Elise laughs. ‘Why is it so cheap? It’s not a crime scene, is it?’

  Kiara coughs.

  Elise’s eyes widen. ‘It is?’

  ‘Well, it was, but—’

  ‘Wait, were you visiting the real estate agent in a professional capacity?’ Elise is starting to sound shrill. ‘Is this the murder house from last weekend?’

  This isn’t going as well as Kiara had hoped. Elise is a paramedic—surely she’s not afraid of an empty building …?

  ‘It’s been cleaned,’ Kiara says. ‘Don’t you think it would be nice to leave town for a bit?’

  ‘I don’t know about you, but the main thing I dislike about Warrigal is the violence. You want to take a break by going to a place where there was a very recent double homicide?’

  Kiara tries to make a joke of it. ‘What are the odds of that happening two weekends in a row?’

  Elise doesn’t laugh. In the shadows of the bedroom, her eyes are black wells from which nothing escapes. ‘What are you hoping to get out of this?’

  ‘I thought you needed a break.’ From whoever is making those phone calls, Kiara doesn’t say.

  ‘You can’t fix me, K.’

  ‘I’m not trying to.’

  Guppy watches them, puzzled by Kiara’s tone and body language. Her dad’s clock ticks too loudly on the wall.

  ‘Where did you go today?’ she hears herself ask.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When I was with the real estate agent,’ says Kiara, trying to sound natural, not suspicious, ‘I saw you through the window.’

  Elise hesitates a beat too long. ‘Oh. I just went to the cafe next door. Before my shift.’

  Just stop, Kiara tells herself, but she can’t. ‘With anyone?’

  ‘For fuck’s sake.’ Elise leaves the room, satin pyjama shorts flapping.

  ‘Elise, wait.’ Kiara rolls out of bed and reaches for her dressing-gown.

  But Elise is already back from the kitchenette. She’s holding a disposable coffee cup smudged with Vegemite—she must have retrieved it from the bin. She reads the scrawl on the side: ‘Takeaway for Elise. Cappuccino, no sugar.’ In her other hand, she holds up a receipt. ‘Medium coffee times one. Four dollars fifty. Subtotal: four dollars fifty. Total: four dollars fifty.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kiara says, though she thinks Elise is overreacting. Kiara didn’t accuse her of anything, just asked if she was with anyone. That’s a normal question to ask your partner, isn’t it?

  There’s always an undercurrent of anger with Elise. Kiara secretly likes it—she doesn’t want to be in a relationship with a dishrag. But this is something else. She barely recognises the jittery, furious woman in front of her.

  Elise and Kiara hardly ever fight, at least not compared to the straight couples they know. Kiara often thinks those people try too hard to imitate the relationships they see on TV. There is no obvious template for what she and Elise have, so they’re free to do what’s best for themselves and each other. But now Kiara can feel the foundations sinking.

  She changes tack. ‘Look, I need your help.’

  This takes Elise by surprise. ‘With what?’

  ‘The case,’ Kiara says, like it’s obvious. ‘I can’t get inside the heads of the suspects, or figure out their relationships to the victims.’

  ‘I don’t know them.’

  ‘Four of the six were on the same high school athletics team—that’s what brought them together. They’re all sporty types, like you. I was hoping you could …’

  Elise glares at her. ‘You’re patronising me.’

  ‘Am I? Sorry.’ Kiara smiles sheepishly.

  Elise takes a deep breath, then sits beside Kiara on the bed. Kiara squeezes her hand, and Elise squeezes back. Finally she says, ‘The house has been cleaned, right?’

  Kiara is a bit offended. ‘Of course.’

  ‘There won’t be little yellow evidence tags everywhere? Blood on the ceiling …?’

  ‘It will be spotless.’

  ‘Okay,’ Elise says. ‘We’ll go.’

  Kiara wraps her arms around her. ‘Yay,’ she whispers.

  They lie down together. Guppy leaps up onto the bed and curls up on Kiara’s feet. Elise strokes her hair. Kiara closes her eyes, wondering if Elise washed her hands after going through the bin.

  The mechanic is a small, bearded man with matted hair and thick glasses. He wipes his hands on a rag, balls it up, then tosses it towards a bucket four or five metres away. The rag goes in without touching the sides.

