Turning into Ava’s driveway, Jake pulled on a pair of latex gloves and left the warmth of his vehicle with regret. The air bit at his cheeks, clouds of mist erupting from his nostrils as he strode the concrete path to the front door of the small home. There was crime-scene tape draped across the doorway. As Jake turned the key in the lock he confirmed for himself there were no signs of forced entry around the jamb. Careful not to disturb anything, he switched on the lights.

Ava O’Brien’s home was the definition of tidy. The furniture was arranged to form neat squares in each room. Cheap prints of the Greek islands were centred on each room’s main wall. Jake opened a kitchen cupboard door expecting to see crockery lined up with military precision …

Nope. Rough stacks of plates, cutlery, saucepans and cooking implements appeared to have been hastily shoved inside the cupboard above the stove. Had Ava hidden them from an unexpected visitor?

There were no obvious signs of a struggle in the house, and no indication that anything had been taken. Nonetheless, he would ask Liam O’Brien to accompany him on a walk-through to see if anything appeared to be out of place.

Jake wandered through the house looking into each room. Ava’s two-door red car was parked in the internal garage. But there were absences—no television, no books, no magazines, no sign of a computer. How had Ava spent her time?

He entered a spare room and found the answer. Swatches of fabric covered every surface: squares, folded triangles, patterns and half-made quilts were stuffed into every corner. And along the back wall a set of shelves contained blue, hardback diaries carefully catalogued in year order, starting when Ava must have been a young woman and continuing for about thirty years. Then there was a gap of twenty years or so before the diaries restarted a decade ago. Had the intervening years been removed, or not diarised in the first place?

Jake opened this year’s. The final entry was dated Wednesday night, a comment on a mostly successful dinner with her brother, despite a mildly singed roast.

Flicking through the thin tome, it seemed Ava O’Brien had recorded her thoughts sporadically with no pattern to the timing of the entries that Jake could discern. They were mostly concerned with passages from the Bible—quotes regarding sin and the measures one should take to guard against it—interspersed with tips about quilt-making.

Jake photographed the shelves and the spine of each diary, then picked up those from the past ten years and took them with him as he left.

If insomnia hit tonight, he had the right reading material to encourage sleep.

Chapter Four

Dunton, Tasmania

Saturday, 7.12 a.m.

Bleary eyed, Jake pulled on his jacket and fumbled at the handles of what he now thought of as his bathroom bag. In the disorientation of waking, he marvelled at how quickly he had adapted to his new situation. In less than a week he’d gone from taking for granted a bright, warm home to ramble through from bedroom to bathroom each morning, to accepting as normal his new dash through the life-draining cold outside simply to take a shower.