Blood Secret Page 9

  She remembered losing her keys once and spending hours searching the house. The obvious places first: her handbag, the hook by the door, the old dresser. Then she looked in spots she might have left them in a distracted moment – pockets of clothing, the basket under the phone, her bedside table. She’d tried to think of logical explanations, hunted through kitchen drawers, the TV cabinet, the laundry bin. Widening the circle, she’d looked under the bed, in the studio, the garden. Finally, she’d pulled the place apart, forgetting logic and hunting through the bathroom, the pantry, the spare room, under the cushions on the sofa.

  Max phoned at lunchtime, told her he’d discovered them tucked into the folds of his jumper. Rennie hadn’t thought to call him. Her key ring was distinctive, a miniature hand weight, a weapon and a tool in one, and she hadn’t imagined he’d mistake them for his own, but as soon as he’d told her, she realised how it’d happened. He’d tossed the jumper on the kitchen bench when he was getting organised for work, must have put it on her keys then taken both when he left.

  Now, as she drove along the water’s edge for the third time since she’d lost Max, she wondered about the keys. How she’d kept searching the same places, how she’d tried to find reasons to explain why they’d be somewhere she’d never put them. How all the time they were somewhere else, somewhere logical that she’d never considered possible.

  Was that where Max was now?

  12

  Rennie had expected to see Naomi’s car in the driveway and when the white dual cab came into view, hope and relief caught in her chest like a gasp – then she realised it was James’s and she was driving Max’s work truck. Beyond it, the front door was wide open. Was Max back? Was there news? Walking quickly to the porch, she heard TV voices and a brief clatter from the kitchen and her mind conjured the sight of Max in the next room, while instinct told her not to cross that bridge prematurely.

  Hayden was slumped on the sofa, eyes glued to the flat screen, feet on the coffee table and a dirty plate balanced on a cushion. Further into the room, Naomi glanced up from the sink and sent her a thin smile.

  It told Rennie all she needed to know. Max wasn’t here and there was no news.

  She did nothing for a second as her needy, wishful self crashed in on itself. Then she raised brows at Naomi, flicking her eyes at Hayden. Naomi shook her head. She hadn’t told him. Rennie swallowed hard and tried for a smile. ‘Hey, Hayden. How’d you sleep?’

  His body didn’t move as his eyes rolled condescendingly in her direction then back to the TV. Translation: what made you think your presence was recognised in Hayden World?

  Rennie was tempted to bark that his father was missing, that he should pay some goddamn attention but she reined it in, looked to Naomi for an alternative approach.

  She shrugged, made a what-do-you-do face. ‘Have you eaten? I didn’t know what you had in the house so I brought a loaf of bread and some ham.’

  Naomi was right. Calming down and improving her blood sugar level was probably a better way to start. She ignored Hayden as she passed between him and the TV and took in Naomi’s tired face and the hand pressed to the small of her back. ‘You look like you need to take a load off. I’ll make something.’

  ‘No need. I’ve already done it.’ Naomi opened the fridge, pulled out a plate and slid it across the counter.

  Rennie eyed the thick slices of multigrain and the lettuce fringing the crusts, not sure she could relax enough to force any of it through the tension in her throat. ‘Thanks. And thanks for coming.’

  ‘Let’s sit at the table,’ Naomi said, then lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘So Hayden can’t hear.’

  Christ, there was more and unless it was a map to Max, Rennie wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it, but she carried the plate to the table that overlooked the garden and the gums and the lake beyond, sat with her back to the rest of the room and waited until Naomi had settled her pregnant belly. ‘What?’

  ‘Brenda rang.’

  Brenda was Max’s mum, James’s aunt – and maybe she did have a map to Max. ‘Has she heard from Max?’

  ‘No. I think she just rang for a chat.’

  Brenda and Mike rang every weekend, talked to Max about the garden and his cooking exploits and the weather on the lake. It was so far removed from Rennie’s parental experience that she’d listen to Max’s end of the conversation with a mixture of scepticism and longing. ‘What did you tell her?’

