4308.267 · September 23, 1988 AD
What the Cicadas Couldn't Drown Out
Four girls on a verandah. Homework spread between them like props for a scene none of them can play. The afternoon heat presses close, cicadas screaming their endless chorus, and Violet carries the memory of last night's terror like a bruise no one can see. Then Mandy's voice drops to something barely above a whisper, and the words that follow turn a missing girl into something far worse. Silverton. They found her in Silverton.
23 September 1988. Late afternoon. Michelle Richards' back verandah.
Violet needs to escape—from her father's watchful silence, from Jasmine's knowing glances, from the house that no longer feels like sanctuary. She finds her friends sprawled among scattered textbooks and half-finished assignments, the cicadas filling every pause in conversation. For a few merciful minutes, the world feels almost normal. There's teasing about Rebecca staying late after Mr Clarke's class. There's groaning about pastoral leases and four-page essays. There's the comfortable rhythm of friendship holding the darkness at bay.
Then Mandy hugs her knees to her chest, and her voice changes.
She heard her father on the phone last night. He thought she was asleep.
Sally Harlow isn't missing anymore. Sally Harlow is dead—strangled, her body left outside Silverton's art gallery like a message no one was meant to read. And Silverton, that ghost town twenty-five kilometres away, is exactly where the Girl Guides are scheduled to camp in two weeks.
The police want it kept quiet. No panic. No cancelled trips. Just silence, spreading like poison through a town that's learned to look the other way.
