by Poppy Gee
This time, being extra careful to avoid the kelp, Sarah dived long and low. She emerged some distance from the rock. Immediately she recognized the hum of a thirty-horsepower Yamaha motor. She treaded water and tried to look over the rock reefs and the incoming waves, but she couldn’t see the vessel. It was safe to assume if she couldn’t see the boat, the driver couldn’t see her. It was dangerous to be swimming where she was. She twisted around and began to swim to the beach. If the boat driver was preoccupied, or not watching where he was going, the propeller could kill her. Sarah swam faster, stopping every few strokes to look for the boat. It was getting louder but she still could not sight it.
“Ahoy!” she yelled.
There was no reply. The approaching engine noise came from the other side of the rocks. Boats—even a small dinghy like the tinny coming toward her—had no business in this cove. There were no pots to check, and it was rocky enough to make line fishing treacherous. Sarah swam, her long hard strokes propelling her toward the beach. As she turned to breathe, she saw the tinny meters away, bearing down on her. It was too close. Whoever was driving hadn’t seen her.
She duck-dived, remaining under for as long as she could hold her breath, scissors-kicking in the direction of the shore. When she was certain the tinny wasn’t above her she came up for air, gasping. Her eyes and ears felt like they were bleeding. She was too puffed to try and shout an insult at the skipper. Fool.
Sarah floated on her back, waiting until her breathing was under control. It sounded like the tinny was heading north, back to the boat ramp. She wished she had seen some identifying information on it, the name, the color, even a glimpse of the engine. He shouldn’t have been in so close. He could have run her over, his propeller butchering her, killing her. Perhaps Anja was the victim of a hit-and-run? She would not have had any idea of the dangers associated with sharing the water with a tinny driven by a moron.
The long-ago night after Erica had pushed her in, Sarah had curled up on her banana lounge bed, listening as her parents discussed how fortunate it was that Sarah fell in and not Erica. Sarah was well able to look after herself, they agreed. She had turned her face to the pillow, biting into the chunky foam to stifle the aching sob. Her brain had flicked from the terror of being submerged under the kelp, to her parents’ apparent indifference to her vulnerability, and back again. Just for once, she had wished to be the fragile, needy daughter.
But no good would come of dwelling on the past. Over the sound of the waves and her ringing ears, she could hear the motor fading. She swam toward the beach.
Sarah spread an old road map of the Tasmanian east coast on the kitchen bench, studied it, and penciled a cross at the place where the woman washed in. Her mother was leaning over the sink, brushing her teeth. The sloshing of the brush in someone else’s mouth was not a sound Sarah was used to hearing. She looked up from the map to see her mother watching her.
“Why are you writing on the map?” Flip said.
Sarah shrugged, swirling the beer in the can. Her mother rinsed her toothbrush. Usually they used the little bathroom at the end of the veranda to brush their teeth.
“Newsflash, Mum. Anja Traugott and Chloe Crawford were young. I think you’ll be safe using the outside bathroom.”
Sarah meant to reassure, to tease; her mother recoiled. There was a moment when she could have apologized, but it passed. Sarah concentrated on the map.
Strange things had happened on this isolated beach. Almost ten years ago, half a dozen perfect square holes, two meters deep, were found dug in the sand. Newspaper reports suggested a midnight boat delivery of contraband—drugs or smuggled crayfish. But like on the morning Roger found that woman, no one heard or saw anything suspicious.
Sarah remained silent as she watched her mother lock the shack door. They had never locked the shack, not even when they visited the nearest town, a ninety-minute drive on corrugated gravel, for groceries. They never lit all four gas lanterns or closed the curtains of an evening, but tonight someone had done so.
As her family settled into their beds, Sarah remained at the kitchen bench, sipping her beer. Erica’s boyfriend, Steve, had arrived earlier in the evening. He was a pilot, and his hat was on the counter. Sarah spun it around on her finger, recalling the fuss Mum and Erica had made about how handsome he looked in his Qantas uniform. She could hear Erica and Steve talking in their bedroom, their voices low and friendly. Dinner’s heated scent, cheese and pasta, lingered. She wished she could open a window, but it wasn’t worth the alarm it would cause.
