The Lost Man

by Jane Harper

  Nathan thought for a minute. He remembered himself driving in desperate circles as he searched for eight-year-old Xander, and the way his heart pounded in his ears and the fear ran pure and cold. Please let him be okay. It would have been worse for the stockman, alone on horseback, on the brink of a natural nightmare.

  “Did he find his little boy?” Sophie asked.

  “Yeah, he did, eventually.” Nathan hesitated. “But the kid’s horse had panicked and thrown him off. The kid was okay but the horse was gone.”

  “So what did the man do?”

  “He must have decided one horse wouldn’t be able to outrun the storm carrying both of them, because he gave his own horse to his little boy.”

  Nathan imagined the man telling, ordering, his son to go on without him. Promising him he would find the other horse and be right behind. Saying it, and knowing that it wasn’t true.

  “Did the little boy get home safely?” Sophie asked.

  “He did.”

  “But not the stockman?”

  “No. He would have known he wouldn’t.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “Yeah, it is. Although”—Nathan paused. “I like to think that maybe he wasn’t sad, right at the end. Knowing that at least his kids were safe.”

  “He’d done it to save his family,” Sophie said.

  “Exactly.” Nathan turned to Lo. “So I know it can be a bit creepy out there, but it doesn’t have to be. You don’t have to be scared of him.”

  Lo thought it over. Finally, she leaned in. Nathan could feel her breath on his face and see the specks of paint on her skin.

  “I wasn’t scared of the stockman,” she whispered. “I was scared of Daddy.”

  “Oh.” Nathan took her hand.

  “He’s not coming back, though, is he?”

  “No. He’s not, Lo.” He put his arms out, and she hugged him. She was small and warm. “It’s going to be okay. You’re safe here, and we all love you.” He pointed at her artwork. “And you know what else? I reckon you’re a better painter than your dad.”

  He got a small smile at that. “No,” she said with something that sounded suspiciously like false modesty. “Daddy’s painting won a prize.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. Yours are just as good.”

  “No, they’re not. Stop being silly.”

  “It’s true.” He got up. “Hang on.”

  Nathan went inside, his vision poor as his eyes adjusted to the light. Lunch smelled great as he passed the kitchen. Through the hall window, he could see Bub and Harry out on the grass. Bub was bowling now, letting Harry have a go of his bat. The door to Ilse’s office was ajar, and Nathan toyed briefly with the idea of going in to see her. Say hello. Say he’d missed her. He hesitated, but kept moving. The girls were waiting.

  In the living room, Nathan stood in front of Cameron’s painting. He raised his hands, feeling the buzz of an outlaw as he lifted the frame from the wall. It was surprisingly light for something that seemed to take up so much space in the house. Nathan waited a moment, but nothing happened. Cameron’s spirit did not, in fact, rise from its otherworldly slumber to warn against the perils of leaving fingerprints on the brushwork.

  Nathan grinned to himself as he carried the painting down the hall, looking at the colors of the land and the sky and the grave. He realized that what he had said to Lo was absolutely true. There was nothing special about this painting. There was no life in it. It was the flat, uninspired work of a man who was too blind to see all the good things he had.

  He stepped out onto the porch, the screen door slamming behind him, and was greeted by a stunned silence. Lo’s mouth actually dropped open. No one said anything for a long moment, and Nathan was vaguely aware that even the sounds of cricket ball against bat had stopped.

  “Oh my God,” Sophie gasped. “What have you done?” But beneath her horror, her eyes gleamed with delight at the sheer scandal of it.

  “Yep.” Nathan nodded. “I touched the painting.”

  “You’ll be in so much trouble,” she breathed. Lo was giggling, her hands over her mouth.

  “I won’t. Because it’s just a painting, Soph. That’s all. And yeah, it’s pretty good, I suppose. But my question right now is, is it better than Lo’s?”

  Lo was hopping from foot to foot, equal parts thrilled and horrified.

  “Okay,” Nathan said. “Lo, you hold up your best picture. Let’s compare.”

