The Lost Man

by Jane Harper

  Liz took a deep breath. “Tell me.”

  “Maybe we should go inside—” Harry started, but she cut him off.

  “No. The girls are inside. Tell me here.”

  Nathan found himself once again wishing that Cameron were there. He would handle this properly. Bub, who was crouched down whispering to his dog, offered no help.

  “It was quite strange,” Nathan started, then stopped. He tried again, doing his best to explain as Liz began to pace up and down the veranda. She only went a short way, as though torn between wanting to hear and being unable to bear it. “We’re not sure,” he found himself repeating. “I don’t know.”

  “His car worked,” Bub interjected at one point, sending Liz shuffling to the far end of the floorboards. “We tried it.”

  “Not bogged?” Harry said, looking from one brother to the other. “No flats?”

  They shook their heads.

  “Any idea what Cam was doing out there?” Nathan asked.

  “Didn’t mention any work in that area,” Harry said. “He wrote in the book that he was going to Lehmann’s Hill.”

  “Bub said he seemed a bit stressed lately,” Nathan said.

  He saw Harry glance at Liz and wondered if he was reluctant to talk in front of their mum. Harry nodded. “I reckon that’s fair to say, yeah.”

  “How bad was it?”

  “Hard to tell.” Harry’s face moved a fraction. It was still impossible to read. “He hadn’t been himself for a few weeks, looking back. Maybe a month, would you say?” He looked to Liz, who gave a tight nod, staring past the lush garden to the barren brown land beyond.

  “It didn’t seem like anything too serious, though,” Harry went on. “Obviously. Or we would have done something.”

  “What do you mean by not himself?” Nathan said.

  “Didn’t have his eye on the ball around here as much as usual, but nothing we couldn’t handle. He said he was tired a few times. I got the idea he maybe hadn’t been sleeping that well.”

  “He hadn’t,” Liz said quietly. “I heard him sometimes in the night.”

  “And he was touchy,” Harry said. “Sometimes looked a bit rough around the edges.”

  No, that definitely didn’t sound like Cameron, Nathan thought.

  “Had something happened?” he asked. “You been having any problems here?”

  Harry shook his head. “Property’s been good. Going well. We’ve had a strong year.”

  “Great. Good to hear,” said Nathan, whose own bottom line had once again been written in red rather than black. The children’s decorations shimmered in the wind, and he thought of his nieces. “Do Sophie and Lo know yet?”

  “Ilse’s in there telling them now,” Harry said, and Nathan automatically glanced toward the door. It was empty. He missed what Harry was saying. “Sorry?”

  “Glenn called.”

  “Oh.” The regular sergeant. “He’s back in town, is he?”

  “Not yet, he wants someone to meet him at Cam’s car tomorrow.”

  Nathan could feel Cameron’s keys in his pocket. “I’ll go.”

  “I already told him I would,” Harry said.

  “Still, I’ll come with you.”

  “Me, too,” said Xander and Bub, almost in unison.

  Liz, who had been staring at nothing, dragged her eyes back and frowned. “Bub, take Xander inside and show him where he’s sleeping.”

  “He knows. Same as always,” Bub said.

  She closed her eyes and took a breath. “Take him anyway.” When the screen door slammed behind them, she turned to Nathan. “How’s Xander coping?”

  “Okay, considering.”

  “How long have you got him for?”

  “He’s getting the plane on the twenty-seventh.”

  “Oh.” She looked disappointed. “He can’t get the next week’s flight? I thought it was your turn for New Year?”

  “It is, but no.” Xander would be leaving a week before the court-ordered date. Nathan could have insisted. It was his legal right, secured and well and truly paid for, but he hadn’t. “He wants to go to a party in Brisbane with his mates.”

  “How long until he’s back again?”

  “I don’t know.” Nathan tried to keep his voice light, but could feel Liz watching him. “He’s got some big exams starting this year.”

