Chapter 6
Kayden
My headset crackled as I lifted the chopper off the grass at the back of the machinery shed. Sapphire sat in the passenger seat, her notebook open on her knee like she planned to take notes the entire flight to Winton.
“You gonna hit me with more questions?” I said into the mic.
“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.
“Cassidy and Xavier could’ve been killed,” I said. “They were lucky this whole place didn’t burn to the ground.”
Her eyes took on that inquisitive sparkle that used to fascinate me. “They were trapped inside when the bushfire came through?”
I blinked at her. “What the hell? You telling me Bob didn’t mention that either?”
“No. No, he didn’t.” Her expression sharpened.
The mid-morning heat was brutal, radiating up off the blackened earth. The windmill behind the cottage creaked as it slowly turned in the mild breeze. I pointed at the windmill. “We were just lucky that wasn’t ruined. Those things cost a fortune to replace.”
She nodded. “So, this fire was lit the same night Bruce’s truck was damaged. Is that correct?” Sapphire asked.
“Yep.”
“But that crash happened near the Rusty Swagman.”
“Yep. And then they followed Cass out here and lit this fire.”
“Do you have any proof of that?” She squinted up at me.
“No, I don’t have any fucking proof of that.” I shook my head. “Ask Cassidy, she was here.”
I marched up the stairs, across the verandah boards that were black in patches, and strode through the open front door, into the cottage.
My ears rang in the silence as I turned to watch Sapphire’s reaction when she saw the damage inside.
Sapphire stepped into the room, and her jaw dropped. Not exaggerated shock. Real shock. Her eyes moved slowly across every bare wall.
“What happened in here?” She frowned, stepping toward the middle.
“The walls were like this when Cassidy and Xavier arrived.” The walls were stripped back to the timber framing.
Every panel of plasterboard had been torn down, and the mangled boards were stacked against the back wall.
The whole interior was reduced to bare studs and insulation gaps, and looked like the inside of a carcass.
Her eyes cut to mine. “Looks like someone hacked off the plasterboard in a hurry.”
“Yep. That’s what it looks like.”
Sapphire strode to the pile of plasterboard stacked against the far wall. She pulled on the front sheet, leaned it against her hip, and looked behind. Shaking her head, she repeated the move with a few more jagged sheets before she pushed them all back against the wall again.
She walked to the bathroom and stood in the doorway.
I looked over her shoulder. The bathroom roof had a massive hole in it, charred rafters jutting out like broken ribs. The remaining tin was warped and buckled, and a massive tree branch had crashed through the roof with one end in the claw-foot bath, the other sticking out of the hole in the roof.
“Cassidy filled the bathtub with water, and they got in. That’s how they survived.”
Sapphire shook her head. “They were lucky.”
“They were smart. That branch crashed into the roof during the fire. It wasn’t like that when I came here last time. Shows how unstable this place was.”
She returned to the stack of plasterboard and ran her hand over the jagged edges. Plaster dust was all over the ground. She ran the toe of her shoe through the dust. Her expression darkened. She squatted down and pushed her finger into a pile of plaster dust, spreading it aside.
It took all my might not to ask her what the fuck she was looking for.
She pulled out her damn notepad and wrote something down without another word.
I folded my arms, growing more pissed off with her by the minute.
She stood and turned to me, sweeping her gaze up to mine. “You know what’s weird?”
I stepped back. “Bob not telling you about the fire? Or about the damage here?”
“Hmm.” She nodded. “So, he saw the walls like this?”
“Yes.”
She moved to another section of the wall, stepping over smaller chunks of plasterboard and running her gaze along the exposed cavities.
She crouched down near the base of one wall, studying the framing.
She plucked something off the floor. “There are foil remnants in here.” She looked up at me.
“Do you think someone packed something into these walls?” She straightened slowly, those blue eyes landing on me with the force of a heatwave.
“How the fuck should I know?”
“You said you were here a few months ago.”
“Yeah. So what? The walls were fine when I came here. They were like this when Cassidy came here.”
“Could Frank have done this?”
“I just said I don’t know, Sapphire.”
“Right. Hmmm.” She nodded, tapping her pen against her chin.
She studied me for a long moment. If she thought I was lying, she was doing a damn good job of not showing it. And if she was acting like she didn’t know what had been in those walls, she was doing an even better job of that.
She turned back to the stripped walls, arms folded, her mind clearly working. “If something was hidden in these walls, then someone went to a lot of trouble to hide it behind new plasterboard, then painting it all to match.”
“Why do you think something was hidden in the walls?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Only because I can’t figure out why someone would pull the sheets off.”
“Maybe they planned to renovate?” I said.
She looked at me again.
I said nothing.
She strolled into the kitchen area and used her pen to poke around the scorched remains.
Her silence was chewing me up, and I couldn’t hold back. “You said there was something weird.”
She clicked her finger. “Yes.” She used her pen to point at the pile of chalk she’d run her shoe through. “The chalk dust seems to be on top of the ash.”
I scowled. “What?”
She strolled to the back of the room again. “See here. If these walls were already stripped before the fire, the chalk dust would be below the ash, not the other way around.”
Oh fuck.
“Well, shit. I don’t know. Cassidy and Xavier were stuck here for two days before we rescued them. Maybe they shuffled the dust around when they moved those boards.”
“Hmm. Yes, maybe.” She nodded like she agreed.
Her expression told me she bloody well didn’t.
“Okay.” She shoved her notepad into her pocket. “Let me have a look around outside, then you can take me to the next spot.”
I groaned.
Her eyebrows rose. “You got a bellyache or something?”
“No, I don’t have a bellyache. I have work to do, Sapphire.”
“Don’t we all.” She walked past me and out the door.
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.”