Page 26 of Beautiful Ruins
“What’s the play, VP?” Scout said, nodding to the crate-sitters. “We waiting for them to throw the first punch?”
I slapped him on the back of his head. “Get off my bike, Prospect.”
He winced, stepping away. “Sorry,” he mumbled, rubbing the spot I’d just hit him.
He knew better than to touch another man’s bike. Seems I’d have to delegate toilet duty for the next week just to teach him a lesson. Still, the kid was trustworthy. Someone I wanted around when the shit hit the fan.
I shook my head. “And, to answer your question, no we aren’t roughing anyone up. Not yet.” I swung a leg over my bike and started the engine. “Let them make the first mistake.”
We’d be ready when they did.
Chapter Seven
SADIE
The air smelled of old metal and sunbaked dirt. I stood just outside the shed in the backyard, hands on my hips. The tin door groaned as the breeze bumped against it, the hinges bent and rusted like everything else time had chewed up in this town.
Dad had once kept the door padlocked, but now that padlock sat haphazardly dangling from the latch, the once bright green outer coating, now faded from the sunlight.
I’d been psyching myself up to set foot in the small tin enclosure where Mum’s life had been packed into boxes and left to rot. Untouched. Covered in rust-coloured dirt. After my run-in with Rowan that morning, and the fact I’d been staring at Logan’s note for half the day, I knew I had to occupy my mind with something else, otherwise I would have lost my shit completely.
Dad had texted me earlier that afternoon to let me know he was going for some drinks with a mate, and he’d be home later that night to change before work.
Of course he had mates to drink with. And me? I had dust,grief, and a rusted shed full of ghosts. He lived in the same house, wore the same boots, drank the same beer. But the man I called Dad was long gone.
I opened Logan’s note for what felt like the hundredth time, the paper now thinning where the creases were deepest.
What hurt the most was that he’d been in pain, and he never once said anything. Was that what he’d been trying to say? That he was struggling. I’d been too late to get to him. I had never known Logan to sulk about anything for more than a day. He had a way of brushing things off—even the big stuff—like they didn’t really matter in the scheme of things.
Whatever he’d been carrying, I’d never get the chance to hear it. He was still gone. I was still lost.
I shoved the note back in my pocket and stepped up to the shed’s opening. All I had to do was walk in. One foot in front of the other. But my feet stayed planted like the ground had swallowed them whole.
With a shake of my head to dislodge my thoughts, I stepped over the threshold and grabbed the first box down from the shelf. Dust spilled into the air like tiny little clouds, clogging up my throat. A cough wheezed out of me, and I waved a hand in front of my face.
I flipped the flaps of the box open. Inside wasn’t much better. A battered yellow torch lay on top, scratched up from its share of childish games and ghost stories around campfires. Murder in the dark had been a favourite of mine and Logan’s. Rowan had always been ‘too big’ to play such ‘baby’ games.
Hadn’t stopped him from hovering on the back steps, pretending to listen to music on his phone, while Logan and I had hidden in the most obvious of spots. Sometimes Rowan would even point some of the harder ones out to me, then chase Logan in the opposite direction, giving me more time to hide. More often than not, Logan had given up after onlyfifteen minutes and would disappear inside. Then, Rowan would find me again, throw me a packet of sour worms—my favourite—and drop beside me, holding out one of his earbuds. Sometimes we’d sit for hours not saying anything at all. They were often the nights I hadn’t been able to wipe the smile off my face. Which was a far cry from where we stood at that moment.
I picked the torch up and turned it over in my hands. Rowan had called me Firefly earlier—his nickname for me when we were kids. I hadn’t heard it in years, but I’d held onto it since the first time he’d used it. Only Rowan had bothered to see me as anything more than a name on paper. Firefly. A word that meant something. He’d named the part of me no-one else noticed. The part that was now burning out fast.
I set the torch down on the floor and continued to flip through the items in the box. I wasn’t about to let myself fall down the Rowan Knight rabbit hole. Not again.
A shaft of light cut through the holes in the sides of the shed, dancing over the stacks of old notebooks and journals. Dust motes floated lazily in the beam, the smell of decay thick in the air.
My mum had spent her life in these notebooks. It had felt like a tug-of-war most days with her, vying for her attention when all she had wanted to be was an investigative journalist—not a mother. It had always struck me as odd that she gave more of a shit about strangers and their business than what she did about her own kid.
God forbid she cared about the thing she gave birth to. If she didn’t want me, why did she become a mother? I didn’t have any siblings. Maybe I was a trial run, a mistake neither her nor my father wanted to admit. A defective product they were stuck with—feeding me, wiping me, pretending I was part of their world.
I pulled out a notebook, my fingers lingering over the edges before opening it. My chest tightened, as if the paper could hold answers I wasn’t ready to face. A bunch of names and dates littered the off-white pages, but nothing stood out. Just addresses and question marks. Something my mother had done often when she was unsure about a detail.
My hands hovered over the next notebook, its corners dog-eared and warped. I flipped it open. Again, it was full of scribbled notes, some of the ink tearing through the page as names jumped out at me.
Hollow Creek Farm. The old Jones farm. All farms. More names I didn’t recognise. But to my mother? They had meant something.
She’d taken me to Hollow Creek Farm plenty of times after picking me up from school. I’d waited in the car while she’d disappeared for fifteen minutes, always returning with either a smile or a scowl. I had never asked what she was doing. I guess I didn’t care enough to want to know.
What I remembered most about the farm was the creek it had been named after—Hollow Creek. Logan and I used to bike there to collect tadpoles. Logan had loved to watch them transform into frogs. But mostly, they’d just died in a bucket in his garage and stink out the place until Rowan threatened to make him eat them.
