The Lost Man

by Jane Harper

  The only sound was the kitchen clock ticking. Both the backpackers were staring at Nathan.

  “Bullshit,” Simon whispered.

  “Yeah, of course,” Nathan said. “It’s only a bloody story.”

  “Still. That’s quite weird. Him vanishing then appearing like that, miles away.”

  “Yeah. Well, don’t lose any sleep, it’s not true—” Nathan started to say, but his words were lost as Ilse stood up suddenly, her chair scraping against the floor. She opened her mouth as if to say something, then snapped it shut, turned, and walked out of the room.

  There was a silence.

  Bub’s chair creaked as he leaned back, shaking his head. “Good one, Nathan.”

  8

  Dinner was well and truly over after that. Simon got up to help Katy, the pair muttering to each other as the family dispersed. Nathan saw Simon whisper something to Katy, and they both looked at him, then away.

  “Your mum’s put Xander in your old room again, so I suppose it’s up to you where you want to sleep,” Harry said to Nathan as he got up to leave. “The staff block’s empty, but the air con’s broken in there.”

  The staff accommodation would be like being locked in a tin can. “I’ll take the couch.” Nathan peered into the fridge in search of a beer.

  “There’re some in the coolroom if they’re not in there,” Harry said.

  “Shit.” Nathan stood up and shut the fridge.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I just remembered something.”

  Nathan’s own coolroom had been on the blink for a while, and after several weeks of waiting, the repair contractor was in the area. He’d been due, finally, at Nathan’s place that day, Nathan remembered now as he pulled open the heavy door to the large family coolroom built off the kitchen. The contractor would have let himself in, no problem with that, but Nathan had expected to be there. He’d try to call him.

  There was no problem with this coolroom at least, he thought as he walked in, goose bumps immediately rising on his skin. He stood for a minute among the industrial quantities of frozen food, enjoying the temperature, before extracting a beer from a tower of boxes.

  Back in the kitchen, he poked his head into the storeroom next door. It was well stocked, he was relieved to see. Not that he’d expected anything less, but if Cameron had been distracted, supplies weren’t something you wanted to let slide. Much like Nathan’s own storeroom at home, it was like walking into a corner store. The shelves groaned with months’ worth of rice and pasta and cans. Lists were pinned to the wall, keeping track of how many of each item were in stock. Everything was in double figures.

  Nathan looked around and sipped his beer. He’d need to double check his own stores were in shape if Harry was right about the flood. He should be all right, though. Like every other household in the region, Nathan placed his regular supermarket order in the nearest city, and every six weeks, a huge refrigerated truck trundled the thousand-kilometer road north from Adelaide with the whole town’s orders. Plan ahead, or pay the price. Nathan knew what he would be eating for every meal for the next six months. He always had enough to get through the floods, especially with it just being him, but if he was going to be trapped, he wanted to be prepared.

  He closed the storeroom door behind him and, out in the hall, he picked up the landline and called the coolroom contractor. Cameron’s wallet was sitting on the hall table next to the phone, as he’d expected. He picked it up as the call went to voicemail and flicked through it while he left a message. A couple of credit cards, some cash. One or two faded receipts from the service station in town. Nathan pulled out the driver’s license and looked at his brother’s photo. Cameron was not smiling, which made him look a little unusual, and had instead assumed a dutifully neutral look. He still had a hint of humor around the eyes, though, and Nathan could imagine he’d just finished sharing a laugh with the photographer. Nathan snapped the wallet shut.

  He picked up his beer and wandered through to the lounge. With the nearest furniture shop hours away, the house barely changed from decade to decade. The couch was the same one they’d had since he was a kid, and he’d slept on it many times before. It wasn’t bad. He saw that Liz had left some clean clothes folded for him and picked them up. They had to be Cameron’s, he knew. Practicality always won out over sentimentality, but it still felt strange to be holding his dead brother’s shirt and jeans.

