The News from Silverton

“Bad news in Broken Hill spreads quieter than gossip, but it cuts twice as deep.” — Mandy Glasson

The following day dragged on with the weight of unspoken fears. Violet carried the memory of the voice in her room like a bruise no one else could see. It pulsed quietly in her chest, tender, untouchable, while everyone else moved through the day as though nothing had changed.

The house felt different. Heavier. Her father’s gaze lingered too long whenever their eyes met, his silence full of some wordless charge that pressed on Violet’s nerves. He never asked, never explained, but the lines set in his jaw told her enough—that something had unsettled him too.

Jasmine, by contrast, drifted about as if the night before had been nothing more than a dream. She hummed under her breath, padded barefoot across the tiles, and pulled faces at Violet over the breakfast table as if daring her to laugh. Yet Violet caught it—the quick, sharp glances her sister stole when she thought no one was looking. A watchfulness. A waiting, as though Jasmine expected Violet to falter, to let slip the terror still coiled inside her.

By late afternoon Violet couldn’t stand the house any longer. The air inside pressed close and stifling, thick with unsaid things. She made her excuses and pedalled across the baked streets until she reached Michelle’s place, where Mandy and Rebecca had already gathered.

They sprawled across the back verandah, their schoolbooks and exercise pads scattered between them like props no one knew how to use. A history assignment for Mr Clarke sat at the centre of the pile, but none of them had written more than a line or two. The paper edges curled in the heat, ink fading into half-hearted scratches.

The late sun slanted across the corrugated iron roof, the verandah boards warm under their legs. Cicadas droned from the trees beyond the fence, their relentless hum filling the pauses in conversation. The air smelled of dry grass, faint detergent from the washing line, and the metallic tang of dust that seemed to settle everywhere in Broken Hill.

Mandy had kicked her shoes off and was idly tearing at a sheet of lined paper, the strips fluttering across the boards. Michelle lay flat on her stomach, chin resting on her arms, pen rolling aimlessly between her fingers. Rebecca sat straighter, knees drawn up, her expression as composed as always, though she turned the pages of her textbook without really seeing them.

Violet lowered herself onto the boards with a soft thud, letting her bag slide to the floor. For a moment she just listened—the drone of insects, the faint creak of wood, the rhythm of her friends’ breathing. Yet beneath it all a tautness lingered, unspoken and unacknowledged, the weight of things they hadn’t dared voice since the other day.

Michelle gave the open textbook a half-hearted nudge with her pen. “Mr Clarke reckons we’ve got to write four pages on the pastoral leases before next week. Four pages! Who’s got that much to say about dusty paddocks and sheep?”

Mandy groaned, flopping onto her back, the hem of her shirt riding up against the boards. “Honestly, I’d rather shovel tailings. He goes on like he’s teaching at bloody Oxford instead of Broken Hill High.”

Rebecca didn’t look up from her exercise book. Her pencil hovered above the page, unmoving. “It’s not that bad if you actually listen,” she said, her tone even, matter-of-fact. “He’s… particular. Wants it done his way.”

Mandy smirked, rolling onto one elbow to shoot her a look. “Oh, here we go. Clarke’s star pupil. Don’t tell me you enjoy hearing about sheep stations and crown grants.”

A faint flush crept up Rebecca’s neck, though her eyes stayed fixed on the blank page in front of her. “I didn’t say that. I just mean… he takes it seriously. Doesn’t like people wasting his time.”

Violet watched her carefully. The flicker of colour in Rebecca’s cheeks, the way her pencil hadn’t touched paper—it was all too telling. She remembered the whisper in class, Mandy nudging her with a grin: Do you think he fancies Rebecca? At the time it had seemed nothing more than a joke, something to laugh off. But now, seeing the way Rebecca’s shoulders tightened at the mention of Mr Clarke, Violet wasn’t so sure.

The cicadas shrilled louder, filling the silence that followed. Violet shifted her notebook onto her lap but didn’t open it. Her skin prickled with the heat, with the memory of the voice in her room, with the knowledge that even here—on Michelle’s verandah, with friends and the comfort of routine—she couldn’t quite settle.

Michelle sighed, rolling onto her side. “I swear Clarke’s got it in for me. Last week he gave me a lecture just for handing in an essay with the wrong margin. Who even cares about margins?”

