Bay of Fires

by Poppy Gee

  “But it’s my life. I don’t want it screwed up,” she said. “Appreciate it if you could keep this to yourself.”

  “Of course.”

  “You get what I’m saying, Hall? I have a private life.”

  She almost smiled, watching Hall to see if he comprehended her implication. An image of her and John Avery making love appeared in Hall’s mind. Did she discard her crankiness with the faded red flannelette nightshirt he had seen flapping on the Hills Hoist? He could not imagine her being warm and cuddly. He almost shuddered.

  “I understand,” Hall said. “And I assume you are not speaking about Gary.”

  “I am not talking about Gary.” Jane started digging again. “No. He’s a bag of shit.”

  “We all have our regrets, I guess,” Hall said.

  She dug and tossed the soil a few more times before shoving the fork in hard. “I’ve never had a man who didn’t let me down.”

  “You’re an angry woman, Jane.”

  She shrugged.

  “You have to get over it,” Hall said.

  She didn’t answer.

  He added, “It’s not healthy to be so angry.”

  “People have said to me, ‘Are you planning on being this bitter for the rest of your life?’” Jane said. “Maybe I am.”

  “Jane…”

  She flicked her hand in his direction, dismissing him. “You’ve made yourself heard.”

  Poised on a rock beyond the old jetty, Sarah looked like a fisherwoman in a painting of a nineteenth-century fishing village. The bare wooden jetty, the empty sea, and the muted green vegetation that matched her clothing conveyed a peaceful sadness. From his position up on the road, Hall recognized her powerful swing as she cast out. There was no way she could avoid him. He cut through the yard of a vacant shack and followed the winding track down to the sea. He moved slowly, carefully picking delicate pink flowers with tiny thorns that cut his fingers, navy blue blooms, and cottontails. The task gave him time to collect his thoughts.

  In Launceston his rundown house had rooms with bay windows overlooking the gorge cliff grounds. From the wooden verandas you could hear gum trees rustling and peacocks calling out at dusk. His house had broken balustrades and five blocked chimneys. It needed fixing, a diamond in the rough. That was what he wanted to tell her. But first he needed to tell her everything that Simone had told him.

  When Sarah greeted him, she seemed agitated. She kept looking across to the wharf and up at the track Hall had come down, as though she expected someone to be following her. No one was.

  She continued to fish as he updated her on Roger’s condition in the hospital. He was sick, still not breathing properly, but it was not pneumonia. She seemed pleased that Roger’s illness was not as severe as they first thought, although she did not say so.

  Two days had passed since their confrontation about Sam Shelley. He could see she was no longer angry, but her indifference hurt him more. He had thought about penning his thoughts. He said things better on paper than he did face-to-face.

  “Simone confessed everything,” Hall blurted out. “I know what happened to Anja and Chloe.”

  He explained almost everything Simone had said in the Mercedes. Sarah listened, her forehead creased with worry, and he decided he would not tell her he was certain that Chloe Crawford’s body was in the mineshaft behind the tip. Knowing Sarah, she would hike up there and take a look. It would not be good for her. Sarah had seen one dead body and that was enough for anyone.

  She cut him off. “Why are you talking to me about all this?”

  There was no way to put it except bluntly. “Simone is threatening to have you charged over Sam.”

  “Is this an ultimatum?” Sarah’s lip curled and he could see her blood-red gums.

  “God, no.”

  “Well what, then? I don’t care what you do. Why are you even telling me?”

  “I’m telling you that I know what happened to Anja and I think I’ve located Chloe’s body and I’m not writing the story. I’m not following it up.”

  “Slow down. Are you insane?”

  Hall knew he was rambling as he explained his plan. He would do as Simone suggested, and let the police work out the details. Perhaps Chloe’s death would look accidental; that would depend on the forensics. He felt sorry for Sam. Simone deserved to stand trial as much as Sam did, but Hall doubted she ever would.

  “She was awful, Sarah,” Hall said. “I’ve never heard a woman be so callous, so cruel.”

  “Sounds like you’re blowing a good story,” Sarah said.

  Hall stared, frustrated with her lack of emotion. “Sarah, breaking this news would be any journalist’s once-in-a-lifetime story.”

  “Don’t do this for me, mate. I’m not worth it.”

  He grabbed her hand and she snatched it away. He felt stupid, a schoolboy making a fool of himself.

  “Why are you acting like this?” he said.

  “Like what? You got what you paid for. I never false-advertised.”

  “Don’t be crass.”

  “Please go.”

  Her voice sounded emotionless, the way it did whenever she spoke to Bunghole. Hall stalled, tasting the salt spray on his lips, watching how the afternoon sun dimpled the water. The beauty of the afternoon ocean heightened his disappointment.

  There was something else he had planned to tell her. It was none of his business. But a tiny part of him hoped she didn’t really want him to leave. If ever they were to have something more together, he had to be brutally honest.