  A plastic Christmas tree stood in the corner of the living room, its lights twinkling. There were already a few presents underneath. Nearby, in the center of the wall and displayed in a heavy frame that Nathan knew had been expensive, hung Cameron’s prize-winning painting of the stockman’s grave.

  It had been a while since Nathan had last seen it and he leaned in to take a closer look. The image caught the grave at sunrise—viewers sometimes mistook it for sunset, but Nathan knew from the position that it was morning—with beams of light refracting out from the horizon. Cameron had paid a lot of attention to the way the light played through the sky, with tiny brushstrokes and a rich palette of color that captured the detail.

  The grave itself was almost an afterthought by comparison. Its dark tones loomed in the bottom half of the painting, and its shape was implied rather than explicit. Even Nathan, who knew exactly bugger-all about art, thought he could see why it was so popular. When it had won its prize, he’d read a couple of discussions and critiques online where people had attached all sorts of meaning to it. Light vanquishing darkness, and vice versa. Loneliness, grief, rebirth. Someone had said they could see the hint of the stockman standing in the muddy grays where the light met the dark.

  Personally, Nathan had never liked the picture all that much. It was a pretty good painting, he could admit, but it didn’t capture the landscape for him. The contrast between the dark and the light seemed a bit heavy-handed. Whenever he was out there, especially alone, it always felt much more fluid.

  Nathan flopped down on the couch and looked again at the pile of his brother’s clothes. They were almost exactly the same as his own—not surprising, given that everyone he knew shopped at the same place—but were a size or two smaller. Nathan and Cameron had been the same height since they were seventeen, but his brother was—had been—lean and athletic where Nathan was more broad and solid.

  When Nathan had found himself alone—not the first time when Jacqui had left, but the second time, the real time—he had passed long hours working out feverishly with a dented old weights set in one of his sheds. After a while, it had dawned on him that no one ever saw what he looked like, let alone cared. Overnight, he had stopped lifting weights and spent the hours instead lying on his couch drinking beer. But it was hard enough to get up every morning in the dark even without a hangover, and the physical work around the property demanded a certain level of strength and fitness, so he’d had to rein that in too. He’d put down the beer and picked up the weights on and off, and had managed to land somewhere in the middle. But he’d never quite got back to what he was.

  Nathan looked down at his own shirt, still red with dust, as a shadow passed by the window. Ilse. She was silhouetted in the twilight, reaching up to unpeg bedsheets from the washing line. They billowed and snapped around her in the wind as though someone was running through them. Nathan watched a moment more, then dropped his brother’s shirt back on the couch and went outside to talk to his brother’s wife.

  * * *

  Ilse’s eyes went to the red dust on his clothes straightaway. It seemed more obvious somehow, out there in the open air, than it had been in the kitchen. Nathan could see her considering its origin as her hand stilled on a peg.

  “They’re going in the wash.”

  She didn’t say anything, just turned back to the sheets.

  “Listen, Ilse, sorry about that stupid stockman story at dinner. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  She pushed a sheet aside to look at him. “I’m not upset because of the story, Nathan.”

  “No. I sup
pose not.”

  She stretched up to grab a pillowcase. They belonged to the girls, judging by the pattern.

  “Leave them,” Nathan said. “You don’t have to do that now.”

  “I do. They’re Lo’s. They’ve been out since yesterday.”

  “It’s already too late, then.” The bed linen would have been dry five minutes after it was put out. The cotton was now covered in two days’ worth of grit. “They’ll have to get washed again anyway. Leave it for now.”

  “No.”

  “Then let me give you a hand.”

  Ilse opened her mouth as though to protest, then gave a defeated shrug. “Thanks.” She twisted a peg in her fingers. “Nathan, what do you think happened to Cam?”

  He pulled a sheet off the line and didn’t reply straight away.

  “Did he get separated from his car by accident?” She stared hard at the peg in her hands. “Or did it look like he meant it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you were out there. What did you see?”

