away when she’d judged distance from the railway siding, but it’d ended up being closer to three or four miles. They’d abandoned their luggage back at the siding and were wearing only light pants, shirts and casual shoes, but even then it had been a long, hot walk. The sand was burning and their shoes were far too thin.
And now… The closer they grew to the buildings, the more Jenna’s heart sank.
The homestead looked abandoned. It consisted of ancient, unpainted weatherboards, and its rusty iron roof looked none too weatherproof. There were no fences or marked garden—just more red dust. All around the house were tumbledown sheds. The house itself looked intact, but only just. Broken windows and missing weatherboards told Jenna that no one had been at home here for a long time.
But it was no longer the house that interested Jenna. No matter how ramshackle it was, it could be a shelter until the next train came through. What she’d focussed on for the last half-mile was the water tank behind the house. It looked as if it might tumble down at any minute, but it still looked workable.
‘Please,’ she was whispering as she led Karli past the first of the shacks. ‘Please…’
And then she stopped dead.
Behind the house, at the end of a crude airstrip, was an aeroplane. Small. Expensive. New.
It wasn’t the sort of plane anyone in their right mind would abandon.
‘There must be someone here,’ Jenna told Karli, and she crouched in the dust and gave her little half-sister a hug. ‘Oh, well done. You’ve walked really bravely, and now we’re safe. Someone’s here.’
‘I need a drink,’ Karli said cautiously and Jenna collected herself. A drink.
She turned and stared at the house, willing someone to appear. No one did.
‘Let’s knock,’ she told Karli.
Who’d live in a dump like this?
She led her sister over to the house and she felt about as old as Karli was—and maybe even more scared.
She knocked.
No one answered.
They waited. Karli stood trustingly by Jenna’s side and Jenna’s sense of responsibility grew by the minute.
Come on. Answer.
Nothing. The only sound was the wind, blasting around the corners of the house.
‘Knock again,’ Karli whispered, and Jenna tried again, louder.
The door sagged inward.
A couple of loose sheets of roofing iron crashed down and down again in the wind.
Nothing.
‘I’m really thirsty,’ Karli told her, and Jenna’s grip on her hand tightened. This wasn’t London. Surely anyone who lived here would understand their need to break in. And…they didn’t need to break. The door was falling in anyway.
‘Let’s go inside,’ she whispered.
‘Why are we whispering?’ Karli asked.
‘Because it’s creepy. Hold my hand tight.’
‘You think there might be ghosts?’
‘If there are, I hope they can fly aeroplanes.’
Karli giggled. It was a great sound. There hadn’t been enough giggling in Karli’s short life, Jenna thought. There’d been none at all on the train with her father, and for the first time Jenna decided that maybe it hadn’t been such a disaster to get off.
If there was water. If the pilot of the aeroplane wasn’t an axe murderer.
Axe murderer? She was going nuts here. She didn’t have time to indulge in axe-murderer fantasies.
No one was going to answer the door.
She adjusted her grip on Karli’s hand to very, very tight. For Karli, Jenna told herself hastily. To reassure Karli. Not to reassure herself.
They tiptoed inside.
Through the back door the place looked much like the outside—as if it had been deserted for years. There was thick dust coating every surface. But…there were footprints in the dust. The prints looked as if they were made by a man’s boots, and they seemed relatively fresh.
Holding Karli’s hand as if it were infinitely important that she didn’t let go, Jenna led her across the bare wooden floorboards of the entrance porch. Their shoes left much smaller footprints beside the big ones.
The next door led to the kitchen.
Here there were definitely signs of life. There were boxes of canned food, a kerosene fridge, a lamp and a pile of newspapers strewn over a big wooden table. While Karli gazed around her with interest Jenna picked up the top newspaper. It was dated two days ago.
Someone was definitely using the house.
And—even better—there was a sink. Above the sink was a tap. Hardly daring to breathe, Jenna released Karli’s hand and twisted the tap. Out ran a stream of pure, clear water. She lowered her head and drank and nothing had ever tasted so good.
‘We’re fine, Karli,’ she said, a trifle unsteadily, and she lifted the little girl so that she, too, could drink. ‘We’re safe. There’s food and there’s drink. We can stay here for as long as we need.’
‘The hell you can.’
She twisted, still holding Karli to the tap. There was a man in the doorway.
For a moment there was absolute silence. Karli was still drinking and Jenna was shocked past speaking.
The man was large. He was well over six feet tall, and he filled the doorway with his broad shoulders and his strongly muscled frame. His build indicated a life of hard, physical work.
So did the rest of him. The man’s hair was sun-bleached, from dark brown at the roots to almost gold at the tips, and his skin was a deep lined bronze. The harsh contours of his strongly boned face were softened by deep, grey eyes that creased at the corners, maybe in accustomed defence against the sun’s glare. The man’s clothes—his hands, his face—were ingrained by layer upon layer of dust.
He had to be a farmer. The man’s whole appearance labelled him as such. He wore moleskin trousers and a khaki shirt, and in his hand he held a wide Akubra hat. This was an outfit Jenna recognised as almost a uniform among Australian men who worked the land.
Was he a farmer here? It didn’t make sense.
She had to speak. She had to say something.
‘H…hi.’ Not so good. Her voice came out as a squeak, and the man’s eyes widened.
‘Hi, yourself.’ Unlike Jenna’s, the man’s voice was deep, resonant and sure, laced with a broad Australian accent. His eyes were calmly watchful, as if at any minute he expected the apparition in his kitchen to vanish.
Jenna was still holding Karli to the tap. Now Karli finished drinking and pulled away. She lowered her to the ground; Karli stared distrustfully up at the stranger and then shrank against Jenna’s leg.
‘I… Is this your house?’ Jenna managed, holding tight to Karli.
‘It’s my house.’ The man was staring down at Karli as if he was certain he was seeing things. Karli didn’t look at him. She shrank behind Jenna’s legs and stayed there.
Silence. For the life of her, Jenna couldn’t think of what else to say.
Eventually, apparently recovering from the shock of finding strangers in his kitchen, the big man tossed his Akubra onto the table and walked across to the fridge. He opened the door and snagged a beer. Raising his eyebrows quizzically—for heaven’s sake, was the guy laughing?—he lifted the can towards Jenna. ‘I don’t know who on earth you are or how you got here,’ he said, ‘but