Feeling lonely and overwhelmed, she tried desperately to keep from getting lost in a wild tangle of thoughts. The luminol on Ray’s clothing. The two men embracing on the front of Y-Mag. The ferry terminal. Ray’s confession. Ray’s confession. That was the loudest thought of all. It slunk and slithered around her, like the slowly circling tentacles of an inky creature from the bowels of the ocean and—

Clunk!

All the power in the house shut off. The room fell suddenly and unnaturally quiet. There was no buzzing lamp in the hallway, no humming refrigerator in the kitchen. There were only the sounds of crackling flames and distant insects. Abby sat in the firelight for a moment, catching up, then went over to the window. Blackouts were common in Belport at this time of year, when the weather was bad, but the night was clear, and the lights were on in Dorothy and Terry’s cottage at the bottom of the hill.

‘You alright up there, Eddie?’ she called.

She heard his bedroom door open, then close, followed by footsteps along the upstairs landing, then Eddie, silhouetted against the dark hallway, appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘What happened?’

‘Power went out,’ she said. ‘I’ll check the fuse box. Wait in here.’

She crept out into the hall and down the corridor, and quietly opened the front door to a chilly blast. She was used to Milt Street looking deserted, but tonight there seemed to be too many shadows and dark things to hide behind. She felt watched. The fuse box was mounted on the side of the house beneath a narrow awning. It was barely more than a dozen steps from the door, but tonight it felt very far away.

Down the verandah steps, onto the damp lawn; she used a penlight they kept on a hook by the front window. Its beam was pencil-thin and pathetic. Rather than lighting her path, it seemed to make everything around it darker.

A couple of metres before reaching the fuse box, she froze.

The little white wooden door was wide open. Someone had flipped the latch and left it that way.

Alarmed, she spotted the figure of a tall man on the periphery of her penlight. He was big, broad and stood perfectly still. Watching her.

‘Who’s there?’ she asked, trying her best to make her voice sound big and brave. ‘What do you want?’

There was no answer. The figure in the dark remained still. For a moment, Abby feared it was David Stemple’s ghost, back to take his revenge, grinning maniacally in the dark. Whoever was standing in the narrow walkway beside the house was well over six feet tall, with bulky shoulders, a narrow head and heavy sleeves that flapped in the wind.

‘I can see you,’ she cried. ‘Who are you?’

No answer.