Whisky Valley Extract

Allen & Unwin
Apr 22
11 min read

Read an extract from Whisky Valley by Joan Sauers.

From the intriguing Echo Lake, Rose McHugh, curious historian-turned-detective, returns to solve her next compelling mystery in the moody Southern Highlands.

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The air vibrates with a scream.

Rose opens her eyes, the scream still in her throat. She slows her breathing and looks around. It’s dark outside. She’s tucked under the doona in her little bedroom in her old wooden cottage in the bush.

There’s a sudden movement in the doorway.

Bob.

She pats the bed, and her big brown dog lumbers up next to her. She gives him a two-handed scratch and he lies down, sharing his warmth through the covers. At the very start of spring, the nights are still cold in the Southern Highlands. Through the window that looks out onto her garden with its jumbled assortment of native and exotic plants, Rose sees shimmering points of starlight through the trees and a paler shade of blue on the horizon, signalling the approach of dawn.

Still unsettled by her nightmare, Rose knows she won’t get back to sleep, and assures herself that a cup of tea is what she needs. She gets up, wraps herself in the fluffy dressing-gown hanging from the wrought-iron bedpost and heads to the kitchen.

The rooms in the cottage are still warm from last night’s fire in the pot-belly stove, and with the kettle set to boil and her portable speaker playing a cello concerto, the terror from her nightmare dissolves.

She brings her tea and the speaker back to the bedroom, where Bob hasn’t moved. Usually he follows when she makes her tea, so she can let him outside, but he must have decided it was too cold and too early.

Propped against her pillows, Rose sips her tea, listens to the low tones of the cello and watches the sky lighten in the east.

Later, after some buttery raisin toast and more tea, Rose is ready to visit the man she’s been seeing for the past few months.

Her older sister, Kim, jokes that this new relationship is adding spice to Rose’s life, no matter how many times Rose insists therapy is no laughing matter. But she forgives her, knowing that humour is Kim’s way of dealing with what happened last year when a man they trusted, who it turned out had killed two women already, tried to murder Rose out in the bush she loved so much.

For a while afterwards, Rose thought she was okay. The bruises around her neck soon faded, and there were no permanent scars from the cuts on her face and hands. Even the eye-watering pain of her broken ribs was a mere memory. But her first attempt at walking in the bush had ended in a meltdown that she later realised was a panic attack. And then came the nightmares—the kind you feel in your body and soul, as if they had really happened. So she decided to see a psychologist.

Rose does not want to live in fear. The whole point of her move to the Highlands after her divorce was to be surrounded by bushland and birdsong, to live her life as an independent woman in comforting solitude. Bushwalking is her favourite activity in the world, and she refuses to give it up. She will not go running back to the city with her tail between her legs, as Kim not-so-secretly hopes she will. She is determined to feel brave again.

But it isn’t easy. In fact, the only outdoor places where she feels totally at ease now are her own garden and the dog park, where killers tend not to lurk in wide open spaces while their dogs frolic.

At least, she doesn’t think they do.

When Rose steps outside the cottage and feels the early September sun on her face, she’s glad she decided not to wear her usual black turtleneck and jeans, opting instead for a white collared shirt and jeans—her warm weather uniform. (The jeans are non-negotiable.) She can smell the heady fragrance of early spring and senses that the plants and all the creatures in her garden and the surrounding bush have been awakened.

She suddenly feels positive, almost joyful, and hopes that, along with therapy, springtime in the Highlands will help her to heal.

As she drives through Berrima, she passes the Highlands Area Museum, or HAM, where she’s worked for the last year and a half—first as a volunteer and now as the modestly paid director of the museum, which is dedicated to local history. But it’s closed on Monday, which she now calls Therapy Day.

In her small village, there are other signs of spring—tiny clusters of pale, celery-green leaves in the trees and, in front of the cafes and gift shops, tight white buds amid the waxy dark green leaves of potted gardenias. On the deck in front of the Gumnut Patisserie, people are sitting in the sun with their coffees and eclairs. She’d love to join them, but has vowed never to miss an appointment with Nestor Valk.

When Rose decided she wanted to talk to someone, her best friend George recommended a psychologist he saw after struggling to cope with the death of his wife of fifty years. Rose had never been to a psychologist, so she’d imagined the full cliché: a kindly older woman or bespectacled and bearded gentleman, rumpled and avuncular, in a small office in some nondescript medical centre. But Nestor Valk was anything but the cliché. To begin with, he was a dashing man in his early forties without glasses or facial hair, and there was nothing rumpled about him. Ever since Kim heard he was youngish and debonair with a vaguely Scandinavian-sounding name—even though his background was Estonian—she referred to him as Alexander Skarsgård, the actor, and Rose had to admit there was a resemblance.

