‘A person died on our island,’ he said, slowly. ‘That isn’t fun or exciting or silly. It’s tragic and sad and scary. We should be showing some respect. Feel free to step in at any time, Ab.’

Abby felt a twang of resentment, shook it off, then did her best impression of a functional adult parent. ‘Your dad’s right.’

‘Are you serious?’ Lori said. ‘You get off on all this stuff, Mum. Have you looked at our bookshelf lately? It’s full of serial killers and mass murders and child kidnappings and—’

‘That’s different,’ Abby said.

‘How?’

She glanced across the table at Ray. ‘Because those things didn’t happen in Belport.’

‘Yeah but they happened somewhere. Your argument makes no sense.’

‘That’s because I’m an adult. We don’t have to make sense. So change the subject and eat your pasta.’

Lori looked at her bowl. ‘Oh, so that’s what this is.’

After dinner, the family dispersed. Eddie took care of the dishes, Lori disappeared into her bedroom to pretend to finish her homework, and Ray went upstairs to take a shower. Abby switched from beer to red wine and took a glass with her out into the garage.

She turned on the light and switched on the old three-bar heater she kept beneath her workbench. It glowed to life, filling the room with the smell of burning dust.

Abby pulled a knitted throw rug over her shoulders, set her wineglass down on the bench and swung open the bar fridge. Inside, wrapped in a plastic shopping bag with the Buy & Bye’s double-B logo printed on the front, was the possum Susi Lenten had found dead beneath the powerlines outside her house.

Abby looked at the shape beneath the shopping bag for a moment. She had never worked on anything so large before. Critters like birds, mice and rats were harder to taxidermy than larger mammals because everything was smaller – at least that’s what it said in The Big Book of Taxidermy she’d checked out from the Belport Library. But the bigger they got, the more real they seemed.

The wool throw rug she’d pulled over herself caught on an exposed nail and slipped from her shoulders. It was deathly cold without it. Despite the three-bar heater running at full steam, the badly insulated garage was impossible to heat. She might have performed her taxidermy at the kitchen table, where it was warm, but she was pretty sure Ray would divorce her if she suggested it.

Three fat brown moths scuttled out from below the bar fridge and flapped briefly against Abby’s chin. Abby swiped at them but missed. They rose in a loose formation to the fluorescent tube overhead and whacked against it, over and over.