The Lost Man

by Jane Harper

  “There it is. I can see it.” Ilse pointed through the dusty windscreen. They were the first words they’d exchanged in fifteen minutes.

  Cameron’s card lay open and discarded on the seat between them. Forgive me.

  Nathan scanned the herd of cattle. The cows bristled at the sound of the car engine and began walking almost as one, in a wave of movement. A single animal remained, watching her calf wrestle with the wire that trapped its hind leg.

  “I saw it while I was riding,” Ilse had told him earlier in the hallway. “I didn’t have anything to cut it loose.”

  “Right,” Nathan had said. Something like that was ideally a two-person job anyway. “Give me a minute. I’ll meet you at your car.”

  There had been a slight hesitation. “Mine’s not working. Take yours?”

  “No worries. Keys are on the seat.”

  Actually, where was Ilse’s four-wheel drive? Nathan had wondered as he’d watched her leave. He hadn’t seen it since he’d gotten there.

  Nathan had written their destination in the logbook by the phone, then ripped out an empty page and scribbled a message for Xander. He’d looked back at Simon, who was still hovering.

  “You’re sure that’s what you heard with Cam and Harry?” Nathan said. “You’re not trying to cause trouble?”

  “No. No. Why would I?”

  “Have you told anyone else? Bub or anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Bub and Harry seem pretty close.”

  “Harry’s close to everyone here.”

  “Not you as much. You’re kind of—” Simon shrugged. “Anyway. Look, I didn’t know Cameron well, but he was good to us. And I like to think I’m a good guy.” He looked at Nathan. “I suppose I’m taking a punt that you are too.”

  Nathan hadn’t known what to say to that. Finally, he had turned and followed Ilse outside, leaving Simon staring after him.

  Ilse had already been sitting in the passenger’s seat with the engine running. The air-conditioning was a relief as Nathan climbed in. They pulled away, heading down the long driveway. The house was far behind them before they’d both opened their mouths.

  “Ilse, I found something from Cam—”

  “What was up with Simon—?”

  They had spoken in unison. Ilse frowned.

  “What did you say?” she said. “Something from Cameron?”

  Nathan pulled the card from his back pocket, and she practically snatched it from him. He kept his eyes on the road as he explained where he and Xander had found it, along with the framed family drawing. Long minutes ticked by as Ilse sat and stared, her head bowed and her hair falling into her eyes.

  “Ilse—” Nathan said finally. She cleared her throat and dropped the card on the seat as though she suddenly couldn’t bear to touch it anymore.

  “It’s okay. I’m okay. I don’t know what to tell you. Every day—” She gave a tight shake of her head. “Every day, I feel like I understand my husband even less.”

  They hadn’t spoken again until they reached the herd.

  Nathan stopped the car a fair distance away to avoid causing more stress than necessary to the calf and its waiting mother. They got out, and Nathan threw open the rear door, rummaging through his equipment bag. He found a couple of pairs of different-sized wire snippers and turned to find Ilse standing a short distance away, watching. From the way her eyes flicked to the side, he could tell she hadn’t been looking at him, but past him. Into the back of his four-wheel drive, where they had been together, once upon a time, a million years ago. Nathan slammed the door and started toward the calf. The animal watched warily as they approached. The mother stiffened and flicked her tail. The rest of the herd eyeballed them.

  “I heard that was how the stockman died,” Ilse said quietly. “Trampled in a stampede.”

  “Really? No—” Nathan started, then stopped as the calf started to bellow. Its mother swished her tail, her muscles quivering. “Keep an eye on her, though. She’s not going to like this.” He handed the wire snippers to Ilse. “Are you right with this?”

  “I’ve done it before. Just tell me when.”

  Nathan approached slowly, letting the animals get a good look at him. For all the use that was. The cattle were so free range, they were almost feral. They never got used to seeing people. The mother eyed him up as Nathan got closer to the calf. He could see that the wire was not too tight around its leg. A bit longer and it might well have pulled itself free. For now, though, it was stuck. Behind him, he heard the mother snort.

