Feeding the Demons Read Online Free Page B

firmly shut. She stood there a moment, not breathing. There was nowhere for anyone to hide in the lounge area. It felt empty. She went back to the bathroom and slid back into the hot water. But her mind wouldn’t leave the incident alone. Why had the bathroom door suddenly shut? Nothing happens without a reason. I’ve been out of the job for five years, she thought, and I’m even more suspicious now than I was when I was a cop. Maybe it was something to do with physics, or convection, explained in terms of hot and cold air and the creation of high and low pressure areas. She tried relaxing back into the water but the fright had unsettled her so she pulled the plug, stepped out and dried herself down. She couldn’t find her knickers anywhere and had to crawl underneath the bedcovers to retrieve her bra.
    She would go home and get her costume, go for a quick dip to clear her head, grab a coffee and a croissant and then face whatever the day would bring.
    She walked into the lounge area to retrieve the rest of her clothes, but stopped short in the doorway. A chill of fear rippled through her body as hair follicles, obeying a primitive directive, stiffened. She felt the rush of adrenalin; that explosion of icy fire. Now she understood why her clothes had looked almost laid out when she’d glanced without attention earlier.
    They’d been laid out all right. She covered her mouth with a hand as if to silence herself from making some shocked noise. Oh Jesus, she thought. Kit was right. This was not fun. This was horrible. I’ve gone to bed with a weirdo. She stood there a moment more, taking it all in, the clothes, the talcum powder, the tatters. Then she rushed to check her bag in the drawer beside the bed. Nothing was missing. The eighty dollars she remembered from last night were folded safely in her wallet, as was the business card of the man she’d picked up. The video camera was still safe in its bag. She picked it up and returned to her clothes in the lounge room. Using the slow panning technique that had been so much part of her crime scene work when she was a cop, and was still important in her security operations, she recorded every nasty detail.
    •
    Fortunately, it had been raining yesterday morning, so she was able to cover herself with the raincoat she’d been wearing and drive home. She made her way through the early morning traffic of the Cross and eastern suburbs as quickly as possible, her skirt, panties, pantyhose, blouse and jumper carefully stored in the large sheet of white paper she’d managed to beg from the hotel’s kitchen.
    As she put the key to the deadlock of her flat, Gemma noticed that her fingers were trembling. Noel had wired the front door lock and the alarm system together so that unlocking the door also disarmed the electronic shriek. A square of envelope showed under next door’s door and she wondered briefly if the Ratbag and his mother were away. She walked into her flat to the stink of flowering stocks going bad in a vase and Taxi running cross-leggedly over the polished boards to greet her, calling for breakfast, with his tail straight up in the air. She placed the wrapped-up clothes on the hall table and seized him, snuggling her chin into his marmalade fur, holding on to him for comfort. ‘Oh, you cat,’ she told him. ‘You straight-tailed, orange-flavoured cat.’ Her heartbeat was easing but he picked up her distress and struggled against her, so she let him plop heavily onto the floor again. Her mother’s beautiful face shone from a silver-framed photograph and next to that was the collection of dainty miniature porcelain dolls, seven of them, standing along the back of the sideboard like a line-up. She’d lost interest in collecting them by the seventh. I think I might give them away, she thought. But maybe, one day, I’ll have a daughter. That day seemed a very long way off. And the sight of her mother’s face renewed the guilt she was feeling about keeping