One Sunday by Joy Dettman

woman’s high-heeled shoe in the dust. Rachael had been wearing shoes with heels, and one of those shoes had probably made that print.
    â€˜So she walked away, she wasn’t carried from this place.’ He found another print, and a good one, and it was heading for Merton Road.
    â€˜She’s walking,’ he said, moving forward, eyes searching the dust. ‘She’s still walking here, and still alone, Thomo. And there she is again.’ He tracked those shoe prints ten or twelve yards up Kennedy’s Road before he lost them.
    â€˜You’ll never make a black tracker, Thomo.’
    With Merton Road and the hotel close by, he stopped. He’d have to have a word with the widow Dolan sooner or later, a waste of time or not. Why not do it while he was down this end of town?
    â€˜Go and get her out of her bed, Thomo,’ he said.
    Â 
    Tom had knocked on Harry Dolan’s door more regularly than he knocked on his widow’s door. Born and raised in that pub when pub hours had been pretty much as you like it, Harry had considered six o’clock closing as a personal attack, brought in by the government purely to ruin his business. He’d ignored it.
    His widow, city born and bred, made a good show of complying by the laws of the land, closing her bar room door at six on the dot on weeknights, but every Saturday night she had a party in her cider pit, and had some lying coot lined up who’d swear black and blue that he was throwing the party, that the drinks were on him. She had a fundraising get-together every Sunday afternoon, served tea and scones in the cider pit – or so she said. He knew she was selling grog in there. Where she hid it, he didn’t know; he’d wasted a lot of time during the early months of her widowhood, creeping up on that pit and trying to find out.
    Len Larkin spent half his life at the pub, though he wasn’t a heavy drinker. Other than losing half of one arm, Larkin was one of the few returned boys who’d come through the war unscarred. He, Dave Kennedy and Tige Johnson had been the only survivors of Molliston’s 1914 football team, until Tige went mad one night and blew his brains out on Squire’s front lawn.
    Tom parked his bike in the shade of an overgrown pear tree, heavy with fruit, remembering the last time he’d parked it there when he’d ended up threatening to charge the widow with everything from selling grog after hours, to selling herself. That woman always put him at a disadvantage, always sent his good sense scattering like a flock of cockatoos off a wheat paddock.
    He checked his watch. No sign of any life down here – however, it was now well past rising time for normal folk, and if the widow wasn’t one of the normal folk, then that was her problem, Tom told himself as he marched to her front door and rapped hard on it.
    No sound from within. He hammered that door, near ringbarking his knuckles before it opened and a wild frizz of red-gum auburn hair came through it.
    â€˜Oh, it’s just you, lovey. Drop your trousers in the hall and put your two bob on the table,’ she greeted him, one amber eye mocking him, the other hidden behind that hair.
    He lifted his chin, but not his helmet, which was on a level with the top of that hair this morning, only because the doorstep gave her an extra five inches, though the widow Dolan was no midget; Tom had touched six foot two and a half when he’d joined the force.
    â€˜A sensible word or two this morning, thank you, Mrs Dolan.’
    â€˜Oh, don’t go all official on me now, lovey. They call me Red in the bedroom.’
    â€˜They call you a menace to decent flamin’ society, that’s what they call you! Your mouth needs hosing out with turpentine.’
    Shouldn’t have said that. Always saying the wrong thing with this woman, but she had a tongue on her that drove him to it. Every time he had to deal with her, he ended up