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the verandah to watch Petal crossing the paddock, picking her way through the shoulder-high trees. When Allie turned to open the glass door into the house, her legs turned to water at the sight of Julia sitting at the kitchen table, her face in her hands, slowly moving her head from side to side as if grinding her hands into her face. Allie sank down on the damp verandah boards and wrapped her arms around her legs.
    Julia opened the door and came to sit close beside her. A stream of fruit bats flew over the house towards the forest and the smell of the lemon pie grew stronger. The longer Julia was silent, the more afraid Allie felt.
    ‘Allie?’ Her aunt’s voice shook. ‘They’ve found her. Mae’s body. Around at Middle Harbour. I just got a phone call…’
    ‘Who? Who said they’d found her?’ Allie heard her own voice as if from a distance, while her eyes followed the drips falling from her plait onto the boards, where the water sat in neat circles, like plump drops of blood.
    ‘The policeman left his number,’ Julia put her hand on Allie’s arm. ‘In case you want to speak to him. Come inside.’
    She shrugged Julia’s hand off. ‘But she was the best swimmer.’ Her voice was just a whisper, ‘We swam in the harbour all the time.’ The bats were still flying into the distance, as if nothing had changed.
    Julia nodded. ‘Yeah. She was a good swimmer. We’ll have her…body sent up here. I said that we wanted her up here. I’ll ring Barry Brooks in town. He did Mum and Dad’s funerals.’ She rubbed her face. ‘Something happened didn’t it, that last night? Before she went out? Did something happen?’
    Allie slowly undid her plait. She had lain awake for hours after Tom came, waiting for the calm, waiting for him to go. She could have got up and stopped Mae going down to the harbour, she could have done something.
    She let Julia reach an arm around her and, as she leaned into her aunt’s body, she remembered the day that she and Mae had found a fairy penguin at Goat Island, its bloated body split open and leaking the salty stench of death. They had stood on the rocks looking down at it, its fur matted and dirty and its beak open in a grotesque yawn. Her stomach cramped and she doubled over, the terrible smell of the burning pie all around them.

chapter four
    The rain gouged at the land and washed streams of red mud into the creeks. In the morning, Julia brought her tea and buttered toast in bed, then Allie followed her aunt down the paddock, where the girl slid the saplings from their pots and slowly packed soil around them, her fingers in the red dirt, pressing and pressing at the grains of soil while the rain beat down on her. She could still feel the last warm touch of Mae’s skin on hers. The frantic hand waking her, to urge her down the stairs to tell Tom to leave. Her own fingers left watery muddy marks on her legs.
    Julia gave her the job of pricking-out the tiny seedlings from the trays into individual tubes. ‘Just don’t damage the roots or stem,’ she said as she demonstrated. ‘If you do, then chuck it. Best to spend time growing only the strongest ones.’
    Allie spent hours in the quiet of the potting shed, carefully lifting the little four-leafed plants, their delicate roots quivering. Even while it rained outside, the sprinklers sprayed mist onto the hairy leaves of the tiny trees. She sat on the damp wooden chair in the corner, the sweat rolling down her body, waiting for the seedlings to grow and watching the discarded ones wilt on the ground.
    When they came up for Mae’s father’s funeral, her mother told her, ‘This is just meat, you know.’ She had pinched her arm. ‘Bodies go back to dust but we leave traces here and there, atoms of ourselves. We float in the air everywhere we have ever been. Every word spoken, every breath exhaled. Every drop of sweat. My father and mother are still all around this farm.’
    While Julia spread straw in the chicken house, Allie