  ‘Bill shoots, he scores,’ Kiara says.

  ‘Detective Lui! I am not worthy.’ The mechanic makes a little bow. ‘What can I do for you?’

  Bill trained alongside Kiara at the police academy in Goulburn. He’d signed up to get away from his aggressive stepfather, and was an enthusiastic recruit. But once he was a probationary constable, it became evident that he had no real passion for justice. He lasted only four months and now seems much happier wielding a spanner than a badge.

  The dimly lit garage smells of sugar soap. A poster bolted to the corrugated wall reminds all staff to use protective gloves at all times, even though the only employee is Bill, who isn’t wearing them. A Jaguar, gleaming but dented, is raised up on a steel platform. Even the undercarriage is shiny—maybe Bill’s washed it.

  ‘Hoping to book in a service,’ Kiara says.

  ‘For one of the police cruisers, or your Navara?’

  She points back over her shoulder at her ute.

  Bill leans sideways, eyeing the vehicle. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Nothing, I hope. But I thought it would be a good idea to get it checked before I go up the mountain.’

  ‘Taking Elise for a drive?’ Bill sounds a bit too interested.

  ‘Yep. Can you fit me in?’

  He squints. ‘Dunno—I’m pretty busy.’

  Kiara looks around at the garage. There are no other customers and no vehicles other than the Jaguar. ‘Doing what?’

  ‘I’ll have you know that my schedule fills up weeks in advance these days,’ Bill says, affronted. ‘This little beauty was booked in a month ago.’ He gestures to the car on the platform.

  Kiara finds this very unlikely. Bill may be the only mechanic in town, but there’s not much demand. Warrigal is full of old people who can service their own equally old cars. So can Kiara, but she needs to spend the day printing out evidence photos for her case file.

  Bill is still talking about the Jaguar. ‘She’ll take me the rest of the day, easy.’

  ‘How about tomorrow?’

  He scratches his chin. ‘I’ve got a bit on.’

  Kiara doubts this. ‘Okay. Thanks anyway.’ She sighs theatrically. ‘Elise was really looking forward to a romantic getaway, you know?’

  Bill’s too-interested look returns. ‘Well … I suppose I could rearrange some things. Let me check the calendar.’

  Kiara can see it from here: the plate number from the Jaguar is scribbled on a square representing last Monday; the rest of the month is blank. ‘You do that,’ she says.

  LAST FRIDAY

  ISLA

  Isla climbed out of the Tarago and staggered over to the bushes near the edge of the driveway, feeling like she might throw up. The air conditioner had blown a plasticky smell onto her face throughout the long drive, which included some alarming hairpin bends with sheer drops just beyond them. If you were out here in the dark, she thought, you’d be likely to walk off a cliff.

  As a kid, Isla had never been afraid of heights. She would climb the scrap heap near her parents’ house every weekend, wobbling on rusted wheels and old freezers, and was one of the few who dared to leap off the top. She’d come home bruised, scratched, and grinning all over her dirty face.

  She and Oscar had honeymooned in the Daintree Rainforest, at a resort surrounded by scenic trails. One night, while he was in the shower, she switched on the news. In Colorado, a climber had fallen to her death when the rock she was clinging to broke off the cliff face. For some reason, Isla couldn’t get the image out of her head. She didn’t sleep at all that night, and the following day, when they hiked up to a lookout, she wasn’t able to go close enough to the edge to take a good selfie.

  Oscar asked if something was wrong. She said no, and he believed her.

  That was the moment Isla realised her mistake. She loved Oscar partly because he hadn’t gone to Warrigal High. With him, she could pretend to be the person she wished she was. But now she was married to a man who didn’t know her.

  Every night for the rest of the trip, she dreamed she was scaling a wall of red stone, Oscar waiting for her at the top. She would reach for his hand, and he for hers, but just as their fingers were about to touch, she’d lose her footing and plummet into the endless dark.

  Dom and Cole were unpacking the back of the Tarago while Felicity stood nearby, breathing on her gloved hands for warmth. Oscar and Clementine were surveying the house. The quiet up here was eerie. A small town like Warrigal still had some level of background noise: dogs, traffic, a neighbour’s radio. This far from civilisation, even the birds seemed reluctant to break the silence.

