Crystal Coffin

by Anita Bell

  She looked like a stray that had been abandoned by the roadside, but Locklin wasn’t in any hurry to pick her up. Her last name was Fletcher. The company name on the title deeds to his father’s estate was now the Fletcher Corporation. And he figured that couldn’t be a coincidence.

  He moved around behind a large gardenia hedge, but no matter which way he looked at her, he couldn’t see anything but bad news. She had a thin wallet that bulged in the left hip pocket of her jeans, but her jeans were tight and he doubted he could lift it without her noticing.

  She twiddled with her necklace a couple of times and frowned as she looked around and checked her watch.

  She wasn’t late. But he decided he would be.

  Sweat began to dampen her cotton shirt around her armpits and a march fly buzzed her ear, making her startle. March flies were big, but this one sounded like a pterodactyl with fangs. Locklin could hear it from a dozen metres away. She waved at it a few times, but it didn’t leave her alone. Then she struck at it, stumbling over the two small bags at her feet. Stuffed like bulging-eyed terriers that had eaten too much for their leather bellies, they sat in silent repentance. Telltale swellings poked from their innards, betraying the heel of a shoe too quickly packed, and she humped them into the shade of a jacaranda tree a few metres away.

  She fiddled with the charm on her necklace again and she tapped her foot, reading the poster for Friday’s carnival at least four times between looking up and down the street. She tucked the charm out of sight between the pearl-coloured buttons on her blouse and tugged her long sleeves down again over her wrists. Her watch blipped the hour and he heard her stomach grumble.

  ‘Rats,’ she said, eyeing the phone booth in front of the post office. ‘I should have got a phone number.’ She rummaged through her bags to find a phone card, and that’s when she saw them — the boots that were standing behind her.

  Nikki saw the truck rocking in the car park, but it didn’t hold her attention for long. She looked into the face of the stranger who was staring at her. His grey eyes hardened like steel against her as they surveyed the length of her nearly seventeen-year-old body. He soon looked back at her face with a decision that she could easily read. Girls like her weren’t his type.

  ‘You Nick Fletcher?’ he said flatly.

  ‘Nikki,’ she corrected, trying to smile. She wasn’t sure if she should offer him a handshake, but she did and he took it like medicine.

  ‘Jayson Locklin,’ he said, letting go to whistle to a dog that was asleep outside a cafe across the street. ‘Thorna Maitland sent me to get you.’

  The red dog trotted over, sniffing her hand with its nose but it smelled like wet manure so she didn’t try to pat it.

  Locklin picked up her bags and whistled to it again as he headed off towards the truck.

  Nikki followed with the dog at her heels. She felt like a cow that was being herded home from the market. She pinched her nose at a smell as they neared the truck, and stopped a short distance from the crate. It reeked like the dog. She could smell shoe polish too, but Locklin’s boots weren’t to blame. They were scuffed and dirty.

  He rolled the back door of the crate open and tossed her bags onto the floor behind a pair of horses that looked around their rumps at her. One was bridled, but it wasn’t tied to anything and it turned sideways to watch them putting bags in through the open door.

  Locklin reached his arm in and clicked his fingers.

  Did he want her in the back of that?

  The cattle dog leapt in behind the bags and got a scruff round his ears for the effort. Nikki relaxed, but not much, just enough to remember something that she should have done before she got off the bus.

  ‘I need to go first,’ she lied.

  ‘You just got here.’

  ‘I mean, to the loo,’ she said frowning. ‘Or am I supposed to squat behind a tree?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, glancing up at the pub. It was close — less than a hundred metres up the road past the cafe — but there’d be faces there that he wanted to avoid. Behind him was the park with shady trees and under the shade of the biggest tree was a small brick building. He nodded to that instead.

  She reached past him to rummage through one of her bags and withdrew her hand with a small grey purse. Then she headed off alone.

  ‘We’re on a schedule,’ he said to her back, but he didn’t have to. She wanted to get this over with as much as he did.

  Inside the musty building, she cupped water from the tap in her hands and swallowed it with half a pain-killer. Her headache didn’t seem so bad out of the sun and she didn’t need to use all the facilities, only the water to help her swallow and a little more to cool her face and hands.

