7

ALICE

The road stretched into the vast distance, and there was nobody else on it for a very long time.

It was a good thing, she thought. A lot of cars meant nobody would approach, but one alone would make her nervous, Impreza or not. Of course other people would know about Darwin: at the very least, he would have been found by somebody, there would have been a doctor to declare the time of death and, who knew, maybe someone to conduct an autopsy. Had he been sick? Did he do it to himself?

There was also Choker and Sadie Quentin – who could apparently be trusted – plus her two daughters – an unknown quantity. That was a lot of people to keep a secret, but then, all of them had probably taken home a few thousand dollars to shut the fuck up.

Alice mostly tried not to do a lot of thinking when she drove. It was a time to empty the mind of anything not right in front of you: to feel good about the car you were driving, to feel the gentle undulations of the land underneath the tyres. These country roads were the stretch to focus on letting an old car do her best; they were also a place to watch, undistracted, for potholes – or kangaroos that could bound across your path and end your engine, or your life. Today, though, with Darwin here too, her mind refused to empty. She called Teddy.

Art picked up. ‘She’s in the bathroom,’ he said. ‘How’s your companion going?’

Art didn’t know who Alice was driving, or that Teddy would soon have that information while he didn’t. The two of them trusted Art almost entirely, but he was far too messy to hold on to gossip, let alone a secret as large as Darwin. He was hoping for a clue from Alice, but she would not bend.

‘Good,’ she said, ‘but they’re not much company. Talk to me for a little?’

‘Always,’ Art said. ‘We’re after this missing kid, but not getting far with our interviews. Poor guy doesn’t seem particularly beloved. And nobody’s offering us a drink, can you believe it? We’re at a 7-eleven for the toilet, but Ted even floated getting a coffee from here. It costs a dollar, Alice. I had to tell her not to. These are the hardships of the job nobody ever talks about.’

Alice snorted. ‘What were you going to do last night before Choker put a pin in it with this job?’

‘Go out too late, drink too much, hope I get an Uber driver that won’t mind if I puke out of the window. Try not to text you and Teddy since you were on holiday, which already didn’t work out.’

He’d sent Alice sixteen Instagram reels in the past twenty-four hours and texted her a picture of a pink sprinkle donut he found in the gutter with a crying emoji next to it. ‘I’m sorry you’re missing out on your puking,’ she said.

‘Once I get paid, I can throw up out of a Silvertop Taxi instead, like a real gentleman.’

Alice smiled. ‘Thanks. You’re getting me out of my head a bit. Driving around with a dead body … it’s heavy. And I don’t mean literally, though I also do mean literally – this thing must weigh a ton. It looks like it’s made out of oak.’

‘Oak, huh? What are coffins usually made out of?’

‘Particle board, for a cheaper one, or solid timber for the mid-range. This is the nicest one I’ve ever had the misfortune to drive around.’

‘Huh. Who’s inside?’

‘Can’t say,’ she said, with no guilt.

‘Buzzkill,’ he told her. ‘Also, I miss you. It’s more fun when we all work on something together. When it’s just me and Teddy, she always scolds me about things. When you’re around, you tell her to knock it off. For example, she’s here now and she just heard me say that, and she punched me in the arm. Yes, Teddy, I told on you to Mum, what are you going to do about it?’

Alice laughed. ‘You kids stop acting up when I’m not around. Anyway, I miss you too. This is a hard job alone, but I guess it would be harder if both of you were here, since we wouldn’t all fit. You’d have to bunk with the casket in the back.’

‘Eh, I’ve slept in weirder places,’ he said. ‘Want me to put Teddy on?’

‘Nah, I’m nearly there, and you made me feel better. You go find this missing dude, okay?’

‘Okay, Mum. Love you.’

‘Back at you, sport.’

After Alice hung up, she said to Darwin, ‘I hope you don’t mind. It’s hard not being able to have you talk back. But there’s a place I have to pull over and take you to, soon. We’ll take a few minutes there, have a nice little moment, and see what it was you liked about it.’

