Bay of Fires

by Poppy Gee

  Sam slammed his brakes on and skidded the back wheel sideways, spraying her legs with warm black sand.

  Since Christmas Day she had seen him three times. At the boat ramp they had said hi, nothing more, and on the beach and at the Abalone Bake she had pretended not to see him. Embarrassing details fizzed through her head. Worse were the details she could not recall. These could not be dismissed with a sarcastic comment. She turned to face him. Get it over and done with.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “I owe you an apology,” Sarah said.

  She avoided looking him in the eye. Instead she looked down, at his legs, which were muscled and shaved. His arms and laterals were as thick as an adult’s. She remembered her mother saying Sam rowed and swam for Hutchins, the private boys’ school in Hobart where he boarded. She had seen him surf; he was obviously a natural athlete.

  “What for?” Sam said. “Coming on to me?”

  “You wish. It was the other way around.”

  This time she watched his face. Her comment had been a worthwhile punt. He reddened and scuffed his toe in the dirt sheepishly. His shoelaces were not done up properly. Man, he was young.

  “You’re too young to drink,” she continued, ignoring the feeling of déjà vu that occurred so frequently these days. “Not that I care. Some people would give a shit, though.”

  “Who gives a damn?”

  “Yeah. Have you told anyone?”

  “Who am I going to tell around here?”

  There were other things she wanted to know, physical details such as who had made the first move, and how much she had told him about herself, and whether he had still been there when she crawled up into the dunes. No way was she going to ask him any of that.

  Phlegm caused by the cigarettes she had smoked the night they hooked up—Sam’s cigarettes—irritated the back of her throat. Even though it was now five days later, she could still feel the tobacco’s effect. She wasn’t used to it. She coughed, but that did not dislodge the mucus, and she had to use more force, which made a rude hacking sound.

  “You’re all class, aren’t you?” Sam said as she spat into the dirt behind her.

  It was a fair call, and one that she would usually enjoy retaliating to. Given the circumstances, it was better not to push her luck. Little shit.

  Sarah said, “Tell me, where were you when that backpacker was murdered?”

  “What?” Sam was startled.

  “I’m asking everyone. Just wondering.”

  “Don’t know. Probably surfing.”

  “What break?”

  “Are you Inspector Gadget?”

  Sarah ignored the question. Everyone knew where they were when Anja Traugott went missing. It was like when Princess Diana died, or the Twin Towers collapsed. Judging by how flustered he looked, he was probably doing something embarrassing.

  “Were you choking the chicken?” Sarah grinned.

  “You’d know.” He stepped toward her and she could see the acne scars on his cheeks. A flashback from that stupid night appeared in her mind; his face was so soft that at one point in her drunken stupor she had thought she was kissing a girl.

  “What’s wrong?” Sam asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You look like you’re about to have a big cry over something.”

  He grinned, and she remembered when he was nine or ten and had turned up at the lagoon with a hessian sack clutched in his hand. Sam had held the bag up, shaking it, and told everyone there was a blue-ringed octopus in there. When he threatened to set it free in the lagoon, everyone screamed and raced up onto the rocks to get away. Sarah had kept her distance. She liked blue-ringed octopuses, but their bite was fatal. There was no antidote for their paralyzing venom, which would kill an adult in three minutes. Sarah had always felt a bit sorry for the soft-bodied creature. The male died soon after mating, and the female, who laid fifty eggs and carried them around under her arm, died months after the eggs hatched. Blue-ringed octopus were intelligent animals and not aggressive unless they were threatened. They should never be put in a bag. When Sarah told Sam this he had laughed. Dangling the sack, he halfheartedly chased people farther up the rocks. Eventually he stopped. It turned out there was nothing in the bag but a pile of seaweed.

  Sarah thought of reminding Sam about the incident but changed her mind. She did not want to prolong the conversation.

  “Race you back,” she said.

  “Want to bet on it? Ten bucks.”

  “I don’t want your pocket money.”

