When she'd left work she hadn't even bothered to go home. She'd brought everything she would need when she left the house that morning.
She pulled into a big all-hours convenience store and bought a jumbo bag of cheese Twisties, some chocolate and Coke. Sometimes she had to wait a few hours before they got home. A queue had formed in the service station. A sign pronounced a record lottery draw this week; the people ahead of her were all stocking up on tickets. Their motivation seemed alien to her.
Looking at two women about her age in the queue ahead of her, she wondered suddenly how the hell it had come to this. How had she ever become so lost? She thought again about going to the police, but images of what had happened to kids, to her, what was happening to someone right now, interrupted her thoughts again. Asleep or awake, her mind was filled with little else.
Last time she'd tried to have dinner with friends it had been a disaster. As soon as their kids were in bed, she'd started in on her second bottle of red and her stories of horror. Trying to tell her friends, to convince them, that their children weren't safe, to teach them what to watch out for, how often to check their kids' rooms for evidence that someone was grooming them for abuse: she wanted to keep them vigilant. When they'd tried to change the subject, she'd become belligerent, loud, unconcerned if the children awoke – they should be hearing this too. When she broke down in mortified but unstoppable sobs, they'd driven her home, and had not called since. Not that she blamed them, and not that she cared, frankly. People didn't understand, and there were other things she needed to do.
Throwing a bulging bag into her passenger seat, Mercy got back into her car, lit a cigarette and drove with purpose into the deepening evening.
35
The bite in the pre-dawn breeze stung Jill's ears and woke her fully. The chill told her that summer was nearing its end. Dressed in white shorts and a singlet, her bikini underneath, she realised she'd need a tracksuit for her morning runs soon.
The change from summer to autumn always filled Jill with melancholy. For her, spring and summer represented youth, childhood. Autumn was about endings, the loss of innocence. And, of course, it was the precursor to winter; it was the beginning of winter when she'd been kidnapped. Those three months were the longest of the year, every year, for Jill.
She jogged down the steps of her apartment block and out into the quiet, dark streets of Maroubra. She had been restless last night, thinking about little Jack at the drop-in centre. She hoped he'd call.
She shivered as she crossed the street and lifted her pace, trying to warm up. But the coldness was inside; her mood matched the gunmetal-grey ocean, the surf roiling and messy this morning.
The beach was deserted. Even the gulls weren't playing. There were no surfers; she was alone. Familiar feelings of despair and apprehension rose up inside her with the isolation, and she caught them in her throat before they forced out a sob. She dropped her towel on the sand in her regular spot, put her head down, and ran.
For the first time in a long time, she thought about Joel. Maybe she should get in touch. She smiled wryly, realising she'd just slipped into the same pattern she did every year – when the weather got colder, she got lonely, and for two years in a row she'd spent winters casually dating Joel, only to feel stifled and resentful by summer. It's not fair to do that to him again, she thought.
Each footfall on the hard sand sent some pain through the area around her healing ribs. She tuned it out. Gotta get back to it sometime, she thought; I'll go mad without running. She reached the end of the lap and turned to make her way back to the other end of the beach. Spray from the turbulent surf blew into her eyes, and she wiped her face with her hands. As her vision cleared, she thought she saw someone else on the beach. There. She didn't break stride, continued running back the way she'd come. The hooded figure ran back from the edge of the ocean towards the street. That's weird, she thought, he can't have been down here more than five minutes. Must be too cold for him.
As she approached the place where she'd left her towel, Jill realised that this person, the only other person on the beach this morning, had also picked this very spot to stop. From three long strides away, she could see her towel was disturbed. She always left it folded tightly. She looked up towards the road to try to spot the runner, but it was still grey and misty and she couldn't see anyone. She thought about stopping, but figured that it had probably been a vagrant hoping she'd left her wallet under her towel.
'Been living at the beach too long to do that, dickhead,' she muttered under her breath and kept running.
Jill ran laps until the sun grudgingly rose in the east over the ocean, but the day stayed dull, and there were still few people on the sand when she finally stood dripping over her towel.
'What the fuck?' she said aloud, looking down at the edges of a manila folder protruding from underneath her towel. She stood there a few moments longer, just staring at the folder, and then looked up and down the beach.
A chubby female newsreader who lived a few blocks up from Jill was sparring with a personal trainer, throwing half-arsed punches at his gloves. There were a couple of board riders out beyond the chop, just sitting there, hoping. A middle-aged couple drank takeaway coffee silently, looking out to sea. A dog barked like a mad thing, chasing pigeons and waves, while his owner stood watching, lead in hand. That was about it this morning.
No-one was anywhere near her towel.
She bent and picked the towel up, leaving the envelope there. She hugged the towel to her body, drying her face, starting to shiver. What the hell was in there?
She wanted to delay the moment when she looked inside. She absolutely hated surprises. She scooped up the folder, flicking it to remove the sand that had settled on top. She walked back towards her unit.
The folder had broken her routine. She didn't stop for the paper, and as she ran up the stairs her nerves jagged. She pulled her key from the small pocket in her shorts, and let herself into her apartment.
She threw the folder onto her breakfast bar and stared at it balefully. She wanted to open it now, but felt she needed her routines more than ever at the moment. It was a shower first, coffee, the newspaper on the balcony. The folder would be her paper this morning. She stripped, and walked naked into her black granite bathroom.
Twenty minutes later, coffee in hand, and dressed in black combat pants and a fitted navy shirt, her blonde hair pulled into a tight ponytail, Jill was ready to check out the folder, and she carried it out to the balcony. Suddenly in a hurry, she didn't bother to sit. She dropped the folder onto her outdoor table and flipped open the cover. A photograph, blown up to A4 size, lay before her, but it took a while to understand what it depicted, her brain not at first recognising the tangle of colours and shapes.
When she realised what she was looking at, Jill's coffee cup slipped from her fingers and crashed to the terracotta tiles of her balcony.
The photo showed, close-up, a face so pulverised that its features were almost unrecognisable. One half of the head was caved in completely, so that most of the mouth was lost in a black, red and white gaping hole. One of the eyes was missing; the other was just visible through the blood. It looked like there was a tooth or bone fragment stuck in the blood above the eye. The blood looked wet. Whoever had taken this photo had been there when this violence was inflicted. Jill knew it.
She dropped into a chair and put her head between her knees. The action caused her to notice the spilled coffee seeping into the porous terracotta, and this revived her a little. She went inside to her kitchen and grabbed a sponge and cold water, and came back outside to clean up the mess.