The police station was yellow. The desks and windowsills were a lime green, but the yellow seemed to bleed over them and everything else. On the table in front of him, Sam had a mug of hot Milo that the officers had made, and even the cup was soaked in yellow, showing up the cracks in the porcelain. Everything looked old: the large grey typewriters that filled the air with clacking, the withered papers on the noticeboards. Even the officer they were sitting with looked years older now than she had driving over with them in the squad car. Her badge said Barnes, but when she introduced herself to the children it turned out her name was Sam too.
Sam had refused to let Katie out of his sight from the moment they had been led from Dettie’s car. He hugged her and shared his water with her while they waited for the police to arrive, shielding her from the sight of Dettie ranting and screaming over at the next fire engine. He’d held her hand throughout the entire ride with the police officers. Across several dozen more kilometres of blackened earth, past signs warning of extreme weather conditions and total fire bans, to a town called Merredin, where a small police station sat in the shadow of the boxy courthouse next door.
Officer Samantha had let Katie and Sam have showers in the locker rooms. When they were both washed up and the nurse they called had helped clean Sam’s stoma with antiseptic and ointment, Samantha gave them each a change of clothes from the station storeroom. Katie’s T-shirt, PCYC written in huge letters across the front, hung down past her knees. Sam’s was an aqua colour and had a drawing of a constable on it. The cartoon cop had a huge grin and sunglasses, and he was pointing out from Sam’s chest, saying, Cops are cool. It looked like the officer who was over at the front desk speaking on the telephone, the one whose Adam’s apple kept bobbing above his collar.
On a table beneath the window, the clothes Sam had been wearing for the past few days were packaged into piles. He could see his Australia singlet folded up inside a plastic bag that said Evidence. In another bag beside it was his old shirt, the one he’d thrown up on—the one Dettie had been washing when she cut herself on the sink and bled. The pale brown stain left in its fabric was exposed, and glowed almost purple under the fluorescent lights. Katie’s clothes were folded beneath the window too; even though they were sealed up with tape he could still smell the petrol.
Sam reached for his Milo and took a slow sip. His hands still trembled, and as he set the mug back down he could see long red marks on his arm from Dettie’s fingernails. The hollow sensation was still in his belly, and the warmth of the Milo didn’t reach it. It reminded him of the moment before a roller-coaster first tips downhill. He was burping like he needed to throw up and his skin was clammy. It felt strange to be in the one place for so long, not moving. It sent a relentless tingle through his muscles—as though after driving for so long he now had motion sickness from keeping still. He almost missed the rumble of the car beneath him. To be sitting in a crowded yellow office where nothing on the desks rattled, and no trees flashed by, seemed unnatural. He tightened his fingers on the two paddle-pop sticks he’d managed to grab from the car. The others were probably still scattered on the dashboard, but he could press the two of them together and recall the shape of the boomerang.
Officer Samantha opened a packet of biscuits and cleared a space on her desk for them. Katie grabbed two and dunked them in her drink.
‘Do you guys know what’s happening now?’ Officer Samantha asked, leaning forward in her chair, her elbows on her knees.
Katie was tapping her heels together. ‘I want to talk to Mummy,’ she said with her mouth full.
‘Of course, sweetie. We’re doing that. We’re trying to get her on the phone now. See that officer over there?’ Samantha pointed at the man at the front desk, the one who looked like the picture on Sam’s T-shirt. ‘Soon as we get in touch with her, you’ll be the first to hear about it. So don’t you worry about that. But that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about your Aunty Bernadette. Do you know what’s happening to her?’
Katie shook her head. Sam shrugged. He had watched two officers lead Dettie into the second squad car back on the road. She was still shouting things at them that Sam couldn’t hear, and they seemed to be listening to her and nodding their heads. One of them was even writing things down. But since they’d arrived at the station they had kept her in another room, somewhere out the back.
‘All right, guys,’ Samantha said, ‘well, it’s like this.’ She dragged her chair closer and the wheels squeaked. ‘Maybe you realised, or maybe you didn’t, but your Aunty Bernadette isn’t very well.’ She tapped her fingertips on the table. ‘Your mother explained all of this to the police in Sydney. She said that your aunty needs to take medicine because sometimes she gets very sad.’
Katie was nodding.
‘Now, she’s done that for a long time,’ Samantha said. ‘But your mother says—and we all think she’s right—that it’s likely your aunty hasn’t been taking her medicine for a while. That maybe that’s why she decided to take you guys on a trip without telling anyone. Even your mum.’
