I walk the long way home, along the road instead of through the bush, along past the hobby farms and the hand-painted signs on the side of the road selling bananas and avocados. There aren’t any people manning the stalls, it’s based on an honesty system, and people driving past stop to slip money in a rusted locked box and take the fruit from where it sits, rotting in open wooden crates. I need to walk off this tightness in my chest, walk off the panic, and I need time to figure out how I feel. Walking’s good for unknotting all the thoughts that get tangled up inside my head. I don’t even really notice the way the sun claws at my shoulderblades and scratches them red, and how my hair is like a waterfall of sweat cascading down my back. I ignore the catcalls coming from rattly panel vans full of teenage boys, and from older guys who should know better, and I follow my footsteps home. McGinty’s heart had been shocked into starting up again on his living-room floor, but who knows if it stayed beating? Do I want McGinty to survive? What if he knows I was snooping through his house? He’d know for sure then that I suspected him. Would I be next? Did I just sign my own death warrant, right then and there, as I was pressing all my body weight onto McGinty’s silent chest? These thoughts are bigger than the swollen sun, they’re big enough to make me break out into goosebumps. The questions lie unanswered, though, trailing off like the long, dusty road that unfurls in front of me.

Three days later I can’t stand the suspense anymore. I so badly want to talk to Willow about it, I want to tell her that I do trust her, but she’s not answering the phone. When her dad or her brother pick up I can hear her in the background telling them to say she isn’t home. She doesn’t even bother to whisper it. It’s me who’s having the nightmares now, and I wake up in sweats, slippery as a fish, and it’s Mum who answers me when I call out for Lark in my sleep. My nightmares are stained with purple and I keep dreaming that McGinty is alive, that he’s going to come back to silence me.

It’s the last day of the detox and Mum’s only getting two drinks today. She’s waiting the day out patiently, but I don’t know what she’s going to be like when I set her free, whether she’ll start drinking as soon as a bottle is in reach. The future is filled with imagined terrors, and I try to bat those thoughts away. The present is scary enough, and I need to know whether McGinty is going to come looking for me.

I need to know if he’s alive.

The buses don’t come very often in my town. Every two hours, according to the timetable, but really they come whenever they damned feel like and there’s not much you can do about it. When one finally arrives I pay the driver, and the torn, plastic seat burns my thigh. I read the scrawled graffiti as the rickety thing rattles down the road, jolting to a stop every now and again to pick up somebody, or spit others out. The bus winds down the road that leads to the next town, through farmland, where tall, thin sugarcane stalks sway softly in the breeze, and the road cutting through is like a crooked part in a scalp of thick, green hair. The hospital’s about half an hour away, and when I reach the entrance the air-conditioning blows out in small gusts as the automatic door opens and closes. It’s a small, regional hospital, but it still has that cold, antiseptic feel about it that reminds me of needles. The waiting room is full of bloodied people, sneezing, shivering people, and sad people, bracing themselves for bad news. You can tell those sad people by their hands. If they’re next to somebody, they’ll be holding hands so tightly their knuckles are white, or if they’re by themselves, they’ll be gripping their own hands, just as tightly, as though hands were somehow life rafts. I gulp in some air and I try to swat away my nerves enough to walk up to the counter.

‘I’m here to see about Donald McGinty. He was brought in three days ago,’ I tell the lady behind the desk. She’s middle-aged and bespectacled, with brown hair that’s pulled back and pinned.

‘Are you a relative?’ she asks, without even looking up at me.

‘Umm, no, but the thing is, I found him having a heart attack, or something, and I was just wondering whether –’

My sentence is cut off by a big, booming voice. ‘So you’re the little hero?’

I look up to see a man dressed in scrubs, a doctor. He’s a tree of a man, tall and solid, even though he’d be in his late fifties, with the kind of dark-grey hair that looks like smudged ink. He looks over to the front-desk lady.

‘She’s all right, Julie, she’s the one who saved Don’s life,’ and with that he swoops his bough-like arm around me, and ushers me up the corridor. ‘I’m Dr Morrison by the way. Don’s woken up from a coma, if you want to see him,’ he tells me as we pass other people in scrubs, and frail old people hooked up to drips. ‘He’s awake, and sitting up and talking. The odds of him surviving were only about eight per cent, and the odds of him surviving without brain damage, well . . .’ He stops for a moment and he looks down at me, squarely into my eyes. ‘It’s what we call a miracle. You saved his life.’

