Chapter 14
CYCLONE
Ronnie ran to her pickup in a downpour and drove home in a gale, wind howling, trees leaning sideways. Wipers swinging wildly barely dented the fingers of light and color obscuring her windshield.
Main Street in Tinaroo was under a shallow oily puddle. Traffic crawled. After the ice cream store she signaled and turned left down a gravel drive.
The sign for her mobile home village flapped in the wind.
The shared drive along the back of the chain fence behind the Maccas car park bore a collection of potholes and puddles.
Standing water already filled low areas between aluminum dongas, turning couch grass lawns, cement patios and gravel parking spots to blurry grey glass, dark mirrors reflecting storm clouds.
Minor flooding, so far, but if rain continued for days the water levels would rise.
Water was the strongest thing in the world.
Floods were the most expensive natural disaster in the state, causing billions of dollars of destruction each year.
A river that jumped its banks was more destructive than wildfire.
The Barron periodically wiped entire neighborhoods off the map, leaving behind nothing but mud scars and broken trees.
This neighborhood would need to be evacuated, or someone’s nan would cark it and be found weeks later sunk into a moldering mattress. Ronnie should have received an emergency text alert from the manager.
Dogs barked as she rolled down Lane B. The lawns between Lane B and Lane C were a pond. Neighbors’ inflatables and kid toys floated up against chain-link fences, queuing like school kids.
Her side lawn was one with the neighborhood puddle. The patio she and Mikey had laid last time her friend visited was under water.
When she opened the door of her truck a wall of water instantly soaked her arm.
She heard Matilda and Maya barking inside the donga.
Hunched against the rain she fumbled with her keys, then edged through the door sideways so the girls wouldn’t run out.
They ran between her and the steel barrel where she kept their food.
“I already fed you, babes, but I know you’ve had a stressful day.”
She scooped dog food into their bowls. Matilda and Maya leapt at their bowls like they hadn’t been fed in days.
A flash of lightning, close, eerie like power flickering, then an ear-splitting crash shook the donga. Electricity hummed in the walls. Ronnie held her hands in the air, careful not to touch anything metal. People had been electrocuted during storms like this.
Where was Rainbow?
The dogs wolfed down their food and licked each others’ bowls.
Rainbow must be at school. Kids didn’t get electrocuted at school.
Rainbow would ride the bus home and run up the rickety front steps of Maude’s white wooden Queenslander.
Rainbow would spend the evening on the couch watching telly or reading in bed. Either way, she wouldn’t be in danger.
Her worrying wouldn’t make the girl safe. She could call Maude, but then what? Please make sure my daughter doesn’t touch any metal countertops or take a bath tonight?
She opened the fridge, staring at the vanilla slice she had bought for Rainbow yesterday. She had meant to send it home with her.
It stared back, sad and lonely. She ate it.
Another eerie flash of white light. The dogs tore through the donga, whining and shrieking like they had been kicked. They knocked over chairs in their hurry to scramble under the table.
The family room was a mess. The dogs had been panicking while she was in Mareeba. She picked up the chairs as she crossed the room. Wet carpet smell. The dogs had probably peed in her bedroom.
Ronnie flicked on the overhead light. Her bedroom carpet was under water.
Huh. Her donga was on cinder blocks. How high must the water be outside? It hadn’t looked that high. Surely the water hadn’t risen while she was feeding the dogs?
Ronnie shrugged into her raincoat. Her cast was too big. She cut the wrist of the raincoat with scissors.
She stuck her head out the back door, then took the plunge and waded barefoot through water up to her ankles. It was cool. Water in the back garden came up to her shins. If it had been moving it would have been dangerous.
She went back inside, threw Rainbow’s clothes in a duffel bag, then loaded the dogs in the passenger seat of the truck, bribing them with strips of bacon. Her laptop, charger and phone she put in a garbage bag.
The office manager at the primary school in Atherton answered on the third ring.
“Ronnie? Is that you?”
“You all right?”
“We’ve got all the petrol for the generator. We haven’t lost power yet.”
“I’m assuming there’s no sport this arvo.”
“All afterschool activities cancelled. They’re already talking about cancelling school tomorrow.”
“Keep me posted.”
“Cheers, love. Ta.”
Next, she called her dad, who didn’t answer. She called Blaise, who said he was at the fire station.