  She could have whipped him—not easily, but she was pretty fit at the moment. Instead she let him ride ahead so that he would think he was beating her.

  Sarah thought over the conversation as she packed her fishing gear that afternoon. Sam’s cockiness was unnerving. Usually, younger guys were easy to be around. Their self-absorption was a buffer to Sarah’s insecurities. They didn’t expect anything from her. They were into the same things she was. Lots of men her age liked to watch motocross or boxing on television; not many wanted to have a go themselves.

  Jake was a natural athlete. He had a welted scar that twisted down his bicep like mangrove roots, collected during a mountain bike race. It was when he told her he raced that she’d decided to hire him. His previous job experience on the salmon farm at Tickera was not extensive.

  If she was honest, part of the appeal of younger men was their lack of inhibition. Like her, most young guys drank unreservedly. That was how she had ended up in the disabled toilet at the Pineapple Hotel the first time she went there with Jake. In the bathroom, which smelled of piss and shit and vomit, Jake told her she was a great fuck. The band was blasting a song from Hunters and Collectors, and she heard him only because he repeated it several times.

  But Sam Shelley was seventeen years old. Most women her age were married with children, worrying about things like how to pay a mortgage on one wage and which kindergarten to send their kid to. Not dwelling on what an idiot they’d been on the drink the other night. Sarah Avery needed to get her shit together.

  Onshore gusts clipped the tops off majestic sets of six-foot waves and veiled Sarah in sea spray. Sand swirled, and the water twisted into an undertow that sucked at the beach. It was just the sort of place you wouldn’t want to swim; perfect for chasing salmon. Schools of black back salmon were visible in the water, clouds of dimpled silver riding in the crest of each wave. She grunted as she swung the rod, sinking the surf popper lure bang in the gutter twenty meters offshore.

  “Got a fright the other night. Night you all were cooking abalone it was.”

  “Stop sneaking up on me.” Roger must have come down from the dunes; she would have noticed him if he were on the beach.

  “There was a thump out the back.”

  “Possums?”

  “I thought it was.” He sat down cross-legged and cupped sand in his hands. His arms were thin, too thin to restrain a strong woman.

  “Sounded loud, like a V8 taking off up the driveway. I got up to have a look.”

  She felt the bite and played with the fish, gradually bringing him closer to the shore. It was likely she would get a few bites today. Black back salmon and the younger, feistier cocky salmon fled when the ocean was flat and bright. On days like this, unsettled swell washed food into the water colony and the salmon followed. She admired the cocky salmon. He swam with the waves, used their force to propel him to prey. She was only half listening when Roger spoke again.

  “Dead devil. Road kill. A week old, from the way it smelled.”

  Stunned, she allowed the line to slacken. “Someone threw road kill at your house?”

  Roger described the black furry animal he had found sprawled beside his doormat, its mouth and eyes wide open. In the morning he grabbed the stiffened devil by the back legs and dropped it under the paperbarks behind the fence. Hot soapy water and a hard-bristled brush couldn’t remove the brown bloodstains from the timber planks on his deck. The tufts of fur caught in the
wooden cracks reeked with the putrid smell of a carcass rotting for days in the sun. Burnout marks remained on his driveway. Roger grinned as though the story was a joke he was part of.

  “I can still smell it on me.” Roger sniffed his fingers.

  “You going to tell the police, Roger?”

  “I hear plenty of noises around my place and none of them get to me.” Roger’s chapped lips twisted over his broken teeth as he imitated the noises made by various animals that lived around his house. Possums thumped up and down his pitched roof, fighting with catlike screams; a bird’s nest stuck to his kitchen window was full of whimpering baby sparrows; rats scratched under his floorboards.

  “A blue-tongued lizard, this big, lives under the tank stand.” Roger grinned. “I call him Louis. He likes sausage mince the best.”

  “Tell me. The skid marks on your driveway. Were they continuous or broken?”

  “Continuous.”

  Sarah nodded. “You’re a good man. You don’t deserve this.”