“Because you barely wrote anything,” Mandy said, smirking. “Don’t blame him for your laziness.”

Rebecca shifted, her pencil tapping once against the page. “He’s not unfair. Ryan just expects—” She stopped short, the name hanging in the air.

The cicadas droned on, indifferent, but the verandah seemed to tighten with the weight of her slip.

Mandy’s head snapped round, eyes wide, mouth already curving into a grin. “Ryan? Since when do you call him Ryan?”

Michelle sat up, interest sharpening in her face. “Ooooh. Now it makes sense, doesn’t it? Staying behind after class, all serious-like.”

Rebecca’s cheeks flared, a deep blotch of pink climbing towards her ears. “It was just a mistake,” she muttered quickly, looking down at her exercise book as though she could vanish into the lines. “I meant Mr Clarke.”

“Sure you did,” Mandy teased, leaning over to nudge Violet with her elbow. “What do you reckon, Vi? Our Rebecca’s got a little soft spot?”

Violet forced a laugh, though her stomach knotted. She studied Rebecca’s face—the stiffness in her shoulders, the way her pencil now pressed hard enough to dent the paper without leaving words. It wasn’t only embarrassment. There was a weight in it, something heavier, and Violet couldn’t tell if it belonged more to Rebecca… or to Mr Clarke.

The moment hung awkwardly, the late sunlight pressing against them, cicadas whining like static in the background. And though the girls’ teasing eventually gave way to nervous giggles, Violet couldn’t shake the sense that a line had been crossed—one Rebecca couldn’t quite take back.

The teasing still clung to the air when Mandy shifted, her laugh dying quicker than the others. She drew her knees up, hugging them tight against her chest, her face pale beneath the flush of the late afternoon sun. For a moment she said nothing, only picked at a splinter in the verandah boards, her eyes flicking restlessly towards the garden fence as though she half-expected someone to be listening.

Then her voice came, quiet but trembling.

“Vi… they’ve found her. They found Sally.”

The words hit like a blow. Violet’s chest constricted, her stomach dropping clean away. The verandah seemed to tilt beneath her, boards hard and hot under her palms.

“Found her?” The question left her lips in a whisper she barely recognised. “Where?”

Mandy’s throat bobbed as she swallowed. “Silverton.” She glanced at each of them in turn, her voice faltering, raw with something too big to contain. “My dad came home late last night—he thought I was asleep, but I heard him on the phone. They found her body. She was strangled.”

The cicadas outside seemed to swell in an instant, their drone thickening into an oppressive wall of sound, pressing against the silence that followed.

Rebecca’s hand flew to her mouth, muffling a sharp intake of breath. Michelle shook her head, eyes wide, words stumbling uselessly on her tongue. “No… no, that can’t—are you sure? Mandy, are you absolutely sure?”

But Violet sat frozen. Her mind spun with the name of the town, each syllable an echo from the edges of her life. Silverton. It was more than a place—it was a pattern, a shadow that threaded itself through everything: Emily Sullivan’s disappearance, the letter that had warned her, the strange maps and scribbled notes, the whispers that had curled around her since the moment she’d touched Sally’s journal.

Sally hadn’t just vanished into the Outback, swallowed by the vastness like so many before. She had been silenced.

The image of her bedroom drawer seared into Violet’s mind—the journal tucked away beneath folded clothes, the map’s fragile paper marked with those secret places. They weren’t keepsakes anymore. They were dangerous. Every line, every note, every scrawled fear seemed to pulse with a heat that burned against her skin even from here, as though they might catch fire under the weight of what Mandy had just said.

And for the first time, Violet felt it—not just curiosity or unease, but the noose of the mystery itself tightening, inch by inch, around her own throat.

Michelle was the first to speak, though her voice came out thin and uneven. “Strangled?” The word cut across the verandah like barbed wire. “But… she wasn’t really that much older than us. She was—” She faltered, shaking her head as though the thought itself was too jagged to handle.

Rebecca lowered her hand slowly from her mouth, her voice quieter than the cicadas outside. “Silverton. That’s where we’re going for camp.”

The words did not fall so much as spread—like oil across water, staining everything they touched.

The verandah fell still. Even the breeze seemed to retreat, leaving only the relentless cry of cicadas sawing at the silence, their shrillness filling the places the girls could not. The afternoon light angled low through the trees, striping the boards, every shadow stretched longer than it ought to be.