  Naomi made a face, like she wasn’t sure if she’d done the right thing. ‘Well, I didn’t want to start a panic, and I wasn’t going to say anything at all, but then I wasn’t sure if you’d told her already and I figured if she was starting one of her weekend ring-arounds, she might hear it from someone else. So I told her Max was missing.’

  Rennie imagined Brenda at the breakfast bar in the house at Yamba, sun streaming in, the hiss of surf in the distance and her hand on her chest in shock. ‘Was she okay?’

  ‘She was all, “Oh my goodness” and “Oh dear”, and she kept relaying the information to Mike in the background.’

  Rennie winced. Their visits to Haven Bay could be awkward, Brenda flushed with maternal warmth, Rennie decidedly uncomfortable with it. But to watch her and Mike laughing and fussing over Max was like a window to another kind of life. ‘Did she have any ideas?’

  ‘Not really. She seemed as baffled about it as we all are. But she was going off to make a few phone calls, see if anyone’s heard from him.’

  Was she baffled Max had disappeared or that he’d left another woman?

  Naomi pulled the cling wrap from the plate and slid it closer to Rennie. ‘Have something.’

  She took a bite, forcing it down. ‘How come you’ve got James’s car? I thought he was going to the office.’

  ‘He came with me.’

  Rennie glanced into the empty yard, a sudden flare of possessiveness at the thought he might have turned his attention to her own private space in the studio. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In the study looking through Max’s stuff.’

  She swung her head towards the hall, possessive on Max’s behalf. She returned the sandwich to the plate and pushed her chair back. Slow down, she warned herself. James wasn’t just a business partner. He and Max grew up together, shared a happy kinship all the way into adulthood, forging some kind of proprietary bond that Rennie had never understood. She’d always assumed it was her distrust of family and blood ties that was the real problem. She trusted Max. It didn’t extend to relatives. Max could explain him all he liked but James’s unreadable face had never changed her mind.

  They had something in common today, Rennie reminded herself. He was worried about Max, too, so she should cut him some slack, and maybe he’d see something in the study she’d missed. She got to the door, expecting him to be standing in the room as she had, eyeing the shelves and desk, but he wasn’t. He was in Max’s swivel chair, parked in front of the computer, hand on the mouse, screen alight, making himself at home with a cup of coffee and a half-eaten sandwich.

  She couldn’t keep the surge of possessiveness from her voice. ‘What are you doing?’

  His shoulders tensed for half a second before he turned. There was no greeting; he just spoke as though he’d been waiting for her to get there. ‘Do you know Max’s password?’

  She folded her arms and asked again. ‘What are you doing?’

  He frowned a little, just a hint of what’s-the-problem? ‘I’m trying to get into his computer.’

  ‘Our computer,’ she corrected. ‘Why?’

  ‘I thought there might be something on there that would tell me . . . us where he went.’

  As though there was forethought to it? ‘You think the kid in the four-wheel drive sent him an email?’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘You think a teenager in a four-wheel drive took him?’

  ‘I don’t know what’s hap
pened.’

  He watched her for a second, maybe weighing up the edginess in her voice and the day they’d both had. ‘Okay, look.’ He rubbed a hand across the stubble on his chin, took a deep breath and let it out. ‘I’m not sure what to think, either. I just thought it was worth a look.’

  She’d been out to Garrigurrang Point twice for the same reason. ‘Okay.’

  ‘What’s his password?’

  ‘For the email?’

  ‘That too, but I meant for his files.’

  Rennie stared at the monitor and the screensaver photo of a sunset over the bay. ‘There isn’t a password.’

  James swung the chair back around, gave the mouse a nudge and the picture was replaced with the desktop photo – another one of the bay taken from Garrigurrang as huge storm clouds gathered like a Hollywood version of an alien invasion. He held the arrow over the icon labelled Max’s Stuff, double clicked and a password window popped up. ‘Yeah, there is.’

