Nest by Inga Simpson Page A

parents didn’t pick it untilit was pointed out, and then – much to their relief – appreciated the joke.
    There hadn’t been many smiles in grade seven, and there were no jokes, because Michael wouldn’t ever be in their photographs again.
    There was an old Fourex coaster from the pub. She flipped it over. Stan Overton. A six-digit phone number. It didn’t look like her father’s writing. Probably some work contact, another tree-killer looking for work.
    There was a stack of faded handwritten receipts for fuel. Never claimed. Today’s were lucky to last out till tax time, especially in this climate. She often wondered what happened when people were audited and all their receipts had gone blank. If it wasn’t, somehow, deliberate.
    The pay slips, such as they were, didn’t tell her a great deal. He hadn’t earned much for hard work – but she had already known that from her lunch box contents. Some of the receipts were interesting: payments for loads of wood he had organised himself, perhaps. Those sums seemed larger, but then he would have had to pay his men, and maybe give Sam a cut. The date on one of them pulled her up; it was the day he disappeared. A larger sum than usual, too.

Coaster
    J en put on her boots at the front door. The scrubwren’s eyes were less fierce in their little black mask. Jen would have liked to get a photograph, but that felt too rude, too intrusive.
    She took advantage of the cool morning to walk to the village. It was always a pleasant journey down, but with a killer return. The council were doing something patchy to the side of the road, and one fellow gave her a wave. She waved back.
    The dairy farm off towards the mountain was lush green, and the dams full, but the cattle were bellowing. It couldn’t be for want of food or drink. Perhaps they had been separated from their calves. Jen’s thighs were burning already, straining not to tumble downhill. A kingfisher sat on the powerline, surveying the scene. In the sun, his coat was indeed as resplendent as a king’s.
    It had all begun here – the ‘opening up’ of the area. The first white settler had lived just downstream, in a hut on the bank of the creek, accumulating runs until he controlled the land all around the river mouth. He had owned the abattoir on Slaughter Yard Road, too – quite a monopoly. He had grazedcattle, though not all that successfully – run off, in the end, by Gubbi Gubbi. It gave her some pleasure to know that the first people had been particularly ‘troublesome’ in the area. As if something in the country itself encouraged resilience.
    This time the mill gate was open, as if expecting her.
    ‘Hey, Sam,’ she said.
    ‘Hi, Jen,’ he said. ‘How are things?’
    ‘Nice to get a bit of rain.’
    ‘Reckon.’
    She stepped inside the shed. It still smelled the same. Wood, of course, but all different notes, mixed with oil and metal and time. Old number plates covered one wall, dating back to the fifties.
    ‘Coppers still haven’t found that girl,’ he said, holding up the local rag. ‘Some big investigation unit set up in the city now.’ Caitlin’s parents, or the people who used to be her parents, were on the cover, pleading for public help.
    ‘Someone must know something,’ she said.
    He looked over his glasses, which were in need of a good clean. ‘Cuppa?’
    ‘Sure,’ she said.
    She sat up at the workbench, scarred with chisel and saw marks, spills and chips, half-covered with old newspapers and scraps of paper scribbled with measurements and phone numbers.
    ‘Sam?’
    ‘Yeah, love?’ He put her cup down in front of her, to the right, and flipped out a coaster to slip under it, as if the beach were still a more polished piece of furniture.
    ‘These coasters,’ she said. ‘From the old pub. Where’d you get them?’
    ‘Fred gave me a whole box, before the place was torn down. I pinched a couple of bricks, too, from the building. Nearly got myself arrested.’
    It had divided