A Place of Hiding

Once she was there, they had little choice but to wait for what would happen next. They could storm the dolmen and risk her life if China was armed, which Deborah knew she was not, or they could wait till Deborah brought her friend out. What would happen after that—her own arrest, most likely—was something about which she did not care at the moment. She shoved open the thick wooden door and entered the ancient chamber.

With the door shut behind her, black enveloped her, thick and silent like a tomb. The last noise she heard was a shout from Le Gallez, which the heavy door cut off when she closed it. The last sight she had was the spearpoint of light that fast extinguished at the same moment. She said into the stillness, “China,” and she listened. She tried to picture what she’d seen of the dolmen’s interior when she’d been inside with Paul Fielder. The main inner chamber was straight ahead of her. The secondary chamber was to her right. There might be, she realised, further chambers within, perhaps to her left, but she hadn’t seen them earlier and she couldn’t recall if there were any additional fissures that might lead into one.

She put herself in the place of her friend, in the place of anyone caught in this position. Safety, she thought. The feeling of being returned to the womb. The inner side chamber, which was small and secure. She reached for the wall. It was useless waiting for her eyes to adjust, for there was nothing to which her eyes could adjust. No light pierced the gloom, not a flicker, not a gleam.

She said, “China. The police are out there. They’re in the paddock. There’re three of them about thirty feet from the door and one on the wall and I don’t know how many more in the trees. I didn’t come with them. I didn’t know. I followed. Simon...” Even at this last, she couldn’t tell her friend that her own husband had apparently been the instrument of China’s downfall. She said, “There’s no way out of here. I don’t want you to get hurt. I don’t know why...” But her voice couldn’t get through that sentence with the calm that she wanted, so she took another route.

“There’s an explanation for everything. I know that. There is. Isn’t there. China.”

She listened hard as she felt for the fissure that gave way to the small side chamber. She told herself there was nothing to fear, for this was her friend, the woman who’d seen her through a bad time that was the worst time ever, one of love and loss, of indecision, action, and action’s aftermath. She’d held her and promised, “Debs, it’ll pass. It will pass, believe me.”

In the darkness, Deborah said China’s name again. She added, “Let me walk you out of here. I want to help you. I want to see you through this. I’m your friend.”

She gained the inner chamber, her jacket brushing against the stone wall. She heard the rustle of its material and so, apparently, did China River. She finally spoke.

“Friend,” she said. “Oh yes, Debs. Aren’t you ever my friend.” She flicked on the torch that she’d used to illuminate the lock on the dolmen’s door. The resulting light struck Deborah squarely in the face. It came low from the camp bed, where China was sitting. Behind its bright glow, her face was as white as a marble death mask hovering above the light. “You,” China said to her simply, “don’t know shit about friendship. You never have. So don’t talk to me about what you can do to help me out.”

“I didn’t bring the police here. I didn’t know...” Except Deborah couldn’t quite lie, not in this final moment. For she’d been on Smith Street earlier, hadn’t she? She’d returned there, and she’d seen no shop to buy the sweets that China had claimed to have secured for her brother. Cherokee himself had opened her shoulder bag in a search for money and had brought forth nothing, especially not the chocolate bars he supposedly loved. Deborah said more to herself than to China, “Was it that travel agent? Is that where you’d gone? Yes, that had to be it. You were laying your plans, where you’d go first when you got off the island because you knew they’d release you. After all, they had him. That must have been what you wanted from the first, what you planned, even. But why?”

“You’d want to know that, wouldn’t you.” China played the light up and down Deborah’s body. She said, “Perfect in every way. Good at everything you set out to do. Always the apple of some man’s eye. I can see you’d want to understand how it feels to be good for nothing and have someone oh-too-happy to prove it for you.”

“You can’t say you killed him because of...Chi na, what did you do?

Why did you do it?”

“Fifty dollars,” she said flatly. “That and a surfboard. Think about it, Deborah. Fifty dollars and a banged-up surfboard.”