  When had Max put a password on his files?

  ‘Any ideas?’ James asked.

  Was Max worried about her looking at his files? Or maybe he was worried about Hayden getting in and moving things around. He’d done it before. But if he was concerned, why hadn’t he told her to do the same? ‘No, no idea.’

  ‘I’ve tried names and birthdays and combinations thereof. His, Hayden’s, yours, his family’s, mine. Are there any other names he might use?’

  ‘Try Max-Renée.’ She spelt the combination of upper and lower case letters that they’d used for internet security: MaXReneE.

  James hit enter and an electronic beep sounded an invalid password. ‘Are you sure of the capitals?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Spell it again.’

  She watched the keys as he tapped, lifted her eyes to the screen as the beep sounded again. ‘I emailed a file to the office for him a while ago and there was no password.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Maybe two weeks ago.’ She watched James, thinking the time frame might make sense for him. Possibly there was work that required a password, something with privacy issues. He kept his eyes on the screen, his face expressionless as a muscle at the hinge of his jaw started a slow pumping. If something clicked, he wasn’t talking about it.

  ‘What about his email password?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s the one I gave you.’

  He tried it with the email and was refused entry. ‘He must’ve changed it.’

  Rennie slid her hands into the pockets of her jeans. It was good practice to change a password and Max had every right to alter it whenever he wanted but, as far as she knew, he’d used the same collection of letters for four years, since she’d moved in and contributed to the cost of the computer. She kept her emails separate, had several accounts, used a different password for each of them, none of them in her real name. She’d encouraged him to be more careful but he always claimed the chances of forgetting a new password were higher than the likelihood of someone hacking in.

  Naomi’s voice cut the silence. ‘Have you found anything?’

  ‘We can’t get in,’ Rennie told her.

  Naomi stood at the door, her gaze moving from Rennie to James and staying there as though she was reading something in his face. Maybe Rennie was the only person who couldn’t do it. She glanced at him and saw their silent exchange. Some kind of question from Naomi, an answer from James. Then Naomi smiled at Rennie. ‘Come and eat your sandwich.’

  She hesitated, trying to interpret what hadn’t been said out loud. Was it: Do you need her help?/No, I’m fine? Or: Are you two all right in here?/No, get her out?

  ‘Come on, you should eat. And we have to talk to Hayden.’

  Maybe it was Trish’s earlier bombshell making her brace for more or the ghost of her past still crowding the corners of her mind or that she just didn’t like to be excluded in her own home – but suspicion flared.

  She turned to James. ‘What are you looking for?’

  13

  James watched her a second, tipped his head slowly, pensively to one side. ‘I don’t know.’

  It seemed like he’d taken the time to consider his answer, given her the best one he had, but there was something about it, something that made her gut tighten with doubt. Rennie glanced from Naomi’s encouraging smile to James’s concerned sincerity, feeling the silence stretch with her hesitation.

  On the other side of the wall, the toilet flushed, a door banged and then Hayden was in the hallway, speak­ing before they saw him. ‘When’s Dad coming back?’ He must have expected to see James in the study and seemed surprised when all three of them turned to look at him.

  There was no time like the present, Rennie told herself. ‘We should talk.’

  Hayden rolled his eyes. ‘I just want to know when Dad’s coming back.’

  ‘That’s what we need to talk about.’

  He heaved a sigh and slouched against the wall. ‘What then?’

  ‘In the living room.’ She didn’t want to do it crowded into the tiny study or with Hayden taking a stance in the hallway. And she needed the walk to shake off the previous moment and find some empathy for the kid.

  Rennie took a seat on one side of the corner formed by the living room sofas. Hayden slouched on the other, as far from her as he could get. Naomi perched awkwardly on the coffee table between them, as though she didn’t want to take sides.

  Rennie ignored the look of practised boredom on Hayden’s face. ‘I don’t know where Max is.’

