Free Darkening Skies by Bronwyn Parry

happy for them. In room one on the other side, a mobile phone rang. And rang. Someone muttered a few swear words before it stopped.
    Jenn groaned and reached for her own phone to check the time. Seven o’clock. No way now to get back to sleep. She tossed off the sheet and dragged herself upright. Whether she was ready or not, her day had started. Jim was dead, and she’d left it far too late to return the support he’d given her. But Paul … Paul had his own family, as well as the responsibility of Sean and Mick, and maybe it was past time she shouldered her share of that responsibility.
    The thought of checking on Mickmade her nauseous.
    Bathroom. To the left around the veranda. Another shower might help rid her body of the memory of smoke and ash and refresh her mind enough to face the day. And Mick.
    She pulled on jeans with the singlet she had slept in before venturing out through the French doors into the daylight and the view of anyone passing on the street. About as much privacy here as staying in a camping ground … or a refugee camp. She’d done the latter more than once for work, and intellectually she knew she had no cause at all to be grumpy about the comparative luxury of the Dungirri pub. But she indulged in the self-pity anyway, wishing for the privacy and comfort of four stars instead of the shared 1960s bathroom with its faded pink and black tiles.
    Just outside the bathroom she heard a door slam below, and caught sight of a woman in police uniform running down the street. A police officer running? Her instincts kicked in, honed in places where a running police officer signified danger, and she leaned over the veranda rail to see where the woman ran. The road past the school; a short street with a dozen or so houses, leading to the dirt road that crossed the creek at the causeway. An SES vehicle came around the corner past the pub and took the same road as the policewoman.
    Common sense told her that here, in Dungirri, it was probably something mundane, like a car getting bogged in the sand on the causeway. Not a bomb or a shooting or an insurgent strike. No danger, and nothing to do with her.
    No excuse for avoiding Mick.Better do it before she chickened out entirely. She showered quickly and returned to her room to dress, heading downstairs within ten minutes.
    In the back bar – called the bistro these days – self-serve breakfast ingredients were laid out on a long table: a selection of cereal, juice, fruit and bread alongside a toaster, coffee plungers, teapots and an urn. Whoever ran the place obviously believed in a reasonable quality of coffee.
    It had been too long since she’d eaten a decent meal, and caffeine deprivation had already set in, but her stomach still roiled.
    As she paused in the doorway, someone pounded down the stairs, two at a time. Gillespie, his phone to his ear. ‘She’s still at your place? Good. Keep her safe. I’m on my way.’ As he passed Jenn and headed out the door, he added, ‘Yeah, there’s trouble.’
    A motorbike roared to life moments later and sped off.
    Jenn hesitated. A policewoman running, the SES who also doubled as paramedics, and ‘trouble’ involving Gillespie and someone close to him. Too much coincidence for fifteen minutes on a Saturday morning. And given Gillespie’s connections to Paula and Mark, and the attack on Jim last night …
    Breakfast had to wait. The bike had already disappeared from view, so she followed the direction the police officer had taken.
    The SES vehicle, a police car and a ute blocked off the road outside Doctor Russell’s house. The once-trimmed hedge around thelarge garden had grown high and wild, hardenbergia and honeysuckle threading rampantly through it, effectively hiding the grandest residence in Dungirri from view. Jenn had been inside that hedge just twice, both times sent away without stepping foot in the house. Although Barbara Russell had been a kind, quiet girl in the same year at school as Paula and