Her Knight in the Outback

Now. Before that she’d been a pretty decent graphic designer for a pretty decent marketing firm. Until she’d handed in her notice.

‘Putting up posters is your job?’

‘Finding my brother.’ The old defensiveness washed through her. ‘Is anything more important?’

His confusion wasn’t new. He wasn’t the first person not to understand what she was doing. By far. Her own father didn’t even get it; he just wanted to grieve Travis’s absence as though he were dead. To accept he was gone.

She was light-years and half a country away from being ready to accept such a thing. She and Trav had been so close. If he was dead, wouldn’t she feel it?

‘So...what, you just drive every highway in the country pinning up notices?’

‘Pretty much. Trying to trigger a memory in someone’s mind.’

‘And it’s taken you a year to do the east coast?’

‘About eight months. Though I started up north.’ And that was where she’d finish.

‘What happened before that?’

Guilt hammered low in her gut for those missing couple of months before she’d realised how things really were. How she’d played nice and sat on her hands while the police seemed to achieve less and less. Maybe if she’d started sooner—

‘I trusted the system.’

‘But the authorities didn’t find him?’

‘There are tens of thousands of missing people every year. I just figured that the only people who could make Trav priority number one were his family.’

‘That many? Really?’

‘Teens. Kids. Women. Most are located pretty quickly.’

But ten per cent weren’t.

His eyes tracked down to the birthdate on the poster. ‘Healthy eighteen-year-old males don’t really make it high up the priority list?’

A small fist formed in her throat. ‘Not when there’s no immediate evidence of foul play.’

And even if they maybe weren’t entirely healthy, psychologically. But Travis’s depression was hardly unique amongst The Missing and his anxiety attacks were longstanding enough that the authorities dismissed them as irrelevant. As if a bathroom cabinet awash with mental health medicines wasn’t relevant.

A young woman with bright pink hair badly in need of a recolour brought Marshall’s beer and Eve’s lime and bittes and sloshed them on the table.

‘That explains the bus,’ he said. ‘It’s very...homey.’

‘It is my home. Mine went to pay for the trip.’

‘You sold your house?’

Her chin kicked up. ‘And resigned from my job. I can’t afford to be distracted by having to earn an income while I cover the country.’

She waited for the inevitable judgment.

‘That’s quite a commitment. But it makes sense.’

Such unconditional acceptance threw her. Everyone else she’d told thought she was foolish. Or plain crazy. Implication: like her brother. No one just...nodded.

‘That’s it? No opinion? No words of wisdom?’

His eyes lifted to hers. ‘You’re a grown woman. You did what you needed to do. And I assume it was your asset to dispose of.’

She scrutinised him again. The healthy, unmarked skin under the shaggy beard. The bright eyes. The even teeth.

‘What’s your story?’ she asked.

‘No story. I’m travelling.’

‘You’re not a bikie.’ Statement, not question.

‘Not everyone with a motorbike belongs in an outlaw club,’ he pointed out.

‘You look like a bikie.’

‘I wear leather because it’s safest when you get too intimate with asphalt. I have a beard because one of the greatest joys in life is not having to shave, and so I indulge that when I’m travelling alone.’

She glanced down to where the dagger protruded from his T-shirt sleeve. ‘And the tattoo?’

His eyes immediately darkened. ‘We were all young and impetuous once.’

‘Who’s Christine?’

‘Christine’s not relevant to this discussion.’

Bang. Total shutdown. ‘Come on, Marshall. I aired my skeleton.’

‘Something tells me you air it regularly. To anyone who’ll listen.’

Okay, this time the criticism was unmistakable. She pushed more upright in her chair. ‘You were asking the questions, if you recall.’

‘Don’t get all huffy. We barely know each other. Why would I spill my guts to a stranger?’

‘I don’t know. Why would you rescue a stranger on the street?’

‘Not wanting to see you beaten to a pulp and not wanting to share my dirty laundry are very different things.’

‘Oh, Christine’s dirty laundry?’

His lips thinned even further and he pushed away from the table. ‘Thanks for the drink. Good luck with your brother.’

She shot to her feet, too. ‘Wait. Marshall?’