“Tell him there’s heaps of rain headed this way.”
She locked the door of the donga, then drove over to her cousin’s house.
His dog was out in the back garden, yapping his head off.
She threw him in the truck with Matilda and Maya.
The dogs wagged their tails and sniffed each other.
She let herself into her cousin’s donga, took his yappy little Chihuahua, too.
The tiny one immediately started fighting all three of the others, as she had known he would.
Ronnie went down the line, knocking on every door.
A few elderly people were still at home.
She helped them call their relatives to come pick them up. A few of the elderly people didn’t have relatives nearby, so she called 000 to come help them evacuate.
Women showed up in trucks, started moving boxes out of dongas.
Ronnie drove the dogs and a sweet old nan named Sheila to the farm. Sheila was at least eighty and deaf in both ears.
Nev’s back door was unlocked. Ronnie held onto the white-haired woman with the walker so the dogs wouldn’t knock her over, helping her shuffle to the kitchen in her slippers.
“Make yourself at home, Sheila. I’m going back for another run.
” Ronnie grabbed a box of PG Tips out of the cupboard and filled the electric kettle.
“Make yourself a cuppa. Eat anything you can find.”
“Is this your house?”
“No. This is Nev Bickerman’s place.”
“I thought the view looked familiar. Right down the hill there was the old Shangri-La. Beautiful house. Burnt down in seventy-one or seventy-two. Such a pity.”
Ronnie wrote the address on a piece of paper, and the phone number. She pointed to the landline. “You can use the phone.” Then she hugged the elderly woman and went back out into the rain.
The clock in the empty truck glowed. Where had the last four hours gone? Ronnie turned right onto Boar Pocket road, then right onto the Gillies Range Road. It was getting dark already. Storm dark.
She had to turn on her headlights to see the road. Even then, with the wipes going at top speed, she had to crawl to stay in her lane.
The Gillies was the main road through the mountains, two lanes, on the edge of a sheer cliff. It wasn’t uncommon on clear days to look over the side on a bend in the road and see a car upside down, caught by a tree.
Ronnie pulled over to check her phone. Missed calls from friends and relatives. She called Nev. No answer. She texted her about dropping off the dogs and her eighty-year-old neighbor, then pulled back onto the Gillies.
Fifteen minutes later she drove through Lionheart. The roads were puddles, but passable with four-wheel drive.
Ten minutes later she was back in Tinaroo at the donga village. Several more trucks had appeared: relies helping each other salvage what they could. She picked up where she had left off knocking on doors.
She dropped off a scared kid at the police station.
That was hard, brought up memories. He looked like he was about Rainbow’s age, but unlike Rainbow, he wasn’t very talkative.
He didn’t know where his mum was. Ronnie could relate.
She had been that kid. His mum would be frantic when she returned home and found her kid missing.
She drove back in the dark and left a note on the woman’s kitchen table.
The next time she looked at the clock in the truck she thought it was wrong.
Five hours had felt like two. There was still so much work to do.
Neighbors were helping each other, though, so she felt all right calling it a night.
The only people left in the mobile home park were a few random men moving boxes into utes, a strange man with a pet Amethystine python that probably wasn’t legal, and some teenagers casing the place.
As she was leaving, a patrol car pulled in. Mouth suddenly dry, she gripped the wheel a little tighter.
The paddy wagon stopped in front of her. The driver was looking at her in the headlights. She forced herself to keep her eyes straight ahead, tasted adrenaline.
The officer stepped out of the vehicle. Ronnie swore. She rolled her window halfway down. Water poured in, soaking the inside of the door.
The officer shone a light on her.
“What are you doing, Peterson?”
She stopped breathing. It’s Madonna now, and you know it…
The officer shone the torch into the passenger seat. “Running a dog-walking business now, are we?”
She swallowed. Brad Collins. She had met him when she was a freakishly tall teen with orthodontics who liked to party in the wrong part of town and fall asleep in random places.
He had given her rides home on dark and stormy nights like this.
Why was he in Tinaroo? Last time she checked he still worked for Lionheart.
Solid man. Married. Three kids around Rainbow’s age. Nice guy. Too nice.
“Relax,” he said. “How about this weather?”
The light turned off. She glanced in his direction. He was backlit. She couldn’t see his face. She locked her doors.
