What happens when ambition trumps the truth?

A town reeling in the wake of tragedy

An arsonist is on the loose in Colmstock, Australia, most recently burning down the town’s courthouse and killing a young boy who was trapped inside..

An aspiring journalist desperate for a story

The clock is ticking for Rose Blakey. With nothing but rejections from newspapers piling up, her job pulling beers for cops at the local tavern isn’t nearly enough to cover rent. Rose needs a story—a big one.

Little dolls full of secrets

In the weeks after the courthouse fire, precise porcelain replicas of Colmstock’s daughters begin turning up on doorsteps, terrifying parents and testing the limits of the town’s already fractured police force.

Rose may have finally found her story. But as her articles gain traction and the boundaries of her investigation blur, Colmstock is seized by a seething paranoia. Soon, no one is safe from suspicion. And when Rose’s attention turns to the mysterious stranger living in the rooms behind the tavern, neighbor turns on neighbor and the darkest side of self-preservation is revealed.

Praise for Anna Snoekstra

‘An impressive, high-concept debut crime thriller’

The Daily Mail

‘Brilliant’

Mary Kubica

‘Twisty, slippery, and full of surprises’

Lisa Unger

‘Readers who enjoy a creepy thriller that will keep them guessing will be unable to put this down’

Booklist

‘Smart, subtle red herrings and plenty of dark and violent secrets’

Library Journal

For my sister.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Praise

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part 2

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Part 3

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Part 4

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Acknowledgments

Extract

Copyright

Prologue

By the time the first wisps of smoke rose into the night, the arsonist had made their escape. The streets were empty. A dull orange glow emanated from the courthouse, not yet bright enough to challenge the moon or the neon beer signs of the tavern across the road.

The smoke thickened quickly. Angry, dense clouds were rising in rolls, and yet when a car drove past, its only response was to speed up.

Soon, orange flames grew from the roof, replacing the smoke. The fire was so dazzling now that a contracted pupil could no longer distinguish between the dark gray and the black of the sky. People emerged in time to witness the windows exploding, one after another in a series of dry pops. The fire extended its arms out of each window, waving crazily at the gathering crowd.

Sirens began, but no one could hear them. The sound of the fire overtook everything, its low, light roar like the warning sound made at the back of a cat’s throat. Two girls appeared from the tavern, late to the party. One ran toward the flames, asking if anyone was inside, if anyone had seen anything. The other stood still, shoulders fixed, her hand over her mouth.

When the firemen pulled up, the bright street looked like daytime. The crowd had stepped back, the ones who had been closest damp with sweat. Everyone’s eyes were wet. Perhaps from the ashes in the air, or perhaps because by now the news had circulated.

Yes, there was someone inside.

PART 1

’Tis a lesson you should heed: Try, try, try again. If at first you don’t succeed, Try, try, try again.

—Proverb

1

Laura hurried to keep up with Scott and Sophie, her schoolbag thumping against her back.

“Wait for me!” she yelled, but they never did.

She had hesitated at the memorial outside the burned-out courthouse. A big picture of Ben was surrounded by lots of flowers and toys. The flowers were all brown and dried up, but there was a little plush cat that would have fit perfectly in the palm of her hand. Ben didn’t need it; he was dead. But when she’d gone to take it, she’d looked up at the photo of him. His accusing brown eyes looked straight into hers. So she’d left the toy there, and the twins hadn’t waited and she’d had to run as fast as she could to make sure they didn’t leave her behind.

The sun bounced off the twins’ blond hair, making Laura squint. They were sword fighting with sticks now. Galloping and fencing up the street, screaming “En garde!” at regular intervals. They wore the same white-and-green school uniform as Laura, except her shirt was no longer quite white. It was a pale alabaster from being washed a few hundred times at least. It had belonged to Sophie once, and to their older sister, Rose, before her, as had her shorts.

Despite her every possession being a hand-me-down, Laura was unique. She knew that she was the cutest child in her kindergarten class. Her fringe was cut blunt, accentuating her large dark-lashed eyes. Her nose was a button, her mouth a little pink tulip. She lived for coos and pats on the head.

“Hurry up, Laura!” Scott yelled.

“My legs aren’t as big as yours!” she yelled back, her little black school shoes clip-clopping on the pavement as she hurried.

Then she saw it.

A bee.

She slid to a halt. It was the shape of a jelly bean, with mean-looking yellow and black stripes. The bee buzzed in front of her, blocking her path as it hovered near a bush of pungent purple flowers. Laura was overwhelmed by the urge to see what it felt like. Squishy, she was fairly sure. She wanted to pinch it between her thumb and forefinger to see if it would pop. Laura had never been stung by a bee but Casey at school had once and he had cried in front of everyone. It must hurt a lot.

Very slowly, she inched around it, walking like a crab on the very edge of the pavement until there were a good two meters between the bee and her.

When she turned, the street was empty. Sophie and Scott had turned one of the corners, out of Laura’s sight. If she really thought about it, she would probably know which one, but she couldn’t think. The suburban street seemed to be growing bigger and bigger and Laura felt like she was shrinking smaller and smaller. A sob rose slowly and heavily in her throat. She wanted to cry out for her mum.

“En garde!”

Laura heard it loud and clear from her left. She ran, as fast as she could toward the sound.

* * *

Sophie and Scott changed into T-shirts then continued their sword fight in the backyard. Laura wasn’t invited. They didn’t like to play “baby games,” even though Laura told them that now she was at school she was officially not a baby. She sat up at the kitchen bench, listening to the screams and laughter from outside and staring down at the three plates of crackers that Rose had left for their afternoon tea.

Laura could hear Scott yell so loud it came through the glass. “You’re dead!”

She watched as Sophie feigned a dramatic and violent death. It was a stupid game; she wouldn’t have wanted to play anyway. While they were distracted, Laura quickly reached over, took two crackers from each of their plates and stuffed them in her mouth.

She chewed happily, swinging her legs and kicking the bench. The house filled with the banging sound. She knew she was being naughty. If her mum was at home she’d be in big trouble. But she kept kicking, trying to leave some little brown scuffs to blame on either Sophie or Scott. She hadn’t decided yet.

Rose’s bedroom door opened and Laura stopped kicking. Her older sister stamped down the corridor. Some days Rose would want to braid Laura’s hair, or put makeup on her and tell her how pretty she was. Just like a little doll, she would say. Laura hoped it was one of those days but the angry stomps of Rose’s feet told her it wasn’t.

“How was school?” Rose pulled open the fridge door and put her head inside, as if she was trying to absorb all the cold.

“It was good. Nina said she could climb the big tree but she couldn’t and she fell out and broke her bum.”

Rose stuck her head out and looked at Laura, a can of Coke in her hand. Her lips were tugging up as if she was going to laugh.

“Really?”

“Yep!” Laura began to giggle, and then Rose laughed too. Laura liked it when she made Rose laugh. Rose was the prettiest girl Laura knew, even when she frowned, which was most of the time. When she laughed she looked like a princess.

“Poor kid,” Rose said. She stopped laughing and rested the Coke against her forehead.

Laura didn’t say anything. Nina hadn’t really fallen out of the tree. Actually, she had made it the whole way to the top and then bragged about it all afternoon.

“What was that banging noise before?”

“Dunno. Can we braid my hair, Posey?”

“You know I don’t like it when you call me that.”

“Sowwy,” she said. Sometimes when she pretended to still be a baby, Rose would like her more, but this time Rose didn’t even look at her. Instead, Rose cracked open the can and took a swig. Laura looked at the pictures on Rose’s arm. They went all the way from her elbow to her shoulder and looked like pen, but were there forever. Laura thought they were beautiful. Rose looked up at the clock and groaned.

“I’m going to be late. Fuck.” Rose slammed the can on the bench, and little specks of brown liquid came out.

Laura gasped. She didn’t know what that word meant exactly, but she knew it was one of the worst ones.

“I’m telling!”

Rose didn’t even care; she just walked right out of the kitchen and back to her room to get ready. She was definitely not going to braid Laura’s hair.

Laura jumped down from her stool. “I’m running away. You can’t stop me!”

She ran to the front door and opened it and slammed it shut. Then she very quietly tiptoed away, so Rose would think she had left.

Laura decided to hide under her bed. She wriggled down on the floor and pulled the box of her winter clothes in front of her. If she stayed there for long enough, someone would notice she was gone. They would look for her but they wouldn’t find her. Hiding was the one good thing about being small.

After a while, she started to get bored. It smelled funny under there, like the sports socks she wore all week long for her PE classes. She pulled herself back out. She was sick of this game now. As she sat cross-legged in the middle of her room, deciding whether it was the stuffed turtle’s or the fluffy dog’s turn to be played with, she noticed a shadow pass her window. Someone was coming to the front door of the house. Maybe her mum was home early!

She scampered to the entrance hall and opened the door but there was no one there at all. A wave of disappointment washed over her. Then she looked down. Someone had left her a present! She knelt down to look at it, wondering if it was a gift from Ben’s ghost. To say thank you for not taking his little cat.

2

The denim shorts and tank Rose wore to work were crumpled in the corner of her bedroom. They were in need of a wash but she hadn’t bothered today. Tugging the wrinkled clothes on, she could smell the sweat and beer caught in the fabric. By the end of her shift she’d reek.

Rose slipped her phone into her back pocket. Her fingers itched with its absence. All day, she had refreshed her email again and again and again. It was difficult to be patient.

She took her shoes out from under the bed. They were new, after the soles of her old ones had split from the canvas. They had been held together by threads and then she’d tripped on a beer keg and they’d ripped open like a mouth, her foot left exposed in the middle like a tongue. These new ones were cheap white sandshoes that already looked dirty. They had rubbed her heels raw last night. She winced a little as she pulled them on. Hopefully soon the material would soften, or her feet would harden.

Rose pulled her hair into a ponytail as she walked down the hall, her wrists flicking expertly. At first she didn’t notice Laura, who was sitting on the floor, her back to Rose. It wasn’t like her to be quiet. The only time she ever was was when she was hiding under her bed.

She knew she’d be late, but still Rose stopped. Laura looked so tiny when she was quiet. Her shoulders were narrow as she hunched forward over her crossed legs. Moving closer, Rose realized she was talking very, very softly in a strange high-pitched voice.

“No, I want chocolate, please. Thank you. Yum, yum, yum.”

“What are you doing?”

Laura looked up at her. “None of your beeswax!”

Rose squatted down next to Laura to see what was in her hands. It was an old-fashioned doll, with a porcelain face and hands and a cloth body. It was nothing like any of Laura’s other toys. Weirdly, she noticed that it looked just like Laura, big brown eyes, brown hair in a bob, cut sharply at its jaw.

“Why’d you cut its hair? You’ve ruined it,” she said.

“I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did.”

“Did not!”

“You did. You cut its hair so it would look like yours.”

“I didn’t! The person who gave it to me did it. They left it outside the front door. It’s a present for me.”

Rose touched the soft skin under Laura’s chin so that she would look up.

“Are you fibbing? I won’t be mad.”

Laura held the doll in front of her and put on the high-pitched voice again. “Posey’s just jealous. You’re all mine!”

A strange feeling crept inside Rose then, a sense of something not being right. She considered taking the doll away, but Laura looked so content playing with her tiny twin. She was being stupid, she decided; of course someone didn’t leave it for Laura. She must have borrowed it from another girl at school.

Leaving Laura to play, Rose left the house. She pulled the flywire screen door shut behind her and poked her finger through the broken netting to snip the lock closed. The thing was pointless. She remembered when she and her mother had installed it, years ago now, for security. These days it wouldn’t have a hope of keeping intruders out; it would barely even protect them against blowflies.