His ‘office’ didn’t match the stereotype either, being located in the library of his grand Victorian mansion, Hardwicke Hall, on the outskirts of Bowral. Dr Valk—or Nestor, as he insisted Rose call him—was married to the slightly older Sonja, who had inherited her family’s trucking fortune and now spent her time and money supporting classical music organisations and tending her garden. At first Rose had resisted the idea of seeing a male therapist, especially at his home, but when George had told her that Sonja was usually there, pottering around, Rose decided to give him a try.

That had been in autumn, when the maples lining the long, curving drive were flaming red. Today, they’re sprouting fresh green buds, and baby birds chatter urgently in their nests.

Nestor, dressed in a cornflower blue shirt and navy trousers, is waiting outside as Rose pulls up in her old Honda. She’s always a little embarrassed to park next to his silver Mercedes sedan, but he greets her as if she’s stepping out of a carriage fit for a coronation.

From the nearby rose garden, Sonja, sporting a broadbrimmed straw hat and stylish overalls, waves. ‘I’m mulching!’ she calls out.

‘Better you than me!’ Rose calls back, and Sonja laughs. Rose has tried to get into gardening, but she has yet to catch the bug. In fact, she’s surprised she hasn’t killed any of her own plants. But there’s still time.

Sonja leaves the garden and approaches Rose. ‘I hear you know Billy Mah!’

‘I’ll get the tea, Rose,’ says Nestor. ‘Come inside when you’re ready.’

‘Thanks,’ Rose says, and turns to Sonja, who’s removing her thick gardening gloves. ‘Yes, Billy was my son’s best friend at school.’

‘How wonderful! So you’ll be coming to the festival?’

‘Yes, we have tickets for both of his quartet’s concerts.’

‘He’s a special boy,’ Sonja says, her tone proprietorial.

‘He always was,’ Rose replies, realising to her shame that she is trying to one-up Sonja.

‘I’ve been a patron of the Spring Chamber Music Festival for years,’ Sonja says, ‘and I finally managed to lure Billy down here for it.’

‘Lucky us!’ says Rose, conceding the point. ‘I’d better go.’

Sonja smiles and goes back to her roses.

Entering the house—a fairytale confection of verandahs, towers and turrets in the Queen Anne style—Rose walks through the reception hall hung with museum-quality paintings, including an eerie landscape by Arthur Boyd, past the sweeping staircase and into the library. Entering Hardwicke Hall’s library is, for Rose, like entering church, back when she was still a practising Catholic. Its shelves hold thousands of antiquarian books in mint condition, and there is a rolling ladder on one wall that she is dying to try.

At the far end of the room, a low fire dances in the marble hearth warming two couches facing each other. Rose sinks back into the plush cushions upholstered in a pattern based on a William Morris design called Blackthorn. Like everything else in the house, the fabric has a story, a history, that Rose finds as compelling as the therapy she comes here for.

Nestor enters with their tea on a tray, and they begin. After recounting her nightmare from that morning, Rose returns to her parents’ death and the grief that, since her own brush with mortality, now felt as fresh as the day it happened.

‘It’s like Echo Lake found the old scar and drove a knife into it, and now it won’t stop bleeding.’

Nestor leans forward, takes a few tissues from the box on the ottoman between them, and hands them to Rose. Until then, she hadn’t realised she was crying. She blows her nose noisily.

‘Thanks,’ she says, with a weak laugh. ‘I can’t believe I still do this.’

Nestor’s voice is gentle. ‘It’s all part of the process—the progress. Echo Lake happened. It was real and it was terrible. It couldn’t have left you unscathed.’

They use ‘Echo Lake’ as shorthand for everything that came after Rose found photos of a missing woman and was later brutally attacked by the man who had killed her. Even though that man was now in prison for life, he had burrowed under Rose’s skin and deep into her unconscious.

‘I just don’t understand why the killer himself never makes an appearance in my nightmares,’ she says. ‘I never see his face. And even though the dreams always start in the bush, they end on a city street with the rush of a car and a bone-shattering crash.’

‘In the weird logic of the mind,’ Nestor assures her, ‘it makes perfect sense. You’re protecting yourself from images of your most recent trauma with another trauma buried deeper in your past. Which is why, in order to heal, you may have to deal with your distant history as well as what happened recently.’

This was territory Rose and Nestor had explored often over the last few months. She had described how, when she was fourteen and Kim was twenty-two, their parents were killed in a head-on car crash. Nestor had helped her realise that, unsurprisingly, she had never fully processed what happened.

So, at Nestor’s prompting, Rose had begun dredging up memories from the past. In many ways, her mum had been more of a friend to Rose during those sometimes difficult early teen years than Kim had been. When Rose started high school, Kim was already at university studying to be a teacher, and they had little in common, while Rose and her mother shared a love of crime fiction and spent many happy hours dissecting the books they’d both read over endless cups of hot chocolate.

