They opened it, of course.
No reason to think it’d be bad news, so no reason to avoid it. Fat drops of rain spattered on her windscreen as she tore a strip of yellowing tape from the old buckles and fiddled with them until they popped open. Not locked … just stiff with tarnish and disuse.
The lid creaked as it opened. An insect, startled by the ingress of rainy daylight, scuttled through a pile of loose paper and disappeared beneath a tarnished photo frame. Kirsty frowned. A leather journal, newspaper clippings … a rusted tin box, some old book. She picked it up and inspected the cover:The Muddle-Headed Wombat. Possibly a first edition, but when she opened it the dust of long-ago pressed flowers flaked loose, and the title page was torn and covered in crayon scribble.
A sentimental keepsake, surely.
She put it aside and nudged at the pale blue tissue paper peeking through from the bottom, feeling the heft of some heavy fabric within. A dress, she thought, running her fingertips over a rowof small, satin-covered buttons. Cream by the looks, or perhaps a white that had yellowed with age. A suitcase full of mementoes seemed so … clichéd. Perhaps if Mary had still been alive to explain what they all meant, but … What was she to do with these?
Moving the leather journal to one side, she lifted a torn length of newsprint from the suitcase. The paper was brittle and yellow, and she smoothed its curled edges gingerly to avoid the whole thing disintegrating into silverfish dust … and stared.
A photograph of a plane took pride of place in the news article. Not just any plane, but a small, nugget-shaped one-propellor plane from a long-gone era—it was flying high above a patchwork of cloud.
What on earth?
A headline ran above the image:Old Bill Is Reunited With His Lost Love.
Bill who?
Former RAAF pilot and WWII veteran William (Bill) Bluett hopes to fly over the Anzac Day Parade next month in tribute to his fallen mate. His plane, an Australian-made—
Damn it. The rest of the article was torn off.
She prised a dressmaker’s pin from the paper and a small, square photograph came loose from the back. Its dull surface was marred by a stripe of rust.
The same plane, but this time it was on chocks in front of a shed, and an older man and a child sat in its cockpit, grinning wildly at whoever had taken the photograph.
Anzac Day flight from the cowshed,Bluett’s Farm, Shannon Gully Roadhad been written in neat cursive along the white border.1974. She peered at the photo again. The kid could be six or seven, which might make this child her father.
Trevor William Bluett.
She closed her eyes and rolled the old pin through her fingers. What was she doing, poking through all this stuff? Digging up the past was only for people who were interested in looking backwards. Which she wasn’t. Work hard, play hard, move on to the next adventure. That’s how she lived her life—well, mostly, other than her stint in Port Augusta which had somehow gone on way longer than she’d intended—and as a strategy it had been a winner.
Up until the curse of the Foxes decided to rear up and bite her in the bum.
Her gaze dropped back down to the clipping in her hand. She wasn’t just a Fox, was she? She was half Bluett, and here she was in the Bluett home town, with no job to go to for the foreseeable future, and a pokie addict knitter waiting for her in South Australia.
Mary Bluett couldn’t help her, not anymore, but that didn’t mean Kirsty couldn’t find out more about the family another way.
And … hanging out in Clarence would be the perfect way to not think about the plane crash. The mother’s screaming. The man gripping her arm—
Nope. She wasn’t going there.
The rain had turned from a spatter to a drumbeat, washing away the dust and bugs of her long road trip, as she picked up her phone and began another internet search. Not ailments this time—funnily enough, her symptoms seemed to have been left behind in Port Augusta. Maybe there was something to her mother’s up-stumps-and-scarper strategy after all.
She typed into the search bar:Show me a satellite map of 376 Shannon Gully Road, Clarence.