Free An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire Page B

enlisted to search the surrounding area centimetre by centimetre. By 10 pm Tuesday the vans and floodlights and army of searchers were gone. All that remained of them was a series of indentations and skid marks in the asphalt and mud dividing the grass from the road.
    Strathdee, population 3000, situated 450 kilometres south-west of Sydney and almost the same distance north-east of Melbourne, used to be the number-one stopping place for travellers on the road between the two cities. But thanks to the highway bypass completed five years ago, the thousands of cars, trucks and coaches that would once have stopped here for a stretch, bite to eat or overnight break now pass right on by. Several hotels and restaurants as well as a major service station complex have closed and a few hundred locals have moved, many of them to the comparatively thriving rural hub of Wagga Wagga, 50 kilometres west.
    Still, Strathdee is no ghost town. Its retailers and small businesses serve the surrounding cattle and sheep farmers and on any given night its four pubs, two hotels and large, sprawling caravan park are kept busy by a mixture of locals, long-distance truck drivers on their compulsory driving break and tourists taking it slow, stopping off to enjoy the quintessential Aussie country towns that lie between Australia’s biggest cities.
    On Wednesday, one such traveller, Glenys Morton of Cairns, was horrified to hear of the recent murder. ‘It’s such a lovely, calm little town,’ said Mrs Morton who, with her husband, is spending six months caravanning down the east coast of Australia. ‘It’s the last place you’d expect to hear about that kind of violence.’
    Arthur Tomesberry of the Strathdee Historical Society, however, has a different view. ‘The town has been safe as houses long as I’ve know it, and that’s coming up on seventy years, but the history of this area is a dark one. I’ve always felt, whenever I head out into the bush around here, that it’s somewhat haunted.’
    The ‘dark’ history Mr Tomesberry is referring to includes an alleged massacre of the Indigenous inhabitants in the early 1800s. ‘Bunch of newly arrived Scotsmen came through looking to set up farms. They cleared the locals off the land like they were vermin. There’s no documentation on it, but the stories have been passed down orally and every old family in the area knows something of what went on.’ Mr Tomesberry also points to the ‘reign of terror’ conducted by the bushranger known as Mad Dog Morgan in the 1860s as a contributor to the ‘eeriness’ of the area surrounding the quiet, tidy town.
    For the first-time visitor it’s impossible to say whether the stretch of sparse, bristly grass by the highway five minutes from town has always felt as desolate and crushing as it does today or if the atmosphere of despair set in the moment Bella Michaels drew her last, no doubt terrified, breath.

Thursday, 9 April

    May woke to her phone ringing, saw it was her brother Max and hit ignore. She made some coffee, slapped on some mascara and lippie, dressed in tight tan pants and a fitted, brown-and-white-checked shirt. Packing in Sydney she’d thought this outfit looked appropriately country, but now she was in the actual country she saw that it looked like a city stripper’s idea of a jillaroo. As if she didn’t already stand out here in the whitest bloody town in Australia. She swapped the tan pants for jeans. Now she looked like she was going to round up some senior citizens for a barn dance. Fuck. Tan pants, black t-shirt, black blazer. Not at all country but also not looking like she was trying to be. Okay.
    Her phone rang again as she was leaving the hotel. She leant against the car but it was already too hot for comfort. In April, for God’s sake. She unlocked the door and slid into the stifling interior before answering.
    â€˜Hey, Max, I’m on