Her Back Against the Wood

The tea was still too hot to drink. Wendy Cramer had set it on the coaster beside her recliner and had only just begun to let her aching back find the right shape in the cushion when the headlights came up the driveway.

A small, unwelcome sense of déjà vu brushed across her before the car had come to a full stop. She went to the front window and nudged the blinds apart with one finger, and the breath she had been holding came out of her in a single hard syllable when she saw who was sitting in the driver's seat.

Three years. She had not seen Detective Karl Jenkins's face in three years. The last time he had been in her driveway, it had taken Brett twenty minutes of shouting in a residential street to make him leave, and even then Wendy had stood at this same window and watched him reverse out of it with the slow disbelief of a woman whose anger had been too big for the moment to contain. The car in the driveway tonight was the same car. The man in it was the same man. The anger, it turned out, was still available to her where she had left it.

Brett's voice came from the direction of his own recliner, half-asleep, asking if she was alright. He had not opened his eyes. Wendy did not answer him. What was about to come up her front path was not a thing Brett could help her with tonight, and if he did not open his eyes she did not have to decide whether to tell him what it was.

She made for the hallway.

The knock, when it came, was softer than she had expected — three timid raps that arrived at the door with none of the certainty she remembered from three years ago. It did not change what she was going to do. She took hold of the handle and she pulled the door wide enough for Karl Jenkins to see her face, and the two words she had been holding on the back of her tongue for three years came out of her mouth without her having to decide on them.

She was already closing the door when his hand came up to stop it.

What followed lasted perhaps ten seconds and was a physical contest rather than a conversation. Wendy Cramer — sixty years old, five foot three, with a lumbar spine that had been a small private problem of hers for the last decade — held the door against a man a foot taller than her by the simple expedient of having decided, before he knocked, that she was not going to be the one to lose. Karl pushed. Wendy pushed back. Through the gap he said her daughter's name. He said the word urgent, and for the length of half a breath something in Wendy that knew urgency when she heard it — thirty years of children in her classroom, thirty years of the specific pitch that told you a small person was in real trouble rather than the ordinary kind — recognised the voice on her porch as one that belonged to a man who was not lying about it.

She did not open the door.

She eased her weight against it for the half-breath the voice had bought, long enough to hear what she had heard, and then she pushed the door the last of the way shut while Karl was still leaning into the space the half-breath had left him, and the deadbolt slid home under her hand with a small mechanical finality that she felt in the base of her spine as a thin hot line of pain.

She pressed her back against the painted wood. She stayed there.

The question that rose in her chest as her breath came back was not one she had the full answer to. She did not know what Beatrix had got herself into this time. She knew only that Beatrix had not returned her last two phone calls, and that the last time Gladys had sat at her kitchen table Gladys had looked like a woman who had started on the wine earlier than she used to. Wendy had been a mother to these two for thirty-three years. She knew the weather of them. The weather had been turning bad for some time, and tonight the weather had a detective on it, and the door at her back was not going to be the last one she had to close this week.

Out on the front path, Karl Jenkins was walking slowly back to his car with his shoulder complaining and his migraine climbing into full occupation of the right side of his head. The compulsion that had driven him here from the Entertainment Centre carpark had not been loosened by the closed door. If anything, it had grown. He reached the car and put his hand on the handle, and then — for no reason he could have given if someone had asked him — he looked back at the house.

For perhaps half a second, he thought he saw a figure at the upstairs window.

It was taller than Wendy. It was standing back from the glass, behind the curtains, in a way that made it more a displacement of light than a shape — there, and then possibly not there, with no clean edge to confirm or deny it. Karl's exhausted brain offered him, in that half-second, the thing it had been reaching for since Myrtle Forest: that the figure was Beatrix, that Wendy had lied, that the compulsion which had pulled him here had been pointing at something real. He looked again. The angle of the streetlight had shifted. The curtains were drawn tight. Whatever had been at the window, if anything had been at the window, was no longer there.

He could not have said with any confidence that he had seen a person at all.

He got into his car. He did not start the engine. He rested his forehead against the cool leather of the steering wheel, because the migraine had begun to pulse in time with his heartbeat and because he did not, in this moment, know where else in the city of Hobart a man like him was supposed to go.

Inside the house, Wendy Cramer pushed off the front door with the small involuntary wince of a woman whose lumbar spine had not been designed for bracing against anyone. She went back to the living room, where Brett had drifted the rest of the way into sleep with the newspaper still folded across his lap. She picked up the cold cup of tea from the coaster beside her own recliner and took it to the kitchen and tipped it down the sink without tasting it, and she stood at the bench with her hands on the edge of it and her head bowed for longer than she meant to, because she was not in the mood now for any of the small domestic comforts she had been promising herself at the start of the evening.