couldn't think of her doing anything more senseless when it came to her own safety – and Caitlin wasn't that stupid.
"Or you could ask me to come with you," I suggested as I lifted her from the bed and over to the wheelchair.
"Thank you," she said softly, looking down. Hesitantly, she placed her hands on the wheels and I held my breath. I didn't want her fragile fingers getting hurt all over again, struggling to handle a wheelchair. I couldn't keep up this show of indifference. If she went without me, I was damn well going to follow her to make sure she stayed safe.
Caitlin looked up at me, smiling impishly. "So, are you coming?"
My face lifted with a smile, taking my heart up with it. "Sure," I said. "The downhill path goes all the way through the garden to the lake. Someone's going to have to be there to fish you out."
She stared at me in disbelief.
"You'll see." I shrugged, starting to push her down the corridor to the lift.
I was bloody glad she couldn't see my face, because I couldn't keep the grin off it. She trusted me more than anyone else and she still wanted me around.
48
When we reached the lake, Caitlin started to laugh. I helped her sit on a bench by the edge of the water. She stretched her bare foot out but we were too far away for her toes to reach the murky brown surface. She pulled her foot back quickly, her toes lightly brushing the grass beneath the seat.
"So, are you going in?" I asked her, nodding at the water.
She laughed a little more. "No, it's cold and dirty. I'll leave the lake for the ducks and the fish." More soberly, she continued, "And I'm not sure if I should even consider swimming yet. I'd probably have to recover more before I could swim, or even go in the water." She stared out over the lake, her fingers resting on the cotton covering the transplanted skin on her thigh.
I sat beside her in silence, waiting for her to break it.
"Oh, look!" she cried suddenly, pointing across the lake.
I could see ripples on the surface, but nothing remarkable, and I said as much.
"Ducklings – look, four of them!" She pointed again, counting them for me. I could barely discern something small and brown on top of the ripples. She looked at me hopefully. "Can we go to the other side of the lake to see them better?"
I lifted her back into the wheelchair and pushed her to the paths on the other side of the lake, where they became the maze I'd been trying to avoid.
As we reached the far side, we could see the little ducks climbing up beside the waterfall that fed the lake, into the garden bed above. Full of misgivings, I took her further along one of the paths, into the gardens where the ducklings had disappeared.
Around a corner we found a small pond, hidden from view by manicured hedges, where an adult duck swam with a whole family of ducklings. There must have been at least ten of them.
Caitlin dropped to her knees beside the pond and sat motionless, entranced by the small fluffy things floating on the surface of the water. I stood near her, mesmerised by the smile on her face as she watched the ducks. I still had enough presence of mind to look around every few minutes, worried for her safety.
I heard their voices before I saw them.
"I give it another hour or two. Then it's pretty much getting dark – when I give up 'til tomorrow," one drawled.
"So if I stay five minutes longer than you and I spot her, I get her all to myself," the second taunted.
"If she comes out. All the hospital will say is that she's in a critical condition – no visitors – but it's been weeks. What makes you think it'll be today?"
"Why today or any other day? No one's critical for weeks. Either she's dead or she'll be discharged any day. Bet you a beer it's today." Two sounded bored. I heard the repeated scrape and click of a lighter, but he was too far away for me to smell the smoke from his cigarette.
"Okay. Bet you a coffee she's not as pretty as all the pictures..." One of the voices faded as he moved down the path away from us.
"Angel," I leaned down to say in a low voice beside her ear, "are you ready to give press interviews yet?"
"Hmm?" She looked up at me in surprise. "Interviews?"
"There's a press crew around, waiting for you. I heard them talking."
She went pale, her smile evaporating. "I don't want to, oh hell, not yet."
"Time to go back inside, then." I held out my arms, ready to help her up.
She looked wistful. "We're pretty well hidden here. We could stay and hope they'll just go away."
Against my better judgement, I gave in, with conditions. "If they do see us, I'll get you inside as fast as I can."