In Eumundi her house was never completely closed, not even at night or when it rained so hard the house swayed to an oceanic rhythm on its old legs. Up north, nature was not restrained by brick walls and insulation. Curious possums wandered through the living room, and rats used the frangipani tree as a ladder to access the kitchen window, both creatures leaving bite marks in the avocados in the fruit bowl. Moss grew in the bathroom and palm fronds pushed through the wrought iron veranda railing. Even the cobwebs had mold growing on them.
She opened the gas fridge and tried to replace the beer cans she had drunk. Doing so now was better than doing it in the morning, when the task would be incorporated into Erica’s running commentary. It was difficult to stack the cans on the top rack without making a noise. She knew she didn’t need another one. She knew she should drink some water and go to bed. Instead, she took another can of beer back to the bench. Fine soot had fallen from the lantern wick onto the counter. With her finger she traced the letters JW in it, looked at them for a moment, and erased the initials with a swipe of her fist.
She was home, but homesickness overwhelmed her. What for, she did not know. There was nothing to go back for. She folded the map of Tasmania tightly, pinching the brittle old paper so hard it tore.
Her head hurt when she woke in the morning. The water bottle she had taken to bed was empty. Hanging from the ceiling above the top bunk was an old wooden surf rod, its rusty sinker dangling directly over Sarah’s face. This was the bedroom she had slept in every summer holiday since she was a child, and it had not changed. Rat-chewed boogie boards were wedged in the wardrobe, a yellow sticker saying Brownies Are Beautiful peeled off the door, the shaggy green seventies bedspreads and doughy polyester pillows smelled from being in storage all winter. It wasn’t so much a bedroom as a hole in the wall. The bunk and the cupboard only just fit inside the space. There was no door, and she could see the kitchen and the ocean through the window above the sink. Anyone walking past could look in and see her, too.
She could hear Erica and her boyfriend in the kitchen. Steve had picked Erica a flower while she made him coffee. It was a tradition they were copying from Flip and John, who had begun every day of their thirty-six-year marriage with the ritual. Jesus. They lacked the imagination to dream up their own thing. They were so cheesy, and Sarah was about to tell them when she heard Pamela’s voice.
“I was interviewed this morning and you’ll be pleased to know I’m innocent,” Pamela called as she entered the shack without knocking. “The police have three names they’re interested in. All local men.”
Sarah heard her mother gasp.
“Who?” Erica said.
“Everyone’s saying it’s one of those men who camp behind the lagoon. Roger Coker found the body, which makes him a suspect. Of course, there was talk he had something to do with Chloe Crawford’s disappearance, way back then.”
“He’s an official suspect?” Erica asked. “Goodness.”
“There’s a yellow station wagon driving around with a group of surfer boys whom the police would like to speak to. I said they hadn’t been in to the shop.”
“Roger Coker has the right profile,” Erica said. “He was mistreated as a child. Neglected. Abused. Remember when Don saw Roger running along next to the car and horrible old Mrs. Coker hanging out the window hitting him with a rope?”
“Maxwell saw that. Not Donald. I’d forgotten,” Pamela said.
“It was good
that she died,” Flip said.
The gas in the hot water system clicked and hummed, and there was the flush of water rushing through the pipes as someone filled the kettle.
“I don’t know that Roger is capable of murder,” Erica said. “He’s too gentle, too shy to hurt someone. Remember when he ran over the possum and then came up here to ask Dad to put it out of its misery?”
“Call me a snob, but the people who camp around here become more unsavory every year,” Pamela said. “I was saying to Donald, it’s the rubbish that bothers me. When you camp, you take out whatever you take in. And it’s high fire danger, but Donald and I could smell campfire smoke yesterday.”
“That rubbish was revolting last year,” Flip said. “I’ll never forget all the broken glass bottles and cigarette butts we picked up off the beach on New Year’s Day.”
