and excited another darker part. She watched as he choked back his emotions, deeply buried, as he told her harrowing stories of gang rape, savage beatings and other depraved human behaviour he had experienced and witnessed in jail. She contorted her pretty face to display sadness and understanding for him, while underneath laughed at his weakness.
In their fourth week together he told her of his secret plans, plans which she already knew about before they had even met. It was why she had chosen him in the first place. He had been sworn to secrecy, lives depended on it, including his own. But such was his devotion, and her control over him, he volunteered the information and willingly placed his life in her hands.
By then her own plans had been carefully formulated to blend seamlessly with his. She accepted it as fate that their paths had crossed. Fate, coming to assist her in her quest for justice, a quest that had begun many years before, but had only recently begun to form into an actual shape.
She remembered the moment when she knew he was completely hers, like a sixteen year old schoolboy in love for the first time.
“Do you love me?” she had asked him after a long and tiring session in his bedroom.
“I do. I love you.” She appraised him minutely, carefully weighing the tone of his words and searching his face and body language for any hint of male insincerity. She smiled when she found none. He was hers for the taking.
“I want to help you.” she had said. Then she had leaned close to him and placed a small seed of an idea into his mind. She nurtured it and grew it in him, gently directing it toward the fulmination of her own plans, and so artful was her manipulation, that in the end, he considered it to be his creation, his idea.
The plan had been unnecessarily complex, she knew that, but she had fallen in love with its symmetry and its deliverance of natural justice.
Chapter 22
As she lay on the bed beside Manuel, Kylie’s green eyes gazed out the window to the blue morning sky beyond which showed no hint of the previous night’s rain. Her mind reached back into the past and she remembered a time from long ago, the last time she could remember ever being truly happy. It was a simple weekend trip from Canberra to the south coast of New South Wales with her parents. It began with the singing of the usual road trip songs and ended when she awoke in complete blackness with water rushing into the car, already up to her knees and coming up fast. She screamed but her parents didn’t answer. She had instinctively known they were dead and that they could not be helped. While there was still time she rolled down her window. She gasped as the cold water flooded into the car and enveloped her body. She waited until the car’s cabin was almost full and the inflow of the water had slowed before sliding her slim teenage body through the opening and blindly searching for the surface in the dark waters.
Misery touched her life that day and would remain a regular companion thereafter. After a week in hospital she was visited by her Aunt Maggie, who despite being her only living relative she had met only twice some years previously. Although her mother and her aunt were born of the same parents, their indifference toward each other had grown through the years and was sufficient to overcome their blood ties. Her mother had rarely spoken of her sister and on the rare occasion that she did, she maintained they had simply drifted apart over time and neither had made the effort to bridge the gap.
In the ensuing days in hospital Kylie Faulkner came to understand that arrangements were being made for her to go and live in Cooma with her aunt and her defacto Lester after she was released from hospital. She didn’t want to move to another town and live with people she barely knew but as she was still a minor she was given little choice in the matter.
In time, her physical injuries from the accident, which included a fractured ankle and several deep lacerations, healed to become only thin white scars on her pale skin, but the scars that couldn’t be seen, the ones in her mind, remained open and infected. She was traumatised by her parents’ deaths and was troubled by nightmares and flashbacks of the crash, and would break out into a cold sweat whenever she travelled in a car. In addition to her problems she was uprooted from her comfortable middle class life in Canberra to the seemingly perennially frost bitten and fog laden Cooma.
Although Aunt Maggie had similar facial features to Kylie’s mother, unfortunately that was where the similarities ended. While Kylie remembered her mother as being a slim, pleasant woman with an easy going soul, Maggie was a short, dumpy and taciturn woman who rarely smiled because she found little in her life to smile about. Her hair was cut boyishly short, she wore no makeup and dressed in clothes of a style that helped to date her ten years beyond her forty-seven years.
Her defacto Lester, who for some reason she had put up with for thirteen years of her life, was a fifty-five year old semi-functioning alcoholic who somehow managed to hold down a part time job as the local broker for an insurance company. He was overweight, slovenly and his predilection for gambling and consuming enormous quantities of alcohol managed to keep the small family poor, despite Maggie earning reasonable money as a nurse at the local hospital. The more they earned the more he spent. Despite his habits, Maggie complained little and Kylie often wondered how the pair had come to be together. She thought that perhaps it was an example of a relationship between two people who had stayed together for lack of anything better immediately on offer.
In the first few months of living with them, Lester had maintained a cool indifference towards Kylie in the presence of her aunt. But when Maggie was absent, Kylie soon felt his eyes upon her, feeling their way over her young body and resting on certain places that are unique to a woman and strangely enticing to a man. In time, as his boldness grew, the glances turned to stares and then in turn to lascivious leers. Even though Kylie was still at the fledgling stage of her development to womanhood she reminded Lester that he still had the same urges of a younger man.
Once a month, as part of her duties at the local hospital, Maggie travelled with a doctor to conduct regional clinics in some of the many small settlements dotted throughout the Snowy Mountains. It was an arduous, whistle-stop, two day tour and required an overnight stay at Cabramurra if all went according to plan on the first day. It was during the third road trip since Kylie came to live with them that Lester made his big move.
Kylie awoke to the sound of keys being fumbled at the front door at around two a.m.. She had heard it all before as Lester went out drinking at least three nights a week and stumbled home, either at closing time or when he had run out of money, whichever came first. It was a bitterly cold night of around minus seven degrees Celsius and Kylie groaned at being woken and pulled her doona tight around her. After several unsuccessful attempts to identify and insert the correct key, Lester eventually made it inside. Kylie listened to him take off his shoes and go to the toilet where he noisily urinated in the only bathroom in the ten square house. The wooden floorboards creaked involuntarily as he then shuffled his way around the house but then stopped and silence prevailed. Kylie wondered what he was doing as she hadn’t heard him go to his bedroom which was down the hall from hers. She waited for him to move again and betray his position in the house but heard nothing. Her nerves began to prickle and she raised her head from her pillow and looked at her door. Through the one inch crack under it she could see the shadow of two feet and her breath caught in her chest as she realised he was standing outside her door. Her heart raced and pounded like a drum up in her throat as she heard her door silently and slowly swing open. She pretended to be asleep in the hope that he would go away but in he came, confidently staggering straight to her bed.
“Kylie? Kylie, I’ve got something for you,” he whispered. He lifted the covers and ran his freezing cold hand up her thigh and between her legs.
She gasped with shock from the touch and was slow to react.
“What are you doing? Are you crazy? Get out of here.”
“C’mon, don’t be like that. You know you want it. I seen the way you been looking at me,” he said chuckling.
“Please leave me alone,” she pleaded, but Lester ignored her. She gathered her wits and tried to push him away as he continued to run his hands slowly over her body, but despite his obvious drunkenness he easily overpowered her, for although he wasn’t a strong man, he still outweighed her by over forty kilograms. She fought harder and struck out at him with her nails but this angered him and he slapped her several times. The blows jarred her head, blurred her vision and were enough to force her to submit to his will.
As Kylie stared sightlessly out Manuel’s apartment window at the thin and wispy cirrus clouds that she could