  With a grin, she chose one.

  “Sophie, you be the judge. Which is better?”

  Nathan flipped Cameron’s painting over in his hands. He held it up in front of his face, the painted side facing away from him. And all at once, the world tilted. Sophie’s laughter was muffled by the pounding in his ears.

  “I judge that Lo’s is better,” Sophie was saying. “Ten out of ten.”

  Her voice seemed very far away, and when Lo cheered, it sounded like she was underwater. Nathan tried to nod, but his head felt heavy and unbalanced. He realized the girls were watching him.

  “I agree,” he said, his tongue thick in his mouth. He saw Lo smile, but only in his peripheral vision. His gaze was trained on the back of the painting. Specifically, on something taped there. Something worn and opaque, with fine red dust in the plastic creases. Nathan felt the ground sway a little.

  “It’s hot out here, girls,” he managed to say. “Go inside and grab a drink of water.”

  “Okay.” He heard their footsteps and the door slam behind them.

  Nathan’s hands were shaking as he laid the painting face down on the veranda. The plastic envelope was taped carefully in the center of the frame. He fumbled at it, not caring about any damage to the front of the picture, and wrenched it free. He stood up.

  Beneath the dust, he could see the colored edges of banknotes, the etched lettering of a passport cover, and several folded, official-looking certificates. Nathan felt his heart skip, as though there was a sudden hollow in his chest. He had not actually expected to find it, he knew in that instant. Not really.

  Don’t touch the painting.

  Nathan shot a glance around the deserted yard. There were no sounds of cricket ball against bat anymore from the other side of the house. He couldn’t hear Bub cheering now.

  Shit, no. You don’t mess with Cam’s masterpiece.

  In the distance, Harry’s cabin stood dark and secluded, its door firmly closed.

  Don’t you bloody touch it. You’ve done enough damage.

  Behind Nathan, the house loomed over him, as though holding its breath. He could not hear Liz or Ilse moving around. The windows to the kitchen and office were still and blank.

  It belongs on the wall.

  Somewhere behind him, Nathan felt rather than heard the creak and tread of footsteps on the hall floorboards. A moment later, the screen door gave its soft shriek. He didn’t move. He couldn’t bring himself to look around.

  Golden Rule in this house.

  Who had warned him?

  Don’t touch the painting.

  Everyone. Everyone had.

  The footsteps were close now.

  “I tried to tell you,” a voice said. “You never listen, Nathan.”

  He turned.

  38

  “I tried to tell you.”

  Nathan knew the voice as well as his own. He turned around. A few steps away, face partly shrouded by the shade of the veranda, stood his mother.

  Liz’s eyes darted from the painting on the ground to the plastic envelope in Nathan’s hands. She looked up at him. Her gaze was steadier than he had seen it in days.

  “That was nice.” Her voice was low. “What you told the girls about the stockman. I could hear from the kitchen.”

  Nathan’s hands felt numb, like the envelope could slip through his fingers. “True story.” His voice broke a little on the words.

  Liz met her son’s eye. “Can I tell you another one?”

  The rattle of a girl’s footsteps rang out from the hall, and imme
diately Liz took a quick step forward and plucked the plastic envelope from his hands.

  “Not here. Walk with me, Nathan.”

  She took his arm, her grip firm, as she propped the painting against the house and slipped the envelope into her apron pocket.

  In the midday light, Liz’s shadow had shrunk to a tight, dark spot beneath her feet as they crossed the yard. They walked toward the gum tree and stood under the gentle sway of its branches. At their feet, the graves lay side by side.

  Nathan could hear the blood rushing in his ears as he looked at the ground. Old dirt next to freshly turned earth. He had so many questions, he couldn’t find just one to ask.

  “I’d gone out riding,” Liz said, finally. “After Sophie hurt her arm, and told us all that her horse threw her. We couldn’t have that happening. Not with her wanting to do gymkhana. So I wanted to take her horse out myself.”

