“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.
Chapter 7
Sapphire
* * *
The chopper lifted off the burned ground, and Kayden banked hard south. Below us, the cottage shrank to a black scab on the scorched paddock, the windmill catching the sun off its blades and throwing it back at us like a signal.
I made myself wait until the cottage disappeared from view before I turned back to my notebook.
A page of bullet points stared back at me.
Cassidy and Xavier in cottage for 2 days. Hendersons lit the fire – unconfirmed, no report filed. Chalk dust on top of ash – walls stripped after fire, not before. Paint tin – check for fingerprints. What was hidden in the walls? Cash? Drugs?
Someone had gone to enormous trouble concealing something inside those walls. New plasterboard. Fibro glue. Fresh paint. That wasn’t a rushed job. That was careful, deliberate, and planned well in advance.
But whoever took out whatever had been hidden there had been in a hurry. Panels had been hacked off in chunks. There’d been no attempt to tidy up. In and out fast.
And they’d done it after the fire. The chalk dust didn’t lie.
But Kayden had.
