The Auction a Romance by Anna Erishkigal Read online

  "She needs you," I said softly.

  With a grim nod, he went straight into Pippa's bedroom and shut the door.

  I waited and waited, but no sound came from Pippa's room except the occasional sniffle. I suspected he'd gathered her up to hold her until she fell asleep the same way he'd held me after Gregory hurt me. I went into my closet and dug out the Christmas presents; her grandmother's afghan and the scarf I'd finished for Adam. I glanced up when I heard Pippa's door open, but was disappointed when he went into his own bedroom and shut the door. He didn't come back out again, not even to drink his nightly White Rabbit beer. I stared at the pathetic offerings I'd left under the Christmas tree. Adam had gifts from Santa hidden in his room, but it wasn't the horse that Pippa wanted, and I did not dare knock on his door to ask.

  "Some Christmas this is turning out to be," I said to the angel at the top of the tree.

  I decided it was better to leave the tree lit overnight.

  Chapter 37

  The station tonight was unusually dark and quiet, not that there was ever any sound in this land between, but usually I could feel vibration, even if I couldn't actually hear. I reined Harvey towards the only source of light, the Christmas tree which shone out the picture window like a beacon for Santa Claus. In front of the door stood the girl on the white pony and her horse, her expression almost as grief-stricken as Pippa's.

  The white pony whickered a greeting. I couldn't hear it, but I felt it.

  "Hello," I said to Adam's mother. "You decided to come back?"

  The girl gestured for me to follow. She directed the white pony to walk down towards the river, but it was no longer sleepy, but roiled with white-water at flood-stage. She led me not to the usual sandy area we used as a beach, but turned onto a narrow path which led upriver, not that far, but due to the blackthorn, it was not the most convenient spot to access. As we reached the riverbank I could feel, down to the core of my being, the little dun-beige calf call out as it struggled not to drown.

  The girl on the white pony disappeared, but I knew what I had to do.

  "C'mon, Harvey," I said. "Let's go get her."

  Someone shook me.

  "Rosie?"

  Bright light shone into my room from the hallway. I blinked, disoriented, as Adam's dark outline came into view. He clutched my shoulders and shook me again.

  "Rosie. Please, wake up. Pippa's missing."

  I sat bolt upright, clutching my skimpy nightgown which I'd cast open in the heat to reveal far more breast than was appropriate to flash my boss. Pippa. Missing. The dream.

  "What happened?"

  Adam's voice warbled.

  "I went to bring out the Christmas presents and heard Thunderlane scratching on her door. I went in to check and her bed was empty."

  "Did you search the house?"

  "Yes." His voice broke. "I think she ran away."

  He dug his fingers into my shoulders, a frantic, worried gesture.

  "Her mother promised a horse for Christmas," I said. "She might have gone outside to see if Santa Claus brought her one, instead."

  "I'll go check the barn and the paddocks," Adam said. "Thunderlane can usually find her when she wanders off."

  He called the dog and bolted out the door. I yanked on my shorts and hurried outside, tucking my nightgown into my waist. The air felt hot and airless, while down from the river, the crickets and peepers called in a deafening midsummer crescendo.

  "Pippa? Pippa!" Adam ran frantically from stall to stall, searching in the tack room, the work room, and behind the empty grain bins. His voice grew high-pitched and frantic as he threw open the back barn door and ran out into the paddocks, calling Pippa's name into the inky night.

  Thunderlane circled, sniffing the ground, but wherever Pippa had gone, she hadn't left enough of a scent-trail for the dog to pick up amongst all her other scent-trails.

  "I'll check the hayloft," I said. "Sometimes she goes up there to play."

  I climbed up the ladder to the central loft which straddled the middle aisle. Sometimes I came up here in a futile attempt to get a few bars for my mobile phone. I moved some bales of straw; places she might have crawled in to hide or go back to sleep, but all I found were surprised field mice. I remembered the dream.

  The Fairy Queen promised I'd have a horse soon….

  "Adam … the river!"

  "Why would she go down there in the dark?"

  "Because that's where the Fairy Queen likes to bathe."

