Free Diamonds in the Dust by Kate Furnivall Page A

didn’t stop to draw breath, “you can tell your boss from me that I mean to find out—”
    The wail of an air-raid siren cut right through her words. Not again! Hatti cursed her luck as everything shut down around her. Counters were closed, blinds were yanked down, people scurried out of the building, running like jackrabbits for the air-raid shelters. Hatti found herself out on the street and the doors of the office slammed behind her, but she was too fired up now to want to sneak off down a stinky burrow somewhere. Instead she marched off into the brilliant sunlight, stamping her boots in noisy defiance, feeling heat rise up her face and the familiar churning in her stomach.
    Damn the Japs!
    They had brought fear to the easygoing inhabitants of Darwin, spitting death from the skies and streaking its untidy streets with blood. The first air raid last February had caught them all off guard, 188 planes leaving hundreds dead and wounded.
    She looked up now and saw a formation of twin-tailed Japanese bombers roar overhead, skimming down as usual in the direction of the naval base over at Stokes Hill Wharf, but there were always a few stragglers who liked to play cat and mouse with Darwin’s citizens. A bomb sent whistling down on a house one day, a bunch of shops obliterated the next. Worse were the fighter planes, the buzzing Zeros that amused themselves by strafing the streets with their machine guns, vying to knock down as many pedestrians as they could, like a game of skittles. It ripped the heart out of Darwin each time. Hatti could feel it bleeding into the dirt as she strode down the street.
    The shops on Cavanagh Street were locked up and deserted, even the ice cream parlor she liked to visit for a three-penny cone, so it came as a shock when the door of one of them burst open as she passed. Two men crashed into her, stomping on her feet and banging her shoulder.
    “Whoa!” she scolded. “Look where you’re going.”
    But she was the one who did the looking, and it was a moment that set her red curls quivering. The two men, regaining their footing after barging into her, looked like scrawny crow-eaters from down south. Their four hands were so loaded up with jewelry that strings of pearls trailed down from their fingers, glistening in the sunshine like threads of drool from a sick dog’s jaws. She blinked and looked again. No, these weren’t men. These were raw-boned boys, no more than fourteen or fifteen years old. White, with scared faces, and both with pale jumpy eyes. Brothers, she thought first off. Looters, she thought second, and it was that second thought that got her all riled up again. She seized hold of a sleeve on each of them.
    “What the hell d’you think you’re up to?” she yelled. She straightened up to her full height so that she towered over them. “Stealing is a sin,” she declared. “And you’ll go to prison for it, as well as hell.”
    One set of pale, scared eyes got more scared. The other pair grew flat and cold, and Hatti could feel in her bones that this one may be smaller than she was but he was working himself up to taking a damn good swing at her. She saw his chunky knuckles bunch tight around the brooches and rings in his hand.
    “Drop that stuff,” she ordered.
    “Stay out of this, lady,” the scared one hissed.
    “Or what?”
    “My brother here is a trained boxer. He’ll—”
    Hatti didn’t wait for more. First these no-good kids go looting a jewelry store and then they threaten her with violence. Well, they’d chosen the wrong day to get on her bad side. She released her grip on the sleeve of the scaredy-cat and swung her handbag—which contained a can of corned beef for her supper—straight at the other brother. It landed fair and square on his jaw, so that his head jerked back and for a split second his eyes went walkabout in their sockets. He stumbled. His brother had to drop the jewelry to free his hands enough to prop the boxer up on his feet—he was