  “There was a cop from St. Helens, he could talk through everything—”

  “I know that.” She stopped him. “I’m asking you. Please.”

  He sighed. The sheets rustled around them as he told her what he could tell her, seeing the small crease deepen between her eyes. She listened mostly without speaking, her eyes damp and her mouth tight. She interrupted only twice, first when he told her about the shallow hole at the base of the headstone, and again when he mentioned the water and supplies abandoned in the back of Cameron’s four-wheel drive. She made him explain that again. It made no more sense the second time.

  He watched Ilse as he spoke. It had been ten years, but sometimes, in the right light, she still looked like the girl he had met behind the bar that first night. He’d been different too, then, back when he was a semi-regular at the town’s lone pub. Making the long drive a bit too often, if he was honest, when the sting of his divorce had still been pretty raw.

  His wife—ex-wife, the paperwork had finally come through—had driven away down the Balamara Track a year earlier with five-year-old Xander in tow and without a backward glance. Without much intention of sticking to the child access arrangement they’d managed to agree on either, as it had turned out.

  Nathan had promised Xander that he would call him in Brisbane every day, but the line rang out too many times to be a coincidence. When he did get through, Xander was called away before they’d had a proper chance to talk, leaving Nathan listening to the dial tone. Jacqui had been impossible to pin down on the dates of a promised visit. Nathan had made himself give her long enough to settle into her new life, and then even a bit longer, but he had walked into the Balamara pub that particular night having transferred an eye-watering sum to retain a family lawyer.

  The distance from his son made him feel sad, and the lawyer’s fee had made him feel poor, and Nathan had turned up that night not expecting that to change. There was only so much benefit a man could realistically get from nursing a beer in an empty pub.

  Ilse had been there.

  She was the only one behind the bar, and he was the only one in front of it, so she’d served him with a smile, and he had introduced himself. She sat across from him as they chatted. She had been working in the pub for exactly three weeks and one day, she told him, having arrived in town with her backpack exactly three weeks and two days earlier. She was Dutch, originally, but had been studying environmental science in Canada, and she leaned across the bar as she taught him how to pronounce her name in a soft melodic accent.

  “Eel-sa,” he’d tried, and she’d smiled.

  “Close enough.”

  He’d kept trying until he got it right.

  Her parents were divorced, and her mum had died a year earlier from breast cancer—she had stopped talking and looked down at the bar for a very long time, and, eventually, Nathan had tentatively reached out and put a hand on her arm. She had smiled then, and he’d felt something dislodge inside him. Anyway, she had said, still smiling, that had given her the motivation to finally go traveling. Have an adventure and see the world a bit.

  “What do you think of the outback?” he had asked, and she’d laughed.

  “It’s cool. It’s like the edge of the earth.”

  He bought them both a drink, and they’d sat together in the empty bar as he’d filled her in on the local gossip. He’d had his acoustic guitar in his car and—he cringed at this later—he’d fetched it and played for her. But they had laughed as he played Australian songs she’d never come across, and she called out requests for Dutch songs he’d never heard of.

  “So what else do people do for fun around here?” she’d asked eventually, in a way that reminded him a bit of how Jacqui had used to speak to him. Back in the early days, when things were still good.

  “Apart from come here?” Nathan had said. “Let me think. Sometimes people enjoy punching on.” She’d rolled her eyes. “It’s true, don’t underestimate it. A couple of cousins from Atherton brawled in the street for four hours last year. People brought chairs out and watched.”

  “Four hours?” She had laughed. “If that’s true, and I don’t believe it is, by the way, they’re either really good at fighting or really bad at it.”

  He had grinned back. There were other things that people sometimes did for fun out there. Like drive up on the sand dunes to watch the sun set over the desert with a bottle of wine. That could be a lot of fun with the right person.

