“Maybe.” Joy didn’t seem overly enthused. “I guess I could pop round and ask her once it stops bloody raining.”
They both paused to listen. Skye eased open the back door to see the faintest glimpse of blue between the clouds.
“It’s stopped,” she called, and Joy joined her.
“You never get used to it, do you?” Joy murmured. “The view out here, all that sky and mountain and sea. Victoria said it makes her feel small, but it’s the opposite for me. I felt small at home, just another cog in a city full of moving parts. Now, don’t get me wrong, Sydney isn’t all bad. We have parks and the harbor, but there’s still a claustrophobic element. I reckon it’s unavoidable when you cram that many folks together. When I still had Bobby, it was all right, you know? I was in my bubble. But afterward…well, death has a way of bringing everything into sharp relief, doesn’t it?”
The sun had yet to reappear, though Skye could feel the warmth of it.
“I went to Sydney a year after my dad died,” she said. “I didn’t want to be at home on the anniversary, and my oldest friend lives there. I walked around that place all day every day for two weeks on my own, while Sal—that’s my friend—was at work. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more invisible. That’s not to say Sydney is unfriendly,” she added as Joy’s lips tightened a fraction, “just that it was easy to get lost in, become one of the cogs.”
“Nobody enjoys feeling invisible,” Joy said.
Skye stared beyond the boundaries of her garden, her eyes tracing the roughly hewn pathway that led up to the ridge.
“I didn’t used to,” she said, the words catching somewhere in her chest. “Dad always told me I was his compass point, the pin keeping his life on course. Soppy old fool.” She shook her head. “It’s no wonder, really.”
“No wonder what?” Joy asked. Her voice had softened, the usual teasing edged out by something gentler.
She could tell her. About Martyn. About all of it.
Skye drew in a breath only to let it go as Tigri sprang up ontothe wall, mewing indignantly. The cat was no doubt outraged by the puddle-strewn route he’d be forced to take to reach her.
“I’d better go and get him,” she said, slipping her feet into flip-flops.
“Mind your step,” Joy called after her. “Looks as if more of that wall’s fallen in there.”
All the stones Skye had spent weeks carefully resetting had collapsed back into the mud, dragging more with them. A shallow cavity gaped beneath where the largest rocks had stood. As she stepped closer, something caught her eye, half-hidden in the dark hollow.
“In a minute,” she murmured to Tigri, who had stalked along the wall to meet her. Skye shifted her weight, then crouched, trying to see more clearly.
“You found something?” Joy asked, picking her way across on bare feet.
“I’m not sure. There are stones in the way—hang on.”
The first one she lifted was wet and slithered from her hands.
“Careful,” Joy said, scooping up her dress to avoid being splattered with mud.
Skye shifted three more stones, each one landing with a thud as she flung it aside. The last was lodged deep, wedged between the crumbling edge of the wall and the gnarled roots of the lemon tree. She crouched lower, braced her knees, and with a groan of effort, worked it free.
At that moment, the sun broke through, spilling wide shafts of light across the hillside. Puddles shimmered, and crystal droplets shook loose from the branches overhead.
In the hollow below where Skye and Joy stood frozen, a collection of tiny bones lay gleaming in the earth.
Twenty-four
“Are they human?”
Skye had directed her question to Andreas, but it was Mia who answered. Joy had called on the middle sister, arguing that their resident vet was the closest thing they had to an expert.
“Some look as though they definitely aren’t,” Mia said thoughtfully, “but I can’t be sure. A few are quite dense, which makes me lean toward animal. The only way to be certain is to have them measured and tested.”
“I’m not sure we should even touch them,” Skye said. “Whoever buried them would probably hate the idea of us having dug them up.”
“You didn’t,” Joy pointed out. “It was the storm.”
Andreas, who’d arrived of his own accord to deliver a set of paint samples, was bending over the exposed grave, hands on his knees and a stoic expression on his face.