  Isla turned to face the bushes and bent over, putting her hands on her thighs and willing herself not to vomit. She took deep breaths, counting the leaves on the dirt driveway between her feet—six, seven, eight … When she ran out of leaves, she counted the tyre tracks from cars and mountain bikes. She tried to imagine what kind of fruit loop would ride a bike all the way to the top of this mountain.

  ‘You okay?’ Cole asked behind her, making her jump.

  She straightened and forced a smile back at him. ‘Just a bit car sick.’

  Cole owned a gym and looked the part. His muscular arms were always exposed by a short-sleeved shirt, a fitness band gleaming on his wrist, and his close-cropped hair highlighted the bulges on either side of his neck. His short blond beard often twinkled with sweat. But he was soft-spoken and gentle. Isla had once watched him lift an injured bird into a cardboard box, and she’d wondered—out of nowhere—if he held Clementine as tenderly as that.

  ‘Try standing up straight,’ he said. ‘Watch the horizon. Give the fluid in your inner ear some time to stabilise.’

  From Dom, Isla would have found this annoying. I’ll look wherever I want, thank you. But she followed Cole’s advice, squinting in the midday sun as she gazed out across the endless bush.

  He rested a strong hand on her back. ‘Is it working?’

  The moment felt familiar. Isla remembered hiding behind the science block as a teenager, her guts churning, face burning. Cole’s arms around her, and his gentle voice: Don’t worry. You’ll be okay.

  She exhaled, banishing the memory. ‘Maybe,’ she said.

  ‘Just a sec.’ Cole hurried to the boot and unzipped a leather bag. He kept his back to her as he did it. When he turned around, he was holding a blister pack. ‘I packed ginger tablets.’

  Isla wasn’t surprised. Cole was perpetually—almost pathologically—organised. He never forgot anyone’s birthday and was always the designated driver. A while ago, Isla had noticed that his shoelaces usually matched the colour of his shirt, so either he had a lot of shoes or he regularly changed the laces. Even his body was tidy: no freckles on his tanned skin, no veins visible in his blue eyes.

  Isla realised she was staring. Averting her gaze, she found herself looking at Clementine. She was blonde, like Cole, and equally partial to activewear. When she and Cole were side by side, with their matching serious expressions, they looked like the creepy telepathic kids from a sci-fi novel she’d discovered as a girl.

  ‘The Midwich Cuckoos,’ Isla once whispered to Oscar, pointing at Cole and Clementine.

  Oscar had frowned. ‘Huh?’

  She tried the title of the movie. ‘You know—Village of the Damned.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ he replied, with no idea what she was talking about. He hadn’t picked up a book since university.

  This made her realise she was making fun of Cole and Clementine, her oldest friends, because she envied them. She’d expected to have a marriage like theirs, where two people seemed to fuse into a single organism, with the same opinions and goals. Instead, Oscar had somehow forced her into the role of the wet-blanket sitcom wife, casting himself as the beleaguered husband. If she asked him to unpack the dishwasher or get his clothes off the bathroom floor, she was nagging. If she did it herself, she was being passive aggressive. If she didn’t, she was lazy.

  When they first met, Oscar had loved the way she talked about big ideas rather than the meaningless day-to-day gossip that enthralled the other students—or so he claimed. Isla was starting to wonder if that was just something he’d said to get laid: You’re not like other girls. You’re interested in serious things. Because now she wasn’t allowed to be anything other than his wife and Noah’s mother. If she wanted to go to a job interview, she was leaving him to pick up the slack; if she tried to keep track of politics, she was spending all her time on Twitter. She could only imagine what he’d say if he caught her on Pornhub—particularly if he saw what she was looking at.

  At that thought, her hand twitched towards the phone in her pocket. She stopped herself.

  ‘Aren’t these for sea sickness?’ she asked, taking the ginger tablets from Cole.

  ‘I think they’re mostly a placebo,’ he said. ‘So why wouldn’t they be just as effective on land?’

  She laughed. ‘I don’t think placebos work if you tell the patient they’re placebos.’

