There Is More Light Than Dark

Chapter Sixty

Wednesday August 17

Harper Lewis pulled over at the side of the main road a couple of kilometres short of the township of Barwon Heads, just where the GPS shows the Merc stopped on the night that seemed to change Avery. She parked the car under a thicket of tea tree, opened her door and walked slowly around the roadside.

McCoy sat in the passenger seat, re-reading the file in earnest until he realised she had turned the ignition off and was beckoning for him to come out. McCoy felt better than ever that he had Lewis with him. Partly because she could verify whatever he might find and help him with an extra set of eyes and hands, and partly because he needed someone to listen. He'd never dump some of what he had been thinking on Chloe even though he knew she was tough.

It was more that he didn't want her to pity him and what he had to deal with and think about all of his days. She knew he carried things; could tell from the way he'd stir his coffee slowly and kiss Rose's head for seconds longer than he needed to sometimes when she was reading him a story. She'd see his eyes stay open and behind them he'd drift off to the land he worked in where what humans were capable of initially stunned and shocked but after 25 years just had you disappointed.

Chloe McCoy knew this only through watching him and feeling what he emitted; but she could have handled the real stuff if he'd thrown it at her.

But here was Harper Lewis, a five year out Senior Constable, now Detective, who was quiet but precise; the fact that she had also gone to University to study law but dropped it when she saw how the wrangling often meant justice didn't follow the law probably helped too.

There was farmland on either side of the road mostly. Some long low stone walls and grand houses in the distance behind them. Shallow culverts metres from the roadside collecting discarded cigarette packets, branches fallen from some of the large cypress trees behind the fences and pockets of water from the winter rains that had fallen. His breath puffed, condensing and hanging in the cold air as if he were smoking again.

McCoy looked at every blob of old chewing gum, at the darkened patches of asphalt where the sun had not reached to dry yet and at each stone and leaf and piece of debris that sat on the road. He lifted hundreds of them with his pen, careful to examine every single piece that was not part of the road itself. He trudged through the culverts, raking his hands along under the long grass hoping he might feel something that made him jump. But he sat back into the car an hour later with nothing more than wet feet and cold hands and he put his hands on the dashboard and thumped it lightly.

'Something happened here. It had to have.' He spoke quietly to himself, more so than Lewis; partly to put himself into their scared minds late at night, part reassurance that he had studied the GPS data, that he trusted his feeling about Vincent; that a kid like Avery Prosser doesn't just suicide without something substantial happening.

'Something changed.' He heard Lewis repeat to herself from the driver'sdrivers seat she had sat herself back in.

'Yeah, but maybe not right here...' McCoy also spoke slowly and drifted off.

Lewis looked across at him but said nothing more. She nodded as another car raced by, rocking the sedan their cold coffees sat in the doors of. He nodded at the key and put his seatbelt on, indicating for her to get going.

Reluctantly she started the unmarked car and rolled into a U turn, heading for the Otways via Winchelsea.