The door was just like everything else in her life, in this town. After the car factory shut down, Colmstock had quickly lost its sense of purpose. Once, it had been pleasant. The largest town in the area and right off the Melton Highway, it was considered a nice place to stop off for a night on your way to the city. Small enough to have a strong community, but big enough that you could walk down the street without knowing every person you passed.

These days everything in Colmstock was broken and ugly. People weren’t so friendly anymore. Too many residents had swapped a social drink or two for a meth habit. Crime rates were up, employment was down and yet the population stayed the same. It was as though everyone felt a sense of loyalty to the place. Well, Rose certainly didn’t. She was getting out of here. Even the idea of it made her smile. The idea that this wouldn’t be where she lived anymore, that she could have a whole different life. Realizing that her pace was slowing, she forced herself to stop dreaming. Her new life would start soon, but right now she was late for work.

Rose headed for Union Street, waving a hand over her face to keep away the flies. Even though the sun was up, she didn’t feel safe walking alone. There was a much quicker route, but it meant going past the fossickers. She wouldn’t do that no matter what time of day it was, so she had to circle around the long way. Slipping her phone out of her pocket, she refreshed her email again. Nothing. Her heart sank. They’d said they would get back to her today. She couldn’t bear to wait any longer. She had never been so ready for anything.

Since she was a kid, she’d always wanted to be a journalist. There had been a lot of setbacks, the local paper The Colmstock Echo closing being the worst one. Then she’d got an email saying she had been long-listed for a cadetship at the Sage Review, a national paper. A week later she was told she had been short-listed. Still, she hadn’t let herself get too excited. It was just too good, too amazing to happen to her. Then just eight days ago she was down to the final two. It was just her and one other hopeful person out there refreshing their emails today.

Her friend Mia was certain she would get it. Rose had laughed and made some joke about whether she’d seen it in her crystal ball, but really, she had believed her. In her gut, Rose knew she was going to get the cadetship, for the simple fact that no one could want it as much as she did. It just wasn’t possible.

She hurried past the lake, which was surrounded by dry knee-high grass, home to snakes and mosquitoes. It reeked of stagnant water. Next to it, the bare frame of a swing set stood, taken over by an insistent flowering weed. Someone had cut down the swings a few years back, leaving the skeleton of the frame. She wondered if the swings had been rehung in the backyard of one of the nearby houses or if they had been destroyed just for the entertainment of a few kids.

Rose turned away and picked up her pace, the rubber soles of her new shoes slapping against the sticky bitumen, trying not to remember how, once upon a time, when the water was still blue, she’d gone for picnics by that lake with her mother. Her mother, who had sat mute next to her new husband Rob James when he’d told Rose it was time for her to move out. It was okay, since the cadetship was in the city and board was part of the deal, but still, it had hurt.

She crossed over toward Union Street, careful to hop over the cane toad that was squished into the road. Here, people would swerve onto the wrong side in order to squash one. They’d stay there, flat as pancakes, covered in ants, until they turned stiff and hard like dry leather in the baking sun.

The main street of Colmstock was three blocks long. There was only one set of traffic lights and, farther up, a pedestrian crossing in front of the squat redbrick church. Not far from where she stood was a pub. She could see the dog racing on screens through one of its grimy windows, which were often splattered with blood from bar fights by the time it closed. There was the Chinese takeaway joint with its loud red lit-up sign, nestled between the Indian restaurant and the antiques store, which had both closed years ago.

Farther down was the primary school and the Colmstock council building. From where Rose stood, waiting for the lights to change so she could cross the street, she could almost see the burned-out courthouse. It stood between the library, which had escaped the blaze, and the grocery store, which hadn’t. In front of the steps to the courthouse was the memorial to the kid who had died there, Ben Riley. The picture of him was fading, bleached by the constant sun. The building was cordoned off with plastic tape. Barricades should have been put up, but it hadn’t happened yet.

Rose stared at the charred remains. Now that all the files inside the courthouse were ashes and the computers were melted blocks of plastic and wire, did that mean the scheduled trials wouldn’t go ahead? Did it mean that people who would have been criminals no longer were? Would the law be put on hold until they rebuilt the place? Even from here, she could smell it. The burned wood, bricks and plastic frying in the sun. It had been three weeks and the smell hadn’t gone away. Maybe that was just how Colmstock would smell from now on.

Her pocket buzzed. Forcing herself to keep her hand steady, she took out her phone. She half expected it to be some dumb text message from Mia or a spam email. But it wasn’t. She opened the Sage Review’s email, her mouth already tugging at the corners, ready to grin, ready to hold in a scream of excitement.

Dear Ms. Blakey,

Thank you for applying for the Sage Review Cadet Program. Unfortunately

Rose didn’t read the rest. She couldn’t.

Her mouth hadn’t caught up yet. She was still smiling a strange hollow smile as she crossed the road to Eamon’s Tavern Hotel.

3

Like many of the businesses on Union Street, Eamon’s Tavern Hotel had once been one of the grander houses of Colmstock. It was larger than the others and more imposing with its wide stoop and double windows. However, any opulence the place had once possessed was long gone. It had been due a fresh coat of paint about twenty years ago. Now the facade of the building was crumbling and dirty. In the windows were neon beer signs: Foster’s. VB. XXXX Gold.

Inside Bruce Springsteen played on repeat. The smell was musky: stale air and beer. The lighting was always dim, probably an attempt to hide the deterioration. Still, no darkness could hide the fact that everything was just a little bit sticky. It was the kind of place that had a few motel rooms around the back but no one would ever want to sleep there if they weren’t drunk off their arse.

The bar was half-full of tradies and cops downing their paychecks, sitting heavily on dark wooden chairs. The place was popular with the law. The police station next door served the smaller towns in the region as well as Colmstock, though the boys didn’t like to drink more than a stone’s throw from the station. Seeing the things they saw some days, even walking the ten paces to Eamon’s felt like too far for a beer. The other pub down the road was where you went if you wanted it to be clear that you didn’t like the company of cops. Still, anyone who still drank in public rather than staying home with a baggie of crystal and a glass pipe was considered an asset, no matter where they chose to do it.

Underneath a faded black-and-white portrait of the Eamon family, the original occupants of the house, was the L-shaped bar where Rose chatted with Mia. They had worked at the tavern together for years and had spent hundreds of hours doing exactly what they were doing now: leaning against the bar, drinking Coke and talking shit.

Laura wasn’t the only one who thought Rose looked like a princess. Senior Sergeant Frank Ghirardello, for one, was watching her from the corner of his eye as he drank his beer. Even with the tattoo up her tricep, she looked as pure and perfect as a movie star. That first sip of cold amber poured by Rose herself was the closest thing to bliss he knew. Frank had been keen on Rose from her very first shift at the tavern. She had served him a beer with foam six inches deep. The way she had looked at him, he was sure in that instant, she was The One. So he had taken the beer, tipped her and tried to drink the thing even though he had received a face full of froth with every sip. Frank had never been big on alcohol, but in the last few years he had developed a small drinking problem just to be close to Rose.

Around him, his squad discussed their theories on the most recent case, which had already replaced Ben Riley in their minds. Not for Frank. Some arsehole pyro had been causing a stir all year. It had been small blazes at first, a bush or a letter box smoking and smoldering. They’d liked to believe it was bored teenagers, although that had never been very likely. The high school had shut down this year because of low enrollment, the class sizes less than a quarter of what they used to be. Most of the teenagers either worked at the poultry farm or had adopted the pipe full-time. The ones on meth were still committing crimes, assault and robbery mostly, but none of them seemed to have the patience to light a fire just for the joy of watching it burn.

Then, last month, it had escalated very suddenly. The psycho had been too trigger-happy with his lighter and burned down half a block of Union Street. Ben had only been thirteen, and he was what they called “special.” “Brain damaged” was the real term. The boy acted more like a little kid than a teenager, but he was the darling of Colmstock. A smile for everyone. His parents owned the grocery store and sometimes he would play in the storage shed behind the courthouse next door. He had made it into a little cubbyhole. Poor kid had no idea the smoke meant run.

At first he’d been sure it was Mr. Riley, his dad. The guy had made a mint from the insurance and Frank suspected that he wouldn’t have been opposed to lighting up his own son if it came to that kind of cash. But he had an airtight alibi. Frank had checked it and no way it was bogus.

Around him, the other men were joking now. Enough was enough. It was no time to be laughing. He cut into the conversation.

“Any headway?” He was looking at Steve Cunningham, who was the council chair. He knew what the answer was going to be, but he asked Steve every time he saw him anyway. He needed them to demolish the wreckage of the courthouse; it’d been almost a month. The rest of the group stopped talking and looked at Steve.

“Not yet,” Steve said, and even in the dim light Frank could see his shiny bald patch reddening. “We’re still trying to bring together the funds. It’ll happen.”

“Right,” he replied.

“I’ll get the next round,” Steve said, standing. “Frank?”

“I’ll pass, mate.” He knew it wasn’t Steve’s fault, but he liked to have someone to blame. That black mess felt personal to him. It was a sign, blaring his failure to the whole town.

Frank had seen a lot of bad things. Of course he had. But seeing Mrs. Riley, telling her the fire was already too bad, that he couldn’t go inside, that he couldn’t save her son. The expression on her face as she was forced to stand back and let her child burn. He’d never forget it.

He ignored his friends again and watched as Rose finished pouring Steve’s round and went back to flicking through the newspaper. She was talking quietly to Mia Rezek, whose father, Elias, had been a cop himself before he’d had a stroke about five years back. The two of them were acting as if they were hanging around at home rather than on the clock. Rose smoothed a hand over her hair. The movement was so simple, so casual, yet it made his throat constrict. God, he wanted her. It was almost unbearable.

He leaned back in his chair. The tavern was just quiet enough for him to hear what she was saying.

“‘With Saturn lingering in Aquarius, nothing is off-limits,’” Rose read. “‘Something unexpected will surprise you today.’” She snorted back a laugh. “Look out, single gals.”

“It doesn’t say that,” he heard Mia say. Then their voices quieted.

Raising his head, Frank saw they were looking over at his table. He quickly downed the dregs of his drink and made his way toward them.

“Ladies, what are you staring at us for? See something you like?”

He flexed his biceps at Rose, but she wasn’t even looking at him. She was already pouring his beer. Mia had noticed it though, and she smiled. He noticed the pity in her eyes and hated it.

“Don’t waste your breath, Frankie,” she said, leaning her elbows on the bar. “Rose is getting out of here.”

“I still have a few weeks, don’t I?” he asked. He was hoping she, or Mia, might give him news on the program Rose was hoping to get into. They’d talked about it like it was already guaranteed, but he didn’t think it was. Or at least, that was what he hoped. His life would be so empty without her.

Looking at Rose, he saw her hand shake ever so slightly, spilling a droplet of ale onto her wrist. She rubbed it onto the seat of her shorts and handed him the beer.

“Something like that,” she said. He was about to question her further, probe her like he would a perp in his interview room, but Mia interrupted.

“Let’s see, then.” She picked up his empty glass from the bar and peered into the foam inside it intently.

“Anything about my love life in there?” he said, looking at Rose again. Her smile back at him was thin. He should stop; he knew it. He should ask her out for real, not keep making these lame, obvious jokes. He was past thirty now and he was acting like a horny teenager. It was embarrassing.

“Well,” said Mia, spinning the glass around, “I’m seeing a lot of positivity here. It’s telling me that nothing is off-limits. That something unexpected is coming. Something that will surprise you.”

They looked at each other, not knowing that he was in on the joke. It didn’t matter; he took the opportunity.