  Nathan suddenly didn’t want to hear. But he closed his eyes and made himself listen as she spoke. On the day Cameron would fail to come home, Liz told him, she had done what she did every day. She saddled up. It was a habit she’d formed during her marriage. On a horse, she was taller and faster, and for a few hours, at least, no one could touch her.

  That day, she was on Sophie’s horse. It needed the exercise while Sophie’s arm healed. Liz had ridden for longer than usual, feeling for any problems with the animal. The riding seemed fine, and the horse was responding well. Liz thought about Sophie’s arm and rode on, trying harder now to sense the faults. She’d already gone farther than she meant to when the thought first crept in, slick and dark.

  “There was nothing wrong with that horse,” Liz said, the shadows of the eucalyptus leaves playing across her features. “I couldn’t work it out. It didn’t make any sense.”

  Nathan thought of Ilse’s car sitting neglected in the garage. That hadn’t made any sense either, until it had.

  “So I just kept riding,” Liz went on.

  She had pushed ahead, growing more uneasy with every step. Sophie had been pale and shaking as she had clutched her injured arm, Liz remembered. She had cried, and said she was scared. But she’d wanted to jump back on her horse the minute she was allowed. They’d all praised her for being so brave. Sophie had barely responded to that.

  The feeling in the pit of Liz’s stomach had already started to take on a familiar shape when she saw the man standing by the stockman’s grave. She slowed the horse. Her eyesight wasn’t as good these days, and for a long minute, under the blinding sun, the man looked very much like someone else.

  Liz had stopped to watch, then walked the horse closer. She recognized the four-wheel drive nearby and breathed out. Of course it wasn’t the man she’d first thought, there was no possible way it could have been. It was her son Cameron.

  “What was he doing?” Nathan asked. He’d opened his eyes and was staring at the ground.

  “He was digging.”

  Cameron had had a shovel in his hand, and was slicing it into the soft soil. Liz rode up, taking her time. Cameron had not been right lately, and even now, he dug with a restless energy that set her teeth on edge. Liz dismounted and hooked the reins around the wing mirror of his car.

  Cameron had straightened then, wielding the spade in both hands. The metal glinted in the sun, and she was reminded, once again, of a different man. Something about the look in his eyes. He wasn’t pleased to see her.

  Can I get some water for the horse? She walked to the rear of his vehicle, where he kept his supplies.

  Cameron had waved a hand, his attention already back to the soft ground at his feet, as Liz found a bucket and filled it with water. She looked over as the horse drank.

  What are you doing?

  He bent down. Checking something.

  Checking what?

  Why my bloody wife’s been dragging my kids out here.

  Liz hesitated. I thought you were going to the repeater tower?

  I am.

  Bub’ll be waiting.

  I’m doing this first.

  Cameron ploughed the spade into the sand once more, then stopped. He made a noise in the back of his throat.

  “He’d found something.” Liz’s voice was hard to hear.

  The noise Cameron made was not quite one of triumph; the undertone was too hollow for that. Liz suddenly wished she had ridden in the other direction that morning. The horse had finished drinking, she saw with relief. She put the empty bucket back in the rear and turned in time to see Cameron stoop and dig his hands through the sand. When he stood up, he was holding a plastic envelope, opaque with red dust.

  What’s that?

  Cameron smiled in a way that made Liz’s stomach clench. Buried treasure.

  “I knew what it was.” Liz rubbed a hand over her arm, and Nathan could see both the recent skin cancer wound, and the other, older, scar that they never talked about. One of many. They all had those kinds of marks: Liz, Nathan, Bub. Cameron, as well. Marks they kept hidden and never acknowledged.

  “I knew straight away what Cameron had found,” Liz said. “I used to have something just like that myself.”

  Liz’s version had been an old biscuit tin, and she’d hidden it in the middle of a bucket of horse feed. Or she had until Carl had found it. The blow had burst her left eardrum, and her hearing had never recovered. But she’d learned her lesson, and she’d never tried that again. The boys had still been small, and she had been too scared of the consequences.

