by Poppy Gee
And here he was again, feeling nervous, like he was bushwalking and could not find his location on the map. But the feeling was not as sickening and helpless as how he had felt when Laura left. Just like being lost in the bush; his anxiety was laced with endorphins, the sweetness of a challenge that was almost, but not quite, beyond him. He had asked Sarah to come for lunch with him. It would be good for him. And, he hoped, it would be nice for her too.
He opened John’s book, grateful for a constructive diversion. The book contained maps of the area, some dating back to the late 1800s. Others were more recent, detailing the mines that had been rehabilitated in the 1990s. The government-led initiative had seen some shafts filled in and others gated or blocked to protect humans and animals from danger. Hall would get an expert to suggest that a body could be disposed of in one of these mineshafts, get the police to comment on it, sex it up with an emotionally loaded quote from someone like John Avery, and there was a nice story. Better check the copyright issues related to John’s book. There were the pictures, too. A good Saturday double-page spread.
He wound down the reading lantern and closed his eyes.
On the morning of New Year’s Eve, Hall’s battery-operated alarm clock rang at five a.m., rattling the wooden nightstand. He was at his desk in the office in Launceston four hours later. The first part of the drive had taken him longer than he anticipated. He slowly negotiated the unlit gravel roads, mindful of wombats, wallabies, and devils. He was thankful he hit nothing except that which was already dead. In hindsight, he should not have left so early. It would have been more sensible to wait until the sun came up, but he was anxious to finish his work in town and return before nightfall.
Driving back to Launceston, Hall was conscious that there was something eluding him, a piece of information he needed to consider. The first thing he did when he arrived at the office was examine a map in John Avery’s book that depicted the coastal hinterland. There it was: Atherton’s Lookout, a village on the other side of the Blue Tier mountains, roughly one hundred kilometers from the Bay of Fires. Once prompted, the facts snapped mechanically through his mind. Five or six years ago a teenage girl vanished from Atherton’s Lookout. She had ridden a horse up the forestry roads. The horse returned, but she didn’t. Hikers stumbled across an old timber hut, high in the mountains, recently used, recently abandoned. Police had looked into the possibility that a deranged hermit had abducted the girl and was keeping her for company.
Hall looked up the article. The photo was not particularly clear, but the girl was uncannily similar to Chloe and Anja, the same fine features, the pale good looks. To this day she had not been found. There was no escaping it; it looked like paradise, but the east coast was rotten at the core. He put the information in a folder to think about later.
The office was pleasantly quiet with only a skeleton staff present due to it being New Year’s Eve. Elizabeth didn’t speak to Hall when she walked past his desk. His index fingers whacked the keyboard as he pretended to be consumed by his notes. He spent the day on the phone, typing as he interviewed, following up on old stories. A family who survived carbon monoxide poisoning after firing up a barbecue inside their house; a light rail linking Riverside with Invermay (despite the Voice’s persistent campaign, an expensive light rail was never going to happen); and the residents of Peace Haven nursing home had finally raised enough cash to start building their smoking gazebo. Good on the old fellows; that was the only story that made Hall smile.
As Hall proofread his smoking gazebo story, it occurred to him that one of the gentlemen driving that gazebo agenda had a brother who reared racehorses on the east coast, not too far from the Bay of Fires. Bennett was their surname. If Hall remembered correctly, Allan Bennett was the name of the horse trainer. Perhaps a man involved in the shadowy business of horseracing might have knowledge of the local fishing underworld and be able to help Hall locate the crayfish-poaching suspect the police spokeswoman had mentioned. It might not come to anything, but it was worth a phone call. He looked up the number and dialed. No answer. He would try again later.
There was a Post-it note on his computer reminding him that he was welcome at a party that evening at the home of one of his colleagues. He would make his apologies another time. There were a lot of people going and the friend would not mind if Hall was absent. In any case, Hall had arranged to interview Sam later in the day.
