Grand Masti - Fun Never Ends. Neha Puntambekar

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      Dark eyes studied him. ‘That must get you into a lot of trouble,’ she eventually said.

      True enough.

      ‘Let me buy you a drink. Give those guys some time to clear out and then I’ll help you put the posters up.’

      ‘I don’t need your help. Or your protection.’

      ‘Okay, but I’d like to take a proper look at that poster.’

      He regarded her steadily as uncertainty flooded her expression. The same that he’d seen out on the highway. ‘Or is the leather still bothering you?’

      Indecision flooded her face and her eyes flicked from his beard to his eyes, then down to his lips and back again.

      ‘No. You haven’t robbed or murdered me yet. I think a few minutes together in a public place will be fine.’

      She turned and glanced down the street where a slight doof-doof issued from an architecturally classic Aussie hotel. Then her voice filled with warning. ‘Just one.’

      It was hard not to smile. Her stern little face was like a daisy facing up to a cyclone.

      ‘If I was going to hurt you I’ve had plenty of opportunity. I don’t really need to get you liquored up.’

      ‘Encouraging start to the conversation.’

      ‘You know my name,’ he said, moving his feet in a pubward direction. ‘I don’t know yours.’

      She regarded him steadily. Then stuck out the hand with the staple gun clutched in it. ‘Evelyn Read. Eve.’

      He shook half her hand and half the tool. ‘What do you like to drink, Eve?’

      ‘I don’t. Not in public. But you go ahead.’

      A teetotaller in an outback pub.

       Well, this should be fun.

      * * *

      Eve trusted Marshall Sullivan with her posters while she used the facilities. When she came back, he’d smoothed out all the crinkles in the top one and was studying it.

      ‘Brother?’ he said as she slid into her seat.

      ‘What makes you say that?’

      He tapped the surname on the poster where it had Travis James Read in big letters.

      ‘He could be my husband.’ She shrugged.

      His eyes narrowed. ‘Same dark hair. Same shape eyes. He looks like you.’

      Yeah, he did. Everyone thought so. ‘Trav is my little brother.’

      ‘And he’s missing?’

      God, she hated this bit. The pity. The automatic assumption that something bad had happened. Hard enough not letting herself think it every single day without having the thought planted back in her mind by strangers at every turn.

      Virtual strangers.

      Though, at least this one did her the courtesy of not referring to Travis in the past tense. Points for that.

      ‘Missing a year next week, actually.’

      ‘Tough anniversary. Is that why you’re out here? Is this where he was last seen?’

      She lifted her gaze back to his. ‘No. In Melbourne.’

      ‘So what brings you out west?’

      ‘I ran out of towns on the east coast.’

      Blond brows lowered. ‘You’ve lost me.’

      ‘I’m visiting every town in the country. Looking for him. Putting up notices. Doing the legwork.’

      ‘I assumed you were just on holidays or something.’

      ‘No. This is my job.’

      Now. Before that she’d been a pretty decent graphic designer for a pretty decent marketing firm. Until she’d handed in her notice.

      ‘Putting up posters is your job?’

      ‘Finding my brother.’ The old defensiveness washed through her. ‘Is anything more important?’

      His confusion wasn’t new. He wasn’t the first person not to understand what she was doing. By far. Her own father didn’t even get it; he just wanted to grieve Travis’s absence as though he were dead. To accept he was gone.

      She was light-years and half a country away from being ready to accept such a thing. She and Trav had been so close. If he was dead, wouldn’t she feel it?

      ‘So...what, you just drive every highway in the country pinning up notices?’

      ‘Pretty much. Trying to trigger a memory in someone’s mind.’

      ‘And it’s taken you a year to do the east coast?’

      ‘About eight months. Though I started up north.’ And that was where she’d finish.

      ‘What happened before that?’

      Guilt hammered low in her gut for those missing couple of months before she’d realised how things really were. How she’d played nice and sat on her hands while the police seemed to achieve less and less. Maybe if she’d started sooner—

      ‘I trusted the system.’

      ‘But the authorities didn’t find him?’

      ‘There are tens of thousands of missing people every year. I just figured that the only people who could make Trav priority number one were his family.’

      ‘That many? Really?’

      ‘Teens. Kids. Women. Most are located pretty quickly.’

      But ten per cent weren’t.

      His eyes tracked down to the birthdate on the poster. ‘Healthy eighteen-year-old males don’t really make it high up the priority list?’

      A small fist formed in her throat. ‘Not when there’s no immediate evidence of foul play.’

      And even if they maybe weren’t entirely healthy, psychologically. But Travis’s depression was hardly unique amongst The Missing and his anxiety attacks were longstanding enough that the authorities dismissed them as irrelevant. As if a bathroom cabinet awash with mental health medicines wasn’t relevant.

      A young woman with bright pink hair badly in need of a recolour brought Marshall’s beer and Eve’s lime and bittes and sloshed them on the table.

      ‘That explains the bus,’ he said. ‘It’s very...homey.’

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