These Hills Called Home | ONC 2024

[10] Wait and See

    Despite its hasty conversion from a storage area, Gemma's bedroom in the flat provided the best comfort she had experienced since her childhood. The few remaining boxes had been cleared away, carving out plenty of floorspace to fit a spare mattress, an old chest of drawers, and a splintered but sturdy bookcase. With the table and chair Avery purloined from the pub's backroom, Gemma finally had a place to sleep, change, and relax all to herself.

    Yet when the first brushes of sunlight filtered beneath her bedroom door, Gemma had been staring at the ceiling's patchy paint for a long time. While the dark gales that howled of grief and loneliness no longer disturbed her sleep, a new, gentler breeze had whistled within her last night. For the first time in years, a melody of home played in her ears, cloaked in the colours of all her conflicted emotions.

    Gemma tossed her blanket aside and pulled herself out of bed, the bare concrete floor biting at the soles of her feet. Swirls of soupy musk wafted to the back of her throat from the pub's aged heating system, and restless pipes gurgled over her pattering footsteps. As the rest of the building creaked back to life, the kitchen murmured with the hum of hard work from the tireless laptop perched on its island. A long cable tethered Jacob's phone to the computer, its braided curls funnelling troves of invisible data between the devices. Early morning sunlight winked off their darkened screens, and the fan's rhythmic whispers called to her as the single soul stirring nearby.

    The purr of the open laptop proved too tempting to resist, and Gemma slid onto a barstool and swiped her finger over the computer's touchpad. Light bloomed across the screen, and windows crammed with folders and files cluttered the desktop's compact space. The sprawling mess crowded Gemma's thoughts out in a flash, yet tiny specks of understanding glinted through the mire. In one night, she had gained access to more information about her brother's life than she had received in the past five years.

    Fuelled by a flurry of curious optimism, Gemma's first few clicks brought little of note. An appointment diary, client addresses, and wage slip records seemed unlikely to lead to meaningful answers, though Jacob's salary was as enviable as Nathan had suggested. Her search muddled through list after bloated list of dull documents, the dead ends combining to entomb her withering heart.

    Then she found the pictures. Through the muddle of miscellaneous snapped notes, a clutch of photos clearly taken outdoors attracted Gemma's eye. A small farmhouse sat at the centre of each image, its rotten thatch roof pushing the weather-worn stone walls below to the verge of collapse. Wild grass ran rampant over the house's front path, its dominance disrupted only by pops of purple from dew-soaked thistles. In the background, orderly crop fields rolled towards dense woodland or the bank of a leaf-strewn stream. It looked like many other ageing farmhouses around Milnhome, and yet there was no doubt Jacob held an interest in it.

    "Someone's hyped to bust the shady corporate douchebags." Strolling out of her room, Avery clicked her fingers at Gemma on her way to the kitchen. Her bold white band t-shirt swayed like the windswept trees, and the young daylight leapt to highlight the soft amber roots that usually hid beneath her beanie. "I hope my portable Batcave here didn't wake you up, early bird."

    "Don't worry. After years of sharing rooms with noisy kids and a noisier brain, your master hacker setup was no problem," Gemma answered, laughing at the smug bow of her friend's head. She brought up the first farmhouse picture and turned the screen to face over the island. "Jacob took a bunch of photos of this building. Do you know it?"

    Avery paused with a pair of green-striped white mugs in her hands and glanced at the photo, yet no recognition flashed through her eyes. "I know it's way further out of town than I'd wanna go," she said with a shake of her head. As she set the kettle boiling and ground up enough coffee beans for them both, she wagged a long stirrer in Gemma's direction. "This is more Nate's gig. I'll forward the pic to him, and hopefully it'll ring one of his farm boy bells."