  He ran back into the house to grab a flashlight, and then bolted out towards our favorite swimming spot, almost two meters of frantic muscle. With the river so low, hopefully she'd be able to swim if she'd wandered in while sleepwalking, but there were funnel spiders and brown snakes to step on in the dark, not to mention wild dingos and the occasional aggressive emu. I grabbed my own flashlight and took off after him.

  "She's not down here!" Adam's voice came out as a strangled cry.

  "Look upriver."

  "It narrows out," Adam said. "You can't get past the bend on the beach."

  "There's a path up here somewhere, isn't there?" I played my flashlight back and forth, searching for the path the girl on the white pony had shown me. I moved in a search grid until the beam shone upon a thin path of grass that looked like it'd recently been crushed.

  "Adam … this way!"

  He bolted up the riverbank and added the beam from his flashlight to mine. Our breath came at a rapid rhythm as we followed the crushed grass through the hot night until it led us back towards the riverbank.

  Thunderlane's nose shot up. With a 'yip' his fluffy tail disappeared down into the darkness. He barked at the foot of the embankment.

  "This way." Adam disappeared down the path without waiting to help me down. I heard a relieved cry. "Rosie! She's down here!"

  I picked my way down through the blackthorn bushes to a spot along the river that grew rough and rocky. This was not the secret well the man on the painted stallion had shown me, but a part of the river much closer to the house.

  "Pippa? Pippa?" Adam dropped to his knees and shook the mud-encrusted figure crumpled at the bottom of the riverbank. "Sweetheart, wake up!"

  A lump rose up in my throat. "Is she okay?"

  Adam's flashlight highlighted her pale, muddy features, still wearing her pink summer My Little Pony nightgown. Her feet were bare, and down one leg a jagged scratch seeped blood.

  Pippa moved. Adam cried out with relief. He felt down her neck, her arms and her legs to make sure she was okay.

  "Pippa, sweetheart," his voice warbled. "Daddy's here. Please, honey. Open your eyes. Let me know you're okay?"

  Pippa groaned, and then she opened her eyes. Even by shoddy light of the flashlight, I could see her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy.

  "Santa didn't bring me a horse," Pippa's lip trembled. "The Fairy Queen promised I'd get one soon."

  Adam's shoulders slumped forward, broken, battered, as though he'd been carrying a tremendous burden and suddenly collapsed from the weight.

  "Let's go home, sweetheart. Do you think you can walk?"

  Pippa shook her head back and forth.

  "That mean old pricker bush made me trip."

  Adam slid his arms underneath her and cradled her to his chest. He buried his face into her neck.

  "You promised you wouldn't run away anymore." His muffled voice filtered out of her clothing. "You promised me you would never do this again."

  "I just wanted to ask the Fairy Queen why she broke her promise!" Pippa wept. "But she doesn't love me anymore, so she hid where I couldn't find her."

  The skin around Adam's eyes wrinkled into purest torment as his mouth turned downwards into an expression of utter grief. He picked up his daughter and rose to his feet, carrying her past the blackthorn even though it left him bloody and full of scratches. He carried her back into the house and stepped back while I wiped down the scratches on her legs with hydrogen peroxide and wrapped it in some sterile gauze. I checked her
skin for signs of spider bites or fangs, but thankfully the blackthorn appeared to be the worst of her injuries. Her ankle turned purple and began to swell.

  "I'll go get an ice pack," Adam said.

  When he returned, I wrapped it in a towel.

  "I know this will be uncomfortable, sweetheart," I said. "But keep it against your foot for as long as you can. Okay?"

  Pippa nodded, her silver eyes filled with sadness. I gave her a hug. Adam picked her up and disappeared with her into her bedroom.

  I arranged the box of presents Adam had carried out and not yet set underneath the tree. It wasn't the horse Pippa expected, but Adam had made sure she'd have plenty of presents. I pulled a chicken out of the freezer to defrost even though it was still the middle of the night. Potatoes? Check. Lots of greens. Check. And Linda Hastings had sent over a gift basket with a variety of homemade artisan cheeses and cookies. It wasn't Christmas at the Jackson's, but it was a respectable start to Christmas at the Bristow's.

