The Manifest Route

The truck pulled out of Luke's driveway carrying two women, a delivery manifest retrieved from a dead man's pocket, and the understanding — articulated by Beatrix in words that closed the last available exit — that they had to see it through. The alternative was not an alternative. It was a police investigation in which one sister had blood on her jeans, the other had wine on her breath, both had their fingerprints across a contaminated crime scene, and the body they should have reported could not be explained to an interviewing officer. The deliveries were not optional. They were the architecture of a lie that required physical construction — boxes deposited at addresses, a paper trail confirming that Joel Gibbons had completed his work before vanishing — and the sisters were the only labour available to build it.

Beatrix turned right at the first junction. The error was not navigational. It was the instinct of a woman whose body still flinched from the town at the other end of the manifest's route. New Norfolk held the repurposed church that had been Timeless Treasures — the shop she and Brody Taylor had filled with rescued objects and shared purpose, the building the bank had repossessed and the family had picked clean, the site of every ambition she had permitted herself to invest in and every loss that had followed. Claremont was closer. Claremont was safer. Claremont did not require her to drive through the geography of her own dismantling. The deflection was brief. Gladys, manifest in hand, corrected the route with the brisk authority of a woman who had spent thirteen years optimising compliance procedures and who recognised, even through the wine and the nausea, that efficiency was not merely preferable but essential — the longer the deliveries took, the wider the window in which Joel's employer might report him missing. Beatrix took the roundabout in a full circle and emerged heading the direction she had been avoiding. She did not explain the original turn. Gladys did not ask.

They passed Luke's house on the corrected route, and the driveway was empty. The delivery truck containing Joel Gibbons's body — the vehicle that had occupied that space when they arrived, that had held the horror which had restructured their morning — was gone. The absence confirmed what their rational minds already knew and what their nervous systems had not yet accepted: the evidence was in Clivilius, the body was beyond the reach of any Tasmanian jurisdiction, and the cover-up they were now performing was the only remaining structure connecting the morning's events to the ordinary world they were pretending to still inhabit.

Beatrix looked at the empty driveway too long. The truck drifted left. The impact was minor — a parked car's side mirror, clipped and sent spinning into the roadside grass — but the sound of it, the crunch of plastic and glass separating from a vehicle that belonged to someone who had done nothing wrong and whose morning had contained no portals, no bodies, and no deliveries conducted on behalf of the dead, introduced a new category of consequence into the day. This was not complicity in a crime they had stumbled into. This was a crime they had generated themselves, produced by the distraction that the first crime had caused, and the decision not to stop — made by Gladys, enforced by the blood visible on Beatrix's jeans — converted a moment of carelessness into a hit-and-run that neither sister would report, repair, or acknowledge beyond the confines of the cab.

The manifest sat in Gladys's lap. Three addresses remained. The road to New Norfolk stretched ahead through the winter landscape of the Derwent Valley — eucalypts, dry grass, wire fences, the ordinary furniture of a Tasmanian day that had no knowledge of what the two women in the passing truck had done that morning or what they were driving toward. Gladys's body, which had been absorbing shock through wine since the discovery of Joel's body, reached its limit on the back road. She asked Beatrix to pull over. She vomited into a saltbush at the roadside — bile and wine and the physical residue of two bodies she had not been built to encounter, separated by four years but occupying the same space behind her eyes. She climbed back into the cab without commentary. Beatrix drove on without asking whether she was all right, because the answer was self-evident and because the manifest did not accommodate recovery time.

They continued toward New Norfolk in the silence that accumulates between people who have exhausted argument, bickering, and deflection and have arrived at the territory beyond — the quiet of two women bound by blood that was more than just their own, performing the final hours of a young man's working life as though the performance might undo the fact that he would never perform them himself. The road carried them forward. The manifest dictated direction. And behind them, in the rearview mirror Beatrix had adjusted when she first sat down — a small ritual of control performed before everything that followed made control impossible — the suburb of Berriedale receded into distance, taking with it the driveway, the empty space where the truck had been, and the last physical location where the morning's events had left a mark visible to anyone who had not been inside them.