“Is it an invitation for a double date? I think I could convince Bazza.”

Frank’s partner, Bazza, a newly-minted sergeant, was a good-looking guy. He was tall, he had muscles and he used to be one of their best footy players a few years after Frank had. Frank loved him like a brother, but even he knew the guy was more Labrador than man. His eyes lit up with pure delight every time Frank mentioned lunch, he eyed strangers with suspicion and he was as loyal as he was thick. Frank was fairly sure if he told the man to sit he would do it, without a thought.

They turned to look at him, just as Bazza burped and then chuckled to himself.

“We’ll let you know,” Rose said, and Frank smiled as if he was only kidding, turning before the hurt could show on his face. He had to grow some balls and ask the girl out properly. Otherwise she’d leave town and that would be that.

Behind him he heard Mia say, “You know, I think Baz is kind of hot.”

His shoulders tensed, hoping like hell that Rose wouldn’t agree.

Thankfully, he heard, “He’s a moron.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

They laughed quietly, and he sat back at his table, thankful it wasn’t him they were laughing at, and took a sip of his beer. He could picture it: Mia with Bazza and him with Rose, barbecues on the days off; Bazza at the BBQ; Mia tossing a salad; Rose bringing him a beer and sitting on his knee as he drank it.

4

Rose heaved the keg onto its side. It was heavy, pulling on the sockets of her arms and tightening the ligaments in her neck. She let it fall the last few centimeters, for no other reason than to enjoy the violent thud as it hit the cement floor. The windowless storage room at the rear of the tavern smelled like damp. Squeezed into the small space were the beer kegs, a large freezer full of frozen meat and fries, and a few boxes full of dusty beer glasses.

Bending over, butt high in the air, she pushed the keg around the tight corner into the back corridor with little baby steps. She looked ridiculous. If Frank could see her now maybe he would stop looking at her like she was hot shit. Or maybe he’d get off on it. The thought of that made her straighten up. She hated having men’s eyes on her. It made her feel as though she didn’t own her own body. As if by staring her up and down they were possessing her flesh. If it weren’t so damn humid she’d wear long pants and turtlenecks and never, ever shave her legs.

She was starting to get blisters. Every step she took her heels grated down against the rough fabric of her shoes, slicing through another layer of skin. She was starting to wince as she gently kicked the keg down the corridor. She passed the stain on the carpet from where Mark Jones had puked up his beer and the crack in the wall that seemed to be getting slightly bigger every day. She tried to remind herself that sometimes she didn’t totally hate this job. Quiet nights goofing around with Mia could be fun. But right now she wanted to pull her hair out. Every night, for years and years, the same bloody thing, one shift identical to another. The only difference was the aging of the patrons.

The numbness she’d felt earlier had worn off now. Her stomach was crumpling inward with shame and disappointment at the email from the Sage Review. She hadn’t told Mia yet; she couldn’t. If she did, then it would be real. Mia would ask her what she was going to do, where she was going to live, and she didn’t have the answers. Instead, she kept her body moving and tried to breathe. Rose had written about everything she could think of. She’d written about the financial crisis and its effects on her town; she’d written about the search for the arsonist who had killed poor Ben Riley and burned down the courthouse. She’d written film reviews, celebrity gossip and, worst of all, attempted an awkward video series on YouTube.

Regardless of the topic, the rejections were always the same. “Thank you for submitting...” they would begin, and already she knew the rest. Everyone always said the only person who stood in your way to success was yourself. She knew that; she really did. Rose just needed one good story, something truly unique. If she just had a great story, they couldn’t say no.

This cadetship had been made for her; she’d fit the requirements exactly. It had been so perfect, so exactly right.

The corner of the keg whacked against the wall, causing a framed picture to fall to the floor.

“Fuck.” She hadn’t been paying enough attention. She couldn’t cope with this. There was now a large crack in the glass across the photograph of the Eamon family: the husband with his war medals, the wife with her strained smile, the little curly-haired girl with her curly-haired doll and the boy with his frilly shirt. Rose hung it back on the wall.

The feeling in her stomach was turning to pain, and she was struggling to swallow it away. It was like acid reflux, spilling out from her gut in a poisonous torrent and into her throat.

She put her head into the kitchen. “All right if I take my break now?”

“Sure,” the manager, Jean, said, not turning around as she chopped a mound of pale tomatoes.

Sometimes she took her break up at the bar, attempting to eat something Jean had made and continuing to chat with Mia and whoever else was sitting there. But if she was going to get through today she needed to have a few minutes to herself. She grabbed the first-aid kit off the shelf and went back into the corridor. She pushed open one of the motel room doors and sat on the end of the bed. Carefully she slid one of her shoes off and examined her heel. The skin was bright red. A blister was forming, a soft white pillow puffing up to protect her damaged skin. Carefully, she traced her finger over it, shuddering as she touched the delicate new skin.

Unclipping the first-aid kit, she rummaged through the out-of-date antiseptic and the bandages still in their wrapping until she found the box of Band-Aids in the bottom. She pulled one out and stuck it on her skin, stretched it over her blister and then fastened the other side down. The process of putting on the Band-Aid reminded her of being a little kid. Of being looked after, of knowing there was someone there to make everything okay. Her throat constricted and she couldn’t hold it in. Holding a hand over her face to muffle the sound, she began to cry. Horrible, aching sobs rose from inside her.

Clenching her eyes closed, she tried to force herself to stop, but she couldn’t. She was so tired, too tired. Her eyes turned hot, tears overfilling them and burning down her cheeks. Crying was easier than not crying.

She stood, looking up to pull the door closed so there would be no chance they would hear her at the bar. Through her watery vision she saw someone. A man, standing in the hallway, staring at her. She tried to reset her face, wiping her cheeks with her hands.

“I’m sorry,” he said and, weirdly, he looked like he might cry too. She stood, her hand still on the doorknob, staring at him, not knowing what to say, so aware of her crumpled forehead, of a tear inching down one of her wet cheeks. His eyes flicked away from hers and her face prickled with humiliation.

She pulled the door closed and sat back on the bed. Staring at the back of the door, she took some deep breaths. The surprise of seeing him had made the crying stop, at least, but now her heart was hammering in her chest. Rubbing her hands over her face, she wondered who that guy had been. She’d never seen him before. That wasn’t common in Colmstock. Not just that. He didn’t look like the other men in town. His face was so unusual, she wasn’t sure what his ethnicity was, and he was wearing a T-shirt with a band’s logo on it and blue stovepipe jeans that looked brand-new. Definitely not the usual uniform for the men around here. She crept over to the door again and opened it an inch, peering out, sure he was going to be standing there still. He wasn’t. But she noticed a Do Not Disturb sign hanging from the knob of the other motel room. Of course, they had a guest.

Closing the door, she went into the bathroom to throw some cold water onto her face. She had been rejected before; she should know how to handle it by now. If she could make it through the rest of her shift, she’d figure everything else out tomorrow. That was all she had to focus on now, getting to the end of the shift. She stood still, centering on just the feeling of her bare feet on the carpet. Then quickly and cleanly she put the Band-Aid on her other heel and, gritting her teeth, pulled her shoes back on.

Back in the kitchen, Jean was flipping a burger on the grill. It sizzled and smoked. Rose’s nose felt itchy with the acrid smell of burning, but she didn’t say anything. She would never tell Jean how to cook and not just because she was her boss. No one would say a word to Jean even if their meat was as black and rubbery as a tire, which was often the case. Even though she was nearing sixty, no one would want to cross her. You’d know it if she didn’t like you.

Rose still remembered the one and only time someone did insult one of Jean’s steaks. Some dickhead friend of Steve Cunningham’s had demanded a refund. He’d told Jean that if she wanted to cook bush tucker she should go back to her campfire. That man had never got his refund, and he had not been allowed to set foot in Eamon’s again. Rose herself would have made sure of that if she’d had the chance, though Jean never needed any help. Even thinking about the guy now made Rose’s blood boil. Steve was lucky; he’d apologized repeatedly to Jean, and Rose could tell he meant it, so eventually he was allowed back.

“Do we have a guest?” Rose asked as she bent down to install the keg she’d brought in earlier.

“Yep. William Rai.” You could hear the pack-a-day habit in Jean’s voice.

“What’s he like?” Mia called from behind the bar.

“Quiet.”

Rose wiped her wet hands on her shorts and went around to the bar. She put a jug under the beer tap and began running the froth out, happy to be away from the stink of singed meat.

“Have you seen him yet?” Mia asked, quietly.

“Yeah,” Rose said. His eyes had looked so shiny, but surely that was just the light.

“And?”

“What? You think he might be your soul mate?” she joked.

Mia shrugged. “You never know.”

Rose smiled and leaned back, watching the white creamy froth overflow from the jug as it slowly turned to beer.

“So I’m guessing you haven’t heard back from Sage yet?” Mia said, looking at her carefully.

Rose flicked off the beer tap. “No.”

“Don’t stress about it—one more day won’t make a difference.”

Rose looked up at Mia and smiled feebly. She wanted to tell her, she really did, but she was afraid she might start crying again in front of all their customers. Just as she was opening her mouth to ask if they could talk about it later, the tavern went silent. It was the sudden, loud kind of silence that felt wholly unnatural. Mia and Rose looked around.

It was the guest. Will. He was paused in the doorway, every single pair of eyes in the bar on him. Rose had been right before—this man was not from Colmstock. He took the stares in, not appearing unsure or uncomfortable, and sat down at the far table. The cops turned back to their beers and the talking resumed.

“Wow. He’s not bad,” Mia said quietly.

“He’s all yours,” she told Mia. She could feel the humiliation crawling back. He must think she was such a weirdo, sitting there with the door open, crying. Hopefully he wasn’t staying long.

Rose watched Mia peel a plastic menu from the pile. She walked swiftly over to Will’s table and put the menu down in front of him. Mia put her hand on her hip and, even without being able to see her face, Rose could see that she was flirting. The girl was hardly subtle. Will smiled at her, only politely, Rose noticed, and pointed at something on the menu. He didn’t know yet not to order Jean’s food. His eyes flicked away from Mia, and he looked straight at Rose, making her breath catch ever so slightly. She turned away and busied herself washing glasses.

By the time his meal was ready, Mia was on her break. She was sitting up at the bar, eating what she normally did for dinner: a burger bun, the insides slick with tomato sauce and nothing else.

“Order up,” Jean called.

Mia shrugged at Rose, her mouth full. “I donf fink he fanfies me.”

Rose looked around, trying to think of a way to avoid a second encounter with the stranger. Maybe she could ask Jean to do it? But she knew then they’d want to know why and telling them would be even worse.

Grabbing the plate, fingers below and thumb on top, she strode toward him. Looking down at it, she saw that he seemed to have ordered a burger without the meat, just limp lettuce, pale tomatoes and cheese on the white bun. He was leaning back in his chair, reading a book, but she couldn’t see the title. As she stepped in front of his light, he looked up at her.

“Here you go,” she said.

He leaned forward. “Thanks.” He paused. “I wanted to ask...are you all right? Before I—”

“I’m fine,” she snapped. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

She looked him right in the eye then, daring him to mention what he’d seen. He didn’t.

“Just checking,” he said and half smiled, creating little crinkles around his dark eyes.

* * *

At closing time, when all the stools were on the tables and the floor was mopped and drying, Springsteen was singing about dreams and secrets and darkness on the edge of town, and Mia and Rose sat on the bar, drinking beers. Their aching feet feeling blissful now that they weren’t on the hard concrete. Jean stood behind them, counting the money in the register.

“How long is our guest staying?” Rose asked, trying to sound casual.

“He’s booked in for a week,” Jean muttered, writing down figures on an order pad.

