taken him to your place above the courthouse? We thought that was where he’d try to go.’
‘No.’ Nick frowned, trying to make his fearful mind focus. There’d never been a need to bring him here.
‘Have you told him where you live?’
‘I don’t think so.’ His brow creased in concentration, thinking it through. ‘No.’
‘We’ve looked everywhere.’ Silence-and then he heard her breath draw in from shock. As if she’d just had a dreadful thought. ‘No!’
‘What?’
You remember that day in the kindergarten after the hostage thing. You told him where you lived.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘You told him you lived on Borrowah Mountain,’ she said raggedly. ‘Nick, Harry can see Borrowah from his bedroom window. We’ve searched every street in town-every inch of the beach. But if he’s headed for the mountain… It’s not so far to the start of the National Park. Nick, he could be in thick bush by now. Dear God…’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THEY searched for the rest of that day, and then for one of the longest nights Nick had ever known. Every able-bodied person in town and for miles around the district turned out to scour the mountainside, and Nick searched with them.
Shanni was asked to stay at base camp in case he returned, as Wendy couldn’t leave her other charges, but the look on her face told Nick it was one of the hardest things she had ever done in her life. To stay still and wait…
At least he could search, and Nick searched like a man possessed, but it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. One tiny crippled boy in rugged national park bushland, some of it so thickly forested that it took machetes and raw strength to hack a man’s way through.
Why had he ever said it? Nick demanded of himself over and over again as he bashed through the bush. Why had he ever told Harry he lived in such a dreadful place?
Shanni must hate him. But she couldn’t hate him for it as much as he hated himself, he thought bleakly. He was hating himself enough for the both of them.
All through that long night, as he joined the line of searchers bashing their way in lines through the forest, Nick was calling himself every type of fool he could think of. Why had he told the child he lived in one of the most inaccessible places in the state?
Because he’d wanted to be inaccessible, he acknowledged, and that need for solitude was now exacting such a cost he couldn’t bear it.
And…for what? A solitude he no longer craved. He was no longer independent, he acknowledged. His very self now depended on the welfare of one small boy.
And one woman.
When he’d turned up at search headquarters-a mobile police caravan set up in a clearing at the base of the mountain-he’d looked at Shanni’s face and he’d seen a terror matching his own reflected in her eyes. For some reason Harry had spun his little self around her heart, becoming as much a part of her as he was part of him. If they couldn’t find him…
Please… Please…
The same pain in Shanni’s eyes was reflected in others… The policemen organising search teams. Team members. All Shanni’s family. The older children from the children’s homes associated with Bay Beach orphanage. Shopkeepers, mill workers, teachers, boy scouts, even the women’s lawn bowls association, for heaven’s sake.
The lady bowlers were making cups of tea as if their lives depended on it and the fitter ladies were donning protective clothing instead of bowling whites and bashing through the bush with the best of them.
Every last person in the district was desperate to help, and Nick’s distress was reflected in their faces. One little boy’s pain, taken on by so many…
‘
These people knew what it was to care, but that care came at a cost. A cost Nick was prepared to pay, and more. He’d pay anything it took. Harry…
But, in the enforced breaks the search coordinators forced him to take, it was Shanni’s face he kept coming back to. There was raw agony in her eyes and he felt such a twisting knot of helplessness and rage and fear that he didn’t know how to hold it in. How could he face her after such stupidity?
Dear God, how could he bear it? He had to have someone to hold-and he was alone.
Because that was the way he wanted it?
No! At two in the morning his group was called in after the moon went behind clouds, and he felt so sick he wanted to retch. He lifted his hand and smashed it down on a tree stump, and then gazed helplessly at the graze he’d made on his skin.
These people…they knew how to care and he didn’t. He’d told a baby that he lived on Borrowah Mountain…
He closed his eyes in despair-and then opened them at the feel of someone touching him gently on his injured hand. Shanni…
‘Nick?’ It was a tentative whisper and the look he gave her was bleaker than death.
What could he say to her? He’d caused this hurt.
‘You don’t need to speak to me,’ he told her.
‘That’s nonsense. We need each other.’
‘Shanni, how could I have done it?’ he demanded, his voice raw with despair. ‘How could I have done something so criminally stupid? I must have been mad.’
‘You weren’t to know it could ever come to this,’ she said softly, and then, before he could say anything more, she wrapped her arms around him and held him. And held him and held him, as if her life depended on it.
And for one long moment he kept himself ramrod-stiff. It needed only this. He didn’t deserve comfort! That she should try and comfort him when he was so dreadfully at fault…
‘We’ll find him,’ she said softly. ‘I know we will. Nick, he’s here somewhere. You’re not to blame yourself. You’re here now for him, and together…we’ll find him. Please…’
And she held him close, kissing him softly on the hair, holding him like a child and pouring her love into him. She was willing into him a strength that, alone, he could never have.
And when they moved away-inches, but enough-there was a new, steely determination between them that was an affirmation that the whole was far greater than the parts. Together they could face this, feeding each other strength.
‘We can find him,’ Shanni said. ‘We must. Together we must.’
‘He won’t come out.’ Heaven knew what made him see it, but suddenly he knew. This thing that he felt-that Shanni had given him. Trust. Love. Completeness. It gave him knowledge.
Harry was his child as surely now as Shanni was his woman. And Harry trusted Nick.
Things were suddenly blindingly clear. There was no chance of these searchers finding Harry-not if one small boy didn’t want to be found-because Harry was heading for Nick with the same single-minded purpose that Nick would feel if Shanni or Harry was in danger. He was heading for the one person in the world he trusted and he loved.
Wendy had told him new people were coming to see him-people he didn’t know but who wanted to be his parents. So Harry had run, and he’d keep running. He wouldn’t want to be found by anyone but Nick.
All night Harry must have been trying to find Nick, but if he’d come to this point, where the road ended and the wilderness of mountain started, he would have gone nowhere but up.
His leg was so weak-so damaged. He couldn’t climb strongly. In the dark he must have stumbled and fallen over and over. He’d be terrified.
But if he heard people searching-calling, as each group had been-would he answer? No, Nick thought, seeing things with a clarity that he hadn’t seen before. Harry was terrified of more than the dark. People hadn’t treated him with love. They were things to be feared.
But not Nick. Whether he deserved it or not, Harry loved Nick.