Scratchy handwriting on Choker’s map read RANGERS PLACE, LOWES TRACK, FIRST STOP, next to an arrow pointing to the curve in the road ahead. She slowed down and saw a pole almost parallel to the ground, like it had been hit by something, with a worn brown street sign just legible enough to know she had found the right dirt track. She turned off, and within moments was surrounded by thick trees that hid the highway behind her.

There was nothing that looked like a place for rangers for a few precarious kilometres, until the bush thinned out abruptly and she was in the middle of a great empty space. It was flat and grassy on either side of the road, with no cattle or animals in sight. Along the road was a small wooden shack and a gravel bay to pull into, and Alice obliged.

There wasn’t much wind outside. High in the sky a raptor circled in slow, long loops. Surely there was a lot to eat here in all this grass – snakes or rats or bandicoots – but it didn’t descend.

The shack was a single room, with a plaque outside saying it was used in bygone days to store food and as a place to sleep on the way to the next town. Said town had once been the place to be out here, but was now, Alice knew, a petrol station and not much else.

She looked up and down the road; there was nobody on it. She went inside the shack, and saw there was still food there: rows of tins along the wall, soup packets, water bottles, a pan, a stove and matches. Everything looked worn, but not old, and the expiry dates on the food were still months or years away. It was a little dusty, and there were dicks scratched into the wood, but it was mostly clean. In the corner was a blow-up mattress spilling out of a box and a foot pump next to it. Someone had written 7–10 Feb, thanks in pen on the cardboard.

‘Was this you, Darwin?’ she asked, leaning in through the back of the car and tapping her knuckles gently on the wood. ‘Did you leave these here for travellers? Did you clean this up? Or did you stay here?’

He didn’t answer. She took one of the bottles of water from the shelf and sat up on Valkyrie’s bonnet to drink it. In the distance, dust curled up above the trees: someone was coming. Alice lowered a slow hand to her ankle to check her switchblade but didn’t move from the bonnet, and when the car eventually went past – a pockmarked older Hyundai Getz – it didn’t slow down, but the person behind the wheel nodded, and Alice nodded back. She picked up her phone and called Jun.

‘All good?’ he asked.

‘Quiet company,’ she said.

‘That feels somehow mean. They can’t help it.’

‘I’m outside the car,’ she said. ‘They can’t hear me anyway.’

She did a lot of avoiding questions from Jun. He respected her time, and she respected his – his early mornings out surfing, his occasional interstate trips to environmental science conferences for work – and he understood that her hours were irregular and that her subsequently generous paydays were a part of this. He knew she was mostly a chauffeur who sometimes filled other roles – she would say ‘taking notes at a meeting’ when she really meant ‘following a dirty, cheating husband’, and similar – and that she drove and worked with people important enough that everything had to be very secretive; she had a few pictures of her with various captains of industry to prove it. He could never know what she truly did for a living, and he had never even been suspicious. She let him use her phone whenever he asked, because he didn’t know how to find all of her work files anyway. He was a climate scientist, not inclined to suspicion or criminal espionage knowhow. He would, she was sure, leave her if he ever found out who she was, because she would leave him if it was the other way around.

‘What have you been doing today?’ Alice asked.

‘This morning we went bodyboarding, even though it’s cold. Cherry says she’s a very good surfer now. She’s in the hotel bath making waves for the mini shampoo bottle to surf on. Yes, it’s a disaster, but yes, I’ll have it mopped up before you get back, and deny everything.’

‘I’m sorry I’m not there,’ Alice said, not for the first time, not for the last. ‘I love you. It’ll be worth it. We can put it in the house fund.’

‘Alice, you can’t talk dirty like that to me when you’re so far away.’

She grinned. ‘Come stop me.’

Jun smiled; she could hear it in his voice. ‘I wish you were doing something less important so you could ditch it and come back to us.’

‘I do too,’ Alice said, though she thought: No job I have done has felt unimportant enough to say no to. ‘I’ve gotta go. I’ll see you tomorrow night. I love you.’

‘I love you too. Stay safe.’