Chapter 6 #2
“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.
“Yeah. Actually, I do.”
“Why are you so cranky?”
“I’m not cranky.”
“You’ve been cranky since the moment you saw me in your kitchen.”
“Yeah, well, you showing up unannounced was a shock. I’ll admit that.”
She tilted her head. “Is this about Bob sending me? Or is this about something else?”
I said nothing.
“Kayden.”
“Leave it, Sapphire.”
“Is it because I’m a cop?”
I laughed, short and sharp. “Frank always said never trust a cop. Turns out he was right about at least one thing.”
“And Bob?” She kept her voice even. “Is that what this is about? You don’t trust him, so you don’t trust me?”
“Should I?”
She held my gaze but didn’t answer.
“There you go,” I said.
“I’m not Bob,” she said.
“No. You just work for him. You take his orders. He sent you out here, and you came here believing we’re all guilty of something. So, forgive me if I’m not rolling out the welcome mat.”
She absorbed that without flinching. That was new. The Sapphire I’d known would’ve fired back twice as hard. Instead, she just stood there with her notepad in her hand.
“So, it’s about Bob,” she said. “And Frank. And cops in general.” She paused. “Is any of it about me?”
The question was like a loaded gun.
“Ancient history,” I said.
“Is it?” She looked at me steadily. “Because you don’t seem to be over it.”
“I am.”
“Sure.” She almost smiled. “It was a long time ago.” She shook her head slowly, and her expression shifted. Not quite hurt. Not quite nostalgic. Something in between. “What happened to you? I thought you were joining the army.”
The question hit like Comet’s double-barreled kick this morning.
“Didn’t work out,” I said flatly.
“Why not?”
“My application was rejected.”
She frowned. “Rejected? But you were—” She stopped herself. Shook her head. “I’m sorry. That must’ve gutted you. I know how much you wanted that.”
“I survived.”
“You more than survived. Looks like you still love this place.” She glanced out across the burned paddock, the windmill, and the hard flat distance of Koolaroo stretching away in every direction. “Country life suits you.”
“Don’t.” My voice came out hard. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Be nice to me. It’s confusing.”
She blinked. Then she laughed—a real laugh, as if it surprised her, the kind she could never fake. The sound of it made me feel something I had absolutely no intention of examining.
“I’m a confusing person,” she said when she’d gotten herself together.
“Yeah. You always were.”
We stood in the shade of the cottage, not quite looking at each other, not quite looking away. The windmill creaked. Something rustled in the singed grass beyond the big gum tree.
She tucked her notepad away and picked up the paint tin. “What’s closer to here? The next outstation or Doug Walker’s clothes and boots?”
“Walker’s stuff.” He grunted.
“Then we should go there next,” I said.
“Yeah,” I said. “We should.”
She climbed into the chopper, and as I shut her door, she pulled the notepad from her pocket again.
She didn’t know about the money hidden in the cottage walls. I was almost certain of it now, which meant Bob had sent her out here blind.
The question was why.
I climbed into the pilot’s seat. Her head was down, reading her notes, flicking that pen against her chin, deep in thought, working through it all.
I was certain she knew I wasn’t telling her everything because I damn well wasn’t.
But God help me, I trusted her. More than I trusted Bob.
That was either very smart or very stupid, and I had no idea which.