Vivienne. Just an ordinary suburban housewife… no more

“You’re excited boss. You think it was her?”

Barnes ignored him and walked around to the rear of the shops. He walked over to the dumpsters. Underneath a bag of garbage, he found yesterday’s newspaper on top of a carrot bag full of crushed cans, food remains and two flattened milk cartons. He extracted an onion with a single bite mark and left the remainder. The onion followed the celery stalk into its own little plastic bag.

“What are we doing boss.”

“She was here Pete, she was here. She found the newspaper here too with the headline article about her, and that’s what made her ring last night looking for me. I had them trace this mornings phone call but I forgot to ask about the one last night. I bet it came from around here somewhere.”

“How can you know that? It looks to me like someone just stocked their pantry, larder.”

“They didn’t, she didn’t, she ate it all on the spot. Look at the onion man, how famished must she have been to bite into that?”

“Still doesn’t mean it was her.”

“No matter, c’mon, let’s get to the next trailer park.”

“Van park, caravan park we call “em.”

The Manager of this park was a nonchalant fellow, and drawled in an accent that Barnes could almost equate to the mid-west back home. The major difference was Barnes could have understood someone from the mid-west. He gathered enough of the gist from the man’s painfully slow observations to recognise that it had to be Vivienne. His excitement grew by the minute with each new discovery. The Manager stood aside after showing them the van in question, a broken lock the only visible damage.

“Okay, now I’m beginning to see the connection. She’s neat, like a good housewife would be expected to be. She even made the bed. And you see over the vacant lot there,” Pete pointed, “is the Franklins store she escaped from.”

“She never slept in the bed,” Barnes stated matter of factly, and he knew without looking where the shopping centre was. He’d already made a mental note from the map back in the pantech at Police Headquarters, dismissing it at the time. He was certain the Police search would have included such an obvious location, even though it was not documented in the report. “She slept on the floor.”

Pete looked at him sceptically. “I know you know that boss, but why would she do it when there’s a perfectly good bed to sleep on right beside her, and how can you be so goddammed sure that’s what she did?”

“I just know Pete, trust me, I know. Drive me past the other trailer park on the way back to the truck will you? I want to see if it fits her comfort zone. Then I need to do some analysis on the food from the takeout.”

“You gonna make veggie soup with it? I’m famished. You eaten?”

“You, we can grab a burger on the way back to the truck. Or you’ll have plenty of time afterward – before the stakeout.”

Chapter Sixteen. “Nightmare”

The brightly lit ceiling flared and made it difficult to see. The smell was antiseptic, strong antiseptic, and it too hurt her eyes. She squinted and tried to turn her head. She now felt and recognised motion from features that passed by against similarly brightly lit walls. Glistening stainless steel water fountains, lowset sinks, blindingly white uniforms, lots of voices, close, talking low, the almost constant orders barked from overhead speakers, the chirp as the p.a. system cut in and off, and the swing of IV lines.

“I’m not sick,” she yelled but couldn’t hear her own voice except as screams inside her head. She strained to look at her body, the swelling of her small breasts inside the green hospital smock, almost the same size before she’d had Tricia. She closed her eyes but the bright light remained painful even behind screwed up eyelids. When she opened them again, her breasts were like mountains tinged by sunset. A light seemed to emanate from her torso. It radiated and enriched everything it touched with a soft glow that was much more preferable to the loud hallway fluorescents. An IV line swung into sight. The clear tube suffused with the bright rainbow colours from her torso, then it swung away again to blandness. It came into view again and she lifted her arm to see where it entered, to ensure it was the rainbow she absorbed, not the bland. Her arm wouldn’t move more than a few inches and she frowned, trying again to lift her head to see why.

A voice, distinct finally, came from in front of her, above her. A voice that was piloting the gurney on which she lay, the voice of control, not the p.a. voice, not one of the creeping minions of voices that suffused across the abhorrently bright corridor. It was the voice in charge.

“Lay still Mrs Curtis. The Doctors are waiting. Everything is going to be alright.”

