Alison slept uneasily, but by the time she uncurled herself, the day was half-over. She’d expected to be woken at some point by the police with their questions. But no one disturbed her. She shuffled into the kitchen, where Sal was standing over the sink, her hands in rubber gloves.
“There’s coffee in the pot, love, just zap it for a few seconds.”
Sal nodded toward the microwave.
The cup was pale blue, with the feathered stains of too many coffees drunk over the years.
Alison’s hands shook as she took up the pot.
“Quite a shock yesterday,” Sal said, watching Alison closely.
Alison got the milk from the fridge door and tipped it in, more than she intended. She shoved the cup into the microwave and watched the seconds count down.
“Billy was by earlier. They’ve finished up at your place. They’ve cleared the car.” Billy Meaker, who’d dared her to jump off the shed when they were ten, and she’d badly broken her wrist doing it. Billy, who was never interesting enough to make things complicated.
The coffee was too hot.
“I can drive you down a bit later if you want.”
Sal balanced a saucepan on top of the drying rack and pulled out the plug from the drain. Wiping down the sink, she turned, focused on Alison.
The coffee was still too hot.
“It’s not your fault, love. You couldn’t have known she was there. You’re lucky enough as it is.”
“Did he say what she was doing there?”
“No, he said you should stop by the station later and he’ll tell you what they know.”
“Right.”
She let the coffee sit a little until she could swill great mouthfuls of it. Cup finished, she stared at the dregs.
“All right. Guess I’ll have a shower.”
In the middle of the firestorm Alison had lain under the heavy damp blanket on the floor and considered the situation. If this was it, she had reasoned, then that’s OK, I don’t really mind if I’m done. Now, as the water beat down on her back as she sat on the shower tiles, she wanted to know if Simone had been OK with it. Or had it happened too fast for her to even think? Alison closed her eyes, saw the blackness, felt the steam well up in the space around her, the hot clarity of the white vapor, pure and smooth, safe to draw in, to suck down her throat without fear. It was still too much like the day before.
Sal banged on the door.
“Alison, love, you’ve been in there forty minutes.”
The room too was full of steam. Her fingertips were shriveled.
“Yep, getting out, Sal,” she yelled back.
The floor was cool underfoot and she wiped a circle in the mirror, cutting through the condensation in three strokes. Her face and neck were red. Her hair—shoulder dusting, brown—was plastered down on her forehead. Her green eyes mostly pupil in the dim light.
“Get it together,” she told her reflection.
Alison biked over to the cop shop on Sal’s old gray three-speed. She left it leaning on the fence and pushed through the heavy doors to the front desk. Billy Meaker, Alison saw, relieved, was on duty. Still a friend after that arm-breaking dare as a kid, and all the teenage shit that came after, Billy was one of the people Alison trusted most in town. As a rule, she didn’t like cops—pigs, her grandfather had called them, his nose upturned in contempt, whenever the subject came up—but for Billy she made an exception. And living in a small town like Lake Bend, she’d gotten to know them all, in spite of her efforts to ignore them.
“Alison, glad you’re all right.” He smiled at her with tired eyes, his shirt rumpled, his shoes, Alison noticed, scuffed with soot.
“Thanks, Billy, pretty lucky.”
“You here about the girl in your drive?”
“Sal said you told her I could come down, get some information.”
“Yeah, of course, come on through—we’re still waiting on her parents, but I can tell you her name is—”
“Simone Arnold.”
“Yeah.”
“I saw her driver’s license. I was trying to figure out who she was.” Alison slid the purse over the counter. It no longer contained the piece of paper with her address on it. When she’d gone to tug on her freshly washed jeans, she’d felt a crumpled lump in the pocket. Pulled out a wad of water-damaged notepaper, remembered slipping it in there on the drive with Jim. Now she was ashamed that she’d snooped, but uneasy about the note, she decided to keep it to herself. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t want Billy to know, but she didn’t. Billy picked up the purse and frowned at her.
“I don’t know why I took this, sorry.”
“So they’ll be your fingerprints we found all over the car, then? The blanket your handiwork? Gotta ask you to give us your prints, so we can see if there are any that shouldn’t have been there.”
“She was killed in a massive bushfire, Billy, it’s hardly premeditated.”
“Yeah, almost certainly, but her parents say she was running away from something.”
“Running from what?”
“Old boyfriend.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“Well, that’s not funny.” He gave her the same hard-done-by face he used to give Mrs. Elliot when she caught him smoking in the woodworking sheds at lunchtime.
“Sorry. Bad time to make a joke.”
“Sure is, Ally, but you never did have much sense of timing. Come through. We’ll do the fingerprints and I’ll take a statement about finding her and what you saw and all that. You sure you didn’t know her?”
“Never heard of her.” Now was definitely the time to come clean about the address. She didn’t, and she didn’t know why she didn’t.
