Crystal Coffin Read Online Free PDF Page B

that he had so far and smiled, remembering that while they’d been loading crates into the plane and arguing, he’d slipped quietly inside the boathouse and helped himself to the contents of the last crate before they came back for it.
    â€˜Do me one more quickie before you go?’ he asked, remembering the little black mare that he’d had to borrow to ride over to the boathouse. ‘Fidget could have salt marks on her back. I had to take her out this morning when I couldn’t find Jack and I didn’t get a chance to rub her down properly before I left.’
    â€˜I’ll take care of it,’ Denny said. ‘Kirby will have my hide if her mare sweats off a single hair while she’s at boarding school.’ He didn’t have to add how Locklin’s kid sister would react to finding out that her favourite horse and everything else that she’d grown up with now belonged to some interstate company called Fletcher Corp. They both knew that she’d be crushed, and the old Scotsman wondered if he could swap a week’s wages in exchange for the mare to prevent that.
    â€˜There’s something you’ll have to do fer me too,’ Denny added, reminded by the name of the company that haunted both their lives now. ‘The Maitlands are expectin’ a new employee, someone to help out aparently, on a coach at five this afternoon. Maitland’s wife Thorna is none too happy about it and now that she’s writin’ my pay cheques, she’s asked me to duck into Lowood to fetch ’em. Can yer do that?’
    â€˜I can,’ Locklin said, looking at his watch. It was four now. ‘What’s their name?’
    â€˜Fletcher,’ Denny said, hearing Locklin’s knuckles crack around the phone. ‘Nick Fletcher. So you be careful.’

    The shrill whinny of a stallion echoed down Main Street, but Scotty Nolan assumed it was one of the girls from his class riding her fat pony past the cafe. They often cut through the park across the road on their way to the river after school, and on such a stinking afternoon, he figured this one had to be stupid to be so far behind the others.
    He scrubbed the fat globules from the cafe hotplates, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand while the vision of a new muffler for his dirt-bike kept him going. But the horse snorted twice at the end of its whinny and an icy whip cracked a chill down Scotty’s spine. There was only one horse he knew with a whinny like that, and that horse was supposed to be dead.
    He looked up in time to see a Bedford horse truck drive past the window and ran around the counter to check it out. He pushed his freckled nose to the glass like a skinny pink pig and could feel the heat haze that was trying to get in off the bitumen outside.
    The truck cut its engine in the car park across the street and a few seconds later Scotty’s face broke into a grin. The driver was out, and he recognised him.
    A thin white muzzle on a long black nose snorted through the rails and the driver patted it, waiting for a car to pass before heading down the tree-lined footpath towards the bus stop. Behind him a dog squeezed its fat red belly through the rails and followed him.
    Scotty rapped his fingers along the window to attract their attention. He made it as far as the cafe door and checked over his shoulder, ensuring he was safe. Janet Slaney was still in the storeroom. She was two years younger than him, but her mum let her run the store whenever she popped out to do some banking at the newsagency up the street. He could hear her singing along with her Best of Madonna cassette while she shifted boxes around for their monthly stocktake and she groaned out something about Bounty Bars and then started counting them from one. He grinned, knowing she’d be a while, and opened the front door just enough to keep the overhead chimes from clanking as he poked his face out.
    â€˜Hey Jays. Jayson