Susan Napier – A Passionate Proposition (страница 2)

Cheryl and Emma.

Her intuition hummed.

Cheryl Marko and Emma Johnson were a tiresome duo of spoiled little madams who had made it starkly plain that they were only here because the conservation camp was a compulsory part of the syllabus for boarding pupils. They had been due to go out on tonight’s bird survey with the others, but Cathy had allowed them to stay behind when, coincidentally, both had complained at the last minute of severe period cramps.

Rather too coincidentally, Anya had thought, doling out mild analgesics to the pair as they had languished smugly in their sleeping bags while the rest of the girls clattered out on their mission.

She eased the door ajar and ducked her head inside the darkened room. A full moon pierced the gaps in the uneven curtains, casting pale bars of light over the narrow bunk beds, striping two motionless lumps in the bunched sleeping bags.

Reassured, Anya was about to withdraw when she hesitated, her grey eyes narrowing. For a couple of fashion-obsessed teenagers who constantly preened over their rake-thin bodies, they were displaying suspiciously voluptuous outlines!

Darting inside, she stripped back the hood of the first sleeping bag and stared in dismay at the untidy sausage of towels and designer-label clothes which had been used to pad out the empty interior. A quick check of the second bag yielded the same result.

Her stomach clenched in apprehension. Of course, it was quite possible that Cheryl and Emma were off on some innocent teenage escapade, but she had the sinking feeling that their sophisticated tastes wouldn’t be satisfied by a common-or-garden midnight feast or giggling dorm raid.

A quick search of the rest of the empty rooms revealed no sign of the missing pair and, clinging to the slim hope that her instincts were wrong, Anya opened one final door and flicked on the overhead light.

‘Girls?’

Jessica jerked bolt upright in her sleeping bag, her spectacles still perched on her nose, while in the next bed a chubby redhead rolled over onto her back, blinking blearily into the glare as she struggled into wakefulness.

‘Cheryl and Emma seem to have disappeared,’ said Anya crisply. ‘Do either of you know where they’ve gone?’

She fixed her eyes on the redhead’s sleep-creased face.

‘Kristin? You’re friends with both of them—did they say anything to you about what they were planning to do?’

‘I was feeling so rotten earlier, Miss Adams, that I didn’t really pay attention to what anyone was saying,’ she replied plaintively.

Anya wasn’t fooled by the self-pitying evasion, nor was she in any mood for a drawn-out question and answer session.

‘What a pity,’ she sighed. ‘I was hoping to handle this on my own, but I guess I don’t really have a choice. You girls should get dressed—the police will probably want a word with you—’

‘The police?’ Jessica gasped.

‘B-but—shouldn’t you wait a bit longer before you do anything?’ gulped Kristin. ‘That’s what Miss Marshall would do if she was here. I mean—they’ll probably turn up soon, anyway…’

‘I can’t take the risk—not with a beach and river nearby,’ Anya said firmly. ‘If I was still on staff it would be different, but I’m just an unofficial helper on this trip. I can’t simply do nothing—that decision isn’t mine to take. Fortunately we have their parents’ phone numbers—’

It was the master stroke.

‘Their parents?’ Kristin’s flush of horror almost matched her vivid hair. ‘You can’t call Cheryl’s Dad—he’d go ballistic! They only went to a party!’

‘A party?’ Anya’s heart sank even further. ‘What party? Where?’

The facts that reluctantly emerged were hardly reassuring. A group of local boys who had been tossing a rugby ball around on the sand that afternoon while the girls were playing a game of beach-volleyball had extended the invitation to a party at one of their homes. Cheryl and Emma, the only ones daring enough to accept, had arranged to be picked up outside the gates of the regional park at ten o’clock by one of the boys in his car. They had been promised a ride back any time they wanted to leave the party.

Anya hid her horror. ‘You mean they agreed to go off in a car with total strangers?’ She racked her brains to remember exactly who she had seen on the beach. She had noticed several familiar faces from her new school, and had been able to reassure Cathy that the boys weren’t a roaming gang of thugs.

‘No, of course not!’ Even Kristin knew the difference between reckless defiance and outright stupidity. ‘It’s OK, Miss Adams—because Emma knew a couple of them from one of the bands who played at our school ball!’

