Vivienne. Just an ordinary suburban housewife… no more

“What?”

“Takeaway, we call them takeaways not takeouts. Now tell me why this wasn’t our girl?”

“She wouldn’t have vandalised anything Pete, perhaps breaking a lock to get in would be all, but she doesn’t want anyone to know where she is. So why would she draw attention to herself by damaging her hideout? Besides, the vandalism began before she came onto the scene.”

“She could have done it to make it look like the vandals.”

“No. She’s smarter than even she thinks she is. If she’d seen the damage she wouldn’t have felt safe enough to stay here in the first place – she would have moved on.”

“Ah, the other caravan park you circled on the other map?”

“Yep. There, the Asian takeout, takeaway,” he pointed. “Damn it, they didn’t wait.”

Pete parked in front of the little restaurant and Barnes raced inside. Happily he noticed the boxes of supplies piled on tables in the restaurant. He apologised profusely to the little man waiting in the kitchen doorway, the small face of a child peering around his legs. The owner confirmed what he reported on the phone this morning. Someone had broken in through the back door, and after stealing or consuming almost every morsel of food, had cleaned up afterward. The only food left were the top leaves of a celery stalk sitting beside the fridges, the teeth marks evident on the stalk. Barnes deposited the celery into a small plastic bag. He apologised again and walked out the front door, trailed by Pete who had remained totally silent during the five minutes in the shop.

“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.”