"Okay." She looked up at me with inviting eyes, her eager smile back. "Oh, come on, they're so cute. Take a look at the baby ducks. I've never seen ducklings this close before."
I watched the ducklings scoot around the pond for a few moments, before turning my attention back to her. She looked so happy, as if there were nothing else on her mind at all. As if none of this had ever happened.
I looked around again, more as a precaution than any feeling that it was necessary. Sunlight glinted off something. It took me a second to realise it was a camera lens.
"Time to go, angel," I told her. "Look, they're taking photos of us."
I lifted her back to the wheelchair and started to push her up the shortest path to the hospital entrance.
"Wait!" I heard the shout behind me. "Please, I just want to ask a few questions!"
"Do you want to answer them, angel?" I asked her, walking as fast as I could with her.
"No." She sounded scared.
I broke into a run as we approached the doors, trying to get her to the lifts before they could follow us. I caught the eye of the security guard as we sped past. I jerked my head in the direction of the reporters following us and he nodded, moving to the entrance to bar their way.
We made it into a lift just before the doors closed and travelled back up to her floor in silence. Too out of breath to say anything, I helped Caitlin back to her room and into her bed before I collapsed into the chair beside her.
I grabbed for the water jug, sloshing water into a glass and gulping most of it down as I struggled to catch my breath.
"Why would any reporter want to interview me?" Caitlin asked, bewildered.
I looked up from my glass to her, wondering if she was joking. "The missing girl back from the dead? When anyone else would have died? You're a real-life Harry Potter – look." I rummaged through the pocket of the laptop bag and pulled out the newspaper I'd kept from that first morning in hospital. An old photo of her, taken before she went missing, smiled from the front page, above the headline CAITLIN FOUND. The article itself was short, telling how her body had been discovered on a south-west beach early that morning where she'd been left to die, before she'd been transported to a hospital in Perth where she remained in a critical condition.
Caitlin looked at the article, still puzzled.
"This is all the press has on you," I told her. "The police won't tell them anything else. They want an interview with you, but the hospital won't give out any more information, either."
"But... I don't want to talk about it. Why would they care about me?"
I laughed. "Because you're news. They've had almost daily features with lots of pictures of you while you were missing, hoping someone would come out with information that would help the police find you. Now someone's found you and they want to know all about it." I paused. "It probably helps that you look good in photographs."
"What will they do now, when they took photos but didn't get any answers?"
"Print the pictures and make something up." I smiled broadly. "We should read the paper tomorrow." And I'll keep that one, too, I thought but didn't say. "I'll go speak to security and make sure you don't get any visitors or phone calls you don't want."
49
"Well that's fucking useless. You and her on the front cover of The West – what's the point trying to hi
de her now? And you've learned... what, exactly?"
I winced, wishing I hadn't called in my report. But it was better than receiving an angry phone call when tomorrow's paper had my picture in it. "She's told me what she remembers, but it's all vague and hazy. There were four men who hurt her, she heard the name Chris, the red Mercedes, being tied up in the dark, repeated abuse, the names cut into her skin..." I swallowed, finding it hard to continue.
"Most of that we already knew before she woke up. New info, Nathan – what has she told you to help us find them?"
"They held her outside the city, somewhere outside of any town – the water they gave her to drink wasn't chlorinated city water. She didn't hear any sounds from outside, so it was well insulated or isolated," I said quickly, trying to tell every tiny detail. "I think she knows a lot more, but she needs someone to help her remember it. That takes time and..."
"Well, you're out of fucking time now. Unless she spills her guts to you in the next hour or two, it's time for a change of plan." I heard a slurp, as if he was drinking coffee.
"What change of plan?" I asked uneasily.
"None of them are stupid enough to come after her in hospital. So she's going home. Maybe they'll target her there." He sounded completely unfazed. "Better than a month of close surveillance with nothing to show for it, which is what we have now."
"You're going to leave Caitlin unprotected and use her as bait for those bastards?" I blurted out, horrified.
"Now, no name-calling. They're fucking potential terror suspects. The girl would be dead anyway if it weren't for your