Blood Secret by Jaye Ford

Not away, not like last night. She wanted the adrenaline-depleting comfort of a fast, exhausting pace. Sweating off the edginess had always made her feel less vulnerable and more capable. She still did it every day, along the lake mostly and mostly because she loved it. She tried not to think about the other reasons.
    She forced them out of her mind now.
    The sun had burned off the soft light of dawn and she went outside, glimpsing only briefly at the calm expanse of water beyond the fence before crossing the lawn again. The cloud cover that’d hidden the stars last night was gone and there was the promise of heat in the early morning glare.
    The garden along the rear fence was in full colour now, not the shadowy shapes of last night. A glossy-leafed, waist-high hedge was the backdrop to purple-covered lavender, a gardenia with its first creamy buds, grasses with feather-duster heads and other plants Rennie didn’t know the names of. Max was the gardener. She just pulled and dug where she was told, hosed and pointed proudly like she had something to do with it when the vegetables came in. Yesterday afternoon, Max had turned the soil around the whole garden, going at it as if it was a workout instead of leisure, adding compost from their bins and whatever was in the big bags he’d hauled home from the nursery. He once tried to explain the science behind it all and she’d feigned interest for about half a minute. This morning, she was grateful for his enthusiasm, that the soil was plumped up and spongy and footprints would be easy to find.
    She walked the length of the bed, finding only indentations where she’d crouched and listened. She unlatched the gate and stepped out. A magpie squawked as it flapped from the canopy of gums at the edge of the lake. A high breeze made the leaves sing as though there was a choir hiding in the branches whispering ‘shhh’. Left and right, there was only the long strip of grass and the bike track, a straight line of fences bordering one side, the eucalypts and water along the other. The mound of grass clippings that had freaked her out last night didn’t look anything like a body in the daylight. Perhaps it hadn’t last night.
    She walked to the lake’s edge, casting her eyes around the boats floating by their moorings, stepping onto wet pebbles at the shoreline to get a better view in both directions. The humps of upturned dinghies were the only interruption to the gentle curve of the bay.
    It was when she was trotting back to the gate that she saw why the tarp covering the grass clippings was still flapping in the breeze. House bricks held down three of its corners. A fourth was lying about a metre from the tarp. She glanced at her fence then back at the brick. Its trajectory was moving away from their yard. She remembered the noise she’d heard from the back door and how she’d stopped in her tracks halfway across the yard. Had someone gone through the gate then bolted as she approached? Had they stayed close to the fence line and knocked the brick off its corner as they ran?
    The brick could have been like that for days, she told herself. Could have been dislodged by the kids that rode up and down the path on their bikes. She walked to the house trying to ignore the pressing, uneasy thought of someone in the shadows, watching as she’d crept about with a torch and knife, as she’d called for Max and freaked out.
    Inside, Rennie dug out Max’s old address book, flip­ped through its dog-eared pages and dialled his sailing buddy Pete.
    He answered at a shout. ‘Yo, Max. Spoke to him. All sorted, mate. Thanks.’
    She’d expected to wake him. ‘Pete, it’s Renée.’
    â€˜Oh hey, how you doing?’
    â€˜I’ve been better.’ She explained about the party and the search afterwards. ‘Have you heard from him?’
    Pete’s voice dropped a few decibels with concern. ‘No, not this