A fifteen-year-old girl was sexually assaulted in her home in the town of Womerah, north-west of Redbelly Crossing, on Thursday evening, 16 September. Police would like to speak to the owner of a mustard yellow Ford Capri seen parked near the location on the evening of Wednesday 15 September. Members of the public with any information …
Womerah. I knew it, but only from travelling through, seeing the sign, wondering to myself how the cluster of tiny houses could be called a town at all. I guessed in 1976 it would have been smaller still. I rubbed my eyes, causing the text on the screen before me to double. A sound at the front of the house made me jump. I looked up the hall. Waited. Listened. Nothing moved. I needed to go to bed. The jumpiness was becoming exhausting. And I was only tormenting myself now. It didn’t matter what Chloe Lutz had been working on. She was dead, and her deadness had nothing to do with me or my family.
I stood, and my phone rang, sending yet anotherwhumpof fear through my chest. I grabbed the phone and answered just to silence it, glancing at the microwave.
‘Do you own a clock?’ I asked my father.
‘Guess what I’m doing,’ he said. I heard a pop in the background of the call. The sloshing of liquid.
‘I can’t decide if it’s appallingly early or appallingly late to be drinking,’ I said. ‘But I’m guessing you didn’t just start, if you’re calling to tell me about it.’
‘I started an hour ago, when I heard you bagged the Redbelly stabber.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Now I can walk around town with my head held high again.’ His words were slightly slurred. ‘When will you start packing to leave the region? I’d like to help.’
‘You’re a few steps ahead of yourself, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘This case might get me out of the red. But it won’t put me in the green. And that’s if we don’t all get smacked on the wrist for entering a hostile scene without backup and killing a man. I think I’ll need to behave myself for a couple more years before I’m ready to pack my bags.’
‘I’ll make some calls tomorrow morning and see what I can arrange.’
‘This makes me feel so loved,’ I sighed. ‘Did you know the guy? Branch?’
‘No. I don’t hang out up there. The further north you go from Maroota, the fewer teeth people have. And I’ve only got half a set myself.’
‘Hmm. Anyway, I’d better—’
‘And that pub’s a shithole. Twenty-five bucks for a burger, my arse. I haven’t stayed in the hotel rooms, but I hear they’re the pits. Tragic place to get poked to death. The girl should have stayed in Sydney and left the past in the past.’
‘Yes, well. As much as I’m enjoying this conversation, I’m gonna go now, Dad. It’s three in the fucking morning.’
‘You answered.’
I hung up, went to the bedroom, put the phone on charger and slipped between the sheets. There was blue light coming from the shutters on the front windows. It fell on Delle’s bare shoulder in stripes.
I sat up sharply after only a minute.
RUSSELL
As I stepped down into the houseboat kitchen, Bridie froze in the doorway to the bedroom, the light behind her haloing around her shoulders and making wings of the sleeves of her white pyjama T-shirt. She’d heard me getting dropped off, and took in the image of me with her mouth open wide.
‘Daaaaad!’
‘I’m okay!’ I put my hands up. ‘But I really need a shower before I do anything else.’
I went in and stripped my clothes off, showered, came out of the tiny bathroom not sure if I preferred being covered in thousands of tiny, open, dirty scratches or thousands of tiny, clean, rapidly closing ones. Every inch of me itched. My palms were ripped raw and trailing white, dead skin. I looked like I’d gone toe-to-toe with a hundred and fifty cats in a pit full of scalpels. Bridie was sitting on the end of one of the single beds at the back of the vessel, her legs crossed, watching me come in with the towel around my waist, her eyes still bugging and her mouth still open. ‘Whathappened?’
‘Blackberry bushes,’ I said. I pointed to the sheets, the freshly made beds. ‘What happened here?’
Bridie looked. ‘Oh, a local lady brought them over. They’re lovely.’ She patted the coverlet beside her. ‘I literally think they’re washed in lavender laundry liquid. You can smell it. And she made us cupcakes. They’re on the kitchen counter.’
‘Oh no.’ I went into my bag, pulled out my boxers and tugged them on under the towel. ‘Old woman.’
‘How did you know she was old?’
‘The cupcakes. The sheets. The whole gesture. I’m a detective, but it wouldn’t have taken one. I don’t like old women, Bridie. So if she comes back, you keep her away from me.’
‘What are you talking about? Who doesn’t like old women?’