  Two years of revision schedules and standardized testing and university entrance marks lay ahead, Nathan had been warned, via his ex-wife’s lawyer. Xander would need focus and stability for these two years. He needed time at home to study. Could Nathan please acknowledge that he understood that?

  In fact, Nathan could understand that. He could also understand that in less than two years’ time, his son would be eighteen years old. Court-ordered visitations would be among the many relics of Xander’s childhood left behind at that juncture.

  The Christmas carols had stopped, Nathan realized, and in the vacuum, he could hear a child crying. He wished the music would start again. Liz turned toward the sound and, without a word, walked to the door and disappeared inside.

  Nathan and Harry were alone on the veranda. In the west, the sun was a burning yellow blaze as it crept lower.

  “Between us,” Nathan said. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

  “I’ve seen tourists do some bloody stupid things,” Harry said. “But I knew Cam hadn’t just broken down, soon as I heard. If that had happened, he’d still be in that car with the air con on, complaining all about it on the radio. Everyone knows that. When Ilse broke down earlier this year, she did the right thing. Sat tight in her car on the north road for four hours until Cam could get to her.”

  “That’s what I told the St. Helens cop,” Nathan said.

  “What does he reckon?”

  “He doesn’t know anything. He wasn’t even trained there.”

  “But he thinks Cam walked away on purpose?”

  “I think so,” Nathan said. “You saw Cam most recently, though. You tell me.”

  “I can tell you there are easier ways to do it. But—” A long pause. “People have done some strange things around here over the years.”

  “You’d just shoot yourself, wouldn’t you?”

  Harry’s eyes flicked over. “Would you?”

  “Well, I would.” Nathan had meant to sound factual, but it came out wrong. Too definitive. It implied that a level of thought had gone into it. Harry was still looking at him, closely now, and neither spoke again for a while. The crying inside the house had stopped, audibly, at least. The Christmas carols had not restarted, though. No tidings of comfort and joy here.

  “What do you think was worrying Cam?” Nathan said eventually.

  “I don’t know. Like I said, we’ve had a good season. If it was something work-related, it’s news to me.” Harry leaned heavily against the railing. “I suppose he turned forty this year.”

  “Did that bother him?”

  “He never mentioned it, but it’s a milestone, isn’t it? Bothers some people.”

  Nathan tried to think back to his own milestone birthday two years earlier. Other than a card from Xander and a phone call from Liz, it had passed as a completely unremarkable day.

  Above him, the decorations fluttered, shedding dust to the wind.

  “Kerry McGrath killed himself around Christmas,” Harry said.

  “I suppose.”

  Although that was different, Nathan thought. Kerry had swallowed every pill in his Flying Doctor supply box after his wife left him. He’d opened the compartments you weren’t supposed to open without explicit instructions from the doc on the other end of the phone, and he’d taken everything from paracetamol to morphine in one go. It had been neither quick nor painless, apparently. At least, that was what Steve Fitzgerald at the clinic had told everyone, probably as a deterrent as much as anything, Nathan suspected. He remembered hearing about Kerry. Nathan’s own box was now at the back of a high cupboard, out of sight.

  He cleared his throat
. “There was Bryan Taylor. He wandered off.”

  Harry made a noise. “He wandered from the pub to his car and drowned drunk in the river. Speaking of, you all set for supplies down at your place?”

  “Yeah. Mostly.”

  “Well, make sure you are. I reckon the water’s coming.”

  “Again?”

  “I think so. There’ll be rain up north, I reckon.”

  Nathan nodded. When Harry made a prediction, it was worth paying attention.

  “There was also your dad,” Harry said out of nowhere, and Nathan looked over in surprise. “That was around this time of year.”

  “February. And he didn’t kill himself.”

  “I know.” Harry was thoughtful. “Just wondered if something might have been going through Cameron’s head. Out there on his own. Maybe it triggered something.”

  “Dad wasn’t on his own when he died.”

  “No. I know that, I meant—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Sometimes people do strange things.”

  They were cut off by the squeal of the screen door. Xander looked out. “Grandma says dinner’s ready.”

