The Forest's Held Breath

The Myrtle Forest does not yield ground; it absorbs it. By the time Karl Jenkins and Sarah Lahey have pushed a quarter-hour past the place where Gladys Cramer's bracelet caught the light in the bank clay, the trail behind them has already begun to forget the shape of their boots. Rain fills the prints. Leaf-litter sifts back over them. The forest has been doing this work since before there were boots to forget, and it does it with the unbothered patience of a system that recognises no urgency.

The trees here are old in the particular way Tasmanian rainforest is old — not tall and theatrical, but dense, low, intricate. Myrtle beech crowds in close to the path, its small dark leaves shedding water in heavy beads. Sassafras leans across openings the wallabies have made and never quite use. Tree-ferns rise out of the understorey like the unfurled hands of something half-buried. The canopy filters the storm into a slower, fatter rain that finds the seams in oilskin no matter how the cuffs are tucked, no matter how the collar is held.

It is the kind of country that forgives nothing and accuses no one.

The two detectives move along the track in single file, Sarah in front, Karl two strides behind. They have been walking like this since the bracelet — since the moment Sarah closed her fist around the silver chain and turned for the trees without looking back to see whether Karl would follow. Sarah's stride is the shorter and the more determined. Karl's is the longer and the more reluctant. The gap between them widens, then narrows, then widens again, the geometry of an argument neither of them is having out loud.

A wedge of cold rolls down off the ridge above. Their breath begins to show. Somewhere in the canopy a currawong calls once, and the call sounds wrong — too close, too late in the day — and is not answered.

Sarah is following Gladys. That much she will say if anyone asks her later: a woman with a sprained wrist and a bottle of wine and the wrong shoes, half a kilometre ahead through bush she clearly believes she knows, footprints pressed into the trail with the deliberate cant of someone heading for a remembered place rather than running blind. There is enough in that to justify pursuit. There is more than enough in the silver bracelet still curled in Sarah's coat pocket to justify ignoring the part of her training that says two officers should not be doing this without backup, in this weather, on this trail, alone.

Karl is following Sarah. That is the part of the afternoon Sarah has not yet noticed, and the part Karl is unwilling to examine too closely even in the privacy of his own head. He is not following Gladys. He has not been following Gladys since the cubicle. He saw something in the cubicle that the rest of his career as a Tasmanian police officer has not prepared him to file a report about — half a second of long silver hair caught in a torch beam, framed in colours that the inside of a public toilet block has no business producing — and he has spent every step since trying to walk himself back to the version of the afternoon in which that did not happen. Sarah's trail through the trees is something he can hold on to. Sarah herself is something he can hold on to. Whatever lies ahead at the end of the bracelet's logic is something else entirely, and he does not want her to reach it before he has worked out what it is.

When Sarah finally stops, it is not at any landmark. There is no clearing, no fallen tree, no obvious turning. She simply stops, and the forest absorbs her stillness as readily as it has been absorbing her footprints. Karl stops too, a beat later, and for a long moment the only sound between them is the slow, irregular percussion of water finding its way down through three layers of leaves.

What passes between Karl and Sarah in the next several minutes does not appear in either of their notebooks. There are no witnesses except the trees, and the trees have been witnesses to so much over so many centuries that one more small human reckoning barely registers in their slow accounting. Karl says her name, and Sarah does not turn. He says it again, more sharply, and something in the way he says it — the fraying at the edge of it — turns her around at last. Whatever Karl sees in Sarah's face stops him mid-sentence. Whatever she sees in his stops her mid-defence.

The rain eases. Not by much, and not for long, but for a span of perhaps several minutes the canopy stops its dripping and the wind drops out of the upper branches and the forest becomes, briefly, almost silent. It is the sort of pause Tasmanian bushwalkers learn to recognise and not to trust — the lull before the next front rolls through off the Southern Ocean. But for those minutes the lull is real, and in those minutes two officers of Tasmania Police, sodden to the skin and miles from anything that could properly be called help, stand pressed together on a track that is no longer a track, holding each other for reasons that have very little to do with the woman whose bracelet started all of this and almost everything to do with the things neither of them is yet willing to say out loud.

When the rain returns, it returns harder. The currawong calls again, and again is not answered. Somewhere ahead, where the trail thins to suggestion and then to nothing, Gladys Cramer is making her way toward a creek her childhood promised her would still be there. She is no closer to being caught than she first entered the forest. But something else has happened in the held breath between two downpours, and Karl and Sarah both know it, and neither of them will speak of it on the walk back out.

The forest, indifferent, lets them go.