  But as Liz had stood by the stockman’s grave, watching her middle son, she wondered how much worse the consequences were for her not having tried.

  You should leave that alone. She had surprised herself by speaking.

  Cameron was surprised too, and his eyes hardened. You don’t even know what this is.

  I do, Cameron. I know.

  Then you’ll know it has nothing to do with you.

  He straightened then, up to his full height. The shovel was hanging by his side, and his hands were gently gripping the handle. It hung loose. He hadn’t lifted it, not even a little. He wasn’t threatening her, he wasn’t, but as Cameron stood there, with the metal blade catching the light as it swayed gently, Liz knew exactly who he reminded her of. He wasn’t her little boy anymore. Or at least, he wasn’t just her boy. He was his father’s son as well.

  And she knew, as she had always known in some part of her, what Ilse had tried to tell her. And what Harry had been so worried about. And why Lo’s pictures were so sad. And why Sophie’s arm was in a sling. And why it would be again. Or worse.

  Liz flinched involuntarily as Cameron stepped past her toward his car. He tossed the shovel into the rear and slammed the door before dropping the envelope through the passenger’s side window and onto the car seat. Liz’s horse bristled, tugging at the reins hooked over the mirror, and she whispered something to calm it.

  I’ve got to get going. Cameron didn’t look at her. Things to do.

  Are you driving to the repeater tower? Liz’s voice sounded odd to her own ears.

  Cameron walked back to the grave and started kicking dirt back into the hole.

  I was going to but— His anger shimmered like the heat. I might go home first. Have a word with Ilse.

  Cameron. Please. The trickle of fear was now a fast-running flood. The girls are at home.

  He said nothing, then at last, he looked up. So? Maybe they need to hear this too.

  And with the tone of his voice and the sun in her eyes, it was suddenly thirty years ago, and Liz knew, without a shadow of a doubt, what happened when men like that came home.

  She felt her hand reach out before she was quite aware what she was reaching for. She had done the calculations in her mind without realizing it. Calculations that had become an ingrained instinct years ago. Fight or flight. He was five meters away, six, maybe. And he was looking down, distracted, kicking the sand to paper over the damage he had done.

  Liz was behind the driver’s seat in the time it took her to draw a first breath, a
nd she had turned the key by the time she drew the second.

  Cameron had looked up, but by then her foot was already on the accelerator. She wound down the window and unhooked the reins from the wing mirror. The horse followed obediently as she pulled away. Not too fast. There was no need; a cantering horse can outrun a man.

  “Cameron tried, though.” Liz’s voice was hollow with horror. “He really tried.”

  And he had, screaming as he chased her. He had known what was happening, and he knew what it meant. It had taken every shred of self-control for Liz not to put her foot down and tear away from that terrible sound. But she kept a steady pace, with her ears shut tight and her eyes straight ahead. And eventually, much later, when at last she slowed and looked in the mirror, there was no one else around. She was all alone.

  39

  Nathan stared down at the graves for a long time before he finally spoke.

  “Cameron’s car wasn’t at the rocks on Thursday morning.”

  Liz looked surprised. “You knew that?”

  “I thought someone had moved it. Or that I was going crazy. I wasn’t sure which.”

  “I made a mistake,” Liz said. “I’d hidden it off the track near home. But I realized that night that it was too far away. He couldn’t have walked that distance. When they found the car, they’d know someone else had been there.”

  “So you moved it?”

  She nodded. “Next day. I rode out early, led the horse on the reins again, and drove to the rocks. I thought that was possible, for someone like Cameron. About ten kilometers.”

  “It’s nine, actually.”

  Liz didn’t argue. “I just didn’t want it to be seen too quickly.”

  Nathan said nothing for a while. He didn’t want to think about it.

  “I didn’t know what to do with Ilse’s documents,” Liz said. “I wanted to give them back to her, but I couldn’t think how. The girls are always in and out of everywhere—my bedroom, the stables. Then Xander started pulling things apart in the sheds as well.” She shook her head. “But everyone knows not to touch that bloody painting.”