  The cocky salmon was losing energy. Her finger monitoring the tautness of the line, she could sense his surrender. She wound him in slowly. Roger held the surf rod while she slipped the hook out of the fish’s mouth. They grinned at each other, silent acknowledgment of their teamwork. There was something about Roger that attracted and repelled her. He was not her intellectual equal. Physically, he was strong but not well built. His arms were too long for his body, his legs and neck so thin they appeared to undulate like sea grass. He would never meet someone who would love him. It wasn’t possible. Sometimes she thought about being his wife, and the thought made her sick.

  “I’ve seen you outside at night, fishing, whatnot. And I saw you up at the tip yesterday,” Roger said. “You were wearing a yellow shirt with a white bear on it.”

  Using both hands, she broke the fish’s neck with a quick twist. It stiffened and she held it until it spasmed.

  He thumped her fishing rod handle in the sand. “Don’t go up there on your own.”

  Hall had written two articles for the day’s newspaper. Sarah supposed they were what he had referred to as a beat-up. Basically the murder investigation was not progressing. In the first article the police claimed that with so many tourists in the area, it was difficult to confirm possible sightings of Anja Traugott. The second article referred to a police statement issued back when Chloe Crawford vanished.

  “At this stage we are treating this as a missing person and are trying to locate the young girl concerned. At the moment there is nothing to suggest she is not alive.”

  The police refused to confirm whether the two cases were linked. Someone in the Bay of Fires had to know something. Jane Taylor had said it from the start: a person doesn’t just walk onto a beach, kill someone, and walk off without a single person seeing or hearing something. Perhaps someone knew something and didn’t know it was important. People were hopeless; you could not trust them.

  Sarah had learned this the hard way. In November, when the pumps had kept shitting themselves, Sarah had not allowed herself to go home for more than an hour at any stretch. Anxious that the emergency alarm would not transmit to her mobile phone, she slept on the couch in her office. Pump failure meant no oxygen and the fish would die. The fish farm had emergency oxygen, but those pumps had played up too. Every time she left the farm, she feared she would return to tanks full of dead fish. It would be devastation—she could lose all her stock, from babies to adult fish. Human error on a land farm could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a few minutes. She had vowed not to take another land farm job again. An ocean-based fish farm was quite different. Farming was safer at sea; if something went wrong, the ocean protected the fish. At sea the oxygen never ran out.

  Sarah gripped the edges of the newspaper. The headline blurred. Her head hurt in a dizzy, disorienting way, as though her skull contained a swarm of wasps. As she pushed the paper away, she glimpsed herself in the window reflection. She looked haggard, gaunt, ugly. Unblinking, she stared at herself. This was what a person capable of being heinous looked like. She didn’t want to think about Jake, but images from that final night in Eumundi forced themselves on her.

  His hands on the bonnet of her car. In the headlights, his eyes hollow, his nostrils flared. Faceless witnesses watching from the dark edges of the Pineapple Hotel car park. His sour beer breath spittle on her face and his index finger drilling her chest. Riding mountain bikes and renovating had made her biceps strong, and when her fist smashed his nose, it popped like a balloon. Blood spurted and he hopped backward across the car park in surprise. Shouting profanities, he ran toward her and knocked her to the ground.

  Pinned on the wet asphalt underneath Jake, she tried to turn away from the blood streaming from his nose. He grabbed a fistful of her hair and forced her to look at him. He put one finger against his nostril and did the fisherman’s whistle, snorting blood over her hair and face and neck. She could taste it, the salty warmth mixed with sweaty rain and wet tar.

  Maybe if Sarah had stopped then, had closed her eyes and waited until he heaved himself off her, maybe things would be better now. Tit for tat, they both got what they deserved. Instead she had kneed him hard in the balls, and when he was in the fetal position, howling, she had straddled him and managed to smash his face with a closed fist before someone pulled her off him.

  Elbows on the kitchen bench, she dropped her head, her shaking, cold fingertips barely holding its weight. Shame engulfed her. Her chest tightened, and for a moment she thought she was going to cry, but no tears came, just a raw, soundless sob, like a person who had been shot in the lung.