  His brief sneer said, Is that it? ‘So you don’t know when he’s getting back?’

  Naomi shifted uncomfortably on the table.

  Rennie started again. ‘He disappeared from a party last night. I don’t know where he is.’

  ‘So he went somewhere. Big deal.’

  Maybe to his fourteen-going-on-twenty-three logic, it was cool to go off without letting anyone know – after all, he’d jumped a train in the middle of the night. Or maybe he was too intent on pissing off Rennie to get the message. She continued, her voice a little firmer. ‘When the party was over, he was gone. He hasn’t come home and he hasn’t rung.’

  He shuffled himself a little more upright and lifted his chin. ‘So, what are you saying? I’ve got to go to Cairns with Mum? I can’t. The plane’s already left.’

  ‘No, Hayden. I’m trying to tell you your dad’s missing. I don’t know where he is.’

  He didn’t say anything, at least not for eight or nine seconds. It was sinking in, Rennie figured, like a puddle into a rock. She waited, expecting to see alarm or concern grow on his face. Instead, one side of his mouth turned up in a nasty smirk. ‘What, he left you?’

  Her skin turned cold, anger hardened in her gut and she wanted to deny it resolutely enough to shut down the doubt that was souring in the back of her throat.

  ‘Hayden,’ Naomi reproached quietly.

  ‘Well, I would. She’s a bitch.’

  ‘Hayden!’ Naomi snapped.

  Rennie clenched her teeth. He’s a kid. Don’t let him get under your skin. Lay it out and move on. ‘I’ve reported him missing with the police. I’m waiting to talk to a detective.’

  ‘You called the cops?’ He said it like it was an over­reaction, like maybe his mother had called the police when he hadn’t come home before. Maybe she’d called them last night when he was on the train instead of in bed.

  Rennie tried to keep the bleedingly obvious tone out of her voice. ‘We’re worried about him. We’re trying to find him.’

  ‘He’s just gone somewhere.’ It was a barely veiled What the hell would you know?

  ‘Have you spoken to him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know where he is?’

  ‘No.’

  She hesitated. ‘Do you?’

  He turned to Naomi and pul
led a face that said Rennie was a total loser.

  ‘Hayden,’ Naomi said gently. ‘Do you know where your dad is?’

  Whether it was the gravity in her voice or the fact that it was Naomi who asked, he lost the scorn. ‘No, I said. You believe me, don’t you?’

  He was attempting to get Naomi on side and Rennie didn’t have the patience or the diplomacy for this kind of conversation. She shifted to the edge of the sofa, gritting her teeth as she tried to find better words than the ones running through her head. ‘This is not about you, Hayden. There’s a chance something’s happened to Max.’

  He swung his face around, ready to unleash another round of go-fuck-yourself but whatever he saw in her expression stopped it before it reached his lips. Comprehension slid through his eyes and suddenly his arrogance looked more like vulnerability. ‘What do you mean?’

  Naomi shot her a glance, another silent communiqué like the one she’d shared with James. This one Rennie could read: go easy.

  ‘I’m worried he might be lost.’ Be honest, Rennie. ‘Or hurt.’

  He watched her a second, then Naomi, then Rennie again. Uncertainty morphing to fear morphing to agita­tion. ‘Nah. No way.’ He sat up straight, agitation morphing to something angrier. ‘No way he got lost. He knows this place better than anyone. Better than Uncle James.’ He narrowed his eyes at Rennie, his voice abruptly loud. ‘He’s probably not even here. He probably hitched a ride to the station and jumped a train. Probably to get away from you.’

  Her chin jerked up as though he’d given her an uppercut. Today, after her sister’s voice doing the rounds in her head, after Trish’s revelations, his words stung. She stood and stalked to the bay window.

  ‘That’s not fair,’ Naomi was saying. ‘We don’t know where he is. And he loves Renée. You know that.’

  ‘Well, he’s not lost,’ Hayden insisted. He still had his brain stuck so far inside his teenage resentment that he was missing the point.