Traced by Catherine Jinks

Author:Catherine Jinks [Catherine Jinks]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2023-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

The drive from Blackheath to Lithgow was hairy at night. There were too many speeding trucks. Too many merging lanes. But I’d tossed back a cup of coffee as I packed my bags, so I was wide awake by the time I reached the steep, winding drop down to Little Hartley. After that, the only issues were high-beam driving and kangaroos. The roads around Lithgow had been widened over the years, and clusters of lights had sprung up across the cleared hillsides that cradled the town’s western edge. Even in the darkness, I always knew where I was—until I turned off the highway and ducked under a railway bridge.

After that, things got more complicated.

Tara and Neal lived in a beautiful, architect-designed house that had once been on Airbnb. Its owners had made a fortune with holiday lets until the first COVID-19 lockdown. Then, confronted by regular mortgage payments and no income, they had panicked and decided to sell at a rock-bottom price around the middle of the year.

I’d known all about the house, thanks to Blue Bookings. With my help, Tara and Neal had snapped it up, using Neal’s inheritance as a fairly sizeable deposit. His father, Allan, had died only fifteen months earlier; each son had received an equal third of Allan’s estate. There had been a bit of squabbling (thanks to the middle brother’s bitchy wife), but finally Neal had ended up with enough to buy what he liked to call his ‘slice of heaven’.

For Tara, the new home’s luxurious bathrooms and enormous, light-filled interiors easily outweighed the fact that she was perched on the side of a hill several kilometres down State Mine Gully Road. The northern fringes of Lithgow spilled into a series of narrow, lightless, heavily forested gullies barely wide enough for a creek bed. Some had dirt tracks wriggling through them, and Tara’s house was off one of those tracks. To reach her, I had to wend my way along the edge of town, through a warren of little streets lined with tiny old houses—some neat as a pin and some barely standing up, all peeling paint and drooping gutters. The last streetlight was just beyond the old State Mine itself, which was a sprawling collection of railway yards, tin sheds and brick factory buildings.

Then came a few more houses, followed by a long, bumpy drive between looming walls of rock and bush. The potholes made it a nightmare in the dark, as did the absence of landmarks. I was always overshooting Tara’s driveway, even in broad daylight.

This time, I was moving too slowly to miss it.

The house was built on three levels, with a triple garage on the ground floor and two more storeys above that. The front door was round the side, at the top of some winding stone stairs. A small backyard had been dug out of the hill behind the house to accommodate a covered porch that lay just off the kitchen. There was plate glass everywhere, and while the exterior cladding was charcoal grey, everything inside looked bleached.

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