“You keen?” Mia asked.

“Nah, the opposite. He seemed like a dickhead. Really patronizing.”

The sound of something banging on the window interrupted them. It was Frank, rapping his knuckles on the glass. He waved good-night, his brown eyes so hopeful that he looked more like a small scruffy street mutt begging for a scrap than a policeman in his thirties. They waved back.

“That man needs to take it down a notch,” Jean said, slight disapproval in her voice.

Rose didn’t respond.

“He’s a nice guy,” Mia said, pushing it.

“It’s not about that,” Rose said. “There’s just no point. This won’t be where I end up.” She took a swig. Mia watched her, carefully.

“You heard back from Sage, didn’t you?”

Rose didn’t look at her; she couldn’t.

“I was so sure you had this one,” Mia said.

Rose felt warmth on her hand and looked down. Jean had placed her weathered palm on top of Rose’s fingers.

“You’re a fighter—it’ll happen for you. It might take a while, but it will happen.”

For the first time that night, the tightness in Rose’s throat loosened.

Jean withdrew her hand and placed two envelopes between them on the bar.

“Patronizing or not, our guest tips well.”

* * *

The air felt cooler as Mia and Rose stepped off the porch outside. The cicadas were trilling loudly. Despite everything, Rose felt a sense of victory. She’d done it. She’d got through the shift, and now she could go home to grieve, while she still had a home. She looked back at the tavern as they walked toward Mia’s car, wondering again about the guest, Will. He must be a relative of someone, down for some family occasion. She couldn’t think of any other reason someone would want to stay in this town for a whole week.

“Oh.” Mia paused next to her.

“What?”

Mia ran to her beat-up old Auster and pulled a parking ticket from the windscreen. She looked at her watch.

“I was only three minutes late!”

“They must have been waiting for it to tick over.”

They looked around. The street was empty. Getting in the car, Mia held the ticket up to the interior light.

“It’s more than I even made on my shift.”

Rose took her envelope from her bag and put it on the dashboard.

“You don’t have to,” Mia said, but Rose could already hear the relief in her voice.

“I know.”

They didn’t talk as Mia drove. The radio played some terrible new pop song that Rose had heard one too many times, but she knew better than to mess with the stereo in Mia’s car. She stared out the window, looking forward to the oblivion of sleep. She slid her heels out of her shoes. Tomorrow, she decided, she wouldn’t wear shoes at all. The tavern was closed on Tuesdays, so maybe she wouldn’t even get out of bed.

The car went past the fossickers. At first it was just a few tents set up in and around a gutted old cottage that had been there for forever. Now it was a real community. People lived in cars; structures were set up. Some people just slept under the stars. It was warm enough. They kept to themselves, so the cops didn’t seem to bother them, even though they all sported missing teeth and raging meth addictions. Rose hadn’t known why they were called the fossickers at first, but then found a couple of years back that they fossicked for opals and sold them on the black market. That was how they got by. Her stomach clenched with fear and she looked down at her hands. She would never end up there.

“So, I heard some great gossip today.” Mia couldn’t stand to sit in silence for too long. No matter how miserable she was, Mia always seemed to feel better when she was talking. “Maybe you can write your next article about it? Working at a cop bar has got to be good for something.”

Unlike Mia, Rose often craved solitude. She didn’t need to answer anyway. Mia usually seemed perfectly happy to just listen to the sound of her own voice chirping away.

“Apparently someone has been leaving porcelain dolls on doorsteps of houses, and the dolls look like the little girls that live in the house. How freaky is that?”

Rose snapped her head around.

“The cops are worried it might mean something. Like maybe it’s a pedophile marking his victims.”

Rose gaped at her.

“What?” asked Mia.

Rose scrambled through her bag, trying to find her cell phone, the image of Laura in her mind, sleeping cheek to cheek with her tiny porcelain twin.

5

“Help! Stop it!” the child wailed.

Frank had tried asking nicely. Now he was prying the doll out of the little girl’s hands. When he’d imagined being a cop, he’d never thought fighting kids for their toys would be part of the job.

“She’s mine!” Laura yelled, just as Frank gave the thing a proper tug, released it from the kid’s iron grip.

Laura stared up at him, looking more angry than upset, and kicked him right in the shins.

“Laura!” Rose yelled at the little shit as she ran out of the room and slammed her bedroom door.

Frank rubbed his shin. She’d got him right on the bone. Truth was, it was throbbing.

“Sorry,” said Rose, looking him up and down. He stopped rubbing his leg and grinned.

“No stress,” he said. He should have guessed Rose’s sister would be like that. Cutest damn kid you ever saw but a real little fighter. When she grew up, she was going to break hearts. That was for sure.

Frank could see the worry in Rose’s eyes, and if he were honest, he liked it. Rose had never looked at him like this before, like he had something to give, like he could protect her. Ben Riley’s mother and the arsonist felt a million miles away now.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“About what?” asked Bazza. Frank won the fight not to swear under his breath. That guy could be an absolute moron sometimes.

He put a hand on Rose’s soft arm. Every part of him wanted to slide his hand up and down her arm, feel her warm unblemished skin. He wondered whether her whole body was that same pale honey, or whether the parts of her that didn’t see the sun were still the color of cream. He could feel his pants tighten ever so slightly.

“I really don’t think it’s anything to worry about,” he said, letting go of her before it really got out of hand. He was here as a professional.

“That’s not what you said at the station yesterday,” Bazza interjected from next to him.

“Shut up, Baz,” he said out of the side of his mouth, his budding erection deflating instantly. He smiled apologetically at Rose. “You’ve told your mum about this, right?”

“Yeah, but she’s doing a double today.”

“We’ll let you know if there are any developments, but if you’re feeling at all worried, you can call me and I’ll be here in a flash.”

* * *

“What did we say about sharing police information?” Frank said to Bazza as they walked back to the car. The sky above them was overcast, but still it was hot and slimy. Half-moons of sweat hovered under each of his armpits.

“Sorry,” mumbled Bazza.

Usually that would be the end of it, but not this morning. “It’s not okay. You’ve been a cop long enough now, mate. You should know better.”

The guy was taller than him, and much broader, but Frank had never once felt threatened by him. Right now, he was giving Frank the round-shouldered, hurt look like you’d get from a kid caught stealing from the biscuit tin. Frank stared back at him like he was just a piece of shit on his shoe. Bazza’s lip jutted out and he went to sit in the car to sulk. Good. Let him stew and think about what it meant to wear the badge.

Frank turned for one last look at the small white brick building. The lawn had not been cut for a long time. Around the side of the house were monstrous, spindly bushes growing around pieces of broken furniture and an old dog kennel.

To other people the place probably looked like a bit of an eyesore. Not to Frank. This was Rose’s house, and he had been allowed inside. He could smell her everywhere. He’d thought that clean, spicy scent was unique just to her, but it must have been the detergent she used because her whole house had that same smell. It was heaven. Now he could imagine what her life was like when she wasn’t at work. Everything in that house, even the toaster, had a strange erotic quality. He only wished that he had got a look at her bedroom.

God, he could do with a drink right now. Just to calm down. The day was only just starting and already it felt like too much. He was hungry for that look in Rose’s eyes. That look like he could protect her from the filth of this world. It made him feel taller, broader, and he could, if she let him. He would protect her from everything. She would never have to pull another beer again.

Although his mouth was already watering, he banished the thought of beer from his mind and pulled the trunk open to grab an evidence bag. He flicked it to let the air in and then took the doll out from under his arm. God, the thing was freaky to look at. He had no idea why that kid had fought so hard to keep it. He was a grown man and it gave him the major willies. Its eyes were wide and glassy and its hair felt too soft. He hoped like hell it wasn’t real human hair. Frank was used to wife bashers and drug addicts; he was used to the guy with bloody knuckles being the one who threw the punch. These dolls were something else completely. More than anything, it was bizarre. It wasn’t only that he didn’t know who the pervert was. He had no idea what on earth he was doing, and even less of an understanding of why. Hell, right now he’d take the arsonist over this case. At least that was cut-and-dried police work. Leaving anonymous little gifts for children wasn’t something they’d ever covered in training.

He squeezed the awful thing into the evidence bag. The plastic stretched across its face, its open mouth gaping as though it was trying to breathe. Frank tried not to think about how much it looked like an asphyxiated child. Despite himself, he shuddered as he snapped the trunk shut.

6

Rose didn’t have a chance to think while she got the kids ready for school.

“Shoes on,” she said to Laura as she passed her bedroom. The little girl was sitting on her bed in her socks, arms crossed. She was still angry about Frank taking her doll away.

In the kitchen, Sophie was attempting to put peanut butter on bread, but somehow had managed to get most of it on her hands, cheeks and the bench. Their mother had recently given her the new chore of making the school lunches, but Rose always ended up doing it. She nudged Sophie out of the way with her hip; it was quicker just to do it herself.

The piece of sandwich Sophie had attempted to make had holes in it from where she’d pressed too hard with the knife. Rose folded it over and took a large bite as she lined up six slices of white bread. She chewed, enjoying the salty crunchiness, as she neatly spread each slice. The peanut butter had to reach each corner; she knew that from when she was a kid. She finished off her own mangled sandwich as she neatly cut each of the three in front of her into two even triangles. Behind her, she heard shrill giggles.

“What are you doing?” she said, turning to the twins. Sophie was lying on the floor and Scott was crouching over her. They stopped and looked at her, Sophie rubbing her wet cheek.

“He was hungry,” said Sophie, and they burst out laughing again.

“Were you eating the peanut butter off her face?”

“Maybe,” said Scott.

“Gross! Hurry up.”

She quickly wrapped the sandwiches in cling film, then tossed them into the schoolbags that had been dumped next to the front door yesterday afternoon. She remembered Bazza tripping on them when he and Frank had come in this morning. The thought made her wince. She hated the idea that they’d seen where she lived. Somehow, with them standing there, the stains on the carpet and the crumbs on the bench top seemed magnified.

She picked up Laura’s bag and went into Laura’s seemingly empty room. Rose knew better.

“Don’t leave without her!” she yelled, hearing the twins opening the front door.

“But she takes forever.”

Rose placed the backpack on the ground and knelt down in front of the bed, taking the small scuffed-up shoes off the carpet.

“Can I have a foot?” she asked softly, and one of Laura’s little socked feet emerged from under the bed. She slid the shoe on and gently did up the buckle.

“Are you angry with me?” she asked.

There was no response, but another shoeless foot was extended out from under the bed. Rose took it in her hand.

“Fair enough,” she said as she slipped the white-socked foot into the shoe. There was no point in trying to explain to Laura. Rose would prefer her sister feel angry than afraid of whoever had chosen her for that strange present.

She held Laura’s ankles in her hands and carefully slid her out from under the bed. Laura ignored what was happening and stared at the ceiling, her cheeks blotchy and red from all the angry crying, her eyelashes still wet.

Rose took her under her arms and, pulling her up onto her feet, kissed her on the top of her head. “Off you go, then.”

The twins banged and skidded out of the house, Laura trotting quietly behind them. Rose often felt sad watching her siblings walk to school. Laura was always left lagging behind. Like Rose herself. She closed the door against the heat and noise, and the house went totally silent except for the low hum of the refrigerator.

Rose padded across the carpet to her bedroom. Standing in the doorway, she didn’t enter. Her suitcase was in the corner of her room. It was open, her best clothes folded inside. She’d packed. Actually packed. That was how sure she’d been about the cadetship. She was such an idiot.

There was no point in unpacking. Cadetship or not, her mother and Rob had told her she had to move out by the time Rob came home from his latest haul. That was in just one week. Part of her thought that maybe if she told her mum what had happened, if she asked for a bit more time, her mother would relent.

