Through a Camel's Eye by Dorothy Johnston

the drawing she had made, the speed with which news travelled around Queenscliff. If Riza’s abductor had come to silence her - she paused a moment for the irony in that - then the best thing would be to run away.
    But Camilla braced herself against the temptation of a cowardly escape. If the thief were really out there, she was being given a chance to prove that she wasn’t a coward after all. She stood in deep shadow by the kitchen window and watched the dim, bobbing light pass across the back yard and stop outside her garden shed. She watched the light disappear as whoever was carrying it went behind the shed. Camilla guessed who it was then, and what she was doing. She smiled to herself in the darkness, as, just in case she was wrong, she bent to take a rolling pin out of a drawer. She stared down at her tense and whitened knuckles grasping the makeshift weapon, catching her breath at the ease with which a violent impulse could rise up without warning.
    The light was lowered and became even dimmer. The torch had been placed on the ground, revealing the shed window from below, and Julie Beshervase peering into it. Camilla watched as Julie tried the catch, then cupped her hands around her face. She wore dark clothes and a scarf around her head, but it was Julie’s figure all right, Julie’s long-legged stance.
    Camilla loosened her grip on the rolling pin and smiled again, thinking of the contents of her garden shed. She watched until Julie picked up her torch and returned the way she’d come.
    No building in Camilla’s vicinity had such solidity and stature as the lighthouse. When she woke to a foggy morning, she got up and headed for the cliff path.
    The fog horn filled every cranny in the rocks; even the rests between each blast were sucked up by the echo. Camilla was fascinated by the thick white stalk of the lighthouse, appearing and disappearing through the fog. Behind her, the pier squatted as a vague horizontal line, a grey denser than the sky. Its verticals were lines of shadow legs, a giant centipede.
    On occasions like this - and it was far from the first one - Camilla stood spellbound by the spectral pillar and the deafening noise. She grimaced, hands clamped to her ears, thinking that it might be a relief to change her loss of speech for loss of hearing, and then frightened that this wish might be taken as ingratitude for what she still possessed. No one had told her to stand under the lighthouse in a fog. In fact, there were signs that expressly forbade it.
    Camilla proceeded along the cliff path, grateful that she knew where to put her feet. She stopped, recalling the white-faced woman. When Chris Blackie had shown her a photograph, she’d hesitated and then shaken her head. She could not be sure. But the woman had been wearing dark clothes and she’d indicated this to Chris. She wondered if she should make another drawing.
    When, exactly, had she heard the scream? Chris had asked her this, but again, she couldn’t be sure. Her thoughts were muddled and she was afraid of being misunderstood. Chris had not been unkind, or hasty, but still, Camilla knew she was suspected of taking Riza, and that she must be careful.
    Thinking of the woman, she felt the membrane between her being and another’s to be stretched so thinly that she might pass through it unseen. She longed for a voice to shout with, to shout a warning that she feared was too late.
    The phone was Camilla’s enemy. When it rang, she fumbled the receiver, hot of hand and face, lifting it with shaking hands, straining towards the voice on the other end. It was usually somebody selling something, or her son. If the former, she felt relieved. If the latter, she tried hard to indicate, by the quality of her listening, answers to his questions about her health, about what she’d been ‘up to’. She knew the questions were a test that she was bound to fail. Success would be recorded when she could reply