‘Two ambulances,’ Clementine said softly.

  ‘Dom is way past that point,’ Isla told her.

  ‘I know, but we have to get rid of the body.’

  Everyone looked at Clementine, aghast.

  ‘I meant, get it to the morgue,’ she said. ‘Obviously.’

  Oscar noticed how rapidly, for her, Dom had become it.

  ‘We’ll have to drive down the hill,’ Cole said.

  ‘What, just go to town with a corpse strapped into one of the seats?’ Isla sounded a bit hysterical.

  A good husband would have put his arm around her. As usual, Oscar thought of it too late. If he did it now, it would seem staged. He looked out the window. Dom’s body was still on the deck, surrounded by a puddle. It was starting to rain.

  ‘No, no,’ Cole was saying, ‘one of us just needs to drive far enough to get reception and call triple zero.’

  Clementine asked, ‘How did Dom get out there without any of us seeing him?’

  ‘The east downstairs bedroom has a door onto the deck,’ Oscar said. ‘He must have gone through that way. Or he could have climbed out the window of the other downstairs bedroom. Maybe even the upstairs window, if he was feeling especially …’

  ‘Dommish,’ Clementine put in. ‘I guess the police will figure it out.’

  A palpable fear settled over the room. Isla put their thoughts into words: ‘Do we tell them about the …?’ She gestured to the bedrooms but stopped short of miming the sex.

  ‘I think we have to,’ Oscar said, though the thought made him feel ill.

  Cole looked more embarrassed than Oscar had ever seen him. ‘It’s not like the … like it had anything to do with what happened to Dom.’

  ‘We don’t know that,’ Clementine said. ‘Maybe he had a stroke from all the excitement. That might explain why he got in the tub with his clothes on.’

  ‘That is pretty much how he would have wanted to go,’ Oscar said. He felt Isla staring at him and realised he was stroking Felicity’s hair. He quickly moved his hand to his pocket—then realised he had no pockets and found himself simply patting the side of his own leg.

  Cole cringed. ‘You want to tell the police that no one knows what happened to Dom because we were all … busy?’

  ‘Do you really want to try to hide that from them?’ Isla asked.

  ‘But someone will tell the media,’ Cole said. ‘Someone always does. All of our reputations will be ruined.’

  ‘Not as ruined as they’ll be if we lie to the police,’ Isla insisted. ‘That will make the investigation a thousand times more complex—’

  ‘Dom is dead, Cole,’ Clementine said, ‘and you’re worried about our reputations?’

  Her husband rubbed his face with his palm. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry. I’ll drive down the mountain until my phone starts working, then I’ll make the call.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Isla offered. ‘So you don’t have to drive and keep an eye on your phone screen at the same time.’

  Oscar glanced over at Clementine, who didn’t volunteer to ride with her husband.

  Cole said, ‘Sure, but at least one person needs to stay with Felicity.’

  ‘I can do that,’ Oscar said.

  Isla shot him a suspicious look. He returned it.

  ‘Okay,’ she said finally. ‘Give me a minute to get dressed.’ She disappeared into the hall.

  Cole went into the entryway, then came back a second later. ‘Who’s got the key for the Tarago?’

  ‘You,’ Oscar said.

  Cole pointed towards the front door. ‘I left it just there, on the hook. Who picked it up?’

  Clementine and Oscar looked at each other.

  ‘You drove to town yesterday—’ Clementine began.

  ‘Yeah, and I put the key on the hook.’

  ‘Is the car still there?’ Oscar asked. It had been in the driveway when they were searching for Dom.

  Cole vanished towards the front door. There was a click, a creak, a pause, another creak, and another click. He returned. ‘It’s right where I parked it.’

  Isla returned from the bedroom, pulling her coat over a loose top and holding her walking shoes in one hand. ‘Maybe Felicity has it?’ she suggested.

  ‘I’ll check.’ Clementine finally stood, apparently planning to go through the pockets of Felicity’s pyjamas.

  ‘We can ask her once she’s awake,’ Oscar objected.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ Isla said coldly, ‘Dom is dead. There’s no reception up here. Right now we can’t call an ambulance, or the police, or anyone at all. Warrigal is more than a hundred kilometres away. We’re trapped here without that key—’

  ‘What key?’ Felicity said.