Really, though, she’d long stopped thinking of this place as her home. She had to start looking for a rental, but even the idea of it made her exhausted. Her sleep had been hollow, never dipping far from the surface of consciousness. Frank had promised he’d come over first thing the next morning when she’d called him in a panic from Mia’s car last night. When she did get home she had quietly pulled the doll out of Laura’s sleeping fingers and put it on the highest shelf, its glass eyes staring at her. The strangeness of it, her own inability to understand what the implications were, meant that no matter how tired her bones felt, her mind had whirred on. She had listened to her mother get up at 5:00 a.m. to go to work. Heard her soft footsteps down the hall, her sigh, barely audible, from the dark kitchen. She hadn’t moved. She’d remained motionless in her clammy sheets, listening as her mother’s car backed out of the driveway, the headlights illuminating her bedroom. Then her thoughts turned to dreams and she was asleep without even knowing it. Soon after she had awoken sharply to Laura’s screams.

Jumping out of bed, she’d realized the screams were out of anger, not fear. Laura had found the doll eventually and was almost crushed in the process by climbing up the bookcase. She only had the thing for about fifteen minutes when Frank and Bazza had pulled up.

Rose was still hovering in her doorway when the home phone rang. She ran back into the kitchen and snatched it up.

“Rose?” It was her mother, sounding breathless. “I just got your message. The police were at the house? Is everyone okay?”

“Yep, but everything’s fine. They just came because someone left Laura a doll.”

There was silence down the line, and Rose braced herself.

“You called the police because of a toy?” The panic was totally gone from her voice now.

“The police were worried, Mum. They say that there’s been a whole bunch of kids getting dolls and—”

“Rose.” Her mum’s voice was quieter then. Rose imagined her in the break room at the poultry factory, her hairnet still on, her body turned away from the rest of the workers’ pricked ears. “We’ll discuss this when I get home.”

The line went dead. Rose slammed the phone back onto the cradle. Her mum never listened to her anymore. Rose ignored the peanut butter smeared across the counter and went back to her room, diving onto the bed. Turning away from the suitcase, she squeezed her eyes shut. The sheets beneath her felt sticky from her restless night.

Rose knew the conversation that was going to happen with her mother when she got home. She knew the way her mum would look at her too, like she was an inconvenience, like she was just another frustration on an already-long list. It hadn’t always been like that.

It was less than a month after the rumor began that the Auster Automotive Factory would close that her mother had started seeing Rob. He was a long-range trucker, and looked the part. Rob was someone her mother would never have fancied before. But when a steady wage became a rarity in the town, Rob became a catch. Back then, Rose didn’t even care. She didn’t care when he moved in, or even when they announced that her mother was pregnant with twins. Rose was seventeen, almost finished high school and stupid enough to be excited about the future. The idea that she would fail to get a scholarship, and what with no savings and no financial support wouldn’t be moving out of town anytime soon, hadn’t even crossed her mind. Ever since then she’d been living on borrowed time.

She pulled her curtains shut and put on the fan. She could smell the ripe stink of her own sweat and it made her even more frustrated. She had been totally right to call the police, and now her mum was angry with her.

Again, the memory of the last time she’d seen Rob surfaced. She’d come out of her bedroom, where she basically lived these days, and her mother and Rob had been sitting in the living room. They’d asked her to sit down. Rob had actually said the words our home, when he’d told her it was time for her to get her own place. Rose was no longer part of the “our,” even though she’d lived in the house for seventeen years longer than he had. Her mother had said nothing, but she’d nodded along with him and hadn’t looked Rose in the eye.

The fan whirred, blowing cold air onto her sweaty neck and making her hair flutter around her face. The pillow felt soft against her cheek. She closed her eyes, relishing the silence and the dark, trying to let herself dissolve into it. To forget her life, just for a moment. But she couldn’t. Every time her mind felt clear, she’d see that porcelain face. Or Will’s expression when he’d caught her crying. Or, worst of all, she’d see herself, staking a claim to some earth near the fossickers. She opened her eyes. It was too stuffy for this. Sitting up, she pulled the window ajar, letting some air in. Fuck it. Just because her life was depressing didn’t mean she had to be. She was going to figure this out. Besides, it wasn’t like she even had a choice. She had to do something.

She slipped on some sandals and put her phone and notebook in her pocket. She left the house, banging the screen door shut behind her. The air was heavy with humidity. Listening to the slap of her shoes against the road, she walked briskly down the street. The tiredness lifted off her like a blanket. It was good to get outside. The morning was getting hot, but at least there was movement in the air. Sitting at home in the house where she grew up, but where she no longer felt welcome, was hardly comforting. From a distance, she heard the echoes of children squealing and laughing. They must have been stragglers, late to school, or perhaps playing truant. She and Mia used to do that sometimes, she remembered, back when there was a high school in Colmstock. Things were so different then, it was hard to believe it was the same place. They’d had a whole group of friends. All of them, except for Rose, had their futures mapped out perfectly. They’d graduate high school and then go to work at Auster’s. It wasn’t a bad job, and the pay was good. High school had felt like their last chance for freedom.

Walking past the football oval, Rose remembered what it used to look like. It had been perfectly green, and one night, they’d done doughnuts with one of their fathers’ pickup trucks. Rose and Mia had lost touch with their friends very quickly after their final year. Two of them had married each other and were on to their third kid, Mia’s boyfriend had killed himself, and one of them, Lucie, had moved out of town for three years only to come back to Colmstock pregnant and alone. Rose had tried calling her, but she’d never called her back and so that was that. Looking out over the field, where the dead yellow grass was coming up in clumps, it seemed incredible that it could be the same place. The stands were covered in graffiti, and the seats were broken. But she could almost still feel the wind in her hair, still hear Mia’s and Lucie’s squeals of delight echoing in her ears.

Colmstock had once thrived as a farming area, but in World War I, more than two-thirds of the young men who left didn’t come back. The town had almost been deserted then, and Rose wished it had. It would have saved them all a lot of disappointment. But it hadn’t, because someone had stumbled on deposits of oil shale in the late 1930s. The rest of the country was still recovering from the Depression, so people flocked to the middle-of-nowhere town to work in the mines. The car factory was built around then, and Colmstock had become a very wealthy town. You could tell which buildings were from that period: grand white facades that were now cracked and weathered.

The mine closed in the eighties. Something to do with cheaper alternatives being discovered, but Rose couldn’t quite remember what they were. The mine entrance was still there. A wide black mouth leading into oblivion. It wasn’t too far from the lake near Rose’s house. When she and Mia had been bored kids they used to sneak under the fence around it and dare each other to jump inside.

The council building was one of the big white buildings, but more important, it was one of the few places in town with air-conditioning. An old woman with a hunch and thick Coke-bottle glasses was sitting on a bench out the front; she smiled hopefully at Rose, who nodded in return. This woman was often hanging around, and if you weren’t quick you’d get stuck listening to her rattle on all day about her cat. Rose stepped inside, and her skin prickled cold. It was a lovely feeling. She stood in front of the notice board, her eyes closed, feeling her blood cool.

This was where the office for the local newspaper used to be. The Colmstock Echo—Rose had done work experience there when she was in high school. Everything about it had felt so right. Going out and finding the real story. The smell of ink on printing day. She’d started working there during the day after she’d been rejected in her university scholarship applications. It had only been for six months, and she’d been at Eamon’s at nighttime, but Rose had been okay. She’d almost been happy. It hadn’t been long until they could no longer afford to pay her, but she’d stayed on anyway. Most of the other staff had left, so Rose had become the deputy editor. Eventually the funding was cut completely. That was when Rose had done the stupid thing. The dumb, reckless thing that had really sealed the deal on her crappy life. The idea of the newspaper closing, of her life just being about Eamon’s, killed her. So, big ideas in her head, she’d got a small loan from the bank. She had been sure if they could just hang on until they had some advertisers, she could save the Echo. It hadn’t made any difference; the newspaper had barely lasted another month. Rose’s loan had grown steadily, and now she wasn’t even managing to pay off the interest each month.

“Rose?”

Steve Cunningham came to stand next to her.

“I thought that was you,” he said, smiling. “How are you?”

“Fine.” She felt caught out; she didn’t want to have to explain to him that she had nowhere to live. He looked up at the board, but didn’t ask her about it.

“It’s quiet around here,” she said, and it was true. They were the only people standing in the corridor.

He shrugged. “I’m used to it.”

Steve was looking terrible; he was pale, which was making the shadows under his eyes appear deep and purple, but his smile was real. She had always suspected Steve might admire her, not in the ogling bad-joke way that some of the other punters did, but like he actually thought there might be more to her than her arse.

With a swish from the doorway, his smile fell instantly from his face. She followed his gaze. Mr. Riley was opening the building’s front door for his wife, his hand on her lower back as he steered her through it. Rose looked away quickly. Since the fire, the Rileys had become almost famous in town, triggering silence and averted eyes wherever they went. Their grief followed the couple like a cape.

“Hi,” Steve said, walking toward them, hand outstretched. “Good to see you both.”

He escorted them past Rose and into one of the rooms beyond the staircase. Rose watched them go, trying to imagine how it would feel to have both your child and your business disappear all at once.

She swallowed and looked back at the board, oddly grateful she definitely wasn’t the least fortunate person in town. She looked for rooms to rent among the badly photocopied posters advertising secondhand cars and used baby cribs for sale. There were two advertisements for tenants. One was so far out of town she had no idea how she could get to work, and the other was a room share, but she wrote both numbers down in her notebook. Neither was appealing, but both were better than sleeping under the stars with the fossickers.

As she stood thinking of how the rent per month added up against her income, she felt a movement behind her. Nothing touched her, but the hair on her arms prickled and stood. Turning, she saw the back of a man walking up the stairs. Will. Without thinking, she began to follow him. She wanted to know more about him, understand what someone like him, someone with new clothes and no apparent connections with the town, was doing here in Colmstock.

Rose waited until he reached the crest of the stairs and turned down the corridor before she began quietly climbing them herself. When she reached the top, he was gone. He must have entered one of the offices. Rose looked into one. A woman sat glumly behind a computer, barricades snaking around the room in preparation for a long line, but no one was waiting. The woman straightened when she saw Rose but Rose just smiled at her and kept walking. The next room was the public records. You were meant to register yourself at the station and ask the attendant to find records for you. Rose had done research for stories here a couple of times. There was no one behind the desk now. Looking at the logbook, she saw that the last entry was for over six months ago. There’d been layoffs at the council around then.

She was about to turn when she heard a sound of a filing cabinet drawer squeak open. Leaning across the desk, she looked into the archives. There was Will, flicking through a drawer like he was perfectly entitled to be there.

“Hey!” she said. “What are you doing?”

He looked up at her and smiled. “Hi,” he said. “You’re the waitress from Eamon’s, right?”

As if he didn’t remember who she was. She narrowed her eyes at him. “You know you’re not allowed to just look through this stuff yourself.”

He shrugged. “Are you going to help me?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t work here, you know.”

He didn’t answer but began flicking through the records again.

She came around to the other side of the desk. “What are you looking for?” she asked.

He stopped, turning around completely this time, and fixed her with a blunt stare. She found herself taking a step backward.

“If you don’t work here,” he said, not smiling anymore, “I don’t see how it’s any of your business.”

He stared at her, waiting for her to leave. And she did. As she was turning to walk out of the room, she wondered why she was doing it. She never, ever let people talk to her that way. If they did she was quick to tell them to bugger off. But something about the way he’d looked at her, about the severity in his voice, had made her falter.