In the station, low-hanging ceiling fans pushed the thick summer air around in circles. They did little to cool the room or dislodge the band of flies that swarmed around the kitchen. Through the back, past the desks and filing cabinets, there was a small interrogation room and, a little farther on, one cell. It was usually empty and today was no different. What was different, though, was the total absence of other coppers. Usually the whole lot of them would be here, cooling their heels on their desks.
“Your place OK, Billy?”
“Yeah, it missed town almost completely—just a couple of places down the Ridge Road and the industrial strip on Orchard didn’t make it, but everything else was untouched. Yarra Ridge’s not so lucky; the SES boys through a bit earlier said they couldn’t even begin to say how bad it was yet.”
“Shit.”
“No words strong enough for this fire, Ally. That’s damn sure.”
The walls of the station were pale green, the casement windows filled with that mottled glass, same as Sal’s front door. The whole place was small; only about six coppers worked out of here, covering a large regional area. The door to the interrogation room was closed, and Billy steered her to the far side of the main room instead, where the kitchen met the office and a small table sat tucked in a corner for meals.
“Where’re your sidekicks?”
“We’ve been taking turns back here. Everyone else is out, dealing with calls. No one’s slept more than a couple of hours. I’m on station duty until the relief gets here from Melbourne, and then we’ve all got twenty-four off, since we’ve basically just done thirty-six on.”
He got the fingerprint kit and asked her questions while he worked. When did she first see the car? Why did she look for the purse? Was Simone definitely dead when she found her? How did Alison know for sure? When they were done Billy leaned back in his seat a bit, shed the outer layer.
“You look like hell.” He smiled at her, the dimples in his cheeks attempting to make up for the insult.
“Gee, thanks, you really know how to perk me up.” She smiled back anyway.
“Come to the Imperial tonight—they’re opening up. I’ll be there, could murder a beer after this shift; most of town’ll be there too probably.”
“Are her parents coming here?”
“On their way now, coming down from Cairns.” He articulated it wrong, forgot to drop the ir, like a local would. Alison knew the trick, though, on account of her years up there after art school, working a shit-kicking job, painting in her spare time, before she’d gotten established enough to live off her art.
“Ever been there, Billy?”
“Me? Never been anywhere, really. Melbourne’s as far as I get.”
“It’s ‘Cans.’ Like a can.”
“What? Why’d they spell it differently, then?”
“Probably to weed out the foreigners.”
He didn’t get it. “Coming for a drink tonight, then?”
“Maybe. Can you let me know when her parents get here? I’d like to talk to them.”
“Why?”
“She was on her way to my house; maybe they know why.”
“You don’t know her, so why do you think she was coming to you? Maybe she panicked in the fire; with the visibility so low, maybe she didn’t even know where she was.”
“Maybe, maybe not. We don’t know. I’d just—I’d like to meet them, is all.” She thought of the note again, bit her lip, held her tongue.
“All right, I’ll let them know when they get here.”
“Thanks, Billy.” Alison, wanting to convey more levity than she felt, winked at him as she waved good-bye, and strolled back out into the muggy afternoon.
In the street she got back on Sal’s three-speed and pedaled down the main drag. The town was small, a few streets jutting off it, no more than fifty houses inside the boundaries. Everyone else lived on bush blocks a short drive out. It was hard to imagine anyone untouched by a fire of this scale. If they survived at all, most people had lost property, livestock, or crops in the blaze. Some had lost loved ones. The paper on Sal’s table that morning put the death toll at fifty-five and rising. Sal had wanted to talk to her about it, but Alison was trying not to think about it. Trying to silence the voice that kept asking why she had escaped what had seemed like certain death. There wouldn’t be a fuller picture until they’d been able to go through all the damaged areas, count the missing. Today, fires were still burning, the heat and smoke and destruction not done with this community yet.
That was the thing about bushfires. They didn’t eat just the bush; they swallowed homes, shops, and cars. Whole streets. Whole populations. Fifty-five people dead. She rolled it around in her brain, trying not to think about how that meant everyone knew someone. Everyone lost someone. There was no avoiding a death toll like this one. Alison didn’t know where to start thinking about it. She had friends she couldn’t reach, whom she hadn’t been able to bring herself even to try to raise. It would be a long time before Lake Bend would be back to some version of “normal,” and even longer before the gaps were somehow plugged. The missing mechanic or teacher, or accountant or ranger. There was no way to map the long way back or speed up the process of turning the grief into something softer but, somehow, stronger.
The road curved around the mountains; on one side the land was char and ash. Twisted metal slumped on concrete slab—these were houses, but now they made a graveyard of sorts. Ashes caught on the wind, and when she breathed, Alison didn’t know what she was inhaling. Was it the remains of trees, homes, pictures, furniture—or was it human? She held her breath as long as she could.