  She pulled her long sleeves up to cool the scratches on her hands and saw the angry marks left by handcuffs. The cuffs were designed for adults and she’d worked her way free; Her wrists were swollen now, red and painful in the heat, and she ran them under the water. Then she rolled her shoulder to work out the soreness and pulled her collar aside to see bruises in the shape of fingers against the base of her neck.

  She splashed more water on her face, rubbing her wet fingers around the back of her neck to cool away her headache, but it only skipped a throb or two.

  She blinked at the face staring back at her from the mirror — hers, but she saw only her mother’s. She splashed her eyes, wondering where the tears were and realised that all she felt was numb. When she looked at her fingers, she still saw her mother’s blood, but the rage and fear were gone. The hatred for her stepfather was gone too, as if she’d run away from her feelings when she’d run away from the murder charge in Sydney.

  She patted her cheeks dry and painted a little confidence on where innocence had once been, using lipstick, blush and eyeshadow from her purse. Then she straightened her blouse and pulled her sleeves down over her aching wrists to hide them until they healed, and she tied her straggling chocolate curls up into a respectable ponytail.

  She hooked a slim, silver-framed set of glasses over her ears, perching them at the top of her nose, and for a heartbeat she remembered what it was like to be Nikki Dumakis, daughter to the first female Federal Minister for the Arts. Then she traded that for reality and the kind of age that takes trauma and not time to accumulate.

  A month earlier, she couldn’t fake her way into a Kings Cross nightclub past a bouncer with a seeing-eye dog, and yet that morning she’d faked her way into an adult-wage job without references or a curriculum vitae or formal resume.

  She wondered if it was the lingering guilt for doing that which made her gut ache, but she knew it had to be the name that still buzzed in her ear louder than the march fly. Nick Fletcher, she repeated in her head. It sounded so wrong coming off that stranger’s lips, as if he didn’t like the taste of its venom any better than she did whenever she spat it off her tongue.

  Nick, short for Nikola, too masculine for someone attempting to trace her trail on paper. And Fletcher, because no hunted girl in her right mind would choose to live with the burden of her torturer’s name on her lips.

  But as she stepped into the searing heat of a hot summer’s sunset, it struck her as ominous that someone by the name of Nick Fletcher would step from the ladies toilets in a quiet country park in a town called Lowood.

  Sydney’s youngest detective, Kalin Burkett, rocked back in his grey swivel chair and meshed his fingers together behind his head. He watched his subordinate pace the office and wondered just how long it would take him to confess that he’d blown the surveillance. A sixteen-year-old girl had slipped a police net — but worse than that, she’d done it twice. Once had been within days of her mother’s murder, and then again early yesterday, when her stepfather had caught her back at the crime scene, allegedly attempting to tamper with the evidence.

  Both times, Burkett noticed, it had been Sergeant Underwood’s responsibility to bring her in.

  He watched the sweat gather at the sergeant’s temples as he paced the room. Fifty-four-ye
ar-old sergeants often had a problem handing case files to younger men of higher rank, and Sergeant Joseph J. Underwood was no exception. Sweat was even swelling in the bald patch at the back of his head. And considering the fact that Sydney Central HQ was kept at a comfortable twenty-four degrees, Detective Burkett began to wonder if there wasn’t more to the story than what Underwood had put in his incident report.

  ‘So where’s the girl?’ Burkett asked again — and a dozen more sweat beads swelled across Underwood’s forehead.

  Locklin studied his enemy as she emerged from the public toilets, wishing to his core that she wasn’t a she. His fists clenched and then released, and as he watched her hips rock below a slim waist, heat surprised him as it rose up from low in his belly. He kicked his boot against the curb and tried to look away, but couldn’t. Then his eyes narrowed again at a new opportunity that he saw.

  ‘Nick Fletcher,’ he whispered, rolling the words on his tongue. Then he hurried to the passenger door, swung it open for her, and waited.

  Scotty threw the last bucket of soapy water on the cafe floor and scrubbed the electric doodlebugger over it as hard as he could. When he was finished, the sweat on his forehead was nearly as thick as the froth on the floor scrubber’s twin brushes. The kitchenette was spotless, but his arms and back ached like they’d been hit with a giant dentist’s drill.