He turned his head, disappointed. He was getting soaked.
“Are you stalking me?” she asked.
He laughed.
“You know I live here,” she said. “You don’t work for Tinaroo. You’re out of your jurisdiction.”
“I work for the county.”
“Since when?”
“Why did you lock your door, Ronnie?”
“Don’t. I’ve had a long day. I’m trying to help out some dogs.”
“Owners left them?” He shone the torch in the truck again.
She looked away. “Is this because I called dispatch about python guy? Did your nan send you?” Peggy Collins was his grandmother. “I told her to send social services.”
“Can’t send Imelda in the middle of the night for psychedelic Steve-o, can she?”
Ronnie could hear “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” blasting from the camper van with the strobe light flickering in the dark window.
“That him?” Brad asked. “Lovely. How much do you know about scrubbies? They’re constrictors, strong as. No shelter would roll that dice.”
“Reckon he needs a motel.”
“He can sleep with his girlfriend in a cage at Happy Paws.” The animal shelter in Lionheart. Brad gestured to the ball of dogs writhing in her passenger seat. “Want me to take the kids to the pound?”
“What if their owners don’t come?”
“Happy Paws.”
His proposition was tempting. “You’ll need food to tempt them into your car. Be nice to Steve-o.”
Brad Collins walked away. The patrol car pulled up beside her passenger door. He got out again. Sighing, she unlocked the door. When he opened her passenger door all five dogs poured out. One by one they jumped in the back of the paddy wagon. He shut his door gently, then stood in the rain.
When he slid into her passenger seat and jerked the door shut she clicked on the overhead lights.
He offered her a cigarette. She shook her head.
“Trying to quit?” he asked.
“What do you want?”
He lit up, took a short drag, blew the smoke away from her. “You know what I need. I need to see my kid.”
“Over my dead body.” Boo hoo. She had no sympathy.
“Is that a threat?” he teased.
She spoke slowly. “I don’t have beef with you. Don’t start beef with me.”
“I would never.”
“I’m minding my own business. You do the same.”
“Or else what? Look, Ronnie. I’m tired of being blackmailed by you.”
She laughed. “You don’t know what that means.”
“I’m not ashamed of what I did. Everyone makes mistakes.”
She saw black and red. A red streetlight two blocks away reflected in the water on the windshield.
“Let me put this in basic terms. You have something I want. You have all the power in this relationship.”
“There is no relationship.”
“I’m willing to compromise. You aren’t. Eventually you have to meet in the middle. Fair’s fair.”
“You’re making me uncomfortable.”
“Sorry. I’ll go.”
“Now.”
“I’m going. Think about it. That’s all I’m asking.”
He still had shiny bronze skin, freckles, smelled like cologne, and filled out his tight uniform in a way she liked. He still had acne on his neck and beneath the uniform a jagged scar on his chest shaped like Japan from the time a homeless kid, not her, knifed him.
I will never have a change of heart. Fifty percent of nothing is nothing. She isn’t your daughter.
He opened his wallet, folded something, tucked it in her cupholder.
How many other fifteen-year-old girls he had slept with?
She wondered where he met them. If he made them promise to keep it a secret.
If he pressured them to get an abortion, then acted like he had no idea who they were, like they were strangers meeting for the first time, when they crossed paths in the check-out aisle at the Big W.
She sighed. “Does Rainbow have other half-siblings I should know about?”
He appeared genuinely surprised. “I told you. You were the only one.”
“The only one who got pregnant?”
“I messed up one time. I’ve been faithful to my wife. I would pass a lie detector test right now.”
She believed him. Brad was a selfish prick, but he had never lied to her. She hated how easy it was to forgive him.
She watched him get out of the truck, close the passenger door, and get into his squad car in the rain, then waited for him to drive off. He seemed to do the same.
She turned on the engine, glanced at the patrol car again out of the corner of her eye, then put the truck in drive. The patrol car flashed its headlights.
She stopped at the stop sign, counted to three in her head, then signaled right, let her foot off the brake and turned the wheel.
Two hundred-dollar bills.
Everyone’s conscience manifested differently. He felt less guilty when he slipped her money. She didn’t encourage him.
He did it for himself. It was cheaper than a therapist, and she imagined it made him feel like a big fucking hero.
The dickhead was blackmailing himself.