  ‘The one for the—’ Isla broke off. ‘You’re awake!’

  ‘Yeah. I must have …’ She sat up on the couch, then collapsed again. ‘What happened?’

  ‘You fainted,’ Clementine said.

  Felicity gasped. ‘Dom! Is he …?’

  Oscar nodded, perhaps too eagerly.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Desperation was written across Felicity’s face. ‘Maybe he’s just concussed, or—’

  ‘We’re sure,’ Cole said.

  Her eyes filled with tears. ‘I thought maybe it was a nightmare.’

  ‘It is,’ said Clementine, as she sat back down next to the fire.

  ‘Do you have the car key?’ Cole asked. ‘We need to get to somewhere with reception, so we can call the police.’

  ‘I thought you had it,’ Felicity said. She nevertheless turned out her pockets. Empty. ‘Did you try the landline?’

  ‘It doesn’t work,’ Oscar said.

  Clementine spoke up. ‘Dom might have the car key.’

  Everyone looked out the window to where Dom’s body lay sprawled alone on the deck. Then they looked at each other.

  ‘I’ll check,’ Cole said.

  ‘No.’ Felicity stood up. ‘I’ll do it.’

  Oscar hovered beside her. ‘Are you sure?’

  She opened the back door and stepped out into the drizzle. Oscar watched as she crouched over Dom and went through his suit pockets. She pulled out a pen, then a sleeve of business cards. No key.

  ‘We could check his bags?’ Cole murmured.

  ‘We should let Felicity do that,’ Clementine said.

  ‘You don’t have a spare key?’ Isla asked them.

  ‘It went into the washing machine a couple of weeks ago,’ Cole said.

  On the deck, Felicity had finished searching Dom’s clothes and was gently cupping his cheeks in her hands. Tears poured down her face and dripped onto his forehead.

  She whispered something to her dead husband. Then she lowered her face to his, and kissed him.

  Oscar finally looked away, anger coming to a boil in his gut.

  NOW

  ELISE

  ‘Thirty-two-year-old financial planner Dominic Pritchard,’ Kiara says. ‘Lifelong Warrigal resident but works in Wagga. Married, no kids. The medical examiner, Gregor, put the time of death between six in the evening and midnight on Saturday, which is consistent with the three witness statements.’

  Elise holds the coffee mug under her nose and inhales the steam, trying to get the caffeine straight to her brain. The early morning sun is doing nothing to wake her up. But it’s good to be out on the back deck, despite the cold. The smell of death still seems to linger in the house.

  She slept restlessly, even with Whitmey keeping watch—or perhaps because of that. At dawn, the search and rescue team arrived and started trampling the bush around the house. They’d found nothing so far, and were now out of earshot.

  ‘I reckon Pritchard’s wife did it.’ Elise sips the coffee. ‘Felicity.’

  ‘This isn’t a TV show,’ Kiara says sharply. ‘You don’t start with a theory and then try to prove it. That’s how wrongful convictions happen. Instead you gather as much evidence as you can, then you put it all together at the end and see what makes sense.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ Elise walks around the deck in a slow circle—anticlockwise, so as to put less weight on her bad knee. ‘What else did Gregor say?’

  ‘Stomach contents indicate that he ate dinner about two hours before his death. Lividity suggests the body was moved from a sitting position to lying on its back; again, consistent with the statements of the three suspects. No defensive wounds—he didn’t see the impact coming.’

  ‘And they found him just sitting here?’ Elise leans against the hot tub, staring down at the submerged jets.

  ‘Right. Fully clothed, with a cracked skull.’

  ‘I don’t see any blood in the water.’

  ‘The tub has been drained and refilled,’ Kiara says. ‘Chemical analysis of the original water discovered no blood but a lot of urine, which Gregor found puzzling.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Urine suggests Pritchard died in the tub, and his bladder relaxed. But apparently the head wound wouldn’t have killed him instantly—you’d think he would have bled into the water for a while before his heart stopped beating.’

  ‘Maybe someone else peed in the tub earlier,’ Elise suggests. ‘Or later.’

