Crystal Coffin by Anita Bell

didn’t try to pat it.
    Locklin picked up her bags and whistled to it again as he headed off towards the truck.
    Nikki followed with the dog at her heels. She felt like a cow that was being herded home from the market. She pinched her nose at a smell as they neared the truck, and stopped a short distance from the crate. It reeked like the dog. She could smell shoe polish too, but Locklin’s boots weren’t to blame. They were scuffed and dirty.
    He rolled the back door of the crate open and tossed her bags onto the floor behind a pair of horses that looked around their rumps at her. One was bridled, but it wasn’t tied to anything and it turned sideways to watch them putting bags in through the open door.
    Locklin reached his arm in and clicked his fingers.
    Did he want her in the back of that?
    The cattle dog leapt in behind the bags and got a scruff round his ears for the effort. Nikki relaxed, but not much, just enough to remember something that she should have done before she got off the bus.
    â€˜I need to go first,’ she lied.
    â€˜You just got here.’
    â€˜I mean, to the loo,’ she said frowning. ‘Or am I supposed to squat behind a tree?’
    â€˜Oh,’ he said, glancing up at the pub. It was close — less than a hundred metres up the road past the cafe — but there’d be faces there that he wanted to avoid. Behind him was the park with shady trees and under the shade of the biggest tree was a small brick building. He nodded to that instead.
    She reached past him to rummage through one of her bags and withdrew her hand with a small grey purse. Then she headed off alone.
    â€˜We’re on a schedule,’ he said to her back, but he didn’t have to. She wanted to get this over with as much as he did.
    Inside the musty building, she cupped water from the tap in her hands and swallowed it with half a pain-killer. Her headache didn’t seem so bad out of the sun and she didn’t need to use all the facilities, only the water to help her swallow and a little more to cool her face and hands.
    She pulled her long sleeves up to cool the scratches on her hands and saw the angry marks left by handcuffs. The cuffs were designed for adults and she’d worked her way free; Her wrists were swollen now, red and painful in the heat, and she ran them under the water. Then she rolled her shoulder to work out the soreness and pulled her collar aside to see bruises in the shape of fingers against the base of her neck.
    She splashed more water on her face, rubbing her wet fingers around the back of her neck to cool away her headache, but it only skipped a throb or two.
    She blinked at the face staring back at her from the mirror — hers, but she saw only her mother’s. She splashed her eyes, wondering where the tears were and realised that all she felt was numb. When she looked at her fingers, she still saw her mother’s blood, but the rage and fear were gone. The hatred for her stepfather was gone too, as if she’d run away from her feelings when she’d run away from the murder charge in Sydney.
    She patted her cheeks dry and painted a little confidence on where innocence had once been, using lipstick, blush and eyeshadow from her purse. Then she straightened her blouse and pulled her sleeves down over her aching wrists to hide them until they healed, and she tied her straggling chocolate curls up into a respectable ponytail.
    She hooked a slim, silver-framed set of glasses over her ears, perching them at the top of her nose, and for a heartbeat she remembered what it was like to be Nikki Dumakis, daughter to the first female Federal Minister for the Arts. Then she traded that for reality and the kind of age that takes trauma and not time to accumulate.
    A month earlier, she couldn’t fake her way into a Kings Cross nightclub past a bouncer with a seeing-eye dog, and yet that morning she’d faked her way into an adult-wage job without