Once

by Elisabeth Grace Foley et al.

  I had covered barely a quarter of the distance before I remembered.

  My hands and feet went numb, as if they had turned to wooden blocks. I paused, and though I was breathing hard with my efforts, the water pressed close. All my body ached with cold. Ahead, the Peninsula seemed no nearer than it had ten or fifteen minutes ago when I began, but when I looked back the friendly shore, dark green with pines and fire yellow with poplars, looked far beyond reach.

  Worse, the throb of a motor underlined my thumping pulse. From the direction of the Chalet, a boat cut purposefully through the water toward me.

  That spurred me into action. I twisted toward the Peninsula and pulled frantically, trying not to think how deep the water was. Think instead of the little holiday cabins dotting the shore ahead of me; think of warm blankets, spirit stoves, tinned soup—

  For the first few strokes I felt stronger, faster, but then it seemed as if the water thickened to glass around me, slowing my motions to a snail’s pace. Wearily, I reached through the water again and again, until at last it closed over my head and my gasping mouth found only water.

  In a panic, I thrashed back to the surface. When my head broke water the roar of the motor launch was louder. I coughed and gasped, blinded with a curtain of hair over my eyes, until a hand plunged down as if from heaven itself, snatched a fistful of my short-cropped bob, and steadied me.

  I couldn’t speak; I was coughing too hard, but I had forgotten about the Homburg hat and was thinking only of the yawning deep below. I clawed desperately for his arm and slammed my knuckles against the boat. A jolt of pain pierced through the numbness. I scraped my hair out of my eyes with my other hand and looked up. My wrist, wrinkled and pale, streaming blood, was caught in a man’s hand.

  “Easy, easy,” he said, over and again.

  I squinted against the sky and saw Max Moran.

  “Hup,” he said, and slid me out of the water.

  I slithered aboard in a stream of water and he pushed me onto a bench in the stern, not speaking but moving quickly and purposefully. He grabbed a greasy cotton rag from a locker and began rubbing my arms and legs. It was wringing wet in a moment and he threw it down and came out with another. I sat there shivering, teeth chattering, while he scoured me dry. When he was done he peeled off his down jacket and pulled it around my shoulders, then crammed his woollen cap over my head down to the ears.

  Then he opened another locker and produced a Thermos. His hands were shaking as he pulled the lid off and unscrewed the cap, but he grinned up at me and said, “You going my way?”

  There were binoculars hanging against his chest. Had he been watching me?

  I shrugged with as much unconcern as I could manage, blue with cold and rattling in the wind as I was. “That depends. I have to get back to the chalet. My shift starts at nine.”

  He handed me a steaming cup of coffee, his unsteady hands scattering drops of it into the bottom of the boat. As I curled my own shaking hands around it, he yanked a tarpaulin over my knees. It was scratchy and smelled of fish, but it helped block the wind. “Your shift? You’re not seriously going to work? You’ll catch your death.”

  “I don’t live on air. I’ve got to eat.” Against the cup, my hands burned with pins and needles. “What’s the time? How late will I be?”

  He glanced at his wristwatch. “Ten to nine. What you need is a bed and a hot water bottle.”

  So the whole thing had taken less than twenty minutes. “Applesauce!” I said weakly.

  “Who’s your manager?”

  “Bill Fisher, but—”

  “I’ll fix it up with him.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  He paused, the muscles tightening at the corners of his mouth. “What were you doing, anyway?”

  “Cultivating my inner life-force. You should try it sometime.”

  “Looked like drowning to me.”

  “So I went out a little far this morning. It won’t happen again.”

  “Idiot,” he said.

  I laughed shakily into my coffee. It was still too hot to drink, but the steam warmed my face. “You know how to make a girl feel special.”

  “Look,” he said, gentling somewhat, “you can trust me. If you’ve been feeling grummy lately—or lonely—”

  Wide eyes. Innocent look. “You think I was trying to do away with myself?”

  A pause. “Were you?”

  “I’d hardly tell a complete stranger.”

