“Getting out of here and running away,” Heather said as she continued to saw.
“I think there might be a way out,” Olivia said quietly.
“What?”
“There was a little girl here earlier. She said she could come in to see us. She said there was a loose board on this side of the shed. I’ll check it out,” Olivia said.
“But what will you do if you get away?” Petra asked. “What will you do after?”
“Phones don’t work here, so we’ll have to get off the island to call the police.”
“You are going to swim to the mainland?” Hans scoffed.
“No. We’re not going to swim. We’ll think of something.”
“You are making a mountain of a molehill, I think,” Hans said and then added something to Petra in Dutch.
Heather nodded to herself and sawed through the final bit of hemp, freeing Owen. “Rub your wrists, get the blood back into them,” she said softly.
Keeping low, Heather scurried across the shed to where Olivia was pulling at the wall.
“Look at this,” Olivia said, tugging at a loosely fitting plank near the floor. “The little girl said it was a different wood. It’s coming out as I pull it.”
“It’s not only the wood; these are just one-inch nails. We can do this if we pull together,” Heather said.
She and Olivia tugged and out the plank came with a loud tearing sound.
They froze for a minute to see if there was any reaction outside.
A dog barked in the distance but no one came.
“We did it!” Olivia whispered.
Heather looked through the hole. There, outside, just fifty feet away in the deep darkness, was what they had called the heathland.
They had created a big enough gap in the shed wall for a child to crawl through, and perhaps if they dug underneath it, an adult could squeeze through too.
“It’s good,” Heather said.
“Are you quite sure your husband was killed?” Hans asked. “Perhaps there was an altercation and you did not see what happened to him? Perhaps he has been taken to a hospital?”
Heather crawled back over to Owen. “Get yourself together. We’re leaving,” she whispered.
“Is that what we’re doing, Olivia?” Owen asked his sister.
“Yes, it is,” she said.
“We’re going to take the water bottle, if that’s OK,” Heather said to Petra. “We’re going to need it more than you.”
“It is not your water. It is for all of us!” Hans protested.
“They will need it more,” Petra said.
Heather crawled back to the hole and began digging into the earth with first the penknife and then her hands. The dirt was thicker and heavier than it looked and it did not give easily. It had been baked hard by the sun for any number of summers. She dug deeper and made a little furrow. “What do you think?” she said to Olivia.
“I can get through,” Olivia said.
Heather nodded.
“Do you want me to go?”
“No, not yet. Let’s get it deep enough for all of us.”
“Are you saying that because I’m fat?” Owen asked. Heather couldn’t tell if this was a mordant attempt at one of his snarky jokes or not.
“I’m the problem. You’re not the problem,” Heather said. “I just wish we had a better tool to dig through this ground.”
“What about one of those hooks in the ceiling? Couple of them look loose,” Owen suggested.
“Perfect. You dig with the knife and I’ll see if I can reach one. Don’t hurt yourself.”
“I’ve used a knife before!”
Heather stood up cautiously and touched one of the hooks in the ceiling. Many years ago this place must have been used for hanging game birds or something of the kind. The hooks were rusted but firmly nailed into the crossbeams. The first one she touched was solid, as was the second. The third, however…she wiggled it and it started to move. Hans was very tall and she was on tiptoes. He could do this easily. She looked at him.
“No,” he said.
“Why not?”
“We are not getting involved in your trouble,” he explained.
“No, you just want to wait here all night, tied up by the neck, until the morning comes, when they are almost certainly going to kill you,” Heather said.
“Why would they do that?”
“Because they are going to make up some bullshit story about what happened to me and Tom and the kids, and you would be able to contradict that story. Therefore, the smart thing to do—the only thing to do—is kill you.”
“This is Australia, not America,” Hans said.
Heather nodded. Well, at least she’d tried.
“They are not evil,” Hans added.
“Perhaps they are worse than evil—they are bored,” Petra said.
Hans said something dismissive-sounding in Dutch.
All the hooks in the ceiling were too solid for her to remove. She was just going to have to dig with her knife and her bare hands. She dropped to the floor and helped Owen carve a furrow in the dirt big enough for both of them to wriggle under the wall. She dug with her nails and fingers. She would have used her teeth if she’d had to.
“OK,” Heather said. “Do we have everything?”
Olivia nodded. Owen grunted.
“I’ll go first,” Olivia said and she got down on her belly and began wriggling through the gap in the timbers. She was halfway through when there was the sound of a door slamming up at the house.
“Hey!” they heard someone yell. “What are those bloody Yanks up to now? Turn that bloody light off!”
Everyone froze.
“Turn that light off, someone! It’s coming right in me window!”
“Back inside, Olivia! They mean the light in front of the shed,” Heather whispered.
Olivia slithered back inside.
“Quick! Back to where you were, and put the ropes over your hands,” Heather said. The kids scrambled back to where they’d been sitting, and she put the nooses around their necks.
She heard a door open and someone come out of the farmhouse.
She put the ropes around her own neck and sat down. She was still fumbling with the rope around her wrists when she heard a key turn in the shed’s padlock. The door opened and Matt was standing there with a rifle in one hand.
“Everything all right in here?” he asked.
“Yes,” Heather said, panting.
“They want me to turn the outside light off. It’s filtering into the house.”
“That’s fine. Maybe we’ll sleep a bit.”
“We get up early round here. With the sun. I’ll make sure you get some food in the morning,” Matt said.
“Thank you,” Heather said.
“No probs,” he said.
“You’re very kind,” she said, just to keep him looking at her and not at the ropes the kids had hastily draped around their wrists. Not to mention the hole behind Olivia.
“I don’t know about that. All this…it’s Ma’s decision…well, like I say, I have to turn the light off, but, as you say, maybe you can get some kip, you know?” he said.
“When does the sun come up?”
“This time of year, around five o’clock.”
“Thank you. We will try to sleep until then.”
“Before you go, I would like to say something,” Hans said.
“Oh?”
Heather’s heart was in her mouth. She looked at Petra, but she didn’t appear to know what Hans was going to say.