‘You said she was fine!’ Washburn was horrified. ‘She can’t be fine. Let’s go.’

He set out for the caravan, half-running. Hirsch trailed him. He didn’t know what to do. Obviously, he could drive Washburn to town, but how might the guy react when he got there? What if Yvonne and Nan hadn’t been fully forthcoming about his equilibrium?

‘Mr Washburn, I—’

Washburn stopped and whirled around. ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’ve been told I’m nuts. But I’m not a threat to anyone. I just can’t stand people for long. The way they’re unable to leave things alone…’

He glanced about uneasily, as if the surfaces and boundaries of the creek and the nearby hills, roads and fences, were shifting. With effort, he gathered himself and said, ‘For what it’s worth, I still love Nan. She loves me. We understand each other. And right now she needs me. Just give me a minute to pack a bag.’

‘All right,’ Hirsch said. ‘And I’ll need to make a brief stop along the way.’

Hope Hill Road was seven kilometres from the Mischance Creek ruins, and when they got there, Craig Washburn said, ‘Are you sure about the number? Sounds far too high to me.’

Hirsch checked his notebook again. ‘Fifty-eight Hope Hill Road.’

‘Who lives there?’

‘People named Rennie.’

‘Huh,’ Washburn said, with an intonation that Hirsch couldn’t interpret.

‘Know them?’

‘I keep to myself.’

Hirsch turned around where the road petered out and headed back along it. Thirty kilometres in length. No towns, only farms and station properties—seven in total.

‘Why would she lie to me?’ muttered Hirsch.

Washburn shot him a wry look. ‘Maybe I’m not the only one wants to be left alone.’

They rode back to Tiverton in companionable silence, the weeds and the stones drifting past their windows until cultivated land appeared. It seemed anomalous to Hirsch. The road dipped and rose and turned in on itself, acknowledging the unruly contours of the land, while Douglas Keir and all who’d come after him had tried to stamp some symmetry onto it: straight fences, driveways and cypress hedgerows, ninety-degree angles, perfect rectangles of wheat stubble. And bright new galvanised rooftops here and there, as if the future mattered, even as the past was proximate and unsettling, stamped in stone: the grave of a shepherd’s son, an abandoned hut, a Ngadjuri rock carving. Yet Craig Washburn lived contentedly out in that country. Now, as they descended from the hills onto the Tiverton flats, he seemed to shrink in his seat. Boundaries closing in on him, thought Hirsch. Or he’s gearing up for the horror.

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