  “Thanks, mate,” Harry said as Xander disappeared back inside. “You coming?”

  “In a sec. You go.”

  Nathan waited until he heard the door slam and he was alone. He walked down the wooden steps and across the springy green lawn, a tangy citrus scent coming from the trees. From the direction of the big shed, he could hear the hum of the generator, turning itself over to keep the property lights burning. He reached the fence designed to keep curious cattle off the lush lawn, and without quite knowing why, climbed over it and stood on the other side.

  Nathan looked out. The sun seemed to be dropping fast in the west. In another hour, the horizon would disappear into something even more endless. He heard a distant wistful howl. It was early in the evening for dingoes, but there was nothing else it could be. Nathan took a couple of steps through the dust, away from the fence and the house and its cultivated greenery. He stared out. It was vast, like looking down from the edge of a cliff, and he felt a rare hint of vertigo.

  At night, when the sky felt even bigger, he could almost imagine it was a million years ago and he was walking on the bottom of the sea. A million years ago when a million natural events still needed to occur, one after the other, to form this land as it lay in front of him now. A place where rivers flooded without rain and seashells fossilized a thousand miles from water and men who left their cars found themselves walking to their deaths.

  Sometimes, the space almost seemed to call to Nathan. Like a faint heartbeat, insistent and persuasive. He listened now, and took an experimental step, then another. Behind him, he heard the squeal of the screen door. Xander calling out.

  “Dad?”

  Nathan stopped walking. He raised a hand, then turned toward the sound of his son’s voice and slowly made his way back to the house.

  6

  The exhaustion didn’t hit Nathan properly until he was back inside. Xander had gone ahead into the kitchen, and Nathan lingered in the dim hallway, feeling hollow. He was used to starting his days in the early-morning dark, but the last few hours had drained him. There was a jolt at his elbow as Bub pushed past and disappeared into the kitchen. Bub looked just as tired.

  Cameron’s dog, Duffy, wandered up to him, still looking forlorn. She had come from the same litter as Nathan’s own dog, Kelly, and now nuzzled his leg in the same way that Kelly once had. Nathan crouched down to Duffy and was immediately reminded of that bad morning last year. He’d woken up and known straight away that something was wrong. He’d eventually found Kelly hiding in one of the sheds, her eyes rolling around in her head, whining in pain. Nathan, who spent more time with that dog than any other living thing, had taken her in his arms and carried her to the house. She had died on the way. She’d been baited, Nathan had told Glenn when he’d calmed down enough to call the police station. His voice had cracked, and he hadn’t cared. Someone had come out to Nathan’s place and poisoned her.

  To the sergeant’s credit, he’d driven out to Nathan’s property and helped him look for signs. They’d found nothing. It must have been targeted, Nathan had insisted. “I know what a baited dog looks like. Someone got her on purpose.”

  Glenn had been sympathetic but skeptical. “I’ve had no other reports. And it’s a fair way for someone to come to do that.”

  “You don’t think they would? To get at me?”

  Glenn had put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m not saying they wouldn’t, mate. I’m just not sure if they actually did.”

  Nathan paused now in the dim hallway, one hand on Duffy’s head, as he heard a whisper coming from around the corner.

  “… but they’ll have to come…”

  A woman. He didn’t recognize the voice.

  “No, I don’t think so. I’m telling you, it’s not that kind of place. He was on the phone asking if anyone was coming here—” A man this time, also whispering.

  “Here to the house?”

  “Yeah, but I think the cop was saying no—”

  The voices stopped abruptly as their owners rounded the corner and saw Nathan standing there in the hall. The man’s jaw was still open with a half-formed word unspoken. He appeared to be in his late twenties, as was the woman next to him. And, judging by their accents, they were English. Nathan felt fractious. That was all he bloody needed. A pair of Pommy backpackers.

  “God, you gave me a fright.” The man recovered first. “You must be Nathan.”

  “Yeah. Who were you talking about?”

  “Who?”

