Red Dirt Road : A Novel (2023) by White S R

Author:White, S R [White, S R]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

The clock read 1115. Dana had managed an hour or so of fitful sleep. Lately, she’d had a run of hideous dreams – massacres, brutality, sweeping panoramas of carnage – but tonight she’d escaped that. All the same, she couldn’t really settle so sat up to make notes.

The desert held an absence of sound that was startling. Every minute or so she caught up to the lack of noise and was perturbed by the experience. She found herself straining for the kind of extraneous stimulation she knew and understood. She tapped pen against paper, just for the sound it made.

She’d been in Unamurra for six hours – Dutton district for nine hours in total – barely long enough to scratch the surface. Yet she felt issues and potential suspects were firing at her from all sides. In fact, she found it difficult to disentangle the chaff from what she really needed to hold. Kernels of ideas slipped her grasp, arguments and lines rose and fell like flotsam on the open sea. Nothing was quite coalescing, even though it felt at any moment as if it might. Or should.

Her mind flipped through each brush-off she’d been given, each nod to the idea that she should leave these murders alone. Except for Cronin. His advice, she now believed, had been trying to guide her towards something. But for the rest? Just pure denial. Either they expected her to perform a perfunctory attempt and announce it wasn’t viable, or she was supposed to actively ignore both her instincts and anything that smacked of evidence.

For senior officers like Judge Trent, she could see the goalposts – he wanted Central to stop patronizing him, he wanted serene final years at the helm, he wanted his dead and absent detectives to be vindicated rather than vilified. That made a strategic sense for Trent, even if Dana found it morally bankrupt.

But the atmosphere in Unamurra – that was something else. What sort of town didn’t want the murderer of two citizens to be found? What sort of town offered free passes on killing? She could have comprehended it, if Unamurra were the kind of place that meted out its own kind of rough justice. If they were a simmering latent lynch mob, waiting for her to leave so the assumed killer could be quietly ‘disappeared’, as Able had put it; that, she could understand. But there was no underlying sense of malice in town that she could discern. Unamurra’s reticence was a deeper malaise – almost torpid, a malarial apathy. It baffled her.

She held fast to the notion she’d had in the car as they drove from Dutton. It said that Unamurra had no exports and no unique selling point to the outside world. In that sense, it was simply a collection of buildings in one location. But it did have a unique psychology. The mental approach necessary to living here, dictated the way people lived here. And that, she was sure, was significant. Though she couldn’t tell exactly how it played out.

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