  Chapter 5

  The police had a suspect. The detective wouldn’t give Hall his name but said it was someone they had spoken to in regard to the murder of Anja Traugott and the disappearance of Chloe Crawford. Hall called Ann Eggerton, the police media officer. She confirmed that the police were talking to a man who lived on the east coast, was unemployed, and had prior convictions.

  “Give me a break, they have a suspect,” Hall jeered. “I bet they’re blaming some poor bloke who’s got no more criminal record than you or me. It’s bullshit.”

  “No. They’ve picked him up three times for poaching crayfish and he’s been convicted twice.”

  Hall grinned down the phone. Gotcha.

  Company expenses wouldn’t cover the cost of renting Jane’s room for a fortnight, Hall knew that. But he deserved a break, and it would be good to have somewhere with generator power to charge his laptop and write his stories. After all, it wasn’t like he could type them up on the picnic table outside Pamela’s shop.

  He thought Jane might have sounded more pleased about the arrangement.

  “Suit yourself.”

  “I’ll pay for two weeks,” Hall said. “I’ll have to go back and forth to Launceston, but I might keep some gear in there. You don’t have to clean it when I’m gone.”

  “Wasn’t planning to.”

  “Fine.”

  Hall sat down and Jane watched him, her face contorting as though she was chewing the inside of her cheek.

  “I don’t want charity.”

  “Good. I wasn’t planning on giving you any.” He opened his notebook, studying it until she marched away.

  Hall was reading the paper at the big table, circling typos. Page seven had five; one case used their instead of there. It was ridiculous. Shame on every one of those subeditors. Attention to detail had gone to the dogs since the Voice downsized from broadsheet to tabloid. A man’s voice greeted him and he startled, spilling hot tea that made the newsprint run. It was John Avery, smiling that wide white grin so hard he appeared ill at ease. He must have come up the inside staircase. Hall introduced himself again, in case a memory lapse was the cause of John’s discomfort.

  “I know who you are, Hall. Everyone does. And I still haven’t given you my book,” John said. “Maybe it’s of no interest.”

  “Trail of the Tin Dragon…Was that the name?”

&nbs
p; “Yes, quite right. This was the entry point; the Chinese miners made their way across to the Blue Tier from here. It’s an interesting story.”

  “I’m very keen to read it.”

  “Well, in that case, swing by this evening. I’ll have it ready for you.” John backed out of the guesthouse. “In fact, stay for dinner. We have a few friends coming over. Just another barbecue.”

  “What can I bring?”

  “Nothing. I’m a wine connoisseur, you see. Amateur. But I’ll open one of the reds I’ve been saving.”

  After John left, Hall folded up the sodden newspaper and boiled the kettle again, pondering what he knew about the man. He was a senior lecturer in history at the University of Tasmania’s Launceston campus but had not taught any classes for a while. At the Abalone Bake, Flip had mentioned her husband was working from home on a research project of some kind. She had added that it was her income as a pharmacist that permitted him to do so. So, John worked alone; he knew the area’s topography, aboveground and below; and he had a bad temper. Hall had noted this at the boat ramp when John snapped at Sarah. A bad temper didn’t make him a murderer, though.

  He was surprised at how pleased he was at the chance of seeing Sarah again. From what he could tell, she was not his type. The woman was obsessed with fish. The topic had snuck its way into nearly every conversation they had had.

  Sarah called herself a fish doctor. In southeast Queensland she ran a barramundi farm where they grew fish from babies into four-kilogram adults. They produced four hundred tonnes of fish each year in huge purpose-built ponds in the middle of paddocks. He had heard of fish grown in cages in Bass Strait and the Tamar River, but not in paddocks. According to Sarah, the advantage of land farming was that the environment could be controlled, which meant higher stock intensity. Ocean-based fish farms were cheaper to run, but you were at the mercy of the ocean’s unpredictable weather patterns. It was scientific, and she hadn’t dumbed it down as she talked about water quality and grading fish.