Bali 9: The Untold Story by Madonna King, Cindy Wockner Read Free Book Online Page B

Lawrence says. But no one suspected that she was in any real trouble.
    She was, though. She was living a life destined to get her into trouble. Mixing with the wrong crowd,spending bigger chunks of time in Sydney with people her family had never met, and going about her week without any thought of what tomorrow might bring. She was in a fast-paced search to belong again—and once more it was an all-or-nothing proposition. She had to find a new place. The past was gone and she needed a future. Now .
    Old friends lost track of Renae’s movements during the months leading up to Christmas 2004, but didn’t think too much about it. That was the good thing about friendship: it could be left a while and always rekindled. Renae didn’t think too much of the consequences of not staying in touch, either. She was worried about today, not tomorrow. She would turn up for work and do her job, always punctual and hard-working, because that was the way she had been taught to act. But outside that she pretty much switched off, just focusing on trying to fit in.
    Some of Renae’s co-workers became her social circle, as she started to live life too fast. And Matthew Norman, her co-worker at the SCG, seemed to be doing the same—according, at least, to charges the pair were due to face in Australia soon after their arrest in Bali.
    Police claim it was only an hour or two before dawn one morning in March 2005—a week before the pair left for Indonesia—that Lawrence tucked herself behind the wheel of a car she did not own and, with Norman as her passenger, sped up the Pacific Highway she knew so well. She drove the highway several times a week, from Wallsend down to Sydney and back upagain, and, like hundreds of commuters who did the same, she knew the stretch of road like the back of her hand. On this morning, she was feeling the need for speed and rebellion. Going too fast, according to police she ignored all police directions to stop. It wasn’t the only perilous journey that Lawrence and Norman would take together.
    Being told his daughter had been arrested in Bali on suspicion of carrying drugs through Bali’s international airport almost stopped Bob Lawrence’s heart. His daughter. Renae. In another country. Carrying drugs. The words mish-mashed around and around in his head. None of it made any sense, and the more he thought about it, the more he considered it not possible. Of course they had the wrong girl—Renae had never even been on a plane. Never been outside her home state of New South Wales, let alone in a foreign country. And she was broke, stony-broke. Bob knew that because her car had packed it in only weeks earlier and he had worried when she fell into a depression afterwards. She could not believe that something else was now going wrong in her life. First the relationship she depended on, and now the car she depended on. Her ticket to freedom, her transport to Sydney—she needed the car to get to work at the Sydney Cricket Ground. She was spending more and more time in Sydney and the car had safely transported her there time and time again. So she couldn’t just go without it.
    Renae called Bob, wondering what she could do. She understood cars, and knew her father did too, and they both knew it would cost dearly to put her vehicle back on the road. Certainly, there wouldn’t be much change out of $800, if they were lucky. Renae didn’t have a clue where she’d get that sort of money, and told her father exactly that.
    Bob knew he could fix the car, but he didn’t want Renae totally off the hook either. He believed in taking responsibility—all children should. She had to stand on her own two feet and take care of her own bills. He thought they might be able to fix it together, a bit like old times when the pair of them would muck about in the back yard pulling a car apart and putting it back together over and over. So he did a deal with his only daughter, who had recently come back into his life. He would help