The Survivors, стр. 49
He turned away from the bedroom and walked across the hall and to the back door. Renn looked up as he stepped out.
‘Olivia told you Bronte thought she heard noises at night a few times?’ Kieran kept his voice low so as not to wake Audrey.
Renn sighed. ‘Yeah.’
‘Any idea what that was?’
‘No.’ Renn rubbed his eyes and turned his back on the beach. ‘You know what it’s like along here. Could have been anything at all. Dog, another animal, anything. A person. Who knows?’
He seemed very flat. Kieran wasn’t sure if it was down to being here in the house, or the sight of the tributes on the sand, or the encounter outside the station with Trish Birch. Take it seriously this time. Perhaps simply the investigation in general. Kieran suspected having Pendlebury as a shadow would make anyone want to make sure they were doing things to the letter. Kieran looked back at Bronte’s room.
‘Am I okay to take Sean’s torch, do you reckon?’ he said. ‘He needs it for the wreck.’
‘That yellow one?’ Renn said, his eyes still on the shoreline. ‘Yeah. You’re right to grab that.’
‘Thanks.’ Kieran went back inside, blinking in the sudden darkness of the hallway. As he stepped into Bronte’s room, he could hear Mia’s and Olivia’s voices floating from the main bedroom.
‘Bronte lent me that book.’ Olivia sounded subdued. ‘She said it was her favourite of his.’
‘Yeah, it’s one of my favourites too. They made it into a movie.’
‘I think I saw that. It was good.’
‘Yeah. The book’s still better though,’ Mia said, and Kieran could hear the rustle of pages. ‘“For Bronte, thank you for the inspiration. Yours, George Barlin.” Were they friends, then? The most I’ve ever got from him was a signature. “All the best” once, when the signing queue was short.’
‘Friends? No, I don’t think so,’ Olivia said. ‘George must have twenty years on her. I think he just knew her from around the Surf and Turf.’
‘Is his wife here with him?’
‘He’s not married, is he? He doesn’t seem married. He’s always in there alone.’
‘Oh.’ There was a pause and a muffled noise, and Kieran realised Mia was checking her phone. ‘No, you’re right, it says here that he and his wife have split. That’s sad. Maybe that explains the sea change. I think they’d been together for a while.’ Mia was quiet for another moment. ‘They met when they were both interning as journalists on a newspaper in Sydney and have a five-year-old daughter. Separated last year. Amicable, blah blah. He’s in this article going on about mutual respect and how he’s never felt so creatively free.’
‘He should try telling his laptop that,’ Olivia said, and Kieran heard the sound of a drawer opening and shutting. ‘He seems to spend a lot of time frowning at it.’
‘Wow, she’s already engaged again,’ Mia said. ‘Took his daughter and moved to America with her new fiancé.’
‘That sounds quick.’
‘Yeah,’ Mia said. ‘Reading between the lines of mutual respect here, I’d say he thinks so too.’
Kieran went over to Bronte’s desk. He reached among the art supplies for the torch and stopped. Lying near it was a small pair of wire-cutters and a tiny skeletal sculpture of a crayfish, spun from intricately twisted copper strands. Kieran picked it up and held it gently in his palm, looking at the wire he guessed had come from his parents’ shed and that Bronte had brought to life, almost unbelievably, as this creature. He wondered how many hours she’d spent on it, and suddenly felt very sad.
‘Ash can’t stand George, though.’ Olivia’s voice floated out from her own room. ‘It’s a bit awkward at work sometimes, when they’re both there.’
‘Because of the garden?’ he heard Mia ask.
‘Yeah,’ Olivia said. ‘Which I can understand. Ash tried really hard to buy the place from his gran, but she needed a certain price to cover the retirement home, and in the end they couldn’t make it work. Then George comes along, and he can afford it, fair enough. But when Ash heard he was ripping up the garden, he went to talk to George – professionally, you know – and asked him to consider keeping part of it. George didn’t want to, so Ash offered to do the landscaping himself, at least have a hand in it, but George wanted to bring in some gardener from Hobart. Award-winning.’ Olivia sighed. ‘I feel bad for Ash, but there’s nothing he can do, it’s George’s house. And George tries not to rub it in, and he’s always been nice to me at work. I’m not sure this is quite what he expected when he moved here, though.’
‘But he would have known what he was getting himself into,’ Mia said. ‘Small-town life. It’s not like he hasn’t been here before. I was telling Kieran before how Gabby and I took his writing workshop that summer.’
‘Oh.’ Olivia sounded distracted. ‘Yeah, George mentioned something about that at work once but Mum was there with me so I kind of shut him down. I got the sense he didn’t really remember Gabby anyway. Not well, at least.’
‘Probably not. The groups were pretty big. They were free community things, you know? One-day workshops. So you had tourists and everyone mixed in there.’ Mia gave a small laugh. ‘And we were two fourteen-year-old girls writing stories about running a pony stable. I mean, I never saw G.R. Barlin