  “She okay back there?” he called.

  “Yes,” Ilse said. “Keeping her distance still.”

  In the dust a few meters away, Nathan could see the telltale tracks of a passing snake. Almost certainly long gone now, but he still took a good long minute to check around nonetheless. Antivenin was expensive and had a short shelf life, so the medical center in town did not keep supplies.

  “What happens if you get a bite?” Nathan had heard more than one backpacker demand in disbelief.

  Nothing good, was the answer, not with the kind of snakes that called the area home. Nathan liked to live by the rule of thumb that, if he got bitten, he would die. End of story. As satisfied as he could be with that, he stepped toward the calf.

  “I’m going for it now.”

  “Okay. Say when you’re ready.”

  In a single movement, Nathan put his arms under the calf and heaved. Before the animal knew what had happened, he had flipped it on its side and wrestled it down, lying across it and using his weight to pin it to the ground. It was stunned, then opened its mouth and bellowed its outrage into his face. It kicked and struggled, and he leaned into its body, using his knees and elbows to pin it so it could barely move.

  “Got it,” he grunted, but Ilse was already there, crouched by the rear legs with the wire snippers in hand.

  He could feel the heat coming from the calf and hear its heart pounding in its rib cage. It struggled and kicked out.

  “Shit,” he heard Ilse say.

  “Did it get you?” He leaned in hard until the animal was subdued again.

  “I’m okay—” He heard her move. “I’m going to try the smaller cutters. I don’t want to catch its skin.”

  Nathan was straining a little to hold the calf still. It was only a couple of months old, but it was strong. It would weigh in heavier than Ilse, and Nathan reckoned he might only have about twenty kilograms on it. Plus it was scared and angry. It didn’t matter, though. He was stronger, and that was enough to make it do what he wanted. It lay still. Nathan listened to the frightened thump of the beast’s heart. And all at once, before he could stop himself, he thought of Cameron.

  “Ilse?” he called.

  “Yeah?” She was back by the hind legs.

  “I tried to ring Jenna Moore. In England.”

  He couldn’t see her, but sensed her stiffen.

  “And?”

  Nathan shook his head as best he could. “She wasn’t around.”

  “Where is she?” He could hear the tension in her voice. Beneath that, a soft snipping sound.

  “Bali, according to her colleague.” The calf strained, its eyes rolling in its head. He checked to see the mother was still keeping her distance, and leaned in. “Wherever she is, she’s out of phone range, apparently.”

  Neither said anything for a minute. Snip. Snip.

  “Why did you call her?” He still couldn’t see Ilse, but she sounded closer. He tried to lift his head to look, and the calf sensed its opportunity. He gripped it harder.

  “I don’t know,” he grunted.

  “Are you having second thoughts? About what she said about Cam?”

  “No,” he said, too quickly. “It wasn’t that.”

  She didn’t reply. Finally, he felt her stand up.

  “I’ve finished,” she said.

  Nathan rolled off the calf, which immediately righted itself and bounded away to its cross-looking m
other. She threw Nathan an ungrateful sneer, and the pair ran off together without as much as a backward glance, happy to be at liberty once more.

  He sat on the ground, breathing heavily. His muscles ached from the effort of holding the calf down. Above him, Ilse was clutching the strands of cut wire in her hands. She had tears in her eyes.

  “Shit. Ilse—” He stood up. “I don’t know why I called. I just wondered what she had to say.”

  Ilse fiddled with the wires. “Bali.”

  “Apparently.”

  She said nothing for a long minute, then lifted her eyes to look at the horizon. “Lots of flights between Bali and Brisbane.”

  Nathan didn’t reply. He walked over to his Land Cruiser to get a length of wire to repair the fence.

  “You think you’d always see someone out here,” Ilse said when he got back. Her eyes were dry now. “But you can’t always, can you? If someone is standing still, or parked a long way away. It’s only when they start moving you even know they were there.”

  Nathan thought about Lehmann’s Hill. “Bub was saying pretty much the same thing the other day.”