Anya rolled her eyes. Oh, great…raging hormones and delusions of rock star grandeur!

The last straw was finding out that one of the big attractions of the party was the lack of any supervising adults.

‘Emma said that this really cute guy—the one whose party it is—told her that it would be a real rave because he had the house to himself for the whole weekend,’ added Jessica.

When pressed, Kristin was vague on the exact location of the party. ‘The boys said it would only take about ten minutes to drive there. Some big, two-storeyed place on the other side of Riverview…’

‘A white house on a hill, with a bridge at the gate and a stand of Norfolk pine trees,’ added Jessica, whose memory was as sharp as her intellect.

Anya’s mouth went suddenly dry and prickles of alarm feathered the back of her skull.

‘The Pines?’ she asked, her voice sounding shrill to her own ears. ‘Was the house called The Pines?’

Kristin had turned sulky again. ‘Yeah, that’s it…’

‘And you’re sure about there being no adults there?’

Kristin nodded and was even more disgruntled ten minutes later as she clambered into the back seat of Anya’s small car.

‘I don’t see why we have to go,’ she grumbled. ‘We’re not the ones in trouble.’

‘Because no one’s answering the phone at The Pines and I’m not leaving you two here alone while I go and get Cheryl and Emma,’ said Anya as she fumbled in the glove-compartment for the wire-rimmed spectacles she used when driving and reversed the car out of the parking area. She’d left an explanatory note for Cathy, although she expected to be back well before the group returned from their survey.

Her hands tightened on the wheel as she turned from the bumpy track onto the narrow sealed road which was the main route from the coast to the suburbs of South Auckland and tried to soothe her taut nerves. She was probably overreacting. It wasn’t as if she herself hadn’t sneaked out to an illicit party or two during her school days—it was more or less de rigueur for senior boarders, and even an otherwise goody-two-shoes like Anya had been obliged to break a few rules in order to assure a peaceful life in the dorm.

The trouble was that in the four months since she had left Eastbrook she had got used to not concerning herself with after-hours student high jinks. One of the things she enjoyed about teaching at Hunua College was the separation between work and leisure. When she left school each afternoon she shrugged off her responsibilities at the gate. Oh, she took home lesson plans and piles of work to mark, but she wasn’t personally responsible for the welfare of the kids themselves until the start of the next school day.

‘What if they’ve already gone when we get there?’ Jessica asked suddenly. ‘What if they come back another way and we miss them?’

‘This is the only road from Riverview to the regional park,’ Anya told her, ‘and there’s very little traffic along it at this time of night, so we should notice if they pass us. Besides, Cheryl and Emma told Kristin they would be back around two, so they shouldn’t have left yet—’

‘Unless the party’s a bust and they’ve gone on somewhere else,’ came the sly comment from the back seat.

Anya gritted her teeth. As if she didn’t have enough worries to contend with! ‘Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we?’

She continued to drive in tense silence. Fortunately it was a beautifully clear night, with only the suicidal dance of nocturnal insects in the high beam of her headlights to distract her from the road. The fields on either side of the unwinding ribbon of tarseal were bathed in monochromatic moonbeams and every now and then a glow of warm yellow light pinpointed a farmhouse tucked amongst a wind belt of trees, or perched on the grassy slopes of the foothills which folded themselves up against the towering shelter of the Hunua Ranges.

Ten minutes had been a macho exaggeration on the boys’ part, for it was a full fifteen minutes at strictly legal speed before Anya reached the cluster of shops, houses and agribusinesses that made up the small township of Riverview.

She eased up on her speed, not even glancing in the direction of her darkened cottage, set back from the road in the large, overgrown garden which had become her personal challenge and private pleasure. Before she had gone away to school she had spent most of her childhood in a succession of inner-city hotels and apartments where the closest thing to a garden had been a potted palm.

They passed the community’s one and only petrol station at the far end of the shops, its neon sign switched off and forecourt pumps locked. As buildings gave way to wire fences and trimmed hedgerows again Anya planted her foot back down on the accelerator, eager to get the coming ordeal over. She hoped that Cheryl and Emma would have the good sense to be co-operative when she fetched them away. She wanted the rescue operation to go as smoothly as possible, preferably without any dramatic scenes that might stir up more trouble than she could handle.