The child's scream shattered the early morning stillness. When it ended, silence washed into the space where it had lingered, smothering all traces of its existence.
By then Alexis Whitham had already left her warm bed and raced barefoot to the front porch of the small farmhouse. By then she had already had time to name her fear. The man she and her daughter had crossed the world to escape had found them anyway.
Charles had found them.
"Jody!"
As if to assist in Alexis's search, the still hidden sun began to streak the purple horizon with fire.
"Jody!" Alexis took the porch steps in one frantic leap, nearly tripping over the hem of her nightgown. "Where are you?"
There was a cry from behind the spiny bushes rimming the small patch of grass that passed for a front yard. Alexis could just make out the outline of Jody's thin body, bent as if she were searching the ground. She was alone "Mommy! Quick!"
Alexis swallowed a sob of relief. Jody was still here. Charles hadn't come and taken her, stolen her so he could hold her until he could get the prize he really sought. He hadn't found them yet. Perhaps he never would.
But something was wrong. Alexis ignored the sharp rocks stinging her feet as she ran along the path. "I'm coming." In seconds she parted the bushes, heading for the nine-year-old sprite who was her whole world.
"Over here." Jody didn't even turn at her mother's approach. She was bending between bushes, just visible in the dim light. "It's a koala bear."
Like a disqualified runner halfway to the finish line, Alexis abruptly halted her frenzied flight. She took a deep breath and willed the overload of adrenaline in her system to evaporate. She didn't trust herself to speak, but Jody didn't notice.
"He's been hurt, Mommy. I was out looking for the wallabies. I left some carrots on the steps last night. They were gone this morning, but I saw a wallaby near the porch, and it hopped over to the bushes. Then I heard this crying, like a baby, and I came over here to see what it was, and it was a koala. And he's bleeding!"
Alexis found her voice. She forced herself to sound calm. Jody mustn't know what she had feared. The child had lived in fear of her father for too long already. "Move away from it now, Jody."
Jody grunted, a universal signal conveying disgust with adults who dared to issue orders. "But he's hurt."
"Now."
The little girl grunted again, then did as she'd been told.
Alexis stepped around her and peered down at the ground. She averted her eyes after she saw that Jody wasn't just exercising her fertile imagination. The koala lay almost hidden by the bushes, its huge eyes open as if in censure.
A child's slaughtered teddy bear.
"He's still breathing," Jody said when her mother didn't speak. "I felt his chest."
Alexis was struck with new fear. This wilderness they lived in was filled with menaces as dangerous as her ex-husband. "Jody, never, never touch a wild animal!" Alexis faced her daughter, moving her a safe distance away.
"He's not wild. He's hurt. I'm going to make him better. Then he can be my pet. You said I could have a pet!"
"I said you could have a cat."
"A cat would disturb the ecological balance."
Not for the first time Alexis silently wished that she could lop twenty points off Jody's IQ. The points wouldn't be missed, and Jody would be so much easier to parent. She gathered the resisting little girl in her arms, nightgown to nightgown. "Now look, neither of us has the faintest idea how to take care of the poor thing. We don't even know what's wrong with him. It could be something like rabies." She held Jody tighter as she realized what that could mean.
"Rabies is not a problem in Australia," Jody informed her. "I've been reading."
Alexis didn't question her daughter's facts. She'd learned long ago to trust the total recall capacities of the brain that resided under Jody's brown pigtails. "We still don't know what the problem could be. We're going to have to find someone who does." She felt Jody relax a little.
"Then you aren't just going to leave him here?"
"Of course not."
Jody peered around her mother's shoulder. "He knows me already. He knows I'm his friend. You've got to think of somebody who can rescue him!"
Alexis was already trying to think of someone who might be able to help. She was living on a remote island, halfway across the world from her home. She had been here just a month. She knew no one, had no resources other than her own two hands and her bank book. And she couldn't draw attention to herself. If she did, her own life could be worth less than the dying koala's.
"Go get dressed," she told Jody as an idea formed. "We'll both get dressed, then we'll go over to Flinders Chase Park. Somebody there should know what to do. They won't be answering their phones yet, but maybe somebody will be up."
Jody took one last look at the koala, then, with a sniff, turned and ran up the path. Alexis hurried after her, the animal's huge eyes haunting her steps. She knew what it was like to lie injured with no hope of rescue. She had recognized the grim acceptance of death, and it had stirred something painfully familiar inside her.
She would find a way to help. And if she had to wake everyone at the rangers' station to do it, she didn't care.