4308.269 · September 25, 1988 AD
A Catalogue of Silences
Scones cool on the kitchen counter. Mandy chatters about boys and weekend plans. Everything about this morning visit feels achingly normal—except for the door standing ajar at the end of the hallway. Violet knows she shouldn't. She knows what it will cost if she's caught. But the study belongs to Detective Barry Glasson, and somewhere inside those walls are answers about Sally Harlow that no one else is willing to give. The handle turns easily. The lie she'll have to tell Mandy won't.
25 September 1988. The Glasson house.
Violet arrives at her best friend's home carrying secrets she cannot share and questions she dare not ask aloud. The morning unfolds in familiar rhythms—Linda's fresh-baked scones, Mandy's breathless gossip, sunlight warming the kitchen tiles. For a few precious minutes, Violet almost believes she can pretend the world hasn't shifted beneath her feet.
Then Mandy steps away to help her mother, and the study door beckons from the hallway shadows.
What Violet finds inside will change everything she thought she knew about her town. Maps spread across the desk, pierced with red dots like wounds. Thread connecting Silverton, Tibooburra, Menindee—small towns she's driven through without a second thought, now revealed as points on a constellation of vanished girls. Names and dates stretching back decades, written in Barry Glasson's careful hand.
And buried in a leather briefcase beneath the desk: a notebook marked Personal. Pages of surveillance notes on Sally Harlow's movements. A word circled in angry ink—Ironsand. And a name that stops Violet's breath in her throat.
A name she recognises.
A name that belongs to someone she trusted.
