I followed her onto the verandah. She scanned left, then turned right and went still.
What now?
She strolled to the right-hand end, and that’s when I saw the ax propped against the railing. Oh crap.
She crouched in front of it. “Well, hello. Looks like we found the weapon they used to demolish those walls. Should be able to lift some fingerprints off that handle.”
“Yeah, no shit. Cassidy and Xavier used it to chop up some of these railings for firewood.” I smacked the railing with my palm. “They were stuck here for two days, remember?”
She stood. “I remember. I’ll make a note of that.” She studied the wrecked railing, then pulled out that damn notebook again.
Bloody hell. We were in trouble. Sapphire didn’t miss a damn thing.
She went down the steps, and I followed her around the back of the cottage. She stopped at the water tank with its warped tin walls that had buckled in the bushfire’s heat.
“That must’ve been one hell of a fire.” She ran her hand along the buckled surface.
“As I keep saying, Cassidy and Xavier are lucky to be alive. You should arrest those Henderson idiots for attempted murder.”
“You do keep saying that. And I may do exactly that, once I have something concrete to take to court.” She crouched and peered under the building. “Oh, hello.”
“What?”
She got down on her stomach and shimmied underneath the cottage, giving me a decent view of her sexy ass, which I had absolutely no business noticing.
“What are you doing?” I crouched down to see where she’d gone. “Sapphire?”
No answer. Nothing but the sound of her crawling through the dirt.
I swore under my breath and followed her in. We ended up shoulder to shoulder in front of a stack of unused plasterboard with paint tins and other shit piled on top of it.
She turned her head and looked at me from about six inches away. “So, who’s doing the renovating, Kayden?”
“Damned if I know. First time I’ve seen this.”
“Hmm.”
“What does hmm mean?”
“It means I’m getting a lot of non-answers.”
“That’s because I don’t have answers.”
She nodded, yet frowned. “So you keep saying.”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“I’m saying I think you know more than you’re letting on.”
“You don’t know me, Sapphire.” I wriggled backward and got out from under there as fast as I could. I stood by the water tank, and it took everything I had not to march straight to the chopper.
She took her sweet time, and just when I was about to call out to her again, her boots appeared, and she wriggled out backward, slow and unhurried, like she had nowhere better to be.
She stood and held up a paint can. “Reckon we can get some fingerprints off this. Don’t you?”
“I hope you do. Then maybe you’ll stop giving me a hard time.”
“You think I’m giving you a hard time?” She dusted her palms on her navy pants.
