I shrug, dig around in Abby’s bag for the cigarettes she made such a big deal of buying for me at the bottleshop.

‘Charlie, I’m driving us back there. We’ll go to the police and they can come get her.’

‘Where will you send them – third tree after the rock?’

We could be anywhere you’d call ‘the bush’, on a road to nowhere except Dad’s farm. There’s not a single thing in my sightline that makes this place different from the miles of other bushland we’ve passed through. And Abby knows it. It’s not like it’s a straightforward trip back to that couple of chopstick roads she’s calling a town either. We took a lot of left then right then left to get on this road before she fell asleep, and that was when it was light. I think, though, we’re about an hour and a bit from Dad’s farm. I’d followed the few signs she’d said would take us close, planning to wake her up once her map let me down. The baby will be long gone before anyone gets to this place.

‘How old do you think she is?’ Abby asks.

‘Mid-twenties maybe, our age.’

She hits the steering wheel. ‘Damn it, damn it.’ She climbs out of the car into the rain, back to the dead woman.

CHAPTER TWO

Sunday 27 January 1974

Abby

At sunrise, dark clouds gather like an angry mob and throw down thick rain onto Brisbane. Thunder lopes from the fringes to the centre of the city, building from a low growl to an unrestrained roar and snap. Currawongs and magpies shelter in the crooks of our ironbark tree, possums hide under our roof. Stocky banksias whip about in the wind as though they’re made from hair. And we seal ourselves from the storm.

Mark puts beach towels along the bottom of the back and side doors. He checks windows for leaks. I make a pot of coffee and put a torch, a kerosene lamp, batteries for the radio, candles and matches on the kitchen bench in case we lose power. I straighten the towels when Mark isn’t watching. And when we’re done we stand, holding hands in the stifling heat behind our glass veranda doors, barely able to hear one another over the smash of water onto our tin roof. We watch the rain slash gravel, grass and concrete, and form quick rivers in the gutters. Woof sits alert beside me, his shaggy tail still.

The football fields at the bottom of our hill are four feet under within a few hours; the stately eucalyptus trees that ring them are cut off from one another, arms up, surrounded by a push of muddy water. By the time the kids wake up – hair plastered to sweaty heads, pillowcase wrinkles on doughy skin – our access roads have vanished. I’ve never seen anything like it. We heard on the radio last night that Cyclone Wanda would lose its puff before it reached the city, but the newsreader warned that another kind of trouble was on its way.