  Using gentle language he explained about John and the key. He kept his eyes on the sea as he outlined his embarrassing initial suspicions and his regrettable secondary suspicions when he found the score sheet in the Scrabble box. Sarah listened, nodding, winding and releasing her fishing rod.

  “I know about it, Hall.”

  “You do?”

  “Can’t believe they’re still at it. Yuck. It’s been going, on and off, for twenty years.”

  “Oh.”

  “Mum and Erica don’t know. I always thought they didn’t need to.”

  He put a hand on her shoulder. Her torso shook as she wound the reel in. It was still shaking as she released it. Gently, she removed his hand.

  “Hall. Go back to town and your teenybopper girlfriends. I’m not interested in you anymore.”

  Hall left her alone on the rocks. As he walked up to the guesthouse, he hoped not to pass anyone. If he had to speak, even to say hello, Hall feared he might cry.

  Sarah glanced at the wildflowers Hall had left on the rock for her. The bunch was tied with a piece of plaited dune grass. No one had ever given her flowers.

  Her head hurt, worse than the meanest hangover she had ever endured.

  What a shocking turn of events. Simone and Sam Shelley. If someone had suggested it to her at the beginning of the summer, Sarah would have laughed in their face. But now it didn’t seem so farfetched. A drunken flashback of Sam in her hire car on Christmas Day began to form in her mind. Sitting beside her, Sam had mentioned his mother in some peculiar context. Sarah could not remember exactly what he’d said, except that she had felt uncomfortable, which made her suspect he had spoken of Simone after their physical encounter. What Hall said was true: if Sam did push Anja into the ocean, if Sam did suffocate Chloe and dispose of her body, it was impossible to prove. Regardless, Hall was mistaken and deluded to keep this theory from the police.

  Whether the murder case went to court or not, Simone Shelley might hold Sarah’s encounter with Sam over her head forever. The realization startled her enough that she slacked the line and lost a decent chunk of bait.

  The only non-depressing thing about the conversation with Hall was his news about Dad and Jane Taylor. Hall’s demeanor was severe and churchlike as he described the affair, as though he were informing her that someone had died. Sarah had never been entirely certain about the relationship between Jane Taylor and her father. It was something she tried not to think about.r />
  There had been funny things over the years that could have exposed an unpleasant set of circumstances. These oddities, such as nice bottles of port or gin going missing from the liquor cabinet which neither Sarah, Erica, nor their mother had a plausible explanation for, or their father’s unexplained absences from the shack, his habit of taking long walks late in the evening, could easily be dismissed as inconsequential. It was easy enough to tell herself she was imagining any familiarity in the interactions she had witnessed between her father and the guesthouse owner.

  Sarah sighed. Long ago, when Sarah was fifteen or so, she had been staying alone at the shack with her father. John had kissed her good night and gone for a walk, as was his custom. When she woke early to go fishing, he was not in the shack. It had not bothered her until, casting her line from the headland, Sarah watched her father emerge from the track that led up to the guesthouse. Father and daughter eyed each other. Their ensuing conversation revolved around the safe topics of fishing and ocean conditions.

  Hall was right about one thing: it wasn’t anyone else’s business. There was no sense in living your life worrying about how other people lived theirs. And maybe Sarah’s mother knew but chose to ignore it.

  She wondered if Hall had been expecting to cast a line with her. She had not offered him any of the raw chicken she was using for bait when he picked up her spare rod. Her decision was made. She was satisfied that he had helped Roger, but there was an implication in the way he told her about it that suggested she should be grateful to him. He had paused after he told the story, as though waiting for her to provide the conclusion. Sarah had merely nodded. Hall had done what was required, that was all.

  Sarah slid fresh bait on her hook and sighed. Who cared if she did sleep with Sam? It wasn’t like she would have forced him. She poised the rod over her shoulder, whipped the line out to sea. She didn’t care what Hall Flynn, in particular, thought about it. He was not morally superior.

  But while he was beside her on the rocks, she had searched Hall’s face. All she had seen was the same crinkled kindness she had recognized in him from the start.

  Hall drove by the wharf, along the high road above the shacks and the sea, past the lagoon, and along the straight gravel road leading out of the national park. He was not worrying about the danger of sliding off the slippery gravel. The sign to Sloop Point caught his eye as he entered the eucalyptus shade and he signaled left. He doubted he would ever return, and he wanted to sit by the rock pool, for just five or ten minutes. Time to take a breath.

  The rock pool was peaceful. Nothing disturbed its smooth, cool surface. As he peered in he could see the beautiful seaweed fronds floating languidly and the starfish and shells clinging to the rock wall. It was as tranquil as it had been the day he visited with Sarah. In the open sea, glistening twists of kelp reared with each oceanic pump. Hall leaned his back against the cold stone and watched gulls circling the white peaks of Sloop Rock. At the other end of the beach the Averys’ shack was indistinguishable from the hillside.