“Was that the fishermen?” Sarah called as she swung down from the top bunk.
“Most likely. We collected an entire garbage bag full of rubbish. I’ll tell you something you won’t read in tomorrow’s paper.” Pamela lowered her voice. “I apologize, it’s gruesome. They believe that girl was killed with two different knives. And the intensity of the attack suggests someone psychotic who hates women, or was under the influence of drugs.”
“The impression I got was that the police wouldn’t confirm any of that until they have the autopsy results, and that wouldn’t be for a week.” Sarah came out of the bedroom. “It’s a suspected murder, a suspected rape, or whatever.”
“I’m just saying what everyone is saying,” Pamela replied. “We would be foolish to wait for a postmortem result to confirm there is a killer on the loose. Someone killed that woman.”
“Maybe,” Sarah answered. There was some sense in what Pamela said.
“Maybe we should go back to town,” Erica said.
“There’s no need to panic.” Pamela sounded confident. “The police are advising people to be cautious. Nothing more. We need to be alert, that’s all.”
“Be alert, not alarmed,” Sarah said.
“They’re not going to catch anyone.” Erica shook her head. “There are posters up in every small town from the Fingal Valley to Bicheno and up to Ansons Bay and they still haven’t found a trace of the Crawford girl. There’s always something on television about her. This is just a tourist. As if the police have a chance.”
Everyone paused. From the road came the sound of male voices, raised in anger. Erica ran into the bedroom to look out the window.
“It’s Don,” Erica said. “He’s yelling at someone. Funny. I’ve never heard him shout.”
The shack shook as the three women ran outside to see. Sarah remained at the table, eating another slice of Pamela’s cake. If Don was going off his rocker, he would be embarrassed afterward. He certainly wouldn’t want an audience.
At the bottom of the beach track Sarah paused to breathe in the cool, calming air. Beyond the rush of the ocean and the cawing seabirds she heard someone cough. There was no sign of another human; no shoes or folded towel.
She weaved through the rocks toward the sound. As she drew closer, she rethought her decision. Approaching a person you couldn’t see was a mistake. She should have either walked straight back up the track or bolted across the rocks to the open beach, where at least the visibility offered her some kind of protection. Here, locked between giant boulders, no one from the shacks could see her. Each breath she took felt strained, as though she were at altitude. Someone was there; she could hear the sound of feet sliding in the sand. She took another step closer and saw the bag. It was a plain green cloth bag, the kind people use to carry their groceries. Poking out the top was fishing line, a weathered milk carton, and, chillingly, an old-fashioned corrugated fishing knife with wide-set, rusted teeth. It was not sharp enough to make a swift, clean kill. When she was a girl, she had seen her father use one like that to dislodge abalone. She looked around, but the beach was empty.
As she moved away, a hand landed on her shoulder. She screamed. A man shouted. Sarah spun around, fists clenched and rising.
It was her father. “What are you doing?” she said.
“What?”
“Dad, you fruit loop. Is that your bag?”
“I beg your pardon,” John said. “Yes, that’s my bag.”
Sarah marched to the bag and peered in. As well as the knife and fishing line there were scraps of fishing net, a plastic ice cream container, a collapsed sandy beer can, and pieces of different-colored glass. He was picking up rubbish. She sat down too quickly, like wet sand being dumped out of a bucket. It hurt her coccyx.
“You scared the hell out of me,” she said.
John glanced at his rubbish bag. “Why?”
Sarah started to laugh. “Don’t worry.”
It was not worth trying to explain her brief suspicion. It was ridiculous. Her father shrugged and continued with his rubbish-collecting mission.
Hundreds of footprints dimpled the icing sugar–white sand, and discarded police tape flickered in the dune grass. A gentle onshore wind hummed into a discarded polystyrene coffee cup. There were no other signs that the dead woman, Anja Traugott, had lain there.