  Ilse nodded. “I’ve heard Bub talk about that. Being able to tell when someone else is around.”

  “Yeah.” Nathan crouched and used pliers to twist the snapped ends together with the new wire. “I reckon he’s right.”

  “Do you?” Ilse sounded surprised. “Cameron always said that was ridiculous.”

  “Oh.”

  “You can feel it, though?”

  “I dunno,” Nathan said. “Sometimes. Maybe. It’s like—”

  He couldn’t quite explain it. Like a pulse over the empty land. The strange heaviness that indicated you were sharing the air with someone else. He knew realistically there would be some sort of explanation. Subconscious recognition of something amiss on the landscape. It was nothing more than that, and it wasn’t even accurate. He’d been getting false positives out at his own property lately. And there could have been hundreds of times over the years that there had been someone unknown over the horizon.

  “Cam was probably right,” he said finally.

  Ilse stood very still, only her eyes moving as she looked out. “What about now?”

  “Do I think there’s someone else here now?”

  “Yes.” Her face was serious.

  “Ilse, it’s not a science. It’s not even a thing.”

  “I know, but can you feel anyone?”

  He looked up at her. He could hear her breathing and see the wind catch the ends of her hair. He could not hear her heartbeat, but he could feel his own.

  “Only us,” he said truthfully. He turned back to the wire. He could feel Ilse watching him, but he didn’t look back. He focused on his work for a while before opening his mouth again.

  “Look, there’s no way that Jenna is out here,” he said. “We’d have heard something if she’d come through town.”

  “Unless she didn’t go through town.”

  “She’d have had to. You know that. She couldn’t stay entirely under the radar. You’d have to have all your supplies, keep completely off-road.”

  “It can be done, though. You do it. Bub’s done it. And Cameron.”

  “And how many tourists have died in their cars trying to take a shortcut?” Nathan twisted the last piece of wire and checked the tension. Satisfied, he stood up and stopped when he saw the look on Ilse’s face. “What is it? Why are you so fixed on this?”

  “Cameron tried to call Jenna as well,” Ilse said. “Three times.”

  Nathan stared. “When?”

  “Once two weeks ago, then twice more in the week before he died. He used the office line, not the main house one. I can see the number on the bill online. She’s a florist in England, isn’t she? I looked her up.”

  Nathan nodded.

  “I don’t think he spoke to her,” Ilse said. “The calls are very short, all less than thirty seconds.”

  “Why would he wait so long to call her? He’d known for a few weeks she was thinking about contacting him.”

  “Maybe it took her that long to actually reach him,” Ilse said. “He might have got an e-mail or something. I don’t know. I don’t have his password.” She stopped. “Or maybe she didn’t get in touch at all and the waiting was driving him crazy. Looking back now, he’d been worried since he heard she’d rung the police station, but it had been getting worse. And he made some other calls in his last week as well.”

  “To who?”

  “To St. Helens. The medical center up there, for one.”

  “Was he sick?”

  “Not that he said. And he wasn’t a patient there, as far as they would tell me. But then, Cameron didn’t like to go and see Steve at the clinic, either, so who knows? He called one of the hotels in St. Helens, too.”

  “Which one?” There were exactly three accommodation options in St. Helens.

  “The cheap one.”

  “Did he make a booking?”

  “If he did, it wasn’t under his own name.” There was something hard in Ilse’s face now. “They had nothing under Jenna’s name either. Neither did the other places.”

  Nathan felt an unpleasant sensation creep through him, and he had the sudden urge to check over his shoulder. There was nothing there but cattle and stubby grass and the horizon. All was quiet. Ilse was watching him closely.

  “You really don’t think Cameron had anything to worry about with that woman?” she said.

  Nathan hesitated. For real, this time. A long and disloyal silence that stretched on and spoke volumes.

  Ilse nodded. “Because Cameron was acting like he did.”

  22

  They barely spoke on the way back. Nathan drove while Ilse stared out of the window, chewing her nails and occasionally turning Cameron’s card over in her fingers.