Vivienne screamed the scream where no sound passed her lips, her arms and legs immoveable, restrained, her head almost as secure. The gurney bowled along the never-ending hallway of bright light and unsourced voices. In panic she managed to bend her knees slightly and raise her torso, her neck straining the bond across her forehead as she strove to see her surrounds. The pent up scream finally escaped her enraged mouth in a long and intense howl that shattered the lighting for twenty feet. The scream failed, dying with her breath, followed by a golden silence that was reverent, as supernatural in its suddenness as the hallway had been long and severe in its illumination.

She sat up on the now stationary gurney, alone. The golden glow continued to emanate like diffused torch light from her lower belly, painting everything in its reach with the flecked sparkle of firelight. There were no restraints, no straps, no marks on her wrists or ankles, no IV bottles or tubes, no needles in her arms. Yet the hallway stretched off into an infinite darkness in front and behind her.

The glow from her belly strengthened, stretching her smock like an instant pregnancy, then burst, ruptured from her belly in a torrent of flaming red and yellow flares. Her second unrelenting scream and pain filled writhing shattered the silence and brought her instantly back to consciousness.

And reality. Vivienne was on the floor of the cabin, which remained intact, except all the light fittings lay shattered around her, globes impotent. She had carefully closed all the curtains, but outside street lighting seeped in around the edges and refracted gaily off the shards of glass peppering every surface. Her hands cupped her belly. The housedress she had driven off in days ago insulted her senses with its accumulated perspiration and grime. She felt the warmth in her belly and lifted the front of her dress, expecting to see a cauterised hole from where the heat had escaped in her dream. Her nightmare.

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 Seventeen. “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 sick, on leave, they’re already running a skeleton crew.”

“That’s okay.”

“He said he was really sorry. He even tried to get some guys down from Brisbane for you… what did you say?”

Foster looked up at Pete. “I said it’s okay, we won’t need it. Come and have a look at this.”

Pete shook his shaggy head and stepped forward to look at the chart on the screen Barnes had been studying. He had no idea what it meant, and glanced at Barnes.

“We’re not going tonight then, to the caravan park I mean?”

Barnes didn’t look at him, but Pete saw the frown. “Yes, yes, but look at the readings will you.” Barnes was excited. Pete was confused.

“I’m looking boss, but I don’t know what it means. We are going tonight or we aren’t?”

Foster stood upright and finally looked at Pete. “We’re having two conversations here, so, to clear the first, yes, we are going tonight, backup or no backup. Now, look at the chart. See the red line?” The chart comprised every colour of the rainbow in almost every hue imaginable. It stretched across two thirds of the screen, but the highest point was a thin red line. “Yes, the tallest line I’m talking about. This is the chemical analysis from the celery and onion from the takeout. Ostensibly, it’s Vivienne’s DNA.”

“That’s if it was Vivienne.”

“It was her alright. I don’t need to tell you that DNA is unique, even more than fingerprints are.”

“Yes, but how do you know what her DNA is in the first place? We haven’t collected any hair or clothing or sample of anything from her before?”

“We don’t have to. I mean if we did, I’d bet next year’s wage that it matched this one.”

“How can you be so sure it’s hers?”

“The red line Pete, that little thin red line.”

Chapter 18. “New Discovery”

“Go to bed.”

“Aw, but Mum?”

“It’s late, get into bed now young man.”

“But you said I could wait up for Dad?”

“I’ll make sure he comes up and tucks you in as soon as he’s through the door.”

“Aw, Mum.”

“Foster! Go to bed now. I mean it.”

“Yes Mum.”

He was about to shut off his computer when he heard the electric garage door activate. Excited, he left the screen on and jumped into bed, pulling the covers up as the car engine died. The garage door ran again, then the car door. Heavy footsteps into the house. Some murmuring. Silence. He peeked out from one eye and saw his bedroom door slowly opening. He clenched his eyes closed. Soft padding steps toward the bed. The hoarse whisper close to his ear.

“I know you’re awake. Your Mother told me.” Foster laughed and sat up into the bear hug waiting for him. “Sorry I was late son.”

“That’s okay Dad. Look. Look at the computer. I got it!”

Big brown eyes looked at him proudly. “Did you now? Well done, congratulations. But it’s late. We’ll look at it in the morning.”

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