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A calm voice said beside her, ‘The patient is breathing but unconscious.’

Jodie repeated the words into the phone.

‘Pulse is steady. Possibly this is heat stroke but we can’t rule out injury from the fall.’

Jodie looked up and met Joan Sloane’s steady gaze. She burst into tears. Like, instantaneously. From no tears to a hundred thousand tears, all of them pouring out of her eyes and down her face and onto Carol’s neatly frowning body below.

‘Joan,’ she said weakly. Retired nurse from Lismore Base Hospital.

Now, who had told her that? An inane thing to wonder.

‘Patient is an elderly woman so urgent assistance is required.’ Joan looked meaningfully at the phone in Jodie’s hand, and Jodie took a breath, then repeated the words to the emergency services officer.

The crowd in the tent had dissipated and she could hear the voice in the phone more clearly now. ‘Nearest street?’ She looked up and found Will’s eyes on her. He had retired with the crowd he’d pushed back and looked … distant. He stood with his back almost at the canvas wall of the tent. He’d know the name of the back street better than anyone, so why the hell wasn’t he speaking up? ‘Nearest street?’ she said again, and her delivery was almost a bark.

‘Westacott.’ Finally. ‘The Clarence Pub beer garden entrance. We’ll, um, have … someone there to wave them in.’

She repeated the information, agreed to stay on the phone, and then let out a sob when Carol, on the ground before her, said, ‘Pet? Did I win?’ and then, ‘What on earth am I doing on the ground?’

‘You have heatstroke, I suspect,’ said Joan Sloane briskly. ‘If you’re not dehydrated I’ll eat my winner’s trophy from last year. Now, why don’t we ask some of these strapping young lads to help you up into a chair? An ambulance has been called.’

‘Well, uncall it,’ said Carol with some of her old vigour.

Joan’s eyes met Jodie’s and the retired nurse shook her head.

‘I’m taking you to the hospital, Auntie Carol,’ said Jodie firmly. ‘No arguments.’

‘You’ve become very bossy, dear,’ Carol said waspishly.

‘It runs in the family,’ said Jodie.A little like red hair.

By the time Joan and Jodie had Carol sitting upright and a plastic cup of water had been found for her to sip and Will’s dad Robbo had ‘wafted’ her with a Twilight Markets brochure to create a breeze to cool her flushed cheeks, two fit-looking paramedics were rolling a gurney into the tent.

‘Been causing a fuss, have you, darling?’ said one of them to Carol.

Carol let them load her onto the gurney and Jodie took her hand to walk beside her out to the ambulance. But where was Will? Why wasn’t he with them? This was a family drama and he’d been like family to them both.

Or so she’d thought.

‘Wait,’ said Carol. ‘The envelope. Who was the winner?’

The mayor was still in the tent, sitting on a chair, her shoulder pads and dark suit making her look like a perched crow. The envelope was in her hand. ‘You sure you want to know?’

‘I’m sure I’m not leaving until I do know.’

Everyone still lingering in the tent fell silent, even the paramedics, who seemed to have intuited that, in this minute, greater things were at stake than lives.

The mayor slid her finger along the seal on the back of the envelope and the glue pulling on paper make a faint cracking noise as the adhesive section tore away.

‘And the winner is,’ the woman said, in an echo of the commanding voice she’d used earlier, ‘Joan Sloane.’

Carol slumped backwards onto the gurney.

Chapter 15

Okay, so two things didn’t happen after the mayor dropped the bombshell that Joan Sloane had won the Christmas fruit cake competition for the second year in a row. Thing one: Carol didn’t die. Her slump was theatrical, as were her words in the ambulance, when she kept insisting she may as well just be taken straight to the cemetery and be done with this mortal coil and a whole lot of other melodramatic nonsense that made Jodie reflect (a little shamefully) on the way she herself had been carrying on for months now.

Thing two: Will didn’t come with them. Not to the hospital in the back of the ambulance—which she kinda understood, on account of the fact that he was the publican, and the pub was currently hosting hundreds of people and every table, glass, stool, chair, loo and elbow space at the bar was full. But he didn’t walk them to the ambulance, either. He’d looked at her from the garden across a distance of several metres. He’d looked at Carol. Then he’d said, ‘I can’t—’ as though that made any sense at all.