Tonight, Simone had invited everyone to her beach house for champagne. Hall had not asked if Sarah would be there, but it sounded like Simone’s invitation was inclusive. Driving him home last night, Pamela had told him that she and Don, and the entire Avery family, were going. The party was a Bay of Fires tradition.
“She’d be so upset if we didn’t go it wouldn’t be worth it,” Pamela had said.
At two p.m. Hall turned his computer off and wandered out casually, hoping it would appear that he was on his way to the bathroom rather than leaving the office. There was no need to go home. When he had popped in that morning, Marsha, his cat, had ignored him from the neighbor’s sunny veranda. Inside his house, her biscuit bowl remained full; she had not been home for a few days either.
Light summer ocean sky welcomed him when he pulled onto the Bay of Fires road several hours later. Wide sky, acres of ocean, and smells that were now familiar: salt, seaweed, seafood cooking outside one of the shacks, rusty fishing gear and old boats and diesel.
Simone and Sam Shelley’s holiday house, or shack, as they called it, was built from glass and untreated cedar weatherboard that had faded to gray. It had expensive green copper pipes. It was a misfit with the scrap metal and recycled timber construction of the neighboring fishing shacks, Hall thought as he knocked on the door. When Simone opened it, barefoot and wearing a white sarong, she tipped her head to the side and smiled as though they had known each other for a long time.
Inside, the floors were Huon pine and the walls paneled with blackheart sassafras, the couches low and lined with green and brown cushions. Sheer white curtains billowed with air straight off the Tasman Sea. In the garden below, a dozen chairs were arranged around a table overlooking the ocean. Vases of yellow and blue flowers were set on the table, obviously in preparation for the evening’s party. Simone stood beside him and admired the view. Her closeness was disconcerting. Hall opened his notebook. He could not see Sam.
“Coffee or champagne?”
“Thanks. But I don’t drink when I’m working,” Hall lied. “Coffee would be great.”
“In that case I’ll save the champagne for tonight. How do you like your coffee?”
“Any way it comes.” Hall didn’t know how he liked it; at home he drank instant coffee.
As the coffee machine groaned into action, Hall looked around at the candles in glass hurricane lanterns and huge tropical shells. He had never seen shells so large. On the table was a book titled Underwater Archaeology: Submerged Treasures. It was the kind of book he would have liked to peruse, but he suspected Simone would interpret his interest in the wrong way.
Sam Shelley thumped down the staircase taking it four or five steps at a time and sat opposite Hall.
“How much are you paying me?”
“Checkbook journalism is not my thing.”
“Geez.” Sam had his mother’s wide blue eyes and ragged blond hair that flopped over his face in an effort to hide the pimples on his forehead and temples. “What do you want me to say?”
Last summer Sam had written a letter and stuck it in a plastic soft drink bottle. Standing on the point, he tossed the bottle out to sea. Six months later a square blue envelope with New Zealand stamps on it was waiting in the Shelleys’ post office box. On the beach of Granity, a small town on the west coast of New Zealand, a fifteen-year-old girl had discovered Sam’s bottle. It was a straightforward quirky warm fuzzy.
“What do you think? She’s hot, huh?” Sam pushed the photograph toward Hall. “Just my type.”
“Sam!” Simone said.
“Nice rack,
too.”
“That’s disgusting, Sam.”
“Mom, we’re men. If you don’t like it, don’t listen. Mom’s always disgusted about something,” Sam told Hall. “She found my porn stash.” Sam adopted a high-pitched voice and mimed someone flicking through a magazine stack. “Naked people, that’s disgusting! Doggy style—disgusting! Shaved—disgusting! Teens, that’s disgusting! Amputees—disgusting! Asian—disgusting!”
“I get it.” Hall cut Sam off.
“That’s enough,” Simone snapped.
If Simone had not been there, Hall would have laughed. Sam did a decent impression of his mother. Hall studied the photo of an attractive girl hugging a large black dog.
“Mom thinks she used to look like that when she was young,” Sam said. “Smokin’.”
“I didn’t say that,” Simone said.
“That’s what you told me.” Sam grinned. “You said it.”
