make the average man comatose he would have realised something was desperately wrong. Before he could think further on these developments Kylie reached for a steak knife she had hidden under her leg and slashed it across his unprotected testicles. Lester screamed wildly as pain lanced through him. He looked at his torn and bleeding testes and then at his attacker.
“You crazy fucking bitch,” he yelled, his voice high, enraged and broken.
She stood there ready with knife in hand, the anger and rage that had built up from all the humiliation and abuse finally erupted and turned her into a savage animal ready and willing to fight to the end.
“Come on,” she taunted him. “Come and get what you deserve you sick bastard.” The look on her face was enough to force him into action and he ran from the house and into the street despite the blinding agony he felt between his legs.
In hindsight Kylie was glad that Lester’s wounds were relatively superficial even though he deserved to be punished further. She realised that if she had killed or seriously injured him it may have resulted in jail for her or maybe a lifetime on the run. That wasn’t what she wanted. That wouldn’t have been justice. After she calmed down she washed her hands and put her clothes on. As she hefted her luggage she smirked at the blood on her bed and the floor and wondered if that, combined with the several stitches that would be required to hold Lester’s nuts together would be sufficient proof for her aunt.
“Probably not,” she said to herself as she walked out the door.
She spent the remainder of the night sleeping at the bus station and in the morning caught the first bus to Canberra. After what had seemed a lifetime but was in fact two years and one hundred and forty-nine days Kylie Faulkner made good her escape.
*********
The next day Kylie met with the trustee of her parents’ estate. He was surprised to see her turn up unannounced at his office, as although he had managed her estate for over two years he had never bothered to meet her or ensure that the money being paid to her aunt was in any way benefiting her. He was pretty much as Kylie had expected, middle aged, well presented and confident, but Kylie saw him as a fat, lazy tick that made a living from siphoning off the proceeds of people like herself. She felt a cold malice towards him because he too had played his part in her misery. She contemplated handing out a similar punishment to him, but decided against it, for the time being at least. It took her only ten minutes to convince him that it was in his best interests to hand over the remaining estate money to her. She calmly explained to him that she was her parents’ only child, she was eighteen and for the last two years her aunt’s boyfriend had been molesting her in any way he saw fit while he was effectively being paid thirty thousand dollars per year to do so. She also said that if he didn’t hand over the remaining money she would have no qualms in making life very difficult for him in any way that she could. Something in the implacable stare of her eyes convinced him of the wisdom in complying with her request.
After subtracting the money he had paid to Kylie’s aunt and his own generous management and administration fees there was only one hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars left of her parents’ initial two hundred and seventy thousand dollar estate. Although he was sad to see the money go, he cut her a cheque which she took straight to the bank and deposited. In addition to the nine thousand dollars she had saved from working, she had enough to start her new life. That same day she caught the bus for Sydney.
Chapter 37
Slowly but surely Kylie Faulkner tried to put the previous few years of her life out of her mind. She enrolled at the University of Sydney, worked part time as a waitress and purchased a unit with the proceeds of her trust money. After she graduated she travelled and worked and attempted to lead what she perceived to be a normal life.
And yet the more she tried to escape her past the more it seemed to doggedly cling to her and remind her who she was and the tainted soil she had grown from. She had few if any close friends and found it difficult to form long term relationships with men. Adding to her misery were the flashbacks of the day her parents died that continued to haunt her nights.
In the period immediately after the car accident she had remembered little of it. However, as time slowly progressed, horrific glimpses of the past would sometimes rush through her mind as she was on the verge of falling asleep. Visions of swimming through cold dark water and the white lifeless faces of her parents would shake her violently awake and leave her unable to sleep for hours thereafter.
Unlike most memories that fade and blur around the edges with time, the memories from the accident grew sharper and more vivid each passing year and plagued her with their insistent nature. Unbidden, fragmented pieces slowly knitted themselves together in her mind and revealed to her more and more of what happened that night. The stress resulting from the flashbacks caused her to consult doctors, psychologists and even hypnotists in an effort to calm her mind and reduce their effect, but none of them were successful in easing her torment.
Twelve years after the accident, Kylie Faulkner’s life was steadily falling apart. The dreams and flashbacks harassed her to the edge of exhaustion and insanity. In a final and desperate effort to save herself she decided to embrace her memories and try to understand their nature and meaning. She wrote down everything she remembered from the accident and as the flashbacks raced through her mind she grabbed snippets of extra information from them and slowly built a fuller, more complete picture of the event in her conscious mind. She remembered the night more clearly, including that the other car involved was a large battered 4wd and that it had appeared around the blind corner, driving in the middle of the road with headlights and two bullbar mounted spotlights blazing in the direction of her parents’ car. The flashbacks also revealed that her father had instinctively tried to shield his eyes from the glare and in an effort to avoid the collision had swerved to the left. He had tried to steer the car back onto the road but it was too late. The car slid off the shoulder and speared into the river. She remembered escaping from the car and swimming frantically upwards through the darkness as her lungs screamed for air and then crawling up onto the riverbank through the mud and reeds as the pain from her broken ankle sent raw jagged pain shooting up her leg.
In time, Kylie began to believe that there was a greater force behind the flashbacks and that perhaps they were a sign, perhaps a plea from her long dead but unresting parents, crying out for justice beyond the grave. It made sense to her and became her focus and her passion. She spent time investigating the accident during her waking hours and filled scrapbook after scrapbook with newspaper cuttings, photographs of the accident and her own notes. She contacted anyone who had been at the scene of the accident, the paramedics, the holiday park manager, the tow truck driver, and unashamedly drilled them in search of extra information. She contacted the Sergeant who had attended the scene of the accident. Armed with her new memories of the accident she hoped to convince him to reopen the case and ultimately identify the driver of the car that caused the accident and bring them to justice.
She sat in Sergeant Soward’s office and told him about what she remembered from that night and implored him to reopen the investigation. He pulled the case file and scanned through it, but despite her enthusiasm and his sympathy for her he was unmoved.
“I’m sorry Kylie, but we’ve got enough work to keep us going for a year to come and seeing that you don’t have any real evidence, I just can’t approve the reopening of a twelve year old case.”
“But there must be something you can do? I’ve remembered so much more now. I can help you. I could even work with you.”
Sergeant Soward studied her face. He was moved by her plea but the harsh reality of running an understaffed country police station remained absolute in his mind. If he relented for her, then other, more current work would not get done.
“I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do unless you have something certain to go on.”
She tried to read him and turn him to her way of thinking, like she had successfully done with many men before, but could find no weakness in his character, no extravagance of pride or ego to exploit. She tried to flatter him but he shrugged it off. She stretched back in her chair, slowly and languidly, and then leaned over his desk, to show him some of her notes, suggestively revealing her cleavage, but he kept his eyes on the paper and didn’t even glance in her direction. After half an hour of discussing, cajoling and pleading to no avail, she thought of a new tack and slumped forward in her chair, complaining of nausea and a migraine. Her act was convincing and Sergeant Soward rose and offered to get her a glass of water and a wet towel. As soon as he left the office she sprang up like a startled cat and rifled through the case file on his desk.