  At last Adam came out of her bedroom. He wandered out into the living room and sank down into his favorite orange king chair with his forehead pressed into his hand. I came out of the kitchen and settled down onto the couch across from him.

  "Why didn't you tell me Pippa had run away before?"

  Adam took a shuddering breath. As he spoke, his voice was husky with tears.

  "It all started after Mrs. Richardson retired. Pippa started talking about her imaginary friend, but I was gone so much, I assumed she was talking about a teacher at school. Eva never told me Pippa started sleepwalking, or the real reason she'd been kicked out of school was because she'd started running away and hiding. I didn't find out any of this until the last time she ran away."

  "The horse camp?"

  "Yes." Adam's voice broke. "I had no idea." His eyes glistened blue with tears. "How could I have been so caught up in my career that I didn't pay attention to the fact my little girl was miserable?"

  "You didn't know."

  "Yes! I did know!" Adam punched his fist into his own belly. "Have you ever had a real bad feeling about something that just ate at your gut so badly you couldn't even eat? And no matter how much people try to reassure you everything is fine, you just know something is wrong?"

  "Yes." I felt that way the day that Harvey was killed. "What happened, Adam?"

  "When Maynor Jackson started drilling into the Condamine River basin near Chinchilla," Adam said, "I expressed concerns about how close the aquifer was to the test bores. I grew up in this river valley, so I know, first-hand, how porous the coal seams are here. I refused to believe it when Maynor told me not to worry, so I ordered some independent tests and advised him not to drill. Maynor promised he'd leave the Condamine River basin alone, and then he sent me to Kazakhstan to site some new oil wells for him there. He kept me there for months, one delay after another, while behind my back he drilled the wells in Chinchilla. Every time I called home to speak to Pippa, Eva said she was at a friend's house, so then I'd get busy and forget about it until the next time I called."

  I took a wild guess. "The new nanny quit, so Eva sent Pippa off to summer camp?"

  "Eva wasn't even in Australia!" Adam hissed. "She took a cruise to Fiji and forwarded the house phone to her mobile, so I had no way of knowing she wasn't even home. The riding camp was geared for older girls, but they wanted a piece of the Jackson oil money, so they took Pippa as an overnight camper even though she was only old enough to go during the day. The girls there ate Pippa alive!"

  "So she ran away?"

  "Not at first," Adam said. "She liked the horses, and some of the day-campers were around her age. She just didn't like getting picked on. Pippa called Eva and begged her to come home, but Eva told her to tough it out. So then Pippa called her grandfather."

  "What did he do?"

  "He paid the headmaster off to keep her there." Adam grimaced and pressed his forehead into his fist. "Maynor needed to keep me away from Chinchilla, so he sacrificed his granddaughter so I'd stay in Kazakhstan."

  "What happened with Pippa?"

  "Pippa had no way to contact me," Adam said, "so she stole a horse and disappeared into the woods!"

  Tears streamed down Adam's cheeks.

  "And I knew it. Every time I closed my eyes, I could feel my little girl calling to me in my sleep. But I was so determined to site the next goddamned oil well that I trusted Eva when she told me Pippa was fine."

  And now you know why Adam left the woman he loved…

  "But you did come home, didn't you?"

  "Yes." Adam wrapped his arms around himself. "I had this nightmare one night that Pippa was drowning. I flew back to Australia, only to find our house had been empty for months. I'm the one who found Pippa in the woods."

  "How long was she gone?"

  "Three days," Adam said.

  "Three days? Last summer? I never heard about a manhunt for a kid?"

  "Maynor pulled some strings to keep it out of the newspapers."

  "Why? Why would he keep his missing granddaughter out of the news?"

  "The riding camp headmaster needed to cover his ass," Adam said, "so he called child protective services on us. That's how Roberta Dingle came to be involved."

  My breath came out as an explosive hiss. I'd had a little boy during one of my practicums, the one whose mother couldn't be bothered to attend a parent-teacher conference. I'd finally sic'd child protective services on the parents, but that had been a public school. For a private camp that relied on wealthy donors to 'sic the government on them, the level of neglect must have been truly breathtaking.