‘I knew it,’ Katie said. ‘I knew she didn’t tell Mummy.’
‘That’s right,’ Samantha said, touching Katie lightly on the knee. Sam felt himself tense, but Katie was fine. ‘Your mum came home and you guys weren’t there,’ Samantha said. ‘There wasn’t even a note or anything. So for a long time she didn’t know what had happened. She was very worried. She contacted her local police. They let all of us other police officers know, and we’ve been looking for you ever since.’
Katie was breathing heavily. ‘Does Mummy know now?’
‘She will soon. If she doesn’t already, I promise, she will very soon. So don’t let that concern you. She knows you were with your aunty. She knows that you guys were heading this way.’
Officer Samantha told them about how Dettie had phoned their father; about how she had called to tell him she was bringing his children to live in Perth. Their father had told her she was being silly, Samantha said, and once he’d hung up, he called their mother to let her know where they were. While Samantha spoke, Sam remembered Dettie’s face as she hissed into the phone near the railway station, her shoulders knotted and her finger jabbing at the air. He’d been so scared then that she might look over and see him. She’d seemed large and forceful, ready to snatch their whole trip away in an instant; but looking back now it was all so feeble. A scared old woman pleading into the phone because she had nowhere else to go.
‘Because of that call your mother knew that you guys weren’t hurt. And I know she’s going to be very, very happy to hear that you’re safe with us now.’ Samantha smiled. ‘So we’re going to make sure we take good care of you until she gets here, all right?’
Suddenly, Sam sat up and gestured for a pen. When she realised what he wanted, Samantha took a biro from her top drawer and gave him the back of an incident report. ‘Is that good?’ she asked.
He nodded. The pen was dry and he had to scratch it angrily on the corner of the page before the ink started again.
What happened to Jon? he wrote, the nib digging into the page.
Samantha looked confused.
‘Jon?’
He travelled with us. Hitchhiker.
‘Where’s Jon?’ Katie perked up. ‘Is Jon here?’
It took a few minutes—Sam writing; Katie excitedly filling in the gaps—but eventually Samantha got the idea. They had picked up Jon along the way and he’d gone missing the previous night. Sam was unable to tell her exactly where they’d last seen him, but he knew it was after Caiguna, somewhere near the Dundas Nature Reserve. To Sam’s surprise she didn’t seem as concerned as he would have expected, but she promised to have the officers interviewing Dettie ask what had happened and let them know.
‘Is Daddy coming home?’ Katie asked.
Samantha puffed out her cheeks. ‘Oh, that I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t think that he’s—’ She leaned over the desk towards them. ‘You know what? How about if I get someone to check that, okay?’
Katie’s expression collapsed into a heavy frown.
Sam was clutching the pen so tightly his fingertips were white. Their father was a waste of time. He wanted to keep talking about Jon, but Katie’s eyes were filled with tears. Samantha smiled tightly.
‘But until we hear back from your mum, why don’t we start to talk about what happened on your trip, hey? Can we do that?’ She lifted out another pad of incident reports, and scratched around in her drawer until she located a short, chewed pencil. ‘So what happened, guys? What happened with your aunty? From the beginning.’
The children sat picking at their clean police T-shirts. Katie put her hands around her Milo mug, but didn’t pick it up. Sam wondered how to start, drawing a circle around Jon’s name with his pen.
‘She was angry,’ Katie said.
Samantha nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, she was. She is. But she’s not angry with you, sweetie. At the moment she’s just a very upset lady. Very confused. And we can try to help her by being very honest about everything that happened, okay?’ She wrote the date and time up in a corner of the notepad. ‘So your mummy went to work that morning, and then what?’
Slowly, Katie started to answer the questions Samantha was asking about the trip, and Sam, writing on his pages, would clarify details. About where they’d travelled, as best they could remember; how long Dettie would drive before stopping. Samantha asked whether Dettie had yelled a lot, and why Katie’s clothes smelt like petrol. A couple of times she asked whether they had seen Dettie taking any pills, even if they were just vitamins, and whether she’d ever gotten lost or confused on the roads. Mostly Katie just answered yes or no, and Samantha would nod, scribbling down whole sentences on her pad while shielding the words with her hand. Sam’s recollections were more specific, and he tried as best he could to offer the names of every town he could recall and roughly when they were there.
When she’d finished, Samantha stood up to go and type her notes. Sam grabbed her shirt as she moved to leave. He pointed at what he had written, slapping his pen on a single word, circled several times:
Jon?