Chapter 21
‘What were you talking to Mum about?’
Meg spun around to see Georgie leaning against the side of the house, vape in hand. She wore cut-off denim shorts and a cropped bra top, showing off her tanned midriff.
Georgie raised a finger to her lips. ‘Let’s walk.’
Meg followed her across the driveway and onto the road. Heat rose from the bitumen underfoot as cicadas chanted their shrill song.
‘So?’ Georgie asked, as they walked slowly. ‘What was that about?’
‘Someone from her past. Does she talk much about her sister?’
‘The one who died?’ Georgie shook her head. ‘They don’t talk about her at all.’
‘They?’
‘Mum and my grandparents.’ She took a drag on her vape, exhaled a cloud of white smoke. She held it out to Meg, an offer. ‘Blueberry,’ she added.
‘No, thanks.’
Meg looked at the houses as they passed.
The front garden of number twenty-seven was wild and unkempt, its letterbox stuffed full of junk mail, its blinds down.
The number seven had fallen off, leaving a mark where it once was.
Hadn’t they just passed another derelict house?
Meg turned to look back up the street where they’d come from.
The shack a few blocks back was clearly uninhabited too, with waist-high weeds threatening to engulf the driveway. One of the front windows was broken.
Meg frowned. ‘What’s with all the empty houses?’
‘Dunno,’ Georgie said, bored. ‘A few have sold recently around here, but no one’s moved in.’
‘That’s weird.’
Georgie shrugged, as though she hadn’t given it much thought and didn’t plan to.
‘It worked out well for my nan and pop. Mum couldn’t believe how lucky they were when someone made an offer on their place.
They were too old to be living alone. Now they’re living their best lives in a retirement community in Queensland.
“Independent living for the over sixties.”’ She made quote marks with her fingers.
‘The house wasn’t on the market?’ Meg asked. ‘They just got an offer? Out of the blue?’
‘Yep.’ Georgie inhaled on the vape.
‘And that was surprising, that they sold so easily?’
Georgie nodded. ‘Our old neighbours took over a year to sell a while back.’
Meg frowned. ‘Isn’t property in Hartwell in high demand? I thought everyone in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney had a country house down here.’ She raised an eyebrow to distance herself from the Sydney elite.
Georgie exhaled. ‘Not on this street. The houses are junk and they all back onto the industrial estate. There’s a dairy factory just behind those back fences.’ She looked in the general direction.
They stopped walking and sat on the kerb in the shade. For a few minutes, they sat listening to the cicadas chant, their lazy pace gathering momentum until it reached a deafening cacophony, then stopped abruptly. Silence crackled in the air momentarily before the slow chant began again.
‘What’s this stuff about Mum’s past got to do with you, anyway?’ Georgie asked.
‘I think Chrissy’s sister is my mum.’
‘So we would be …’
‘Cousins.’
Georgie frowned. ‘I didn’t know Mum’s sister had a baby before she died.’
‘If I’m right, she didn’t die.’
Georgie looked at Meg. ‘You think she just … left?’ A crease formed between her brows that made Meg think of Jenny.
‘Yeah.’
Georgie looked down at her purple toenails. ‘But why?’
‘That’s what I want to know. Your mum said there’s a box of her sister’s things somewhere in your garage.’
Georgie looked up. ‘She did?’
Meg nodded. ‘Apparently some guy came here to tell them she’d passed away and gave them a box of her stuff.’ A long silence. ‘Do you reckon you could help me find it?’
Georgie bit her lip, considering the request. ‘Nah, I don’t think I should. If Mum didn’t want to …’
‘I’d pay you, obviously, for your time and effort.’ Out of the corner of her eye, Meg saw Georgie’s eyes light up. ‘A hundred bucks?’
‘Two hundred,’ Georgie said.
‘Done.’
‘Come around on Saturday morning. Mum’ll be at the café.’
When Meg got back to her room, she called Pete.
‘Hunter!’ he said, over background noise. ‘Hang on a tick.’
‘Where are you?’
‘The pub.’
‘Are you ever not at the pub?’
‘I do my best work here.’
Meg scoffed. ‘I stumbled across something interesting today.’ She recapped her conversation with Georgie about the empty houses on Barton Drive. ‘Weird, don’t you think?’
‘I dunno, maybe.’
‘It’ll be easy enough to find out who’s bought them, won’t it?’
‘I’ll do a title search,’ he said. ‘It might turn up a name.’ A beat. ‘So have you made any progress on the story?’
‘Not really.’ She sighed, heavily. ‘Every lead ends up going nowhere. The Ashworths are probably buttering up the local councillors to get approvals, but that doesn’t sound like much of a story to me.
The protesters have left town. No one seems very willing to talk.
I think I’ll head home on Sunday, if nothing changes.
’ If she was honest, the only thing keeping her in Hartwell was the promise of going through the Baxters’ garage.
‘Have you managed to talk to anyone at the jail?’
‘Not yet.’ She wasn’t easily intimidated generally, but the truth was, the older woman in the wrap dress had put her off. There was something unsettling about the way she’d glared at Meg that first day. ‘I’ll go back tomorrow.’