I try to look pleased, but the panic is ripping away at my insides. He’s awake. He remembers. He’s going to come back to get me.

Shit.

The doctor keeps walking, and I have to run a little bit to keep up. ‘I’ve respected Don for years, and when Margery came in and we couldn’t save her, that was one of the worst days of my life.’

Dr Morrison tried to save Margery? All I can think of is McGinty’s stubby hands wrapped around the folds of her neck flesh.

‘Are you sure she had a heart attack, and wasn’t, you know, strangled . . .’ I blurt out. Dr Morrison looks surprised at me for a moment, and then bursts out laughing.

‘Is that rumour still doing the rounds amongst the kids? I thought that one had died down years ago. Look, I’m sorry, I forgot to ask for your name?’

I bite my lip.

‘Kirra.’

‘Kirra, kids will always want a monster to whisper about, and when someone looks different on the outside, then it’s easy to think they’re not like everyone else on the inside. Don’s definitely taken advantage of that to scare some troublemakers into being good.’ He chuckles to himself.

‘But Don’s no more of a monster than I am. He’s probably better than me, because he’s had to prove himself from the inside out. Don didn’t strangle Margery, she was running for a bus when it happened, there were plenty of witnesses. Besides which, if she had been strangled there’d be horizontal ligature marks across the neck, at the lower end of the thyroid cartilage, and petechial haemorrhages to the face and conjunctiva, along with the usual signs of asphyxia in the lungs and heart. Margery died as a result of cardiac arrest, and so would have Don, if you hadn’t done what you did.’

Shame flames about my cheeks, and I’m so confused. I can feel the doctor’s gaze piercing me.

‘You did a very brave thing, Kirra, and I’m sure Don would like to thank you himself, if you’d like to see him?’

He gestures through an open door to the room where McGinty sits, surrounded by machines that beep, and metal poles holding up clear bags which look like dangling jellyfish.

‘This here is the mystery girl who performed CPR and called the ambulance,’ announces Dr Morrison. McGinty blinks. I don’t really notice his birthmark anymore; I’m just staring at his eyes, which are soft like the earth, and kind. I pad over to him and he doesn’t say anything, he just looks at me in wonder, and then before I can react he reaches across and pulls me towards him into a hug. He doesn’t let me go. He just hugs me and hugs me and it feels so warm, and he’s holding me so close that I can feel his heartbeat.

I’m so glad that I can feel it thumping.

I’m so glad.

As we’re walking back, Dr Morrison is greeted by a pretty lady with shoulder-length dark hair and the pleasant, direct manner of someone who doesn’t truck with nonsense.

‘Johanna!’ he says. He turns to me. ‘This is my daughter, we’re having coffee today. She’s a journalist at the Daily News.’ He turns to the lady. ‘This is Kirra, she’s the girl I told you about, the one who found Don and performed CPR until the paramedics got to him.’

The woman beams at me and takes out a notepad. ‘Lots of people are talking about the mysterious saviour. Nice to finally meet you, Kirra! I know this might be a bit abrupt, but since I’ve run into you, would you mind if I did a story about you for tomorrow’s paper?’

I want to say no, but her face is so kind, it’s the sort of face you just want to please. I chew on my lip and consider it.

‘Only if you can tell me something – that kid, Josh Hohol, who went missing the other day. Have they found him?’

She beams again. ‘Little ratbag. He turned up yesterday – he’d gone to a music festival that his parents had banned him from going to.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘Some kids, huh?’

Relief washes over me, and I’m not even really listening as Johanna rattles on about McGinty’s miracle recovery. Bit by bit, without looking her in the eye, I tell her what I’d told the paramedics, how I was searching through scrap wood and heard the crash. I know I’m going to get grief about this at school, but school is the last thing on my mind right now.

I’m leaning my head against the window as I catch the bus home. Nothing is making sense anymore. Boogie told me that McGinty had strangled Margery. He showed me. And yet, it couldn’t have been true. There were witnesses who watched Margery die, and if it was murder, then the doctors would have noticed it straight away. It makes me wonder what else he lied to me about. Who is Boogie?