She was almost home, replaying the encounter over and over in her head, when she remembered the reason she’d gone out in the first place. She took the notebook out and flicked to the page where she’d written down the phone numbers and prices for the rentals. Wishing she’d paid more attention in math, she divided the monthly amounts by 4.3 and then put together a rough estimate of her weekly wage. Snapping the notebook shut, she felt the all-too-familiar lump rise in her throat again. There was no way it would work. She’d have to get a second job, like most people in town.

Walking in through the front door, she imagined it. The only jobs around were at the poultry factory. She desperately didn’t want to work there. Her mother’s job there was debeaking. Rose remembered the way she’d looked after her first day. She’d come home so pale she looked sick.

Rose had poured her a glass of water and asked her what had happened. She hadn’t really wanted to know, not at all, but she wanted her mother to feel better. Her mother told her about how she’d had to use a dirty pair of scissors to cut the end of chickens’ beaks off so they didn’t peck each other in the battery cages.

“The noise they make,” she’d said. “They’re in agony.”

She had to do one hundred a day; if she didn’t reach the target she’d get her pay docked. Rose had told her not to go back, that she was sure there’d be another job she could get. But her mother had gone back. That was five years ago.

Rose sat down on the end of her bed and looked at her suitcase. If she worked at the factory, she’d give up on ever getting out of town. There wouldn’t be time. Slowly, she shut the lid of her suitcase with her foot and pushed it under her bed, her good clothes still folded inside. She was going to ask her mum for a month, just one month, and in that time she was going to make her dream happen. She was going to get out of here.

7

“So Frank wasn’t worried?” Mia asked, as they laid towels down on the carpet of her bedroom.

“He said he wasn’t, although Baz said he was. It is just a toy though, right? It can’t be anything too bad,” Rose told her.

“How did Laura handle having to let it go?”

Rose smiled. “I don’t know if she’ll ever forgive me.”

“I’m sure they’ll give it back to her when it turns out to be nothing.”

“Hope not—I don’t think I’d sleep with that creepy thing in the house.”

They sat down on the coarse gray towels, the bristles rough on their bare legs.

“If I tell you something, you won’t laugh?” asked Mia, who was stirring the wax that they had heated up in the microwave. The two of them were sitting on the towels in their undies, a half-empty bottle of Bundy between them.

“Maybe, but tell me anyway.”

“My aunt Bell said she’s going to give me her old tarot cards.”

Rose snorted. “You’re going to be a fortune-teller?”

“No!” Mia hit her playfully. “I don’t know—it’s stupid, I guess. I just find it interesting.”

“It’s not stupid! You should do it. You’re good at that stuff. Your beer-foam readings double our tips.”

Mia smiled into the wax tub.

“Maybe we could get in touch with the ghosts of the Eamons?” Rose said, poking Mia in the side.

“They’re tarot cards, not a Ouija board!”

“Same thing though, right?”

Mia opened her mouth to retort, then saw Rose’s smile.

“But seriously,” Rose said, “I think you could do the tarot thing and charge suckers a mint. People in the city love that shit, and I won’t be able to pay the rent on my own.”

“The city?” Mia asked. “I thought, you know, without the cadetship...” She trailed off.

Rose leaned back against her bed. “I’m going to work it out,” she told her. “I’ve already sent in a bunch of job applications. Just for crappy temp jobs and call centers, but something has to come up, right? And once I’m settled, you can follow. We can still do it.”

“Cool. Okay, are you ready?”

“Ready.”

They repositioned themselves so their bare legs were laced together. It was always easier to do it to someone else. One time, when Rose was about fourteen, she had been too afraid to pull the wax strip off and had left it on for a full twenty minutes. When she had finally worked up the courage to do it, it had hurt like hell. The thing had pulled off a layer of skin. For the next week, Rose had a raised pink rectangle on her calf that was so tender she could barely even touch it.

They’d been doing this together for ages, thinking it was easier if someone else was the one to pull the strip off. Sometimes, Rose worried that their friendship was a little stunted. She loved Mia, but it was like they both reverted back to being teenagers again when they were together. Like neither could really grow up with the other around.

Swirling the wax with a Paddle Pop stick, Mia scooped up a globule. It felt warm and nice on Rose’s thigh and smelled like honey. She rubbed a bandage down on top of it. They both took a swig of Bundy, enjoying the burn of it in their throats.

They nodded at each other and Mia pulled Rose’s strip off at the exact moment that Rose pulled off Mia’s.

“I always forget how much it hurts,” Rose said.

They both took another swig.

By the time they’d finished they each had shiny, hairless legs. They were also a bit drunk. They lay on the floor giggling, staring at the cracks in Rose’s ceiling. Slowly, the giggles subsided and their breathing became even.

“My mum will be home soon,” Rose said, the impending argument playing out in her head. “I’m going to ask her if I can stay a few more weeks. She won’t be happy.”

Mia propped herself up on an elbow.

“One of the Friday the 13th films is on telly tonight. Do you want to come to mine?”

* * *

They decided to stop off at the gas station for snacks. Rose was in the mood to really gorge. She was sick of planning and worrying. Watching a shitty movie and eating junk sounded like absolute bliss.

Rose rolled down her window, and they turned up the radio, letting the girlie pop song blare. Turning the corner, Mia braked hard for some kids crossing the road.

“Paper-plate kids never even look,” she said, shaking her head.

One of the kids poked his tongue out through his mask at them. Mia, like most people, thought they were cute. Rose found them disturbing. There were around ten of them, both boys and girls from the local primary school. They wandered around together, sometimes even at night, wearing those dumb masks they’d made in class. Paper plates with eye and mouth holes cut out of them and silly noses and eyebrows painted on. They wore them constantly, the strings tied tight around the backs of their heads.

“So creepy,” Rose said.

“You just think that cos they got you!”

“Shut up!”

It was true. The kids played a game where they’d hide around corners and jump out at people, yelling boo. They scared Rose so much one day she’d actually screamed. Mia didn’t understand how Rose could hate the poor kids. Really she should hate their parents for kicking their children out for the night while they got loaded.

Mia pulled in to the pumps slightly too fast; the brakes squeaked when she stopped.

“Whoops!” she said. “Usually I’m a good drunk driver.”

Rose laughed and they got out of the car, snapping shut the doors. Mia left the keys in the ignition so the pop song would continue playing. She hummed along as she unscrewed the lid to the tank, pulled a ten-dollar note out of her pocket and flicked it to Rose. It seemed to hesitate in the air for a moment before floating down into Rose’s hand.

“Thanks.”

Dusk hung heavily around her. The air retained the heat of the day and felt sticky against her bare skin. Walking toward the service station, she breathed in: freshness, mixed with the tang of petrol and hot cement. The automatic doors opened for her and goose bumps rose on her arms as she walked into the air-conditioning.

There was a line, as usual, at the counter. Since the grocery store had burned down, the service station had been doing great business. Of course, the place was a chain, so the profit it made was being filtered straight out of the town. To another country, probably. Rose plucked two large packets of corn chips, a jar of spicy salsa and a family-sized block of Dairy Milk chocolate from the shelf. Holding the bundle, she grabbed a large plastic cup and put it on the grille of the frozen Coke machine. She watched as the shiny brown icicles filled the cup. Really, she should have picked savory or sweet. They’d probably both feel ill later, but oh well.

“Pump four,” she said to the clerk when she reached the front of the line, “and these.” She dropped the packets and a frozen Coke she’d been awkwardly cradling onto the counter.

“Having a big night?” a voice behind her said. Bazza. He was smiling at her and eyeing the assortment of snacks.

“Yeah,” she said, putting down Mia’s note and matching it with one of her own, feeling a twinge of guilt like she always did when she spent money unnecessarily.

“How’s your sister?” he asked.

“Cranky, but fine.”

“Frank had my bollocks for telling you we were worried at the station.” He laughed, but she noticed a sour note in his voice.

She smiled at him, then took her change and the bag from the cashier.

“I appreciated you telling me,” she said, waiting while he took out a credit card to pay for his milk, bread and chocolate biscuits. Now that Frank wasn’t here, maybe she could get a bit more information out of him.

“So,” she said casually, “how many other families got dolls?”

He thought about it as he put the card back in his wallet. “The Rileys, the Hanes and the Cunninghams... So, just three.”

Rose half expected him to count on his fingers, the idiot. He’d just told her the names of the families without her even having to ask. They walked out of the service station together, Bazza holding his plastic bag in one hand and swinging the large bottle of milk in the other.

“Are you with Mia?” he asked, looking over at her car. Rose was just about to snigger, there was a definite eagerness to his voice, when she saw Mia’s face drop as she spotted them. It took all of three seconds for Rose to grasp how stupid she was being. Mia was more than tipsy, and they both probably stank of rum. Bazza was off work, but he was still a cop. Rose had been so focused on trying to get a lead she hadn’t even thought of it.

“I’ll come say hi,” he continued.

“Sorry, I forgot we were in a hurry. See you later!” she said and ran back to the car, pulling on her seat belt and waving at Bazza. They drove very carefully out of the gas station and then veered quickly around the corner. Mia’s house was only two streets away.

* * *

Rose had met Mia on the first day of kindergarten. She’d been wandering around at lunchtime, looking for a good place to eat her lunch alone. Even as a five-year-old, she hadn’t been great at niceties, so meeting new people hadn’t come naturally to her. Holding her lunch box, her backpack a strange new weight on her back, she’d staked out a small flowering bush. If she sat behind there, she’d been sure no one would bother her. But as she turned the corner, she saw that there was already a little girl sitting behind the bush. She was crouched on the ground, holding her arm up at a strange angle, staring at it.

What are you doing? Rose had asked.

Mia had smiled. Look, she’d said.

Rose had got down onto her knees and looked at Mia’s arm. There was a tiny red ladybug on her wrist.

Fairies, Mia had whispered.

No, they’re ladybugs, Rose had said.

Mia shook her head solemnly, looking at Rose as though she was the silliest person in the world. Ladybugs are fairies. Didn’t you know?

Rose had looked from the ladybug back to Mia. Really?

Yeah, and if you sit here long enough, they’ll climb all over you, Mia said. I already did it this morning. This is their fairy house.

So Rose had sat. They’d sat in silence to begin with, watching as the beautiful little red bugs timidly made their way onto Rose. It tickled a little bit. Eventually they’d started talking, and upon finding out that Mia had no mum, and Rose had no dad, they decided they should be best friends.

* * *

“You’ll have to feed me,” Mia called from the couch. She was lying on her back, arms above her head, eyes closed.

Mia’s house was even smaller and shittier than Rose’s, although it was always impeccably tidy. The place sort of resembled a caravan, without the wheels. Her kitchen cupboards and small table were covered in laminate, printed with a fake wood grain. The couch, which doubled as Mia’s bed, was squeezed tight in the small lounge room, the main room of the house. On the left were two doors. One to the bathroom, the other to Mia’s father’s room. Both were closed.

Rose took out two bowls from the cupboard. She opened the chip packets, the plastic making loud squeaky sounds, and threw a chip toward Mia. She opened her mouth wide, but it missed, landing on her forehead. Rose emptied the rest into the bowls.

The squeaking sound of bedsprings moving sounded from the other room.

“He must be awake. Back in a sec.” Mia slid off the couch, munching on the chip, and went into his room. Rose could hear her talking quietly from inside, her voice soft and gentle.

Rose put the bowls on the coffee table and sat down on the couch, still feeling the heat from Mia’s body on the backs of her thighs. She switched on the TV and opened the chocolate. Tossing a square into her mouth, she wanted to close her eyes, the rich sweetness tasted so good. She’d forgotten to have lunch today and she was starving.

