Five horses stood patiently side by side on still rockers in Eddie’s workshop, their plaited tails gathering daddy-long-legs. Two hadn’t sold at Calliope, and three more had grown since Christmas, but the winter market was coming up in Theodore. Two markets were enough, Eddie said. It took such a long time to make them, and he couldn’t transport more than half-a-dozen without damage. Not everyone who looked would buy. Not everyone had space enough in their car, or money enough in their pockets.

Theodore was seven hours south-west of Carney County, so Eddie would spend the night before the market in a motel. Rosemary wasn’t going with him this time. ‘I have to work,’ she said, but she said it carefully, and I wondered.

‘Take a couple of days off,’ Lily told her. ‘Let the gossip die down.’ As if forty-eight hours would make a difference. A mountain out of a molehill, Lily called it. ‘It’ll blow over as fast as they’ve blown it up.’ And we all swept the dust that floured our steps and chairs in the silence that the newspeople’s helicopters had left.

People had begun to talk.

Eddie wasn’t sleeping well, Rosemary told us. ‘It’ll do him good to get away,’ she said, and we nodded, but he didn’t get away.

Word travels. Maybe someone at the factory had a brother with the police, or perhaps the man who made the saddles for Eddie’s horses was a cousin of the Elses. Maybe Catherine asked after Rosemary, and I mentioned the market in Theodore. However it came to happen, three days before Eddie was due to leave, Sergeant Scanlan drove out to Magpie Beach and told him they’d rather he not go so far from town. ‘Not just now.’

‘He said it wouldn’t look so good—my “running off”,’ Eddie told Rosemary.

‘He said, under the circumstances, it might look suspicious,’ Rosemary told Lily and me the next morning as we stood in the short line for our tickets at the Galaxy. Her fingers were bitten down to bleeding and she looked tired. Lost-in-the-middle-of-the-night tired.

Lily sucked her teeth, pinched her crucifix and ran it backwards and forwards on its chain, the way she did when things weren’t going fast enough or quite the way she wanted them to go. It was the only necklace she was never without, while other pendants came and went. She was wearing the name: Helen in fine golden curls. ‘Who’s Helen?’ Rosemary had asked her once, but Lily had shaken her head. ‘Never you mind,’ she’d said, and that was that. Another life, another time.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Lily grumbled now, but Rosemary just shrugged.

She didn’t mention it again until we were settled in the Pink Fig.

‘You were right,’ she said then. ‘About me taking a couple of days off.’

Our cheesecakes had come with a bowl of berries on the side, and Lily was distributing them fairly with a cake fork and a teaspoon she’d wiped clean with a tissue. There were five blueberries now on each plate and one left over. I expected Lily to eat it, but instead she rolled it up and out of its little bowl and all the way to the edge of the table, where she flicked it away.

I watched it land, against all odds, in the open bag of a mother too distracted by her toddler to have noticed. She’d find the mess of it much later and perhaps not even wonder how it got there. Lily wasn’t wondering where it went.

‘Out of sight, out of mind,’ my father used to say. Laundry kicked under a bed. Bills stuffed in drawers. A wife left home alone.

‘Where are you thinking of going?’ Lily was asking Rosemary, as if there were a slew of choices.

‘I’m going to take the horses to the winter market,’ she told us. ‘And I thought the two of you might like to come with me.’