There were no lights on anywhere. She walked into the courtyard between the prison and the house and listened.
Nothing. In the far distance, she could hear surf breaking on the shore of the island.
The house was a two-story job with a balcony on the upper floor that went all the way around. She walked to the front door and examined it. A heavy wooden door with a keyhole. She tried the handle and then put her shoulder against it and shoved, but it didn’t move.
Heather took a few steps back and examined the building with a more clinical eye. She shook her head to try to get her brain working better.
Two floors. Brick construction. Corrugated-iron roof. There were large windows on the ground floor with bars over them. She did a circuit of the structure looking for any points of entry but couldn’t see any obvious ones.
Heather tugged at the metal bars covering the windows. Although they appeared rusty and very old, none of them seemed loose. She tried every metal bar on every window on the ground floor and then shoved her shoulder against the door again.
Sighing, she tried to figure out what to do.
There was no guarantee that the house would have water. Maybe this whole thing was a fool’s errand.
She walked back to the old cellblock and looked inside the individual cells. Cobwebs hung from all the doorways and the building stank of urine. Watching out for venomous spiders, she examined each cell for anything she could possibly use.
There was a lot of garbage on the floor but the paper waste was mildewed and fit for nothing. There were a few crushed beer cans with liquid inside. She was so desperate she was tempted to pour the contents into her mouth. She decided that if she couldn’t get into the house, she’d risk being poisoned and do just that so she could have at least some liquid in her system for the journey to the beach.
Back into the courtyard.
The waning sickle moon slipped out from behind a solitary cloud and for a moment she got a really good view of the old guardhouse. There were no bars on the floors of the upper windows. If she could find a way up there to that second floor…
She wondered what time it was. How long she had been away? One hour? Two?
On the north side of the guardhouse there was a narrow veranda with a rocking chair and a wicker chair. The rocking chair was useless, but perhaps she could stand on the wicker chair and climb up one of the columns to the second-floor balcony. From there it would be comparatively easy to get to one of the windows, break it, open it, and enter the guardhouse.
Heather picked up the wicker chair. It was not as light as she’d been expecting and she had some trouble carrying it around to the side of the veranda. She pushed it down hard into the sandy soil and leaned it against the wooden pillar holding up the balcony.
She estimated the distance from the top of the seat to the iron railing on the second floor balcony as about six feet. If she stretched her arms and didn’t fall off the chair and was strong enough, she could pull herself up.
Standing on the seat, she tentatively put one foot on one armrest and then the other foot on the other, and when she was certain that the chair was not going to slip from underneath her, she placed one foot on the back of the— The chair slipped and she tumbled backward into the sand with a mild whump. “Ow,” she said and put her hand over her mouth.
It wasn’t as bad as falling off the tree into the red dirt.
She lay there in the sandy grass and looked at the stars. She stared at the starless space called the Coalsack. You couldn’t see that in the Northern Hemisphere. At Uluru, a guide had explained that it was a nebula, a vast dust cloud many light-years across. To the Aboriginal peoples, it had looked like the head of an emu. She closed her eyes. She was alone here in the nothing, but it was OK. Solitude was an old friend that welcomed her after all these months with kids and their friends and their mommies. It would be so easy just to keep her eyes closed. Just to lie here on the sand all night. Eventually, without water, all her systems would begin to shut down. Her kidneys would stop working and her heart would slow, and maybe, if she was lucky, it would just stop completely.
None of this was her responsibility.
She was just a kid herself.
She was twenty-four, but really, she was younger than that. She’d left home only a few years ago. She hadn’t really wanted to come to this island. The kids wanted koalas and she’d been trying once again to get them on her side.
The kids were not her kids.
They didn’t like her very much. In fact, they barely tolerated her. They weren’t her problem.
What was the difference anyway between dying here and dying in some trailer in the woods decades from now. It was all the same groove. The universe wouldn’t even blink.