Welcome to Case Closed.

You're listening to Dirt Creek by Haley Scrivener, narrated by Sophie Lockron.

We. Tuesday, 4th of December 2001

We were waiting for things to converge.

It was still dark.

Even if the sun had been up,

we would not have needed to look around us.

It was the same dirt, lazily punctuated here and there by dry grass,

the same rust-ringed cement water trough close to the fence line,

the same white cypress pines that dotted our own family's properties,

a landscape as familiar to us as the backs of our own eyelids,

and we knew we'd found the spot again by the smell.

It pushed its way into our nose and throat like a rod of twisted tissue,

rammed so far it hurt.

It was the smell of dead lambs left to rot in the sun. The stitches in the man's arm

tugged as he turned the steering wheel of his yute. From his vantage point in the driver's seat,

the main house was just a smudge in the distance. The sun was coming up now. He was checking

the fences after his time away from the farm.

If he'd driven just a metre closer to the fence line,

a meter was nothing on a property like this.

He never would have found it.

But the Yutes cab tipped slightly as he drove over soft ground.

...