“That’s fine.” Naomi waved her hand. “I’ve swapped to the afternoon roster, anyway.”
“Naomi’s a GP,” Raco called as he disappeared into the kitchen and reemerged with a jug of water and some glasses. “At the medical center in town.”
“Speaking of…” Naomi pulled out a chair but didn’t sit, her gaze settling on Zara, who was now under the shade of a distant tree, staring at her phone. “Make an appointment for her to come in and talk to someone, even if she doesn’t want to. We’ve got a new woman recently started who’s very good.”
“Thanks,” Rita said, and Raco nodded as he poured. “We’ll tell Charlie.”
“How’s the general feeling this morning? Thank you.” Naomi accepted a glass of water and pushed her sunglasses onto her head. She had the reassuring presence of a medical professional, and Falk was starting to get a sense of why the Racos had chosen her to be his counterpart.
“We’re all just keen to see what comes out of the appeal,” Raco said. “Would help to have some answers, whatever they look like.”
“Absolutely.” Naomi’s face softened, her eyes still on Zara. “I think that would help a lot. It’s hard not to try to imagine what was on Kim’s mind.”
“Yeah.” Raco cracked his knuckles the way he sometimes did when he was silently debating something, and Rita discreetly winced at the sound. He stopped and nodded toward Falk. “We were actually just talking about that opening-night party.”
Naomi’s gaze slid back at that. She didn’t ask what he meant. “I’ve been thinking about that, too.”
Falk frowned. “What’s this?” he asked, and Raco and Naomi simultaneously drew breath, then locked eyes with an identicalsorry, you gogesture.
“Go ahead,” Raco said. “You found her.”
There was a pocket of silence when all they could hear was the hum of insects. Rita was stroking her son’s hair with an expression Falk couldn’t read. Naomi stared down at her hands for a moment, gathering her thoughts, then looked up at Falk.
“You’d have heard about this bushland party that happens at the festival every year? All the local teenagers and any tourist kids they can drag in go up behind the reservoir on the first night and get absolutely shit-faced.” Naomi glanced at Henry in Rita’s arms. “Excuse my language.”
Rita smiled, pushing back her chair. “I don’t think he minds. I need to get him changed, anyway.”
“And look,” Naomi went on as Rita disappeared indoors. “Unpopular opinion here, because I’m aware I’m a hypocrite who used to do this myself, but that’s one tradition that needs shutting down. Before some kid has a bad reaction to something, or falls down the embankment and breaks their bloody neck, or slips and drowns in that water, because I know no one wants to hear it, but it will happen.”
“But teenagers’ll always—” Raco started, but she shook her head.
“No, Greg. Come on. You know where the border of my property is. I hear those kids coming and going, and I’m telling you it’s not like you remember. Back then it was all people we knew and a handful of out-of-town cousins or whatever. This has grown with the festival, and as I keep saying, as a doctor and concerned resident—local busybody, whatever, I don’t care—it’s getting out of hand. Anyway.” Naomi swatted a fly away irritably. “For all the good it does me to keep saying that.”
Her tone was level and brisk, but underneath she sounded a little uneasy, Falk thought.
“So something happened involving Kim?” he asked.
Naomi and Raco exchanged another look, and then she nodded.
“We’re talking years ago,” she said quickly. “But it was a big night, that one, because a lot of us had turned eighteen by then. Me, plus Charlie and Shane and Rohan, and another friend of ours, Dean.” His name sounded faintly different in her mouth than the others and she cleared her throat. “Anyway. It was obvious Shane was going to be drafted by one of the footy teams, and the rest of us were off to uni after the summer, so it was the last time we were all going to be around for this thing. I mean, people did come back, there were always a few older faces home for a visit or whatever, and there were younger kids as well. You would have been—what?” she asked Raco.
“Fifteen.”
“Yeah, I went for the first time when I was fourteen.” Naomi’s eyes turned back to Falk. “But the point is, there were a lot of people there that year. A lot of drinking, possibly more than usual. And for whatever reason, maybe because of that, I wasn’t really into it that night. The whole thing just felt off.” She glanced at Raco. “You thought so, too?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Everyone got really drunk really fast, and there was definitely a weird atmosphere. There were all these kids there we didn’t know—” Naomi was nodding in agreement as he spoke. “The dynamic was wrong. Little fights kept flaring up, over stupid stuff. And Charlie and Kim had fallen out before they even got there.”
Beyond the veranda, Falk could see Charlie out among the vines. Shane was there as well. Falk hadn’t seen him arrive, but the pair were talking, their stances almost identical from that distance. Shoulders hunched and arms folded across their chests.
“Do you know why Charlie and Kim weren’t getting on?” Falk asked, and both Raco and Naomi shook their heads.
“It would have been nothing,” Naomi said. “Charlie says he doesn’t remember, and I can believe it. They were always breaking up and making up, even then. So they’d had another argument, and of courseCharlie did the mature thing and spent the whole night talking to girls and trying to make her jealous. And Kim, being sixteen, did what you’d expect—drank too much, pretended she didn’t care what her boyfriend was up to, and went off every five minutes to secretly cry behind a tree.”
“They got like that sometimes.” Raco sounded weary thinking about it. “But basically at some point, Kim had had enough and she left. I didn’t actually see her go, but when I realized, I wasn’t surprised.”
“No, me, neither,” Naomi said. “I know it must have been still pretty early—only about 10:00 p.m.—because that was when I decided to leave myself. I was trying to find someone to come with me so I wouldn’t have to walk back alone, but no one wanted to. So in the end I just went.”
Naomi paused and Falk sensed that uneasiness again. He just waited.