  He looked like he wanted to swear. Possibly it would have been the best thing for his blood pressure. Instead he gritted his teeth and said, “Look, we’re alone. You can talk to me, Xue Bai.”

  “Xue Bai?” I swallowed. The dead girl again. “You keep calling me that. I told you my name. Ruby Black.”

  He stared at me, his jaw working.

  I pointed at the binoculars. My hand shook, but I didn’t know if it was from anger or cold. “You were watching me. Why?”

  “I said I wanted to speak to you,” he said after a moment. Reaching into the same locker where he’d kept his coffee, he brought out a big envelope and dropped it on my knees. “About this.”

  His face wasn’t telling me much but he sat forward on the seat opposite mine, shoulders tensed with an odd and furtive eagerness. Reluctantly I handed him the coffee and opened the envelope. My hands left damp marks on the paper. Inside was a sheaf of papers—newspaper clippings, police reports, scribbled notes, snapshots—

  I gave a horrified yelp and clapped my hands to my mouth. The photographs spilled across the wet floor of the boat. Max leaned down and collected them, but one remained on my knees, caught in a fold of the tarpaulin, fluttering a little in the wind. I turned my head away, not willing to look closer.

  “What is it?”

  Max stared at me with a dissonant serenity. “It’s a human heart. Xue Bai’s heart—or so we all believed.” He paused. “They never found the body.”

  I couldn’t pretend I didn’t understand him. I moistened my lips, wondering if I was about to be sick. “You think it’s me. You think I’m her.”

  “Aren’t you?” A pause. A fleeting smile. “Because if you are, I want to know how—”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I asked at the Chalet. You’ve only been in Pembroke a year. No one knew you before that.”

  “Bill Fisher did. I knew him in Christchurch. That’s how I landed the job.”

  “And before that?”

  “Before that? Oh, for heaven’s sake!” My voice lifted half an octave. “Tell me what you want to see. A letter of reference from my last job? Christmas cards from the family? Names of school friends? Holiday snaps? Tax documents? What the blazes, Max?”

  “All right. All right. Of course I haven’t the right—”

  “I’m serious!” I was shaking, head to foot, on the edge of my seat. “If that’s what it will take to convince you, I want you to have it!”

  “All right! I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Good.” That horrible photograph was still on my knee. I shuddered and turned it face down so I wouldn’t have to look at it. “Are we done yet?”

  “Give me another moment.” Max held up another photograph, this one a headstone. “Here’s where they buried the heart.”

  The inscription was clear, even with water blurring the ink. John Donne’s Holy Sonnet X.

  Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

  Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so:

  For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

  Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me.

  I swallowed. “So?”

  He handed me another photo. “Do you know this man?”

  Neat business suit, hair thinning at the temples, and the features of an Oriental. I would have placed him in Shansi or one of those north-eastern provinces. “Let me guess,” I said wearily, “the drug-running father?”

  His brow knitted. “No,” he said, lifting up another picture, “this is
Xue Bai’s father. The photograph you’re holding now is the family chauffeur, Li Chang. The day Xue Bai disappeared, so did he.”

  “I suppose he must have done it.”

  “The police never tracked him down. Nor could they trace the heart back to him. Instead, they arrested a man with family ties to the Irish mob.” Max pulled out another photograph. A young man in a rugby jersey, crouching on the oval. Curly brown hair, level watchful eyes.

  Max Moran.

  I swallowed painfully. “They thought you did it?”

  “They held me a week for questioning, but nothing conclusive turned up and Xue Bai’s parents believed I was innocent.” Another photograph: a European woman with a shiny blonde Marcel wave. “It’s Mrs. Wu I have to thank that I never went on trial for my life.”

  “She looks like money.”

  “She was poor enough before she married Wu. His second wife, of course.” He held up the last snapshot. A thin clever face looked at me through narrow, almost suspicious eyes, their slant emphasised with a long flick of kohl at the corners, the mouth sharply curved and half smiling. Around the slim neck, and dangling across the forehead, a matching necklace and diadem caught the light.