Hall could believe Simone was once a dainty blond girl like the teenager in the photo. She looked young to have a seventeen-year-old son.
“What blows me away,” said Hall, cringing as he heard himself adopt the foreign lingo of a younger generation, “is how the bottle made it that far. How far is it across the Tasman?”
“Sixteen hundred kilometers. My bottle survived huge headwinds, thirty-five-knot northerlies. Crazy cross-currents. Storms. Still ocean. Below the fortieth parallel are the worst ocean weather conditions in the world.” Sam tossed each fact to Hall with a short glance. “And it could have got swallowed by a shark or a whale.”
“Impressive oceanography.”
“Dad taught me.”
“My husband was a sailor. He completed the Sydney-to-Hobart twice.” Simone pointed to a framed photo of a sailing yacht. “That was his pride and joy.”
If Pamela was to be believed, Simone’s second husband drowned after receiving a head injury from the boom of his yacht. It had happened on a holiday in the Bahamas, and Simone had been on board. The first husband had died after a massive heart attack. “Some people say she poisoned the first husband with rhubarb pie,” Pamela had said, and then she laughed, shaking her head to show she wasn’t really one of them. Hall endeavored to differentiate between news and gossip; he tried to avoid the latter, but some people were talked about more than others.
After the interview Sam went out back to find an empty soft drink bottle.
“There are a lot of rumors going around about the murder,” Simone said. “I’m frightened being here alone.”
“Sam’s a big lad.”
“Hall, he’s a kid.”
“They’ll catch the guy soon.” Hall tucked his notebook into his shirt pocket. He followed her out to the veranda.
“I suppose you were at the doctor’s seafood feast last night?” Simone asked. “I wasn’t invited.”
“Is he a doctor?” Hall’s stomach was still queasy from all the rich seafood he wasn’t used to eating. He looked around for Sam. Who was or wasn’t invited somewhere was none of his business.
“He has a Ph.D. in history.”
“Interesting family. I suppose you’ve known them awhile, have you?”
“Sure.” Simone leaned against the railing. “Things used to be different around here. I remember barbecues on the beach every afternoon, everyone sharing the catch of the day. Things have changed.”
“Oh well. Everyone’s coming here tonight, aren’t they?”
“I hope so. I’ve got twenty-four bottles of champagne in the fridge.”
No one had explicitly told him why they didn’t like Simone, but he could have a good stab at guessing. Her sexiness didn’t bother Hall. It was honest. Hall felt more comfortable around Simone than he had around the women last night. She was not the sort of woman who would elicit promises from him that he wouldn’t want to keep.
Over the years, over a ten-dollar steak on Fridays at the pub or in hushed conversations at the piss trough, other journalists had told him stories about getting action while they were on the job. He had never done it. The facts were, for the last seven years since Laura left him, strangers were the only women he had slept with. It was all he could handle—giggling, ridiculously drunk women who were barely half his age and didn’t seem to care that he didn’t want to see them again. Girls who thought the Tarkine Tigers were a band and were impressed with stories about Launceston’s criminal underbelly. Girls who tasted sweet from the red cordial they drank with their vodka and were grateful for each drink he bought them.
Sex, however uncomplicated, was not what Hall was looking for. The revelation pleased him and he whistled tunelessly as he admired the view from the veranda. The sky above the mountains had the faintest red tinge, the promise of an amazing sunset. It was not good light for taking photos. When Sam returned with the soft drink bottle that Hall wanted him to hold in the photo, they arranged to meet on the headland in the morning instead.
“In that case, would you like to drink a glass of champagne with me now?” Simone asked.
“I still need to go to the campground,” Hall said. “I’ve been down there twice already and no one has been there. I haven’t spoken to any of the campers yet.”
“I invited a couple of them tonight.”
“They declined?” Hall could tell as much from her tone.
Simone nodded. “I assume you’re coming back?”
“Yes, absolutely. Thank you.” Hall was definitely coming back.
Simone’s smile widened.