  ‘Oh. My bad. Maybe there’s some real evidence? Hang on.’ He got out his phone.

  ‘Are you going to pretend to find something, just so I feel better?’

  Cole was squinting at the screen. ‘“Ginger tablets have been shown to cure car sickness in clinical trials.”’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No.’ Cole showed her the screen. ‘No reception up here.’

  ‘What carrier are you with?’

  ‘Optus.’

  Isla was with Telstra. She checked her own phone: no bars.

  Dom was walking past, carrying a suitcase in each of his big hands. There were sweat patches under the arms of his Hugo Boss shirt. ‘This is supposed to be an unplugged weekend! A digital detox.’

  ‘A what?’ Cole asked.

  Felicity, who had been rummaging through her backpack nearby, also paused when she heard this. ‘There’s wi-fi, right?’

  ‘Nope,’ Dom said. ‘Just us and nature.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’ Felicity was twenty-four—she’d probably never been without wi-fi in her whole life.

  Isla thought she saw something flicker across Dom’s expression—nervousness? But she couldn’t think of anything he might be nervous about. Everything always turned out just fine for him.

  After high school, she’d never wanted to see Dom again. But then her best friend, Clementine, had married Dom’s best friend, Cole. That connection, indirect as it was, often put them all in the same room. She always acted friendly to avoid ruining everyone else’s night, then went home burning with self-disgust. Now that she was thirty, her supply of fake smiles was running low.

  ‘I don’t remember signing up for a digital detox,’ Isla said.

  ‘The house has a landline,’ said Dom. ‘Relax.’

  ‘A landline,’ Felicity marvelled. ‘Could come in handy if we need to call a phrenologist, or a blacksmith.’ She resumed searching her backpack.

  Isla hated being told to relax, especially by Dom. ‘Whatever,’ she said as she grabbed her suitcase.

  The house towered over the landscape, even taller than it had looked in the photos. Metal cut-outs shaped like birds were mounted on the exterior walls. Garden chairs with weatherproof cushions were scattered around the porch, safe from thieves and vandals out here in the middle of nowhere.

  Isla could hear Clementine and Oscar talking inside. She felt tense whenever her husband was alone with someone she’d gone to high school with—which, on this trip, was everyone except Felicity. But it sounded like they were just admiring the decor. Isla told herself everything would be fine.

  ‘Here’s your key,’ Felicity said, handing Isla an envelope before immediately snatching it back. ‘Oh, hang on—I’m supposed to give the key to Oscar.’

  ‘I can give it to him,’ Isla said, confused, but Felicity was already flouncing towards the house. Isla suddenly noticed how much the younger woman’s new haircut resembled her own. She wondered if Dom had suggested the style; if he was training his wife to look like her.

  Why did Oscar get a key while she didn’t? She resolved to make him give it to her later, on principle.

  ‘Can I carry your bag?’ Cole offered.

  ‘No,’ she said, not wanting to be dismissed as helpless. She hauled the suitcase inside.

  The living room was modern, full of sharp-edged tables, glass-doored cabinets, and other things they couldn’t have at home because of Noah. There was an industrial-sized oven, in case they wanted to cook twelve pizzas at once. Huge windows overlooked the terrifying slope they’d just driven up.

  ‘There’s a hot tub,’ Oscar called from the deck.

  ‘Dibs on the upstairs bedroom!’ Clementine called from somewhere else in the house.

  As the others staked their claims, Isla opened the fridge. There was butter and mayo, but nothing substantial. She hadn’t brought any groceries—Oscar had said Dom had paid for the luxury package, with food and drinks included.

  ‘Are we supposed to hunt and kill our own dinner?’ she asked. It was a joke, but she found herself picturing it. Catastrophising, her psychologist would have said. She imagined herself whittling a spear that was too blunt, stumbling through the bush looking for something to stab, then twisting her ankle in a wombat hole and freezing to death.

  Dom appeared at her shoulder. ‘There should be …’ He frowned at the empty fridge. ‘The agent said there would be food here.’

  Isla felt a perverse joy at seeing something go wrong for Dom. She would gladly starve, if it made him look bad in front of the others. She opened the cupboards: also empty. ‘No cereal either,’ she said loudly.