  “Xue Bai,” he said, “in costume for a performance at a school concert.”

  I put out my hand and took the photograph from him. The lake was very silent; I could only hear a faint slap, slap, slap of waves against the boat. “Good heavens,” I said.

  “You see.”

  “I see… the resemblance. It’s extraordinary.”

  I felt his eyes on me, boring through me; I felt the dead girl’s eyes, slanted and mistrustful. I thrust the bit of pasteboard back at him. “And did you? Kill her, I mean?”

  The pupils were very wide in his brown eyes. “What would you do if I said yes?”

  II.

  I reached out and took his wrist. Under the skin his pulse beat as fast and erratic as mine did. I let go and looked back at the shore, so far away, so very far—

  “I’m freezing,” I said, “and I’m late to work. And frankly, I think this subject is morbid and unnatural.”

  He didn’t move. “I know who killed her. I know who killed Xue Bai.”

  “So why not tell the police?”

  “There isn’t a shred of evidence they’d accept in court. But what about you? Don’t you want to know?”

  I could only stare at him.

  “That’s what I had to tell you,” he said. “If ever you do want to know who killed Xue Bai—if it concerns you to know—you have only to ask.”

  “Good heavens, no!” I half stood, so suddenly that the boat lurched. Under the influence of wind and current, we had been drifting imperceptibly closer to the Clutha and the Chalet, and while I was still bitterly cold and shivering, the sensation had returned to my hands and feet. “Why would I want to know a thing like that? I’ve already told you I have nothing to do with these people. Are you going to take me home, or do I need to swim?”

  “All right.” He handed my coffee back to me and stuffed the pictures back into the envelope. He tossed it into the locker and hesitated. “You still haven’t told me what you were doing out here.”

  I took an incautious mouthful of coffee, so hot it brought tears to my eyes going down, but just the taste gave me some of my courage back. “I went for a swim like I do every morning. When I turned to come back in, someone was waiting for me on the shore—I thought he was searching my coat. I struck out for Beacon Point. He began to follow me and I panicked, thinking I could make it to the Peninsula and come back another way. That’s all. I was lucky you came along.”

  Slowly, he nodded. “All right.” He started the motor with a roar and turned the boat, then opened the throttle. The launch surged ahead. In another moment the wind cut me to the bone. I marvelled how far I must have swum before he picked me out of the water, but it could not have been more than a minute before he brought the boat around in a wide arc and the keel touched pebbles.

  Max kicked off his shoes and vaulted over the side. As his feet touched water, he grunted in shock.

  “You swim in this? They ought to give you a medal, Ruby.” He held out his arms. “Come on.”

  I didn’t want to be carried, certainly not by Max Moran, but my spirit quailed at the cold water and the stony lakebed. I hesitated.

  “You said the chauffeur disappeared the same day as Xue Bai.”

  The smile on his face vanished. “Yes.”

  “Did no one ever look for him?”

  “I thought you weren’t interested.”

  I reached into the glass-clear water and splashed him.

  “Hah!” he yelped, laughing. “They tracked him as far as Hong Kong. And lost him.”

  “And Xue Bai’s parents? Are they still in Dunedin?”

  “Her stepmother is.” Max steadied the boat with both hands on the gunwale. “Her father’s dead.”

  My face was almost level with his and I suddenly knew it was important, very important, to go on looking him in the eye; or who knew what might come into his head? “That’s awful. When did it happen?”

  “Last year. It was methanol that killed him.”

  “From drinking bad moonshine? A man after my own heart.”

  He kept looking at me, a little furrow between his brows. “You didn’t see it in the papers?”

  “No. I don’t look at them very often.” Though clearly I should have paid more attention. I pushed the tarpaulin off my knees and lurched over the gunwale into his arms.

  I had never been much more than a featherweight. On the shingle, he swung me down and said, “Check your coat.”

  There was nothing valuable in the pockets, I knew, just a handkerchief with my initials, RB, embroidered in the corner. I slipped my feet into my rope-soled sandals, handed him his jacket and pulled on my coat, feeling the pockets anyway to make certain. “Nothing missing,” I said cheerfully, “except for my peace of mind. You don’t know anything about it, do you?”

