Deep Wate - Sarah Epstein Page 0,80

some thought,’ he says. ‘We know he wasn’t at Rina’s, so if it was him, three other strong possibilities come to mind.’

I sit up, waiting for him to go on.

‘Firstly, the motel. Room Fifteen. He didn’t stay the night, although he could have come over for a couple of hours. If he was out driving between midnight and two, you weren’t there to witness him coming and going.’

‘True,’ I say. ‘Although he wouldn’t need to drive along Railway Parade to get from his house to the motel. Unless he was really going out of his way.’

‘Agreed. Which is why my second possibility comes to mind. The graveyard.’

‘Really? Mason still hangs out up there?’

‘I think so,’ Raf says. ‘There’ve been a couple of times I couldn’t track him down and I thought that’s where he might be.’

‘But it’s a graveyard. A bunch of headstones and a whole load of weeds. Would he really head there in a thunderstorm? It’s completely exposed.’

Raf nods. ‘I know. Which leads me towards my third possibility.’

‘Which is?’

‘Remember how paranoid we were leaving the bush hut that night, thinking we saw something in the trees?’

‘Wait,’ I say. ‘You think it was Mason?’

Raf sits back and chews his bottom lip. ‘How do you feel about an afternoon hike?’

* * *

It’s overcast again with an unseasonal muggy heat. It presses down on us from above and becomes trapped by the vegetation along the walking track, where there’s no hint of a breeze. Cicadas pulse steadily in the trees around us, their shrill hum rising and falling in waves. I glance at the back of Raf ’s neck and see a trickle of sweat slide from his hairline into his T-shirt collar. The small backpack I’m wearing is pressing against my back and sticking my T-shirt to my skin.

I’m not persuaded by Raf ’s suggestion about Mason visiting the bush hut that night, namely because Raf and I were there ourselves at the time Rina thought she saw Mason’s car. However, the car heading south along Railway Parade around one forty-five in the morning would fit, since Raf and I left the bush hut before two. There’s definitely a possibility he could have driven to the southern end of the reservoir and followed a shorter track to the bush hut from there. It doesn’t explain where he was the rest of the time, though.

When we reach the fork in the track where the sign points to Shallow Reservoir, I hesitate for a moment. A formless idea swirls in the back of my mind. Mason, Henry, the reservoir – a bad combination.

‘You coming?’ Raf says, twenty metres ahead on the other track. I catch up to him, wiping the sweat from my upper lip with the back of my hand.

It’s another fifteen minutes on a gradual incline before we reach the bush hut, and we’re both damp in the armpits and panting by the time we get there. Nestled in among the trees, it’s a rough wooden cabin only five or six metres wide and not quite as deep, propped up by a few low stumps. No one knows who built it originally, although Uncle Bernie said it was here long before he and his friends stumbled across it as kids. Every generation has made new additions over the decades, from furniture to knick-knacks to dodgy repairs. At some point someone managed to lug an old oil drum up here to use as a fire pit, perhaps the same people who added two weathered outdoor chairs. We brought an old rug and a battery-powered radio, and one time Sabeen and I even carried cleaning supplies from the motel to give it a halfhearted once over.

‘So what are we looking for?’ Raf asks. He walks around the small clearing, examining the hut from a few different angles. Surrounded by ferns, some green, others crispy brown and dying, the hut’s timber boards are bowing with damp and covered in lichen.

‘I’m not sure.’ I peer through one of the windows. ‘Evidence Mason was here, I suppose.’

Raf shoves the rickety door open and a long cobweb floats down across the doorway.

‘It looks just how we left it,’ he says.

I follow him in. The hut smells of mildew and the interior is gloomy due to the small grimy windows. The candles we lit on the night of the storm are still sitting on a wooden milk crate pushed up against one wall. I get a nervous hum in my lower abdomen when I glance at the