“It’s starting!” she called. A girl was walking around her apartment, creepy music playing in the background. Rose knew she was probably going to die within the next five minutes, but she still couldn’t help feeling jealous that the girl had her own place. This girl had a cool Japanese-style dressing gown and could wander around in it and make tea whenever she wanted.

Mia ran back in and sat on the couch. “What did I miss?”

On the screen, a cat pounced through the window and they both jumped. Laughing at each other, they settled back on the couch, passing the frozen Coke back and forth between them. Soon, the murderer appeared. A sack over his head. They tried not to scream out loud and bother Mia’s dad.

“Isn’t he meant to be wearing a hockey mask?”

“I think that comes later.”

Rose thought a sack was probably creepier anyway.

“The hockey mask would make him look like a paper-plate kid.”

“Awww,” Mia cooed.

“Why is he doing it again?” Rose asked when it cut to commercials. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever seen the first one.

“Killing everyone?”

“Yeah.”

Mia leaned back, stretching out her feet on the coffee table. Her toenails were painted a dark purple. “Something to do with teenagers having sex instead of taking care of him when he was a kid.”

“So stupid,” Rose groaned. Somehow, giving someone a good reason for mass murder made it so much more fascinating. She wondered what reason the person would have to leave dolls on kids’ doorsteps. It really was such a bizarre thing to do. Mia squealed from next to her; Rose hadn’t even been watching. She got comfy, nestling her bare feet underneath herself.

By midway through, the violence had lost its shock. They were both sleepy and covered in crumbs and their stomachs swirled. They were lying down now, Rose’s head on Mia’s hip.

“I should go,” she said.

“Yeah, I’ll drive you.”

“Okay.”

Neither of them moved.

* * *

By the time Rose got home she knew she had left it too late. She shouldn’t have gone to Mia’s house. She should have been here when her mother got home, not left her mother’s anger to stew even more.

“Hi,” she said.

Her mother just looked at her, exhausted, from her place in front of the television.

“Listen,” she continued, “I know it sounds like I was overreacting this morning—”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Rose. I’ve had a long day.”

“Sorry,” she found herself saying. She took a breath; this was going to be a hard conversation.

“So I know Rob’s coming back next week—” she began.

“You’re not going to ask me for more time, are you?”

The way her mum looked at her told her the answer, and not only that, it told her that her unhappiness, her pain, was just another burden. Something to be endured like the sound of screaming chickens.

“No,” she said and left the room.

PART 2

The day you give up on your dreams is the day you give up on yourself.

—Unknown

8

Pulling her hair into a knot on top of her head, blowing a few loose strands out of the way, Rose turned on her computer. It was an old PC, its fan was loud and hot, and it took a full five minutes to load. She was afraid that one day, it wouldn’t turn on at all and then she didn’t know what she would do. You could hardly mail newspapers handwritten articles. That definitely wouldn’t be considered professional.

She’d slept better last night, maybe because there was too much to think about, too much to worry about to even bother. Her exhaustion was stronger than her anger and frustration, and so when she went to bed she’d fallen unconscious almost instantly, waking up with a claggy mouth. She hadn’t even brushed her teeth. But the rest had given her a new sense of determination, something that even the two rejection emails she’d received from the jobs she’d applied to yesterday couldn’t shake.

She took a swig of Coke, the cold bolt of flavor pushing back against the sleepy heat.

When her computer was finally on, she linked it with the Bluetooth on her phone. She tried to use as little of Rob’s resources as possible. She bought her own food, used her own internet plan and never used the home phone. It wasn’t just that she didn’t want to be indebted to him. She also hated the idea of touching anything he used; she despised everything about him. Not that it mattered much anymore.

All morning she had replayed last night’s conversation with her mother. Rose wished she had made it clear, at the very least, that she hadn’t been stupid in calling the cops. Say the word pedophile and she was sure she could get that breathless panicky quality back into her mother’s voice. The idea did something strange to people, especially parents. Everyone agreed that pedophiles were the lowest scum on the planet, yet people also seemed weirdly fascinated by them. Their stories were always in the news the longest, front page after front page of disturbing stories in sickening detail. Maybe people enjoyed feeling horrified.

The screen lit up and, already, she felt a little wired. She’d dismissed the idea of writing about the dolls almost immediately. Dolls on kids’ doorsteps was hardly a story.

But maybe it didn’t even matter.

She opened a blank Word document and typed the title in, just to see how it would look: Porcelain Terror in Colmstock.

Everyone loved a good mystery. Her fingers started flying across the keyboard, trying to shape the strange truth of what had happened into something more menacing. Trying to make it into a story.

It wasn’t the sort of thing that would ever stand a chance in the Sage Review, but maybe it would be possible in the Star. She and Mia only read the thing for laughs, and because it had the most ridiculous star-sign predictions. The tabloid was always filled with tacky sensationalist articles, like how a suburban man had made his wife swallow an entire live snake as part of a voodoo ritual or how a mother was addicted to eating her children’s glue sticks, in between full-page advertisements for diet pills.

It was fun writing something dramatic and salacious. By the time she had to leave for work, she’d emailed the article to the Star. Usually, she would spend at least a few weeks on a piece, but this one she kept short and to the point. If they didn’t like it, they could go fuck themselves.

PORCELAIN TERROR IN COLMSTOCK

By Rose Blakey

Mystery dolls threaten children of small town.

A mystery is an unusual thing in the town of Colmstock, which all but disappeared from the map after the closure of the Auster Automotive Factory. Now, to add insult to injury for the residents of this forgotten place, a bizarre case has emerged that has the local police baffled.

Multiple families have made the terrifying discovery of old-fashioned porcelain dolls on their doorsteps. Most horrifying of all, the dolls are the spitting images of their young daughters. Hair and eye color of these unwanted gifts exactly matching the scared little girls.

Local police have attempted to calm the victims. However, these families may be right to be frightened for the safety of their youngest daughters. Inside sources have revealed that possible links to child molesters and pedophiles are being investigated and that the dolls are marks of this anonymous sicko’s intended prey.

With the limited resources available to the impoverished Colmstock, the community fears the offender may not be apprehended until it is too late.

* * *

Rose leaned into the wide freezer in the storage room of the tavern. She stroked the back of her head, combing her hair with her fingers so that it came off her sweaty neck. She let it dangle around her face like a veil.

Today had been an especially hot day, the humidity making the air a sweltering, oppressive weight as she’d walked to work, her shoes banging against her bandaged heels. The road had felt like it had been sizzling. Her head was full of dolls, although as soon as she’d started walking she’d realized what she’d written was crazy. It didn’t even really make sense.

The freezer reeked. It was as if something had died in there, froze, then thawed, rotted a bit and then froze again. Still, the cool air on her skin was worth it. It felt like little icy pinpricks on her face and neck. She could happily stay there all day, but Jean would notice her absence soon enough and come to find out why she was slacking off. Reaching into the freezer, she pulled out a hunk of frozen meat wrapped in plastic. It was wedged in there, and the sound of the icicles squealing against each other as it scraped against the side of the freezer made her wince. It was heavy; she held it tightly with one trembling arm as she slammed the lid of the freezer closed with the other.

The meat started to stick to her forearms as she walked up the corridor. She passed Will’s room. The light inside was on, but the Do Not Disturb sign was still plastered to his door. Rose dropped the hunk of meat down on the kitchen bench.

“Thanks,” Jean said from the stove; her white shirt was damp with sweat. Rose couldn’t imagine trying to cook on a day this hot.

“Look at her go.” Jean pointed her chin toward the bar, a smile playing on her lips.

Mia was flirting with Bazza outrageously. She was leaning against the taps, literally twirling her hair. It was almost laughable, but Bazza was eating it up.

“I’ll give them a few minutes,” she said to Jean and went over to the bin. It wasn’t completely full yet, but Rose didn’t really want to go back to the bar. It was only a matter of time before Frank asked her about the cadetship, and she’d have to tell him that she hadn’t got it. She didn’t want pity, not from him or anyone else. Plus, the longer you left the bin, the more likely it was that you’d leak foul-smelling bin juice down the corridor. She tied the black plastic rubbish bag into a knot at the top, then slid it out of the bin; it was already heavy.

Holding it in one hand, as far away from her body as possible, she walked quickly down the corridor. The back door to Eamon’s, past the keg room, was propped open with a brick. They always left it like that when the pub was open. People went into the back alley for cigarettes sometimes, or, very rarely, for make-out sessions. Rose couldn’t imagine anything less romantic. The concrete was cracked and uneven, and the large metal Dumpster stank, even when it was empty. The thing had probably never been cleaned. It smelled like sweet, rotting rubbish and made her want to gag. There was no light out there except for the streetlights around the front and the light that spilled from the open door down the four cement steps. Rose let the bag slide down the steps next to her, then picked it up and hurled it into the Dumpster. She heard it hit the bottom with a heavy thump like a bag of flour, or a dead body. Rose wanted to laugh. It would be great for her career if she found a dead body out the back here, but unluckily for her, it hadn’t happened yet. Although, Jean had told her she’d found a dead cat in there once. She’d said that when she picked it up it was as stiff as a brick. Rose slapped her hands together and walked back inside.

As she passed Will’s door, her curiosity overwhelmed her. She knocked, wondering if he was even inside. The squeak of the bedsprings told her that he was. She thought about running. It was too late. He opened the door a crack, smiling slightly when he saw her.

“Housekeeping,” she said, sarcastically, trying to look past his head into the room.

“I’m fine for now, thanks.” He smiled and went to shut the door in her face.

“Are you sure?” she said, before he could.

“Yes.” His smile widened. “You know, I can’t decide if you are trying to be very helpful, or if I’ve done something to piss you off.”

She blinked. Usually she was the confrontational one.

“Just trying to be helpful,” she said, shooting him a huge, fake grin, then turning to walk away. He might be the weirdest guy she’d ever met. The way he’d hidden his bedroom from her, it was like he didn’t want her to see past him, like he was hiding something. She imagined his room was filled with porcelain dolls and snorted back a laugh as she walked back to the bar. The dolls had only started appearing when he arrived. It was definitely possible, although not very likely. Journalist Uncovers Weirdo Doll Lover Tormenting Town. Now, that would be a good story.

9

“I’m seeing something really special here,” Mia said, staring at the leftover foam in Bazza’s empty beer glass.

“Really?” He leaned forward. She showed him, and his face screwed up as he looked inside. She noticed the way the light lit up the fine hair of his eyelashes.

She leaned closer. “See that line of foam across there.” She pointed at the line near the top of the glass.

“Yeah.”

“That’s your heart line.”

“Really?”

“Look.” She let her voice go really quiet so he’d get closer. “It’s unbroken.”

“Is that good?” He looked up at her.

“It’s really good. It means you’re going to find love. Soon.”

He looked between the line and her. She grabbed an empty glass and flicked on the tap, smiling at him, trying to beg him with her eyes to ask her out. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Thanks,” he said, when she put his beer in front of him. “I wonder what this one will say.”

He left her a tip and went back to his seat next to Frank. Her heart sank a little bit. Had he seen what she was doing and not asked her out anyway? She wasn’t sure if her advance had been rejected or not, but either way she could feel the sting.

“You know, I think he does like you,” Rose said, coming up next to her. “He looks at you like you’re beautiful—he was doing it last night at the gas station too.”

“What, like that?” Mia said, and they both looked to Frank, who was staring at Rose, his eyes soft.

“Yeah,” Rose said and turned away defensively.

Mia sighed and propped herself up on the bar. “Bazza’s dumb but so hot. It’s the perfect combination,” she said wistfully. “I think he’d make a great husband.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Rose said with disgust.

