Boxes on Porches

Gladys Cramer identified the flaw in the manifest strategy while the truck was still following the river road between New Norfolk and Claremont, her hands fidgeting in her lap with the involuntary agitation of a woman whose body was processing what her mind had been too shocked to analyse at the time of agreement. The observation was simple and irrefutable: if nobody saw Joel Gibbons make the deliveries, then nobody could confirm that Joel Gibbons had made the deliveries. Packages on doorsteps were not testimony. They were objects without provenance, as likely to have been placed there by two women in a hired truck as by the young man whose name appeared on the manifest. The entire exercise — the route, the careful parking at a distance, the instruction not to be seen — had been designed around the assumption that completed deliveries constituted evidence of a completed working day. But evidence required witnesses, and the operational principle of the cover-up was the avoidance of witnesses. The sisters were constructing an alibi whose architecture excluded the only element that would make it credible.

Beatrix received the observation with the silence of someone who had not considered the objection and could not dismiss it. Her response — that the deliveries might keep investigators distracted — was the thinnest justification she had offered all day, and both women recognised it as such. The cover story was not airtight. It was not even waterproof. It was a structure assembled in haste by people whose expertise lay in antiques, regulatory compliance, and the management of wine consumption, and it would hold only if the people examining it chose not to press too hard on its seams. This was not a comforting probability, but it was the only one available, and the deliveries continued because the alternative — sitting in a truck with Joel Gibbons's remaining cargo and no plan at all — was worse.

The Claremont and Moonah deliveries followed the pattern established at New Norfolk. Beatrix parked at a distance. Gladys walked. The packages were deposited on doorsteps without contact, without confirmation, without any of the human interaction that a genuine delivery would have produced. Each drop reduced the cargo in the truck and increased the list of addresses where forensic attention might eventually land — doorsteps bearing parcels handled by a woman whose fingerprints were already on file from the morning's crime scene, deposited by someone whose DNA the police would have no difficulty obtaining should the investigation extend to the manifest's final three stops. The sisters were not eliminating evidence. They were distributing it.

The call from Luke arrived as the final delivery was completed, and its content revealed the degree to which the sisters' involvement had already exceeded the boundaries of the cover-up. Luke needed shelving. He needed instructions for pouring a concrete slab. These were not requests connected to Joel Gibbons's death or the concealment of his body — they were the supply requirements of a man building infrastructure in Clivilius, and the fact that he directed them to the Cramer sisters rather than sourcing them himself confirmed what the morning's events had already established: Beatrix and Gladys had been absorbed into Luke Smith's operational apparatus. The cover-up had been the entry point. The errands that followed were the evidence that the entry point had already closed behind them.

Beatrix's offer to pay for the shelving introduced a complication neither sister addressed aloud. Gladys, whose mortgage payment was approaching and whose employment had ended three weeks earlier, could not fund the purchase. Beatrix, who lived rent-free in her parents' home and had not held stable employment since the collapse of Timeless Treasures, claimed to have money. The claim was not challenged. Gladys registered it — the suspicion visible in the narrowing of her eyes and the pointed directness of her question — but she did not pursue it, either because the day had exhausted her capacity for confrontation or because she recognised, in the pattern of things Beatrix chose not to explain, a boundary whose crossing would yield information she was not prepared to hold alongside everything else she had absorbed since the previous evening. The money's source joined the expanding inventory of things the sisters carried separately: Leigh's urgent summons in Beatrix's phone, Cody's midnight visit in Gladys's memory, the morning's horror distributed unevenly between two women whose proximity to each other had never been greater and whose transparency with each other had never been less.

The truck turned toward Bunnings with two addresses cleared from the manifest and a hardware list that belonged to a different category of obligation entirely. The deliveries were finished. The cover-up, such as it was, had been built and left to stand or fall on the strength of packages deposited on porches by a woman nobody had seen. What the sisters were driving toward now was not concealment but provision — the supply of materials for a settlement in another dimension, funded by money Beatrix should not have had, requested by a man whose authority over their afternoon had been established not through agreement but through the incremental accumulation of shared guilt that made refusal indistinguishable from self-incrimination.