‘Oh.’
‘You can feel it, though?’
‘I dunno,’ Nathan said. ‘Sometimes. Maybe. It’s like –’
He couldn’t quite explain it. Like a pulse over the empty land. The strange heaviness that indicated you were sharing the air with someone else. He knew realistically there would be some sort of explanation. Subconscious recognition of something amiss on the landscape. It was nothing more than that, and it wasn’t even accurate. He’d been getting false positives out at his own property lately. And there could have been hundreds of times over the years that there had been someone unknown over the horizon.
‘Cam was probably right,’ he said finally.
Ilse stood very still, only her eyes moving as she looked out. ‘What about now?’
‘Do I think there’s someone else here now?’
‘Yes.’ Her face was serious.
‘Ilse, it’s not a science. It’s not even a thing.’
‘I know, but can you feel anyone?’
Her looked up at her. He could hear her breathing and see the wind catch the ends of her hair. He could not hear her heartbeat, but he could feel his own.
‘Only us,’ he said truthfully. He turned back to the wire. He could feel Ilse watching him but he didn’t look back. He focused on his work for a while before opening his mouth again.
‘Look, there’s no way that Jenna is out here,’ he said. ‘We’d have heard something if she’d come through town.’
‘Unless she didn’t go through town.’
‘She’d have had to. You know that. She couldn’t stay entirely under the radar. You’d have to have all your supplies, keep completely off-road.’
‘It can be done, though. You do it. Bub’s done it. And Cameron.’
‘And how many tourists have died in their cars trying to take a short cut?’ Nathan twisted the last piece of wire and checked the tension. Satisfied, he stood up and stopped when he saw the look on Ilse’s face. ‘What is it? Why are you so fixed on this?’
‘Cameron tried to call Jenna as well,’ Ilse said. ‘Three times.’
Nathan stared. ‘When?’
‘Once two weeks ago, then twice more in the week before he died. He used the office line, not the main house one. I can see the number on the bill online. She’s a florist in England, isn’t she? I looked her up.’
Nathan nodded.
‘I don’t think he spoke to her,’ Ilse said. ‘The calls are very short, all less than thirty seconds.’
‘Why would he wait so long to call her? He’d known for a few weeks she was thinking about contacting him.’
‘Maybe it took her that long to actually reach him,’ Ilse said. ‘He might have got an email or something. I don’t know. I don’t have his password.’ She stopped. ‘Or maybe she didn’t get in touch at all and the waiting was driving him crazy. Looking back now, he’d been worried since he heard she’d rung the police station, but it had been getting worse. And he made some other calls in his last week as well.’
‘To who?’
‘To St Helens. The medical centre up there, for one.’
‘Was he sick?’
‘Not that he said. And he wasn’t a patient there, as far as they would tell me. But then Cameron didn’t like to go and see Steve at the clinic either, so who knows? He called one of the hotels in St Helens too.’
‘Which one?’ There were exactly three accommodation options in St Helens.
‘The cheap one.’