  He had looked at her and been pretty sure from the slight tilt of her head and the smile on her lips that her answer to the invitation would be yes. It didn’t have to be a big deal—God knew, he was never planning to get married again—but he was officially free and single now. And it was only a drive out to the dunes with a backpacker. There was a hell of a long way from that to a ring on anyone’s finger. But—the bitterness had slid in without him even realizing it—it wasn’t so far from a ring to a four-figure invoice from the lawyers. So Nathan had shut his mouth again, and let the moment drift past.

  Instead, they’d had another drink and a few more laughs and at the end of the night, when she was closing up, they had stood facing each other in the doorway, both suddenly a little awkward, and he’d asked when she was working next week. He’d camped out in the back of his car as usual, with the stars shining through the dirty windscreen, and driven home with a grin on his face for the first time in a while.

  He’d gone back to the pub the next weekend, and the next. Not the one after that, though. By then, Nathan had found himself barred from the pub, the shop, and everything else worth visiting within a six-hour radius. The length of his ban wasn’t specified. Ongoing, he was told when he finally broke and asked. So far, it had been nine years and four months, and counting.

  “Did Cam leave a note on him?” Ilse asked from under the washing line, bringing him back to the present. “Or in his car?”

  “No,” Nathan said. “Nothing here?”

  She shook her head. “Was there anything in his pockets that might explain why he was there instead of Lehmann’s Hill?”

  “No. What about on the radio? Did he call in at all?”

  “I was in the office all day, nothing came through. I would have heard.”

  Nathan pictured the large study where the desk-bound work that kept the property ticking over took place. It was a seven-day-a-week operation: ordering supplies, booking contractors, checking the payroll and supplier invoices. It had been Liz’s job when Nathan was younger; now it fell to Ilse.

  “Bub and Harry both said Cam had seemed under a bit of pressure lately,” he said.

  “What? Just lately?” Ilse sounded annoyed.

  “Longer than that?”

  “You know what it’s like running this place. They know what it’s like. There was always pressure on him, even when it’s doing well.” She snatched a pillowcase from the line, folding it badly into a crumpled square. She took a breath and flapped it out, folding it more ca
refully this time. “I think there was something wrong, though. Harry’s right. Cam was stressed, and he was in a bad mood a lot of the time. And he was distracted, which wasn’t like him. I hoped it would pass, but it had been at least six weeks, maybe longer. It was getting worse, if anything.”

  “Did you ask him why?”

  “Of course I did.” She was instantly defensive. “And he told me he was fine. There’s always something that needs attention around here. Just because Cameron was working hard, that didn’t mean—”

  She stopped as they both sensed movement across the yard and turned to look. The light was fading now as they watched Bub walking near the farthest corner of the fence, where the land rose higher. He stopped and looked down at a patch of earth. Even from that distance, Nathan knew where he was standing. Bub didn’t look toward the washing line, and Nathan wasn’t sure if he had seen them amid the sheets.

  “What’s he doing over there?” Ilse frowned.

  “God knows.”

  Bub was standing at the foot of their dad’s grave and, overhead, Nathan could see the shape of the eucalyptus tree he had planted with his brothers after the funeral, twenty years earlier. It had been a hot day and hard work, but it had been Liz’s idea, so they’d done it, digging a hole at the head of the plot. The tree was a decent size now, and its branches swayed, black against the sky.

  To the left of Carl Bright’s grave was the ground earmarked for the rest of the family when their respective times came. The plot directly next to his dad’s would probably have been Liz’s under normal circumstances, but now, Nathan realized with a jolt, it would be Cameron’s.

  “I need to get back inside.” Ilse straightened suddenly. From her expression, he suspected she’d been thinking the same thing as him. “I want to check on the girls before the generator goes off.”

  The generator was switched off each night to save fuel and money, cutting the electricity and plunging the property into a complete blackout overnight. Nathan was used to it. He had started switching off his own for longer and longer these days, lying alone in the seamless dark from sunset to sunrise.