  ‘Maybe. But there was blood on his pillowcase. So it’s as if he was hit in the head, then died in the tub, but didn’t start bleeding until his body was moved to the bed.’

  Elise runs her tongue across her front teeth. ‘Perhaps he had low blood pressure in general? The blood didn’t go to his head until he was horizontal?’

  It’s a weak theory, but Kiara says, ‘Good thinking.’ Patronising her.

  She brought Elise here to get her away from Warrigal, thinking the problem is the town rather than the tripwires tangled throughout Elise’s own mind. Kiara doesn’t actually think Elise can help with the case. Knowing this, Elise is determined to be useful.

  ‘There was a full moon last weekend, right?’ she says.

  ‘That’s right. At the time of death, the moon would have been about there,’ Kiara points. ‘And the trees aren’t tall enough to block the light, so visibility would have been okay. Dominic would have seen the killer if they’d been right in front of him. So the lack of defensive wounds suggests he was attacked from behind, probably by a right-handed individual, since the damage was to the right side of his head.’

  ‘Why was he fully dressed?’

  ‘I’m told he was a bit of a larrikin.’

  ‘You mean a dickhead.’

  Kiara gives a slight nod.

  ‘Was he drunk?’ Elise asks.

  ‘His blood alcohol was point oh nine per cent.’

  Almost twice the limit for driving, Elise thinks. But not so much that you don’t know what you’re doing. She leans on the edge of the tub. ‘Who gets his money? His wife?’

  Kiara takes a deep breath. ‘It’s a bit complicated. From what I can tell, Dominic and Felicity signed a binding financial agreement before they tied the knot—the gist of it was that if they divorced, she wouldn’t get his money.’

  Elise feels a flicker of excitement. ‘But they didn’t get divorced. He died.’ Her thoughts spin into overdrive. ‘Maybe she wanted to leave him but couldn’t afford it, so she—’

  ‘Hold your horses. Yes, she’ll inherit his money … but it turns out he didn’t have very much.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Sixty thousand in savings, eighty in super.’

  ‘Sounds like a lot to me,’ Elise says.

  ‘Well, they still owed three hundred K on their house. The interest was fixed at a low rate, so apparently Dom was in no hurry to pay it down.’

  ‘Did Felicity know they were in dire straits financially?’

  ‘They weren’t,’ Kiara says. ‘Dominic was earning more than enough to make the payments. She might be in trouble now, though. I don’t think stand-up comedy pays very well.’

  ‘He was a financial planner. Surely he had life insurance?’

  ‘You’d think so. I’m still trying to confirm. But it could be like the mechanic who never gets around to fixing his own car.’

  ‘Or anyone else’s.’ Elise thinks of the snail’s pace Bill works at. That dented Jaguar is probably still sitting there. ‘So Felicity is either bankrupted by her husband’s death or set up for life by the insurance, and we don’t know which?’

  ‘At this stage,’ Kiara says.

  ‘Is she right-handed?’

  ‘Left.’

  Elise nods, disappointed. ‘What about the camper?’

  According to the three suspects, there had been an unexplained light outside the window on their first night at the house. On the second day, they’d found evidence of a camp site.

  ‘Search and rescue hadn’t found any sign of them,’ Kiara says. ‘The story didn’t sound credible. I’d think the killer made it up to cover their tracks, except …’

  ‘Except all the suspects are saying it?’

  Kiara looks troubled. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Could the three women have been working together? Maybe it’s a movement. Burn your bras. Kill your husbands.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Kiara said doubtfully. There are two more angles to consider: the ten thousand dollars Dominic transferred to Cole six weeks ago, supposedly to cover IVF treatments, and the letter we found from Oscar to Isla.’

  Elise knows about the letter. Oscar had threatened to leave Isla and take their son.

  ‘If Oscar and Isla got divorced,’ Elise begins, ‘who would—?’

  She jumps. Whitmey is standing right next to her, having appeared as silently as a ghost. He doesn’t look like a man who’s been up all night keeping watch. His uniform isn’t rumpled, there are no bags under his eyes and there’s no body odour, just a trace of cologne.

  ‘You’re a ninja,’ Elise says.

  He ignores her. ‘Getting some help with the case?’ he asks Kiara.