“They won’t cancel it,” Mandy said suddenly. Her tone was clipped, defensive, though she hugged her knees tighter. “Dad will see to that. He’s already trying to keep it quiet—he doesn’t want people panicking. If it gets out, parents’ll pull their kids and it all blows up. He’ll just say she was found, nothing else.” She bit her lip, eyes dark. “He doesn’t want the word ‘murder’ anywhere near it.”

Michelle gaped at her. “But she was murdered! Strangled, Mandy! How can they just… sweep that under the rug?”

“Because that’s how this town works,” Mandy shot back, her voice sharp with something between anger and fear. “People look the other way. Always have.”

Rebecca’s pencil rolled off her exercise book and rattled against the boards. She bent quickly to pick it up, though her hand trembled as she did. “But what about us?” she whispered. “If we’re camping there, if… if he’s still out there—what then?”

Mandy shook her head too quickly. “Dad won’t let anything happen. He wouldn’t. Besides, it’s different—we’ll be with the Guides, with leaders and parents about. It’s not like we’ll be wandering off into the dark.”

Michelle gave a brittle laugh that held no humour. “You really think a few parents and a Girl Guide flag are going to scare off someone who’s already strangled a young woman? Someone who left her in Silverton, right where we’re meant to sleep?”

The bluntness of it hung in the air like smoke, stinging, refusing to clear.

Violet sat frozen. She could feel the words pressing against her skin, like splinters working their way deeper. Silverton. Again and again, Silverton—the place in Emily Sullivan’s story, the place written in Sally’s hand, the place whispered in the letter. The map in her drawer. The journal beneath her clothes. They burned in her memory, dangerous things glowing in the dark.

“They’ll never tell us everything,” Violet heard herself say, her voice a thread of sound in the thick air. “Not if they’re already keeping it quiet. We could be camped in the very same spot she…” The words jammed in her throat. She couldn’t finish.

Rebecca’s eyes shone, the last of the daylight catching them. “If our parents knew, they wouldn’t let us go.”

“Wouldn’t they?” Mandy muttered, her voice dropping low. “You know how people are here. They’d rather pretend it’s safe. Pretend it’s nothing.”

The cicadas rasped on, their chorus roughening as the air cooled, a sharpness creeping in that hadn’t been there earlier. From the next street came the faint echo of a radio playing, cut short by the clatter of a screen door. A dog barked once and then fell still.

Michelle hugged her arms to herself. “Well, I don’t care what anyone says. If Sally was killed in Silverton, then it’s not safe. Not for us.”

Her words lingered, bitter on the tongue, leaving a silence none of them wanted to break.

Violet stared at the fading light spilling across the verandah boards, the sky shifting slowly towards that fragile in-between before dusk. Her pulse thudded hard, each beat reminding her that the ground beneath her feet—ordinary boards, ordinary dust—no longer felt steady. It was as though the town itself might crack open and swallow them, just as it had Sally.

The screen door creaked open behind them. “Girls,” Mrs Richards’ voice called, brisk but soft at the edges, “the sun’ll be down soon. Time you all thought about heading home.”

They turned. Michelle’s mother stood framed in the doorway, wiping her hands on a tea towel. Her smile was small, careful, the kind that aimed for casual but didn’t quite make it.

“Yes, Mrs Richards,” Mandy answered quickly, her voice tight.

As they gathered their books and pens, Violet caught the flicker of looks exchanged between them. Whatever the police and papers tried to bury, Broken Hill’s gossip would already be out there—passed over fences, carried on the wind. If Linda Richards was warning them home before dark, then maybe more people knew the truth about Sally than they dared admit.

From inside came the muffled thump of footsteps on the hallway lino—Michelle’s older brother, Gordon, heading towards his room. Violet thought she heard him mutter something as he passed, but the words were lost beneath the scrape of her chair against the boards.

The girls packed in silence, the air weighted by the things they could not say. When they finally stepped off the verandah one by one, their goodbyes came in low voices, solemn, as if they were parting after a funeral. Each pretended they knew nothing of Sally, though the knowledge pressed against their ribs, sharp and undeniable.

And as Violet wheeled her bike from the Richards’ yard, she felt it again—that same bruise of unease, hidden but tender, that would not leave her.