  He looked at the clock over the microwave and wished he could get away with winding the hands forward a few hours. Four o’clock. And he still had four and a half hours before closing.

  Who’s stupid idea was this? he wondered. But the Yamaha key in his pocket answered that question. Cleaning the store was hard work and figuring out correct change for customers was even less fun, but the job paid well enough for a fifteen year old.

  Janet Slaney’s mother could talk, but she wasn’t half as annoying as her two daughters and he had to admit she was honest when it came to employing him. She’d hired him as casual instead of part-time, which meant that instead of saving up sick pay, holiday bonuses and superannuation, she had to pay him an extra nineteen per cent higher hourly rate. Being casual also made his hours more flexible. If business was slow, she let him go home early. And best of all, it meant he only had to give her two days’ notice before quitting instead of two weeks.

  He was really looking forward to using that little perk. Just three more weeks and he’d have enough cash to pay for his new muffler and maybe a hot flame deco for his fuel tank as well.

  He leaned on the doodlebugger and pictured himself challenging Sergeant Knox to a race up Main Street past the police station. ‘Ready when you are!’ he shouted. Then he twisted back on the throttle, rearing back on the hind wheel and tore off up Main Street with Knox Pox and his jelly gut straggling behind him.

  Then something hit his helmet and he was falling. And night fell on top of him.

  He’d barely hit the floor and blinked before Janet Slaney’s face was looming over his. Her claw-like fingernails messed through his hair and she was talking at him, but it dawned on him slowly that she wasn’t calling him mister anymore.

  Her fluorescent pink lips puckered and he leapt up from the floor.

  ‘Oh, Scott!’ she cried, as he staggered against the microwave. ‘Are you all right?’ Her fingers went back into his hair and he pulled away when she prodded a new lump. ‘I thought you said you were ready for me to throw you the box.’

  ‘What box?’ he said, seeing whole cartons of Mad Murphy’s free-range eggs scattered on the floor. Egg white and orange yolks oozed from the cartons, like the innards of giant caterpillars that someone had squashed under a boot.

  ‘You threw a box of eggs at me?’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Who throws eggs?’.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ she prattled. ‘Do you need a doctor? I can call a doctor. Here let me,’ she said, reaching for the phone and dialling. ‘Oh cripes, Mum’s going to be so mad.’

  Scotty looked at the box. It wasn’t actually big or heavy. It was just large enough for about ten dozen-sized cartons of Mad Murphy’s eggs, and most of them were only small eggs, like from a bantam. But the box had caught him by its corner and a little trickle of blood was oozing from a cut in the centre of his lump.

  ‘Hello? Hello, Dr Crowley’s office? This is Ja —’

  Scott punched the disconnect button and cut her off.

  ‘You won’t get in trouble,’ he said slowly, ‘if no-one knows what happened.’

  Her lips puckered again while she thought about it. ‘What’s the catch?’

  ‘You pay for the eggs,’ he said, not wanting to put off buying his new muffler. ‘Get rid of the evidence and I’ll tell your mum I sold them.’

  Janet smiled. ‘You’d do that for me?’

  ‘Well it’s in my interests too,’ he said, and her smile widened until he saw her teeth. Nice teeth in a nice smile, he thought. Then he wondered if Janet could like motorbikes as much as he did — for about four seconds, until her mouth started exercising again.

  ‘Here, let me bandage you then,’ she said, fussing over his head. ‘I’ll clean you up first, then I’ll do the floor. You sit down. I’ll get the first aid kit. You’ll see. I was thinking about being a nurse after high school — or a doctor. Doctor’s get more money, don’t they? Well, maybe they do, but they work long hours too. And I don’t want to work long hours. Do you? I don’t. I mean, what’s the point of being able to afford a jacuzzi if you’re never home to enjoy it?’

  His ears hurt from listening to her. Now the back of his head hurt even more from not listening to her. He reached around and turned her Madonna tape up louder and Janet stopped yapping and started singing. Not a bad voice either for a thirteen year old, and it sure sounded sweeter with music over the top of it — almost as sweet as the purr of his Yamaha through a paddock full of wildflowers.