Sarah picked up the coffee cup and strode into the dune, ignoring the grasses swatting her legs. Behind the rise the terrain flattened. Banksias and pigface clung to the sandy soil. She stopped in a small clearing which was accessible from the gravel road that ran along the back of the beach. A low wooden sign announced No Camping. Day Use Only. Tires had torn the white sandy surface, the weight of several cars ripping into the ground so the black undersoil showed through like a bruise.
Balancing on the sign, Sarah scanned the coast. Dainty clouds rushed south high above the horizon; beneath it the sea had the calmness of a barramundi pond. A pair of hooded plovers circled her, their distance reassuring.
Sturdy, steady waves broke at the place where the sea had delivered itself of Anja Traugott. Impulsively she ran toward it. At the ocean’s edge she stripped away her clothing until she was naked, throwing it in a pile on the sand. She dove under the first small wave, enjoying the coldness. Mistaking her father for a killer was not a good move. Maybe she and Erica would laugh about it later. Or maybe, with the benefit of hindsight, she would pinpoint it as the moment when she started to lose it. Calm down, she told herself, and allowed the undertow to suck her body in.
The undertow was stronger than she’d anticipated. It sucked her down to the bottom, each wave tumbling her in a death roll. Blinded by the stirred-up sand, she flailed her arms as she struggled to find the surface. She swallowed water and her chest burned. It was uncomfortable but she didn’t panic. The key was not to swim for the safety of the shore but to give in to the ocean and swim with it. She pushed through the back of each wave, and eventually, in what she hoped was a diagonal direction, she swam out to sea until she felt the pressure ease. Behind the billowing greenness the ocean was as it looked from the beach, and she floated on her back until her breathing slowed.
She noticed the man only as she emerged from the water. He was watching her from the dunes, hands on his hips, legs apart. She didn’t know him. He looked scruffy. His shirt was tucked into his pants, not in a fashionable manner but in a way that revealed he wasn’t interested in how his clothes looked. He ducked his head, and she remembered she was naked. Pervert. If he wanted to have a go, he would want to be quick.
She started dressing herself. He had his back to her. She was aware of a weird thrill that started in her stomach and pumped out to her extremities. Even her fingertips tingled. It reminded her of the artificial adrenaline rush she experienced the one time she had taken acid at university. He was probably a tourist. If so, he was a moron, lurking around the murder scene like that. She decided to tell him so. Without taking her eyes off him, she marched up the beach. Her shirt stuck to the wet salt on her skin. It made her back itch. Old mate up there was going to get an earful.
Chapter 3
Hall Flynn turned left off
the four-lane Midlands Highway and onto the crumbling Fingal Valley Road. The sun was too low to be shielded by the visor, and he squinted through the shards of light, trying to anticipate corners he could barely see. The seventies-style sunglasses he had found outside the Gunners Arms on Saturday night did nothing to help. He slowed as he drove through each empty little town, considering buying some better frames from a petrol station, but nothing was open; even the bakeries had yet to position their Open signs.
In sprawling clear-felled paddocks on either side of the road, the occasional lone tree was dwarfed by its own long shadow on grass in the last stages of greenness. Early graziers cut down all the trees except a few, which they left to shelter the sheep. What they did not know was that a tree left alone in the middle of the paddock would die. Trees needed shelter too. Sheep trampled the ground around a single tree, affecting its roots, making it susceptible to bugs and disease. Hall sighed. By February the ground would be dry, the sheep’s white fleeces dusty and blending with the dirt. Hall would report the usual drought stories, interviewing cattle and sheep farmers who complained about not having enough feed to last the summer and the cash crop farmers who moaned about diminishing yields of potatoes, carrots, or canola. He found it hard to be sympathetic; the farmers who cleared every last acre of their land were the same ones who wondered why precipitation levels were falling. Not that he would ever say that outright; it was a journalist’s job to keep his opinions to himself.
The road curled away from another empty main street, mimicking the leafy line of the South Esk River. Hall wound the window down carefully so it wouldn’t get stuck. The morning air chilling his face carried the sweet wetness of rotting river bracken. Damn, it was good to get out of Launceston.
