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CHAPTER
6
Ten minutes later, Kirsty was on the road again. This time she followed the banks of the Clarence River as it looped past dilapidated wharves on the reach near a pretty old pub. She passed more Victorian and art deco buildings wedged between modern, glass-fronted shops, but the town of Clarence soon gave way to countryside. Cows and horses dozed in the shade of whip-thin eucalypts and peeling weatherboard cottages, and the hilly terrain was dotted with neat rows of crops.
She crossed a narrow timber-strip bridge and saw a faded white cross tucked beside a Road Subject To Flooding sign. Macadamia trees, hundreds of them, grew in neat rows up the nearby hill, and black irrigation pipes hung below their lower branches.
The turn she needed was here, somewhere. She slowed to a crawl and looked at her phone screen, glad for the river, which was as good a geographical marker as any highway … yes, there it was. She traced a finger along the burgundy line that marked the road, and one of thosedeja vumemories tiptoed over the nape of her neck.
Hopefully she wouldn’t need a getaway route.
True, no-one had invited her to go snooping over the old Bluett farm, but the satellite map showed a square, grey structure that had to be a shed, and she only wanted to see what it looked like. See if it was big enough to have once housed a plane.
A rocky scree clung to the hillside above the white cross, and if she was reading this map right—and of course she was, she was a freaking outback pilot, wasn’t she?—the shed was up this narrow track on the far side of the bridge, but … that wasn’t all the satellite map was showing her.
Further along the road was another turn-off that must be the main driveway to the farm. The urge to have a look-see at what her dead father’s home looked like was too strong to ignore, so she gave the accelerator a nudge with her boot and drove the ute forward.
She was not prepared for her first sight of the old Bluett homestead.
Once she’d rounded a corner, she’d looked up to see the gentle green hills of the Northern Rivers countryside framing a patch of paddock and house as perfect as any paddock and house could be.
‘Oh, wow,’ she breathed, pulling onto the gravel beside an old milk-can letterbox that had been decorated all over in childish flowers. To the right of iron-red wheel ruts carved into the grass, she could just glimpse a front garden: agapanthus growing green and lush along a low verandah, a frangipani bare of leaves, the stubble of fresh-cut grass under the wire fence. The verandah posts leaned a little drunkenly, and rust had turned parts of the tin roof into lace.
A cattle grid marked the start of a driveway, but she had no cause to go up there.
Not yet. Not if the old shed was long gone and she could save herself the embarrassment of an awkward conversation.
You thinkwhatis in my shed?Yeah. She could just imagine the laugh some old cow cocky would have to share with his mates at the bar.This crazy sheila …
She stretched her hand out the driver’s side window and touched the barbed wire strung between two old hardwood posts. The wire looked older than she was. Old enough to have known Trevor, the father who’d died before she was born. Old enough to know Terri, even, back when she was raining havoc down on the unsuspecting locals of Clarence … there’d be a story there.
Probably not a good one, she thought with an indulgent smile.
Some long-ago Bluett might have strung this fence. She scratched at the rust with her thumbnail and it turned to powder in her hand. Despite having had that name circling in the back of her head her whole life, she’d never given the Bluetts a thought. What did that say about her?
She left her hand on the wire a moment more, knowing she was being sentimental, but it was hard not to be with that lovely old house and its rambling shrubs and overgrown flowerbeds filling her view.
It was a family house.
She could picture kids scampering up trees, dogs barking, mothers in checked aprons pegging tablecloths to a rope strung between two old-fashioned timber cross-hoists.
‘You’re being ridiculous,’ she murmured to herself. This was real life, not an episode ofA Country Practice. The Bluetts had sold this farm decades ago, and maybe they smacked their children, and maybe they had a curse that they’d never dealt with either.
The grass wasn’t greener (only, here in Northern New South Wales, it kinda looked like itwas), but whatever. She didn’t need new grass.
She was A-okay being Kirsty Fox, outback pilot … other than the whole grounding, endangering lives thing, which she wasn’tthinking about anyway on account of her tremor problem, which she’d almost definitely decided was carbon monoxide poisoning.
Crap. She was totally overthinking this.
A figure moved through old fruit trees in a distant field, and she narrowed her eyes. The owner, perhaps?
An akubra sat low over the man’s face, and a miniature horse picked its way through the field behind him. He stopped walking. Looked up.
Had he seen her?
Shit, here she was, planning a furtive stickybeak, and she’d gone and let herself be spotted at the main gate. Cranking the engine over, she did a quick U-turn and headed back to the bridge.
A few minutes later the rutted road she’d turned up had petered out, so she pulled over into long weeds. She’d found it—the old shed.