  "How was Pippa when you found her?" I asked.

  "Inconsolable." Adam looked away, his cheeks stained with tears. "She kept babbling that a Fairy Queen told her if she ran away, it would make me come home and stay. The doctors called it an acute psychotic break and prescribed her medication."

  Adam finally let it go.

  "Because I wasn't there for her, I drove my own daughter insane!"

  The only time I'd ever seen a grown man cry, it was the day I'd told my Daddy I'd chosen to live with my mother instead of him. I stepped over the coffee table to stand beside the garish orange king chair he used to keep his distance. He wrapped his arms around my waist and buried his face into my midriff. A whole miserable, rotten year of pent-up grief and divorce and betrayal and multiple deaths all poured out of Adam Bristow like a sobbing dam that had finally burst after a torrential downpour. I cried as well, but not for me. I cried for him, because it felt as though I could feel his pain.

  I thought of my own fanciful imaginings, that Adam's dead mother had taken the form of a girl on a white pony to welcome me to the closest thing I'd had to a home since my parents had gotten divorced.

  "Adam … Pippa's not insane. She knows her mother is incapable of love, so she created an imaginary mother figure."

  Tormented flesh shuddered beneath my fingers, the anguish of a man who'd lost too much.

  "My father was right about Eva! He warned me, and he was right. It was one thing to put up with it myself, but how could I have been so blind to not see what Eva's instability was doing to Pippa?"

  I sat down on the arm of his chair; his face pressed into my breast, and kissed his forehead.

  "Sometimes, when we love somebody, not only do we blind ourselves to their faults, but we'll cut off everybody who tries to make us see. I did that with Sienna after she told me she hated Gregory Schluter. But now you see Eva and her father for who they truly are. What matters is what kind of father you choose to be for Pippa now."

  Adam stiffened and looked away. But he didn't stand up or ask me to let him go.

  "I'm sorry," Adam said hoarsely. "I shouldn't have dumped all of my troubles onto you."

  He was, I understood, now mortified he'd let me see him cry.

  "We're friends, Adam. If you can't talk to your friends about the uncomfortable stuff, then maybe it's time you found better friends?"

  We sat there a long time,
locked in each other's embrace, and then, by the same unspoken rules which had kept us dancing around one another for months, we pulled apart simultaneously. Until Adam was a free man, our courtship was over. We were back to being employer and employee, and this time it would be me enforcing the rules.

  "I'll go check the locks to make sure Pippa doesn't sleepwalk out again," I said. "You should go check on her and make sure she's still asleep."

  Adam grimaced, his expression wounded.

  "Okay." His voice sounded hoarse.

  Just in case, I dragged the king chair in front of the front door, and then went to the kitchen door and piled a kitchen chair filled with pots and pans in front of it. If Pippa wandered out again, at least she would create a ruckus. First thing after Christmas, I would go to the hardware store and see if they carried some kind of door alarm.

  Chapter 38

  The first hang-up phone call came on Christmas morning, after Pippa opened her presents, but before I'd gotten the pikelets onto the table.

  "Hello?" Adam said. "I can't hear you, hello?"

  But the other end of the telephone never answered.

  The second hang-up phone call came later that afternoon. I answered it this time. The moment the caller heard my voice, the line went dead.

  The third time came later in the evening, just after Pippa went to bed. Adam answered it.

  "Listen, you bitch," Adam hissed into the silent phone. "You gave up your Christmas with her. Now stop calling here. And stop calling me."

  We bid each other good night and went into our separate rooms to catch up on the sleep we'd lost the night before.

  I was at the Mitre-10 as soon as it opened on Friday morning which, even in Nutyoon, had a Boxing Day door buster sale going on, complete with a line of bargain-hunters. When I got up to the checkout, I discovered I'd won a blue key-ring flashlight with the Mitre-10 logo on it. I slipped it onto my car keys and used Adam's credit card to pay for the door alarms. I then stopped at the IGA to get some groceries and faked a smile as numerous townies asked, "Did you have a pleasant Christmas, Rosie?" I gave them expected answer of, 'Why, thank you, yes. We all had a Merry Christmas.'