As he walked across the garden to his car he realized she had misinterpreted his motives. He would return because he wanted to see Sarah—not for the expensive champagne, or whatever else, Simone was promising.
The campsite was impressive. Past the four-wheel drives and boat trailers were several three-room tents erected in a semicircle in a clearing beside the lagoon beach. One had a handmade wooden kitchen, complete with a sink and running water. Another had a massive BeefEater barbecue and beer fridge. All had plastic tables and chairs, shade cloths, and clotheslines out back. Hall inhaled: onions were being cooked. How nice to be on holiday, wearing a tracksuit, drinking beer, and cooking dinner on your barbecue. Everything about camping appealed to Hall.
“We got company!” a woman yelled. She was not unfriendly, but she didn’t return Hall’s smile.
It had been the same on the beach yesterday; suspicious sideways glances and children playing close to their parents. The man who came forward to greet Hall was the man Don Gunn and John Avery had snubbed at the boat ramp. He introduced himself as Keith Gibson.
“But they all call me Bunghole. Even my missus. We’ve been camping here for over twenty years, me and my brother-in-law,” he said. “We could claim land rights.”
Hall pulled out his notebook and jotted down the date and time: December 31, 6:11 p.m.
“Sorry to turn up this late in the day,” Hall said. “I’ve been down a couple of times but I seem to miss everyone.”
“We’d be out fishing,” Bunghole said. “That’s what we’re here for.”
Hall nodded.
“So what do you want to know?” Bunghole didn’t wait for Hall’s answer. “The cops are fucking hopeless. Took them three days to come down and talk to us. We got kids here. The women won’t let us go fishing, they’re so scared. We have to take the whole lot of them with us or one of us men has to stay at the campsite. It’s fucked.”
Hall glanced at the people sitting in front of the tents. The adults were smoking or drinking, and the kids were eating sausages wrapped in bread. They were all listening to Bunghole’s rant.
“Some of the blokes are talking about taking things into their own hands. It’s got to that point.” Bunghole threw his hands in the air, emphasizing that this turn of events was out of his control.
“What’s going to happen next, one of the kids will get raped and murdered,” called a woman who was sitting in a hammock. “The police need to do something.”
“We all know who did it,” Bunghole said. “Cops
know too.”
“Who?”
“No. You work it out. Not my job to solve this crime. Cops should be doing that.”
“They need evidence.”
Bunghole swore. “They’re too stupid, too lazy. The fellas are pissed. I can’t stop them. I don’t have a badge, do I?”
Hall asked permission and took some quotes and a couple of photos. The campers watched him work. The simmering agitation made him uneasy. He had seen it before at logging protests, right before things got out of hand.
John and Don did not like Bunghole. At first the reasons Hall could see for this dislike were enough to make him sympathize with Bunghole. Not everyone attended a private school—and thank God for that. But when a group of men openly disliked an individual, there were usually good reasons. Sarah had mentioned there was a fishing issue. No matter what your background, every man knew the rules when it came to buying rounds, respecting one another’s women, and not cheating in sport.
“It seems to be a common complaint, the lack of police presence around here,” Hall told Bunghole, as he took one last photograph of a teenage boy holding up the large fish he had caught that day.
“You’re on the money. And look, sorry if I sounded agro before,” Bunghole opened a can of beer. “We’re just all upset. Anyone who’s got a daughter can’t help but wonder what it would be like if something happened to her.”
Bunghole dug into an Esky and offered Hall a beer. Hall accepted the can. Simone’s party did not start for an hour or so, and he did not want to arrive early.
They sat in camping chairs overlooking the glassy lagoon. A couple of other people joined them, including Bunghole’s wife, Darlene. Nestled behind the dunes, the campsite was protected from the cold wind blowing off the sea. Dark shadows from the mountains lengthened across the lagoon’s surface, contrasting with the shimmery bronze patches where the sun still reached the water. It was a pleasant place to relax and Hall wondered what his answer would be if Bunghole invited him to stick around for the remainder of the evening.
