were steam vapours rising from the fabric, but couldn’t be certain in the darkness. She slipped the nearly dry garment over her head and ran her fingers through her hair. She was no longer surprised that it was dry.
“More efficient than a clothes and hair dryer combined,” she whispered to herself, and again in spite of everything she giggled.
She rinsed her under garments a number of times and squeezed them dry, holding both to her belly before slipping her legs into warm and dry knickers, tucking her bra into a dress pocket. The sudden cessation of feeding Tricia had a noticeable effect. Her breasts were already too small for the bra. A brief vision from the nightmare returned. She cupped her breasts and slumped to the cool concrete floor. She missed her baby so much, and she sobbed. She knew Brett would be coping with Tricia but theirs had been such a total partnership. Their whole lives revolved around the other, but what she didn’t know was how he was coping without her.
She felt the heat again rising in her belly, and sprung up from the floor. The desire to see her husband and her baby, or at the very least contact them and make sure they were alright became paramount. She opened the door of the ensuite and stepped out, mind focussed totally on finding a public phone. A shadow moved on her left. The shuffling of shoes on concrete alerted her to danger. She swept her arm in the direction of the sound and movement, connecting with a solid lump that seemed to leap backward and crash bodily into the (empty) cabin beside hers before sliding prone onto the grass and laying still.
“Mrs Curtis, please, I’m here to help. I’m Foster Barnes.”
Chapter 17
“Gotcha”
“I asked your friend Rob if he could mount extra patrols tonight around where the last phone call came from.”
“You really think she’ll go back there?”
“She might. Three days now since she’s seen home and hearth.”
“You think she might go home?”
“At the very least try and contact them. She must be missing them terribly and she’ll want to express her innocence to the one person in the world that might listen to her. And her daughter is very young. As a new mother, I don’t think we can begin to understand how Vivienne must feel about leaving her daughter for so long.”
“Her husband?”
“Right, she badly needs to know by now that her daughter is okay and that he is handling everything. But most of all, most of all I think she’ll want to know that he believes in her still. Her home phone is tapped so one way or the other we are going to find out how much she misses them both.”
“There’s the other caravan park you wanted to drive by boss.”
“Excellent, slow down.”
“You want me to go in?”
“No, keep going, just slowly. Can we circle around it?”
The two-metre high chain mail fence appeared incongruous in the neighbourhood of multi-million dollar apartments and penthouses, as did the conglomeration of cabins and caravans behind the fence framed by the soaring high rises.
“Enough?”
“Yeah, thanks Pete, now back to the truck; I’ve got some testing to do.”
“The veggie soup?”
“Yeah right, okay, you can go grab something while I’m working. Get testy when you’re hungry don’t you big boy?”
“Me ol’ Mum used to say the same thing boss.”
“That was just before you ate her right, for being late with your dinner one night?”
“Not my Mum, she’d ‘ave been too tough even for me.”
They returned to the pantech, Pete slipped off to grab dinner and Barnes opened a section of cabinets containing a mini laboratory. The testing equipment connected to the huge computer system self contained within the pantech. As he worked, Barnes listened to the continuing Police chatter from the overhead speakers. He placed the final test fluids into the computer for analysis and unconsciously registered the sound of the door code and scanner. The results flashed onto a computer monitor and overlaid his base graph, the colours and densities melding almost perfectly. He grunted in satisfaction and Pete entered the pantech to see a rare grin from his foreign colleague.
“Looking good then?”
“Better than good Pete, better than good.”
Pete took the comment as an understatement, judging from the look of self-satisfaction on Barnes’ face. It was the first time he had seen Barnes almost happy in the two days since they’d arrived. He was almost sorry to have to ruin it. In forty-eight hours Barnes had impressed Pete with a rare combination of ability and judgement, backed up with an inane knowledge of his subject that Pete found almost supernatural.
Barnes was also the first person in two years to understand the workings of the multimillion-dollar pantech the Federal Police held in secret storage. Apart from routine service technicians cleared to appropriate levels of National Security, Peter was the sole custodian of the entire rig, and the only person permitted to enter the pantech area of the vehicle. He was smug about finally seeing it in operation, and immensely proud that so far it had not disappointed. He was about to disappoint Barnes though.
“Eh, Foster?”
“What is it?”
It was the first time that Pete had used Barnes’ Christian name when addressing him. Barnes knew it must be important. He also knew it couldn’t be good.
“Eh, well, we don’t have any backup, for later. Tonight.” Foster Barnes kept studying his lab findings and Pete assumed it was his way of controlling his temper. “Yeah, um Rob, the Super, is spitting chips. He apologises, but with people off