Gwyneth sighed. Life was complicated at the best of times, and even though she had few worries of her own, she knew her family were struggling to cope with things. Hugh was certainly not the man he’d once been, and she had the deep suspicion that he was hiding some sort of health problem. Jane was itching to leave for a retirement on the coast, and their son Terence was of absolutely no use whatsoever.

Gwyneth understood how worried Jane was about Hugh, but there was the practice to consider as well as Becky and Danny’s future. She had no qualms about the family leaving Morgan’s Reach, and although she would miss them even more than she missed the rest of her brood, she had no intentions of dying anywhere else but in this house. But the future of the hospital was in jeopardy unless someone could be found to replace Hugh – and she knew this was only part of the reason why Hugh was reluctant to throw in the towel.

The crash of thunder directly overhead made her jump, and the echo of it trembled in the boards beneath her feet and in the walls of the house. The corrugated iron roof vibrated with it and the birds roosting in the nearby trees and among the reeds surrounding the precious waterhole rose in an answering thunder of wings and cries of alarm. Wally scrabbled deeper into the nest of old blankets in the dog basket, and Gwyneth could hear Coco screeching furiously from beneath his covered cage on the back veranda.

Jagged lightning pierced the ominous black sky, blinding her with its intensity as another crack of thunder shook the earth and rattled the shutters and screens. Gwyneth shivered, for she could now hear the rusty turn of the weathervane on top of the nearby bore-water pump, but the wind that turned it wasn’t cool and pregnant with rain – it was hot, dry and deadly.

*

‘I told you it was stupid to come all this way with the weather like this,’ snapped Sandra Morgan as she lit another cigarette and furiously puffed smoke out of the car window. ‘What if there’s a flash flood and we’re caught in the middle of it?’

Terence’s expression was grim as he kept his eyes on the road ahead. ‘Give it a rest, Sandra,’ he retorted. ‘And mind what you’re doing with that cigarette. It’s as dry as tinder out there.’

Sandra slumped back into the soft leather seat of the imported sedan and continued to flick ash out of the window. ‘I don’t know why you want to bury us out here,’ she muttered. ‘We had a good life in Sydney.’