Her father had been a high school music teacher, and it was from him that Rose acquired a love of classical music. Some of her most treasured memories were of concerts they went to at the Sydney Opera House led by some visiting European conductor, or a young Richard Tognetti, who had just taken on the role of artistic director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

There was always such a sense of occasion, starting with the walk up the wide steps to the enormous cream-coloured shells, to finding their seats in the majestic, wood-panelled concert hall. When the musicians took the stage and started to play in miraculous confluence, Rose was transported out of her body to another place—a place of pure emotion. Now, whenever she heard a piece by Beethoven or Bach or Stravinsky that she and her father had heard together, it nearly broke her.

Rose had always known that the grief of losing her parents would stay with her, but she’d thought she’d packed it away into a small compartment where it could be managed. It was deeply distressing to find herself reliving it so many years later.

‘But what if I can’t process it?’ Rose asks Nestor. ‘What if I don’t want to? Maybe I just want to get back to where I was before Echo Lake, with my trauma buried so I can go for a bushwalk without falling apart.’

Nestor pauses before speaking. ‘I think you can process it. The fact that you’re here shows you have the desire, and I know you have the curiosity and discipline of the historian. You want to understand. And I have no doubt you can learn how to regulate your fear arousal.’

Rose takes a deep, slow breath, drawing on what Nestor called the ‘foundational work’ they did when Rose started therapy. He had taught her some breathing techniques that definitely helped, especially after her nightmares. As long as she remembered to

use them.

‘And I think as we do the work,’ he continued, ‘you’ll not only be able to manage your grief and your fear, you’ll be able to engage with life—and with people—in a way you haven’t for a long time.’

Rose is very still. It’s one of those moments that she both craves and dreads—when something is said that is so true and yet so hard to accept that she wishes she’d never come. She can’t meet his eyes.

The wood in the fire crackles and spits.

As the silence stretches between them, Rose realises she’s holding one of the Blackthorn cushions to her chest like a shield.

But deep inside, she knows what he’s saying is right. Her need for isolation, her impulse to keep most people at arm’s length, has been a way of protecting herself from the demons inside as well as out.

Finally, Nestor speaks. ‘Now that it’s spring, maybe next time we can wander around the grounds while we talk. It’s a great way to reduce anxiety and might help loosen the hold these events have on those deep places inside you.’

He makes it sound so simple.

Rose answers cautiously. ‘Okay . . . but when you say around the grounds, where exactly?’

‘We could just ramble around the house . . . through Sonja’s gardens . . . and eventually, when you’re ready, we might go down to that stand of white stringybarks below the dam on the edge of the bush.’

‘Sort of like desensitising?’ she asks, trying to keep the wobble out of her voice.

‘Exactly. Systematic desensitisation could be very effective for you.’

‘And you’d be with me?’

‘Every step of the way.’

As he waits for her to say something, she marvels at how comfortable he is with silence.

‘Sounds like a plan. As long as you promise not to fling me into the bush and run away,’ she says, only half-joking.

He laughs. ‘Promise.’

Rose’s phone rings on the drive home, and she knows without looking that it’s Kim. Her sister often calls after her sessions with Nestor. Rose answers.

‘It’s Monday morning, shouldn’t you be teaching?’

‘It’s little lunch. They’re outside inflicting grievous bodily harm on each other, so I’m sheltering in the staffroom with a cappuccino.’

‘You should be out there with them! Haven’t you caught spring fever?’

‘It’s called fever for a reason.’

Rose smiles. She and her sister have vastly differing views on the allure of nature. And a lot of other things.

‘So how was your date with Doctor Skarsgård?’

‘Great. We spent the hour pashing in the library.’

‘Nice. As long as Mrs Skarsgård doesn’t catch you. But seriously, Rose, do you think it was helpful?’

Rose mulls this over for a moment. ‘I’m honestly not sure. I wish I could get through one session without crying.’

‘Well, I haven’t got through a day without crying since the seventies.’

Rose laughs. ‘Are you still coming down for the festival?’

‘What festival?’

Rose is quite sure Kim remembers but is pretending not to.

‘The Highlands Spring Chamber Music Festival.’

‘Oh, right, the one where we’ll be the only people in the audience under a hundred and seven?’

‘That’s the one. But there will be a few notable exceptions.’

‘Like who?’

‘Like the Skarsgårds. Apparently, Sonja has been a patron of the festival for years.’

‘Oh God, can we talk to them? Or will it be one of those things where you have to pretend you don’t know each other because of the doctor–patient thing?’

‘I don’t think it’ll be a problem. Nestor’s pretty casual, and so is Sonja.’

‘Nestor, is it? What happened to Doctor Valk? Anyway, I’ll just call him Mr Skarsgård—or Alex.’

‘Please don’t.’

‘Uh-oh, gotta go. The savage hordes are returning.’

As she ends the call, Rose thinks about how good it will be to have Kim staying for the long weekend. Even though she loves living on her own, the presence of her big sister in the house will be reassuring. It might even keep the nightmares at bay.

She can only hope.

Extracted from Whisky Valley by Joan Sauers.

Available from 3 June, 2025.