  She cleaned up his wound, rubbed ice over it, and gave him dab by dab commentary between choruses while he tried to picture himself somewhere else.

  She was always more yappy in the afternoons, he realised, almost as if she had a word quota that she’d use up on him, if there weren’t enough customers coming through the shop. She must have been close to her quota now, though. She was slowing down. Actually, she’d stopped, he realised, and she was looking at him like she was waiting for an answer.

  ‘Well,’ she repeated. ‘Was it who I thought it was?’

  ‘Who? Which who?’

  ‘The guy who was just in here. The one in the black hat and chequered shirt.’

  Scotty’s heart trampled his lungs. ‘You mean the guy with the Winfields?’

  ‘Cigarettes?’ she said, scratching her nose, and he wondered if she could see him sweating. ‘Your cousin doesn’t smoke, does he? I thought he was an asthmatic, only not as bad as you.’

  ‘Jayson? Yeah, he is,’ he said, letting her think that.

  ‘Well, it sure sounded like him,’ she insisted. ‘Just his shoulders seemed bigger, more muscled up. I couldn’t see much else, but I heard him clear as water.’

  ‘Jays’ unit is in Timor,’ he said, trying not to lie. ‘If he was in town, you’d think the whole unit would be back, wouldn’t they?’

  Janet screwed her hot pink lips into a knot. Then she laughed and he knew by the heat in his cheeks that he must have blown it.

  ‘Sure it’s him, kidder,’ she said. ‘I’d recognise that chicken’s voice under a ten tonne pillow in a blizzard. Too gutless to show his face, that’s all. He didn’t even have the guts to turn up at the funeral. Meggie was looking for him, you know. He still owes her an apology and an engagement ring, running off to Timor like that without even trying to get her back.’

  ‘She broke up with him!’ Scott protested.

  ‘Yeah, but he didn’t try real hard to make up, did he? Seven or eight letters and a few phone calls! She was nearly ready to talk to him. And then he just stopped. We thought he must have died or something. Serve him right too, if he did cark it over there for making us worry,’ she adde
d. ‘Then we could spit on his grave, like the whole town did for his cop-out dad.’

  Scott had heard those whispers before. People were worried. By selling Freeman out to Fletcher Corp, Locklin’s father had let an interstate company get a foothold on some of the best land in the valley. When that happened in a neighbouring shire, the big corporations had used their own marketing networks to cut out local businesses and then undercut local farmers in stages that eventually drove the rest of the shire broke.

  ‘Yes, Janet,’ Scott said, trying not to argue and hoping Jayson would kick Fletcher Corp out again. ‘But don’t you go telling your big sister he’s back now, okay? There’s no point stirring Meggie up again, since he’s going back to barracks soon anyway. Got it?’

  Janet frowned as Scott got a cloth to soak up the broken eggs. ‘Be sure you don’t tell her,’ he repeated, shaking the cloth at her. ‘Or I’ll tell your mum you threw eggs at me and nearly cost her heaps in worker’s compensation.’

  Janet’s lips screwed around on her face again. Worker’s compensation meant the cafe would have to pay bigger monthly premiums because Scotty would get paid time off until he got better. And the cafe was struggling already. Her mum wouldn’t like that idea one bit. So she nodded, reluctantly.

  ‘You might as well go then, Mr Nolan,’ she said caustically. ‘Mum’ll be back soon and I can take care of things until then.’ She put the smashed egg cartons into the box and pushed the box into his chest. ‘Dump this in the big bin out back and we’ll call it even.’

  ‘Righto,’ Scotty said, grinning. He had to run an errand up to the church for his gran anyway. She’d loaded a sack full of ostrich products onto the back of his Yamaha to take up to Father Connolly for auctioning at the carnival, and the town pool was only two hops and half a skip from the church. He’d have time for a quick dunk on his way home to help his gran feed the ostriches. And as a bonus, he’d also have time for a quick stir of Knox Pox, by pushing his Yamaha up the hill so the sergeant wouldn’t hear the busted muffler too early. Scotty could rev it right under his station window before escaping down the hill towards the river flats.