The Drowning Girls by Veronica Lando

Author:Veronica Lando
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

FRIDAY

Two days before the sacrifice

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The grass around Nate’s legs had dried stiff; its brown stalks unmoving. The morning sun had just breached the squat buildings of Port Flinders and the grey headstones of the town’s cemetery were casting elongated shadows. Neat rows of cement jutted up, some barely piercing the overgrown weeds that surrounded them. Most were long forgotten. Occasionally, however, there would be a break in the overgrowth—weeds removed, condolences placed. Flowers here, a teddy bear there. There were some who hadn’t been completely forgotten after all.

The plot in front of Nate was one. A small bunch of yellow wildflowers wrapped in a purple ribbon lay on its side, slowly dying in the North Queensland sun. The gravestone itself, however, was what made it conspicuous from its neighbours. Glaring from its dulled grey face, clear in the morning light, was a single black spray-painted word: Liar.

Kelsey’s grave. Twenty-five years old.

Liar.

He wondered who’d written it; wondered what was buried beneath the soil. Nothing presumably.

The grave next to it was equally well maintained. No flowers though, just an absence of weeds and graffiti.

Gavin Webb.

Kelsey’s dad. Date of death about six months after Kelsey’s.

The flowers on Kelsey’s grave, maybe just a few days old, hadn’t yet completely withered. But it was the word that dominated the headstone. Off to the side, a scattering of empty beer cans suggested that the vandals may have had some liquid courage. Nate looked around—the cemetery was clearly a popular watering hole.

He kicked a can off Kelsey’s grave and a trickle of beer dribbled onto his sneaker. He’d taken the long route to the cemetery on his morning run. A night of fits and starts meant he had woken with a set of heavy eyes and an eagerness to put as much distance between himself and Port Flinders; between himself and Sergeant Boyd.

Dale Boyd.

Boyd’s parting words from the previous evening had run on repeat through Nate’s head all night, turning his stomach and sucking the air from his lungs.

Don’t think I don’t know who the hell you are, Bass.

Boyd’s threat had been real. It’d been real a quarter of a century ago when he was fifteen and protected by the shield of his father’s badge, and it sure as hell was real again now. But nowadays that threat was a gun-carrying, authority-addicted middle-aged man. And Nate was pretty confident he hadn’t seen the peak of Sergeant Boyd’s dick swinging yet.

Twenty-five years and nothing had changed on the surface of Port Flinders. It was a shithole back then when he’d had to spend his summer break with his mum up here, and it was still a shithole now. How the hell had it not fallen off the map in the last quarter century? Dropped off into the sea? The miserable fishing industry had all but shrivelled up and yet somehow the town clung on.

The bloody festival. That’s what did it; what kept the lights on overhead.

An overflowing caravan park, the bistro up to its eyeballs with patrons, booked out fishing charters.

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