Darkening Skies by Bronwyn Parry

thoughts.
    Despite the helmet she recognised Gillespie on the bike, with a young girl riding pillion behind him in T-shirt and leggings, a long dark ponytail hanging down her back. They stopped near the police sergeant, who hugged the girl and called over the constable to escort her around the side of the house and inside, avoiding the plastic-coveredheap in the driveway.
    But it was the sergeant and Gillespie who interested Jenn. She couldn’t hear their words, but their body language spoke volumes. Unguarded concern on the sergeant’s face, very little space between them, Gillespie’s hand gentle on her shoulder.
    Intimacy.
    Gillespie at the pub, seven a.m. phone call, policewoman leaving hurriedly … it all added up. They’d been in room one, next to her.
    ‘Gillespie and a
cop
?’ she muttered in a low voice.
    Mark folded his arms, unsurprised by the scene they’d just witnessed. ‘Yes. Kris and Gil fell for each other pretty hard when he first came back to Dungirri, a few months ago.’
    ‘But wasn’t he caught up in the mafia?’
    ‘Not through choice,’ Mark said. ‘And we’ve had our own tangled web of organised crime around here for a long time, Jenn. Gil might have walked a fine line sometimes through necessity, but it seems he stayed on the right side of the law.’
    Unlike Sean, who’d fallen for the promises and the money and the power of corruption and committed acts she couldn’t reconcile with the boy she’d known.
    Maybe there was more to Gil Gillespie than she’d thought.
    ‘Who’s the girl?’
    ‘Long story. The short version is, Barbara had a daughter, adopted out as a baby. Barb died of cancer a few years back, the adoptive parents died, and Megan is here with her grandparents.’
    ‘And Gillespie?’
    ‘Is her father,’ he said calmly.
    Jenn stared at him, searching for signs that he was joking. Gil Gillespieand the cop was hard enough to figure, but Gil and Barbara Russell …
    ‘How the hell did
that
happen?’
    For the first time since she’d been back, she saw a flicker of his old grin. ‘The usual way, I presume,’ he said. ‘It seems Barb didn’t share her father’s prejudices. Two decent, lonely teenagers can find a lot in common, given the opportunity.’
    A hazy memory re-emerged: a summer night, teenagers gathered at the swimming hole on Dungirri Creek for an impromptu party, and Barbara joining the crowd, a little upset, a little defiant, a little nervous. Someone said she’d argued with her father and walked out. She’d been just as much an outsider as Gillespie, and no-one quite knew how to treat her. Except, perhaps, Gillespie, who lived and worked cutting timber with his violent father a few kilometres from town, and rarely had the chance to mix with his peers.
    Two lonely teenagers, something in common, and the opportunity … she remembered seeing them talking, sitting together on a log at the edge of the crowd. One night, one party – it had to have been then, because Gillespie was arrested the next night – and now there was a teenage girl.
    Oh, there but for the grace of a functioning condom … She felt her cheeks suddenly heating. Damn it. Why the hell was she blushing over something so long ago, so natural and normal for the teenagers they’d been?
    She slid a glance at Mark, but he watched the couple across the road, deep in his own thoughts, oblivious to the memories fresh in hers.
    That long-ago afternoon, justafter his eighteenth birthday, in the old shearers’ quarters, the sweet, shy, gentle loving between them, and the heart-tearing sorrow that followed it when she told him she was determined to leave Dungirri soon …
    He didn’t remember anything about that week. None of it. That bittersweet afternoon was gone, wiped from his mind along with the memories of the accident and Paula’s death.

    Two decent, single adults could find a lot in common, too. Not only sex. And in the case of Kris and Gil, Mark could see the strengthening of the