  She holds his gaze. ‘What, you never bounce ideas off your wife?’

  ‘I don’t take her to crime scenes.’

  ‘I’m standing right here,’ Elise complains.

  Whitmey looks down his nose at her. ‘You are,’ he says disapprovingly. ‘Anyway, I’m heading off. Constable Vickers just radioed in—she’s on her way. And Rohan wants you to call him.’

  ‘Thanks, Seamus,’ Kiara says. ‘Can you tell Vickers to bring some food?’

  ‘Will do.’ Whitmey disappears back into the house.

  ‘Arsehole,’ Elise mutters.

  ‘Vickers is the arsehole,’ Kiara says. ‘She’ll report us. Seamus was trying to keep us out of trouble.’

  ‘Right.’ Elise tries not to look like she’s sulking, but she wishes Kiara had taken her side. Isn’t that the point of being a couple—having someone on your side even if you’re wrong?

  Kiara seems to sense her annoyance. ‘Come on, let’s get this thing solved before Vickers gets here.’

  ‘No, I need a break.’

  Elise walks back into the house and switches on the kettle. Without looking back, she goes into the hall that leads to the bedrooms. Both downstairs bedrooms have windows that are visible from the deck, so she goes upstairs instead, getting as far away from Kiara’s stare as she can. She leans against the window and breathes, looking out at the endless, hostile bush.

  It’s not hard to see why Madden came back. Survival out there would be impossible at this time of year—which means she’ll be back again.

  There’s something in Elise’s shoe, worrying at her heel: a speck of grit, or maybe a grass seed. She sits down on the bed, intending to take the shoe off. But suddenly that seems like too much work. Everything seems like too much work.

  Elise lies back on the bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about the two dead men and what went so wrong with their marriages that they wanted to sleep with each other’s wives. Being attracted to other people is a normal part of a healthy relationship—or at least, Elise hopes it is. She certainly notices other women. Sometimes it’ll be a waitress who smells good, leaning over the table; other times it’s a woman emerging from a gym, with great legs and cool hair. Although people never talk about this, she can’t be the only one who feels it.

  But letting those fleeting moments of attraction become fantasies, and then obsessions, and then actions—to Elise that implies a deep sadness, one that is probably exacerbated rather than eased by an affair.

  She sighs and flops her arms out sideways on the bed, like she’s making a snow angel. She finds herself looking at a small hole in the ceiling.

  It takes her a moment to notice the eye staring back.

  LAST SUNDAY

  CLEMENTINE

  Clementine compressed a raincoat in her hands, crushing all the air out of it, then stuffed it into her backpack. ‘Have you seen my phone charger?’ she asked Cole.

  ‘What do you need it for?’

  ‘To charge my phone.’

  They were in the upstairs bedroom. Dom’s body had been moved to his bed, and the others were gathering their belongings. Only Cole and Clementine were going down the mountain, but everyone wanted to be ready to leave as soon as the police arrived.

  ‘We’ll find some reception long before we find a power point,’ Cole said reasonably. ‘And it could be a long walk. We don’t want any unnecessary weight.’

  He was right. But Clementine hadn’t asked him for advice—she had asked him where the fucking charger was. ‘Have you seen it, or not?’

  He opened his mouth, then closed it, before disappearing into the ensuite and coming back with the charger. Clementine took it and silently pushed it into her bag.

  Last night, in bed, they had lain back to back, Clementine on the edge of the mattress as if she’d rather risk falling off than being touched by her husband. The skin of her wrists was still raw from the cuffs, and her voice was croaky from being strangled. She was desperate to tell Cole who she’d been with and what he’d done to her. But at the same time, she wanted to make sure Cole never found out, ever.

  He hadn’t asked her about the condom. Hadn’t asked her anything. They’d all agreed they wouldn’t talk about the sex afterwards—but even as Clementine proposed that rule, she’d assumed she and Cole would disregard it. They weren’t just married, they were friends. Clementine had joined him at the gym almost every day, before fertility appointments and research filled her schedule. Neither seemed to need privacy. They never closed the toilet door. They’d installed a double-headed shower in their house; her favourite part of each day was washing her hair while they gossiped about their friends.