“Of course. It’s my job.” She looked straight at me.
“Your job. Right.” I had no doubt she remembered that argument from all those years ago. Sapphire never forgot anything.
I kept my gaze forward and my jaw tight, trying not to notice how close she was in the confined space of the cab. The smell of her shampoo cut straight through my other thoughts. Same shampoo. Same scent. Ten years, and she hadn’t changed it. Who does that?
I’d thought I’d never see her again. I’d been okay with that. We were never meant to be together anyway. She liked the city. I was a country bloke through and through. She liked coffee machines and restaurant dinners. I liked Nescafé 43 and a simple barbecue.
Now here she was, eighteen inches away, scribbling something in that neat, precise handwriting of hers, and I couldn’t decide if I was angrier at Bob for sending her or at myself for getting all worked up about her being here.
I banked east and pushed the speed up.
“How long will it take to get there?” she asked.
“Thirty minutes.”
She wrote that down. Of course, she did.
I glanced at her sideways. She looked the same, but there was a difference. A wariness was in her eyes that hadn’t been there before, like she’d seen too much since she’d put that badge on and hadn’t quite found a way to file it at the end of the day.
That’s one thing I was good at—filing away the bullshit.
She caught me looking.
I looked away.
“So,” she said, “how often does someone from the family go out to the eastern outstation?”
“Depends on what needs doing.”
“When were you last out there?”
“A couple of months back. I restocked the supplies.”
She wrote that down, too. Rolling green pastures spread out beneath us, dotted with hundreds of heads of cattle. But as we pushed further east, the green grass changed to red earth, and the creeks turned to dry creek beds.
Then the burned paddock came into view, and in the very distance was the windmill.
Sapphire leaned forward in her seat. “What happened out there?”
We crossed over the burn line, and the ground below was still charcoal black and scorched flat in every direction. The earth was bare and pale gray at the edges where the fire had burned hottest. A few skeletal trees stood here and there, stripped of everything but their trunks.
I looked at her. “You don’t know?”
She turned to face me. “Why would I know?”
I held her gaze for a moment, then turned back to the instruments. “When Bob came out here, he told us Bruce Henderson had filed a report stating that Cassidy had burned half their property.”
She cocked her head at me. “I only know about Bruce’s truck. I don’t know of any report about a fire.”
I didn’t respond. I flew around the cottage, giving her a bird’s eye view of the damage. “The fire caused the roof to cave in. The entire cottage is a write-off. The Henderson brothers lit the fire. We told Bob that. I’m guessing he didn’t put that in a report either.”
She clenched her jaw hard, then shook her head.
I set the chopper down on the burned ground in front of the cottage and killed the engine.
As the rotors wound down, we climbed out.
We stood at the front, her studying the burned cottage, me studying her.