“Nope,” she said, then flicked Rose with the wet, dirty rag in her hand. It left a gray smear on her thigh.

“Yuck!”

“Streets of Fire” came on and Mia started humming along under her breath. She didn’t understand why Jean didn’t play a more varied mix of music, but she didn’t question it. If Jean wanted to listen to Bruce Springsteen every single night, then that was her choice. It had irritated her at first, but after a while she’d begun to enjoy knowing exactly what to expect out of her evenings. Unlike Rose, she quite liked working at Eamon’s. When she was here, she could just focus on each task: pouring beers, serving meals, mopping the floor, and not worry about the past or the future.

Wringing out the cloth in the sink, she watched the gray water squeezing out from the fibers. She rinsed it, letting the water absorb, wrung it out again and then hung it over the tap to dry. The detergent and grit made the skin on her hands feel tender. She wiped them on her shorts, trying to push herself to remember to put on hand cream before she went to sleep. She was always forgetting, and her flesh sometimes got so dry that the skin around her fingernails would crack.

She watched Rose out of the corner of her eye as she dried glasses, the cloth squealing against the glass. Rose never had problems with dry skin. For the tiniest of moments, she felt a pang of jealousy. Rose was so beautiful. If she wanted to, she could get any guy she liked. She could quit this place and start a family and be looked after. But Mia wasn’t a jealous person. She hated negativity, especially in herself, and she loved Rose more than anything. She put the glass down and went over to her, resting her head on Rose’s shoulder. Rose gripped her in a one-armed hug. Their skin stuck together slightly from sweat but Mia didn’t mind. She loved being close to Rose. It held the darkness that she sometimes felt at bay.

“I’m going to miss you when you’re famous.”

“Shut up,” said Rose, but she squeezed her tighter.

They laughed and Mia picked up her rag again. She sprayed down the counter, the bleachy disinfectant stinging her nostrils, and wiped away the beer rings that had dried and gone sticky.

Steve Cunningham came in, a huge grin on his face. This was unusual.

He walked straight up to Mia and slapped a fifty-dollar bill on the bar. “A round for the boys on me.”

A low cheer came from Bazza’s table, and Mia began pouring the drinks, lining them up next to Steve’s note. Steve awkwardly gripped three in his hands and brought them over to the table.

“Is there something to celebrate?” she heard Frank ask.

“Not yet, but maybe,” Steve said, leaning with both hands on the back of a chair. “My application for a review of the shale mine’s gone through. They’re sending someone next month to survey it.”

“Great job, mate,” Bazza said.

“Knew you’d come through.”

They cheered their drinks, glass clicking against glass, and Mia turned away from them.

“Do you remember how we used to play at the mine?” Mia asked. “It’s weird that it used to be a fun place.”

“Yeah,” Rose said. “Are you thinking about him again?”

“No,” Mia told her, “not really. It’s just weird to think about what that place was like before.”

“It was always pretty horrible.”

Mia wasn’t sure if she agreed. She’d go visit the place sometimes, think about his final moments. Right after graduation, her high school boyfriend had disappeared for three days. They found his body at the bottom of the mine. He’d jumped.

“Cover for me,” Rose said from behind her.

Rose was looking at her phone, a shocked look on her face as she rushed out to the back hallway.

For a fleeting moment, Mia wondered who it could be to warrant that look of exhilaration. Her fingers went to the rose quartz that she wore on a chain around her neck, holding the cold rock, trying to find comfort.

“Tell Steve,” she heard Baz say to Frank. Then he turned to Steve. “Honestly, you won’t believe this one.”

“Why don’t you tell him?”

“You tell it better.”

“All right,” Frank said, and Mia leaned forward to listen. She’d heard them all laughing about something before, but hadn’t caught what it was.

“So we get a call out to the wildlife sanctuary out in Baskerton.”

“Yeah?”

“When we get there it’s bloody mayhem. Ambulances, Japanese tourists running around screaming. It’s nuts. So we find this kid.”

“That poor kid,” Buddy added.

“He’s got his uniform on, probably only fifteen, and he’s just standing there, walking real slow in the grass. We make him give us a statement. He tells us a group of Japanese businessmen had come in from the city, wanted to see some real deal fauna.

“So he’s showing them around. Telling them all about the mating practices of tiger snakes, or some such shit. But all they want to see is the kangaroos, you know?”

Steve nodded, already smiling, waiting for the punch line.

“So he brings these bloody idiots into the field where the roos are. They’ve got a red one there. Huge. Taller than Baz here. So the boss is trying to be the big man, you know. So he gives his camera to this poor kid and keeps going.” Frank put on a terrible Japanese accent. “Hoi take my photo, hoi!

“The kid is telling him not to get too close,” Frank continued. “But he wants his picture, you know?

“So he gets real close to the big red. Puts his fists up, posing, like he’s fighting it. The red’s not bothered, just chewing away, ignoring him. The kid’s telling him to keep his distance, but the guy keeps saying ‘Take my photo, take my photo,’ and all the other guys are laughing along. They’d probably been drinking.

“The guy gets even closer, fists in the air, and the roo, he doesn’t even look at him, just swipes. Just one swipe.”

“And?” said Steve.

“Pulled his eyeball out.”

The guys cracked up laughing.

“That’s what the kid was doing. The red had jumped off when everyone started screaming. He was looking for it in the grass. The eye.”

Frank banged on the table and took a swig of his beer, and all the men started snorting with laughter again.

“So did you find it?” Steve asked.

Mia went back to drying glasses; the image of a bloodied eyeball in the dry grass was enough. She didn’t want any more details to add to the visual.

Father came up to the bar, looking a bit white. He annoyed Mia, although she would never admit it. He was a really friendly man with the kindest eyes she’d ever seen, but he was just too damn nice. It made her feel guilty for everything unchristian she had ever done, or even thought. It was as if he could sense her jealousy and that was why he’d appeared. To remind her that it was a sin.

He put five empty beer glasses on the bar. He always did that, collected the glasses from the other guys so that she and Rose didn’t have to.

“Thanks,” Jean said, coming in from the office and picking the glasses up between her fingers and taking them to the dishwasher.

Mia began pouring him a soda, the spits of fizz hitting her fingers as it reached the top. The guy spent so much time in the tavern, yet he never drank alcohol.

“Are priests not allowed to drink?” she asked.

“Mia!” Jean turned around and looked at her sharply.

“I’ve been dying to ask!”

Father just smiled. “It’s not prohibited, but I prefer not to. Plus, one of the boys usually needs a lift home.”

She smiled at him as he took the soda and returned to his seat. He was so charitable; it was next level. Although part of her thought maybe he just got a bit lonely hanging out in the church by himself. She imagined it would be pretty creepy there alone at night.

Jean stood close to her, her bosom pushing warmly onto Mia’s arm.

“I’ve been dying to ask too,” she said quietly, in that scratchy voice of hers.

Mia suppressed a giggle as Jean went back into the office. She pulled the wet, fogged-up glasses from the washer, shutting the lid with her foot. Bazza caught her eye and smiled at her, warmly. Why had it taken her so long to notice what a great guy he was? Maybe it was because of the way Frank talked about him as if he was an idiot. Rose as well.

Mia used to have a crush on Jonesy. He was a cop too, on highway patrol. He was a tall, thin guy, his clothes always looking too short at the ankles but too wide at the waist. Somehow, he always gave Mia the impression that he was laughing at her. One drunken night, she’d given him a blow job around the back of the tavern. He’d gone out for a smoke and she’d pretended that she wanted one too. When she’d taken a puff she’d started coughing. He’d raised his eyebrow at her, told her she was cute and somehow they were kissing before she even knew it. The taste of tobacco in his mouth made her eyes water.

Desperately, she’d wanted to impress him. To show him that he had underestimated her. That was why she’d given him the blow job, just to see what he’d do. But as soon as his dick was in her mouth she wished she hadn’t started it. She didn’t feel as powerful as she’d thought she would. Afterward, he just zipped up his pants, went back inside and still talked to her in the exact same dismissive way he always had.

Bazza was different. She had never even noticed him until the night of the big fire. She remembered it vividly. The acrid stink of smoke, the windows of the courthouse exploding, one after another. She’d stood there, hands over her mouth, trying not to cry. Out of nowhere, Baz was beside her.

“You okay?” he’d said.

She had just looked at him, and then his big arm was around her. Immediately, everything had felt a little easier, just like when she was with Rose. Every time she thought about him, she could still feel that warm, heavy, protective arm across her shoulders.

Rose came back into the bar, her hand over her mouth.

“What?” Mia asked, but Rose didn’t reply. Instead, a small smile crept out from under Rose’s hand.

“Who was it?”

“Don’t laugh,” Rose said, and her eyes were all lit up in a way Mia hadn’t seen for a while. Not since she’d told her about being short-listed for the cadetship. Something cold gripped Mia’s stomach.

“Just tell me.”

“I sent an article in to the Star.”

“The Star?” Mia asked, both desperately wanting to know what Rose would say and also frantically trying to put off knowing. “Don’t you think they’re a joke?”

She wasn’t ready for Rose to go. Not yet, not quite yet.

“I do, but who cares? I’ve got to start somewhere. I sent them an article this morning. They’re going to publish it!”

“What article?” Mia asked. “You didn’t mention it.”

Rose looked at her, and Mia knew her reaction was all wrong. “Just something stupid about those dolls,” Rose said. “It doesn’t matter though—it’s my first byline.”

“That’s fantastic!” Mia grabbed Rose’s hand and grinned. “I knew I could see your success in the stars.”

“I guess you did!” she said gleefully.

“This is so great,” Mia said, letting go of Rose’s hand and turning to put down the tea towel so that she could let her smile drop.

“And they said they want me to write a follow-up piece and they’ll publish that too!”

It was happening; Rose’s big breakthrough, her ticket out of Colmstock. Rose was always saying they’d go together, but Mia knew it would never happen. She couldn’t leave. She turned back around and threw her arms around Rose.

“Congratulations,” she said, squeezing her tight and trying her hardest to focus on Rose’s happiness and block out the fear of what her life would be like without her.

10

Rose had never experienced happiness like this before. It was just the Star, which she knew was a pretty crappy newspaper, but still she felt giddy. It made her want to smile at people on the street; it even made church slightly more bearable. Slightly.

The pews were full today. Father stood at the altar, giving his sermon. Usually, Rose didn’t even bother to look interested, but today she tried her hardest to actually listen.

“‘Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of His Christ,’” he read. Rose wished they had one of those young, hip priests she’d heard about. Someone who made their sermons relevant to people’s actual lives. She looked around the room, wondering if it was someone here who had left that doll on her doorstep. Should she hate them or thank them?

Rose was squeezed tight between Scott and Sophie. She always chose to sit between them. It was easier than trying to get them to stop squabbling if they were next to each other. Next to Sophie was Laura, who was leaning against their mother. Last Sunday, Laura had started crying because their mum would not let her sit on her lap. It was loud and embarrassing. But now she seemed happy enough, sucking her thumb with her eyes taking in the room. Church was the one time you saw everyone with their families. She could see the back of Frank’s head. He was sitting near the front with his elderly mother listening intently, as he always did.

“‘For the accuser of our brethren is cast down,’” Father continued, “‘which accused them before our God day and night.’”

Bazza was sitting in a row with his three brothers. They looked very alike, with their broad shoulders and dumb eyes. Not that you could have seen their eyes today, or any other Sunday. All four of them were asleep in a line, their chins lolling on their chests.

“‘They have gained the victory over him by the blood of the lamb and of their testimony; and because they held their lives cheap and not shrink even from death.’”

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