  “Good heavens, no,” said Max, and his brows knitted. “Look, Ruby, I’m sorry. You’ve had a pretty foul morning. You’ll have to forgive me for being so insistent, before. But it’s uncanny. I can still hardly believe you aren’t her.”

  The way he said it, I felt as if I understood, a little, some of what might lie behind his queer obsessive focus on the dead girl. A twinge of sympathy shot through me. “You must have known her well.”

  He hesitated. “Well enough.”

  “Cared for her?”

  At first he didn’t answer, just stared at the path as we climbed the slope toward the Chalet. His voice was gruff when he finally replied. “That’s all in the past now.”

  I slid him a mocking smile.

  “I owe you something for putting up with me,” he said suddenly. “Look! I’ll tell you what we’ll do. If you haven’t come down with raging pneumonia by nightfall, I’ll take you out to dinner in Queenstown.”

  Some consolation. “My shift doesn’t finish till nine, Max.”

  “When’s your night off?”

  “Sundays. Cabaret night.”

  “I’ll be gone by then. Who did you say your manager was? Fisher? I’ll fix it up—”

  I had to laugh. “No, Max. Honestly. It’s not you; I need the money.”

  “Well, fair enough. We’ll have to make it after your shift one night. There’ll be somewhere nice to eat here in Pembroke.”

  There was no helping it. “Not with me, Max.”

  A sheepish grin. “No more police photographs. I promise.”

  And just like that, I would have given almost anything to say yes. “Oh, it’s not that. It’s just that I don’t want to be splashed across all the society pages. ‘Max Moran’s latest.’ That’s not my style.”

  He looked at me, the smile slowly fading. “What’s wrong, Ruby Black? You on the lam?”

  “Just shy. Over here.” I led the way to the little shingle-roofed cabin near the big chalet which I shared with the three other girls o
n the staff. Bill Fisher occupied a dingy basement under the chalet itself, and the two valets and the chef lived in another cabin closer to the road. Eight of us in total.

  I was going to be late, and I desperately needed to get warm, but I hesitated in the doorway. Maybe he was a mystery I couldn’t resist. Maybe I felt sorry for him. Maybe, after all this time on my own, I craved his attention.

  “Thanks again, Max. I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t been watching. Look, let’s go somewhere with no society columnists. Have you ever seen the sun rise from Mount Iron?”

  “No.” He looked hopeful.

  “Right. Meet me on the summit tomorrow at eight. I’ll bring pastries and coffee.”

  Mount Iron seems a friendly little hill by comparison to the massive splendour of snow-covered peaks at the other end of the lake. It was still dark the next morning when I hid my bicycle deep among the tea tree growing on the Albert Town side of the hill, settled the strap of my knapsack more comfortably across my shoulder, and began the ascent.

  At this time of the morning, the sunrise was still only a faint yellow glow beyond the purple heads of the Grandview Range. It would be another glorious day.

  I disturbed no rabbits as I climbed; they would all be asleep in their holes by now. There was barely even a sleepy murmur of birdsong. The path climbed steadily, looping under rocky crags on this side of the mountain, then reaching a gentler flank, running uphill through the shadows of more tea tree.

  This side was steeper than the other, and further from the chalet, but I knew I could get better pastries for a lower price in Albert Town than anywhere else. I felt no regret for my thriftiness. Each penny counted. Each penny was a step closer to freedom.

  I would not give one of them up unnecessarily. Certainly not for Max Moran.

  The path steepened again, ridged underfoot with long striations of rock, and I stopped to catch my breath for the final ascent. In the east the light had strengthened. The Grandviews were covered in cloud shot at the edges with gold, as if a divine chariot were about to break loose on the world. Under the delicate pink and gold of the sky, the farmland of the Clutha basin took on rich jewel colours: dark foresty jades of pine or cypress, the fresh malachite of paddocks, and above them the warm dry jasper of barren slopes.