‘Would you be a dear and ask your husband to stick to the speed limit when he’s driving past our house? You know me, normally I wouldn’t mind, but there’s a pothole that the council hasn’t got around to fixing yet, and when it rains it fills up with water, and when your husband drives past doing eighty in a sixty zone, he sprays mud all over the nature strip, and it drowns the grass seed, and—’

‘I’ll let him know,’ Abby said. ‘Anyway, I should get in out of this rain.’

‘Mmm, I noticed you forgot your umbrella. You really should keep one in the car in case of an emergency. You’re still a city girl at heart, I suppose. You’ll figure it out one of these days. Where was Ray off to in such a hurry, anyway?’

Abby felt herself being pulled into the human vortex, so she took a step towards the house and looked at her watch, as if she had somewhere to be. Then she hesitated. ‘Wait, when was this?’

‘Not twenty minutes ago,’ Dorothy said. ‘He was driving like Juan Manuel Fangio. Like I said, normally I wouldn’t mind but—’

‘I have to go,’ Abby snapped.

‘Oh, your generation move a mile a minute,’ she said. ‘What do you have on? A party? Not great weather for a barbecue if that’s what you had in—’

‘Uh huh, bye,’ Abby cut her off. She felt Dorothy’s eyes on her back as she hurried up the driveway.

Where was Ray off to in such a hurry? It was a good question. She entered the garage through the side door, turned on the light and looked over at her workbench.

She could remember returning Ray’s clothing and workboots to the box, but she couldn’t remember putting it away. She had left it on the bench, she was sure of it. But it wasn’t there now, and neither was Ray.

She stood there awhile, deliberating. The box and all its contents were probably at the bottom of Elk Harbour right now. She felt her skin flush hot, then run so cold it made her shiver. Since the murder, she had been living in a state of heightened panic, and had at times wondered if it might all become too much – if her spirit might simply slip away from her body, from her reality, from a world that once felt safe and predictable but now made her feel like a stranger.