  “You need to tell Glenn,” Nathan said. “About Cameron trying to call Jenna.”

  “I already tried.” Ilse didn’t look over. “He wasn’t at the police station when I called last night.”

  “Did you leave a message?”

  “No. I got diverted to the Brisbane switchboard. I didn’t want to—” Ilse sighed, still staring out at the passing landscape. “I’ll try him again.”

  She didn’t say anything else until the homestead came into sight up ahead.

  “I’ll get out here,” she said, as they passed the stables. “I put away the horse quickly earlier. I want to check on her.”

  Nathan pulled to a stop. “Ilse—” he said as she climbed out. She waited. He wanted to tell her it would all be okay. Instead, he shook his head. “Nothing.”

  She slammed the door, and Nathan watched her walk away. When he pulled up outside the house, he could see the girls riding in the far exercise yard. Liz was looking on while Xander sat nearby in the shade, flipping through a sketchbook in his lap.

  Nathan walked over and leaned on the railing next to his mum. He waited for her to tell Lo to keep her heels down, but she didn’t. Her eyes were dull.

  “Everything all right?” he said.

  “Steve called from the clinic. The—” Liz stumbled over the word, “—autopsy has been completed. We’re right to go ahead with the funeral.”

  Nathan thought about Cameron’s call to the medical center in St. Helens. “They didn’t find any other health problems?”

  Liz shook her head vaguely and didn’t ask why. Xander looked up, though.

  “Do you want to have a rest?” Nathan said. “I’ll help the girls with the horses.”

  He waited for Liz to argue, but she just nodded. With visible effort, she pushed herself away from the railing and trudged toward the house.

  “She’s been bad all morning,” Xander said. His voice was a little cool. “Lo nearly fell off earlier, and she didn’t even notice.”

  “Right,” Nathan said. “Mate, listen, I’m sorry about going without you just now—”

  “It’s fine.”

  It wasn’t, Nathan suspected, but
Xander seemed distracted as he looked up from the sketchbook. “Did you show Ilse the card from Uncle Cam?”

  “Yeah.” Nathan told him what Ilse had said. He hesitated, then told him what else she’d said, about the phone calls to St. Helens.

  Xander frowned. “Did Cam think Jenna might be in St. Helens?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he did.”

  Xander’s eyes fell again to the sketchbook in his lap. It was full of Lo’s paintings.

  “What’re you looking at?” Nathan said.

  Xander handed him the book, open to the page he’d been examining. Nathan flicked his eyes across the painting. It showed two girls, one smaller than the other and both with dirty-blond hair. It was hard to tell how old they were, but the bigger one had her arm encased in a colorful sling.

  The two girls stood in the foreground of the picture, with bright orange earth under their feet. Behind them, looming large, was a big dark shape that blocked the line of the horizon. It had been drawn by someone young but skilled, and was entirely recognizable.

  “The stockman’s grave, isn’t it?” Nathan said. Beside the headstone, Lo had painted another shape. It was shadowy and unfinished, but had a strangely human quality. A woman, Nathan thought, for reasons he couldn’t quite qualify. While the girls were clearly identifiable, the woman’s features were formless and elusive. Nathan looked up from the picture. Cameron’s daughters were riding now over by the far fence.

  “I didn’t know they’d been out to the grave.” Xander pointed at the sling on the painted girl’s arm. “Not recently, anyway.”

  “Me neither.” Nathan raised his voice and called out. “Girls.” His tone made them pull up their horses immediately. “Come here. I need to talk to you.”

  “Are we in trouble?” Sophie said, as she cantered over and drew to a halt in front of him in a swirl of dust.

  “No. I wanted to ask about this picture, Lo.”

  Lo leaned in, but as he held it up, her face changed. She didn’t reach out to take it. Behind her, Sophie craned her neck to see. Her horse was disturbed, turning in tight circles. Nathan could see the reins wrapped tightly around Sophie’s good hand, the leather biting into her knuckles.