Burn Patterns by Ron Elliott Page B

ever feel like that?’
    â€˜You’re educated.’
    â€˜What does educated mean, really?’
    â€˜Yes. You’re right. I’ve heard you can throw knives, juggle.’
    â€˜Would you like me to show you? The juggling, I mean. Have you got items in your purse?’
    â€˜A lighter?’
    â€˜Oh.’ He appeared shamefaced.
    â€˜Do you remember the girls in Candonin?’
    â€˜Where is that?’
    â€˜In the desert, I think.’
    â€˜Ahh.’ It meant something to him.
    â€˜Do you remember you were brought here by policemen?’
    â€˜Yes, I was in the back.’
    â€˜There was a fire.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Did you want to escape?’
    â€˜I had to get out.’ James walked away from the glass, sitting again on the bunk.
    â€˜How was there a fire?’
    â€˜I crashed. I crashed, we crashed. They were shouting.’
    Iris leaned closer to the communication holes to hear him properly. ‘Do you remember the school, James?’
    â€˜I have to get back to them. Get them out.’
    â€˜At the school?’
    â€˜At the crash. There was a crash.’
    â€˜Did you hurt your arm in the crash?’
    â€˜Yes, there was fire.’
    â€˜Yet, you said you crashed a while ago. James, you told me you crashed some time ago.’
    He considered his bandaged arm, blinked at it. He looked up at Iris, smiling. ‘I get confused. It can be very confusing on your planet.’
    â€˜Yes, it can.’

Chapter five
    Iris went straight to her home office. She and Mathew both had offices on the ground floor. Mathew’s was moderately spartan. Huge desk. Wall of law books. A rug, a single reading chair under the window. Iris joked that Mathew’s home office was modelled on the Third Reich. Space as power. Mathew didn’t like the joke. He called her office ‘the junk shop’.
    Iris’s office was cluttered. It had been her workplace at one point. Clients had been able to come around the side of the house, entering directly through the French doors. There was a comfortable couch, other lounge chairs. She still used the wooden filing cabinets to hold the few files she was working on from the practice.
    Her office was full of relics. A large painting of a bushfire was on one wall, painted by a child. A battered brass fire-extinguisher sat in a corner, a gift on Iris’s departure from the fire service. Iris still had pictures done by Rosemarie. They charted her life from barely recognisable faces and stick figures all the way to a couple of paintings from Rosemarie’s high school art class. They were all framed, scattered about the walls and cabinets. There was a stethoscope and a microscope in a wooden box, both once owned by her father. A couple of his history books were in the bookcase.
    It was the butterflies, however, which dominated. Framed display cases filled the walls. A smaller frame held a purple Lycaeides melissa, another a sole red-banded jezebel. Twenty blue morphos were arranged in a deep wooden frame. Another contained a spiral arrangement of different sized monarchs.Ulysses swallowtails were everywhere, the blue and the green, also the darker Mexican ones with black dots. Once the family discovered Iris’s fascination with butterflies, it became a default gift. The office had never been restful. It positively pulsed with detail and colour.
    Iris opened her laptop to her file on Francesca Garbello. It was time to write a letter acknowledging the breakthrough of the recent visit. Francesca had been raped. Her husband was at work, her children inside the house. Francesca was unloading shopping from the car, which was in the garage. She hadn’t closed the garage doors yet. He grabbed her from behind, pushing her face down on the back seat of the family car.
    In spite of physical injuries, Francesca tried to keep the rape a secret. Her husband, Carlo, noticed certain of the symptoms, and assumed he had done