  “The person you heard on the phone. Talking to the police.”

  “Oh.” The man hesitated, glancing past Nathan to the empty kitchen door. “It was Harry. Sorry. I wasn’t listening, I just … heard.”

  “Right.” It was hard to see the pair properly in the low light. “Who did you say you were again?”

  “Simon and Katy.” The man pointed as he said their names, as though Nathan might need help working out who was who. “We’re no one.”

  “You must be someone if you’re hanging around my dead brother’s hallway listening in on phone calls.” It was unnecessary and Nathan knew it. He just couldn’t help it.

  The woman found her voice. “Cameron hired us.”

  “Yeah, Bub said. To do what?”

  “Help your mum around the house, for one thing,” she said, nodding toward the kitchen. “So, if it’s all right with you…?”

  She’d stepped around Nathan before he could answer, and he found himself trailing them into the kitchen. Harry and Bub were already seated at the large wooden table. Nathan pulled up a chair next to Xander and looked across at the English bloke—Simon, was it? He had pale eyes and a very straight nose and thick dark hair that shone in a way that seemed strangely unnatural. Nathan would have had trouble tearing his eyes away from it, if it hadn’t been for the girl.

  Katy was—and Nathan could think of no other word—a stunner. In the brightly lit kitchen, he could see how her skin and hair shone, and her T-shirt clung to her in all the right ways. As she smiled at something, a hint of a dimple appeared. She brushed behind Nathan, and he had the overwhelming urge to reach out and take her hand. He frowned and put his palms on the table.

  Bub was watching with a look of slavish devotion as Katy moved from bench top to table, carrying plates of beef and rice. Even Xander was introducing himself with an enthusiasm Nathan hadn’t seen before and a glaze in his eyes that made him look a little like Bub. Only Harry seemed unmoved, his stony expression unaltered. Katy bent over to get something from a low drawer, and Nathan wondered what Cameron’s wife made of her.

  “We’re not waiting for Ilse?” he asked Liz, who was hovering in front of the open fridge door as though unable to remember why she was there.

  “She’s still with the girls,” Harry answered instead. “She said to start.”

  “Oh.”

&nb
sp; Katy set the final plate down. “One for you, Bob.”

  “Thank you, Katy.”

  “It’s Bub,” Nathan said automatically.

  “Sorry?”

  “Just—” He could feel Bub glaring at him. “With your accent, it sounds like you’re saying Bob.”

  “I am.”

  “It’s Bub. ’Cause he’s the baby.”

  “Oh.” Katy’s brow creased. She looked at Bub, who was shoveling food into his thirty-year-old mouth. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Bub, with feeling.

  “That’s so embarrassing.” Katy gave an awkward laugh. “I’ve been calling you the wrong name this whole time.”

  “Well, his real name’s Lee,” Liz said with a sigh. She had finally shut the fridge and sat down. “So you’re not the only one.”

  Bub gave Katy a smile that made her glance away, then turned to Harry. “What did Glenn have to say about meeting tomorrow?”

  Harry’s eyes flicked toward Liz. “Not now, mate.”

  “I’m only asking.”

  Bub had changed his clothes, Nathan realized. He looked down at himself and across at Xander. The red dust from the death site had crept into the creases of their shirts, and the color suddenly made his skin crawl. He rubbed at another red patch on his jeans. It made his hands feel gritty.

  “I’ll put the washing machine on later,” Liz said quietly, and Nathan realized she was looking at the dust as well.

  “Thanks.”

  No one spoke and, for a while, the only sound was cutlery against plates. After a few minutes, Xander turned to the backpackers, as Nathan had known he would. The kid lived in a city. He couldn’t cope with quiet like the rest of them.

  “How long have you been out here traveling?” Xander asked Simon, who also seemed relieved to have the silence broken.

  “Nearly a year.”

  “You’re not heading home for Christmas?”

  “No plans—” Simon started, as at the same time Katy said: “It’s too expensive.” Their eyes met, and something passed between them that Nathan couldn’t read.