  He thought back to the first murder story he had covered, as an earnest cadet reporter. The victim had been his age, a seventeen-year-old boy who had died in police custody. As well as horrific injuries to his face and head, the boy had severe bruising on the inside of both thighs, as though something had been held there with considerable pressure. Two years after the boy died, Hall had sat with the mother in her pretty house in Riverside. He could hear her broken voice as though it were yesterday: “I wanted to know every detail of what happened to my son. But now when I think about him, that’s the first thing that comes to mind—his final terrified minutes.”

  Anja’s parents were better off thinking she drowned in the ocean than that she was chased, half naked, down the rocks by a psychopath. And Chloe’s parents were better off thinking she died accidentally stumbling into a disused mineshaft than that she was suffocated by a deranged boyfriend. Even if Hall forgot about protecting Sarah and the case went to court, the Shelleys would never tell the truth. Hall was certain of it. Roger was not a reliable witness. There was a chance that police forensics would find something on Chloe’s body to connect Sam to her, but in reality, date rape was hard to prove, let alone when the victim’s corpse had been exposed to the elements for a year.

  A text message came through on his phone. It was from the HR guy. It said: Your editor is concerned that you are not answering your phone nor have you filed any copy recently. Please make an appointment with me.

  Hall reread it. He hadn’t filed anything decent for days, hadn’t returned any of Elizabeth’s calls, either. And now, obviously, she had held another meeting with that kid from HR. Hall typed: I quit. He pressed “send” before he could change his mind.

  Without thinking, he swung his arm back and hurled the mobile phone as hard as he could. It bounced off the rock and disappeared into the ocean. That phone was company property; they could take the cost out of his last paycheck.

  He sat down hard on the rock. Twenty-three years. No gold watch, no farewell lunch. Not even a bottle of cheap champagne while they stood around the desks. It wasn’t the way he wanted to go.

  Waves rolled in, splashing over the rocks, not making it far enough to disturb the rock pool’s perfect blue surface. It was the same warm summer sky, the same dappled sea and circling gulls, but for the moment it held no charm.

  Simone’s green Mercedes was parked in front of her holiday house. Sarah stood at the edge of the Shelleys’ garden, deliberating whether or not to go in. She had the option of not visiting Sam. She could let it go, let things run their course. There had been the same option with Jake that night at the Pineapple Hotel. In hindsight, she should have gone home well before the confrontation began. She should have refused to respond when he pretty much called her a whore, in the pub, in earshot of her entire staff. When he stood in front of her car, she should have waited until he moved rather than jumping out and confronting him. But this situation with Sam was not going to escalate. Not today. She had not had a drink for three days. Her mind was calm.

  Her tentative knock echoed in the quiet afternoon. Sam came to the door. His eyes were bloodshot; either the ocean was extremely salty or he had been crying. It sounded like he deserved to. But that was not why Sarah was here. She wanted to apologize for what she had done wrong.

  Sarah did not lower her voice.

  “I’m not here to have a go at you. I just want to talk to you about…what you said to Hall.”

  “I can’t remember.”

  Sam shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at his sneakers. They were laced tightly, the laces tied in neat bows, the first time she had seen his sneakers done up.

  “I said something about riding in your canoe,” Sam said.

  “Something about me and my canoe?”

  “I’m sorry. I was trying to impress the reporter.”

  “Look, what happened at Christmas was my fault. I’m dealing with the reasons behind it, just so you know.” Shame rushed over her, flushing her cheeks. “I’m sorry. For giving you beer and for everything else that happened.”

  Cooking sounds came from inside the Shelleys’ house, reminding Sarah and Sam that they were not alone. Sarah could smell garlic and onions frying. Whatever anyone said about Simone, her son was well looked after. Sam stepped outside and closed the door behind him. The sun was in his eyes now and he squinted.

  “You didn’t do anything.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Christmas Day in your car. You were smashed and singing songs, but you didn’t—there was no canoe. You let me feel your tits and—”

  Sarah’s face heated with embarrassment. “Shut up.”

  “You told me to piss off.”

  “Enough information.”

  Relief coursed through her, a salve on her soul. To Sarah, his revelation was as thorough as a rushing king tide that flooded the beach and removed all debris as it sucked back to the ocean. She almost thanked him. She had no memory of doing anything
sexual with Sam, but in her experience that did not necessarily mean nothing had happened. She felt like double air-punching. Instead she turned to leave, waving her hand without looking back.

  “Wait.” Sam followed her up the dirt steps to the road. “What about Anja and Chloe?”

  “Nothing to do with me, Sam.” Sarah felt even more relief as she uttered the words.

  “It wouldn’t have happened like it did if the women hadn’t wanted to come with me. Tell Hall that. I jumped in after Anja, I tried to save her. I didn’t mean to hurt Chloe. Mom says it’s partly their fault—”

  “They asked for it?”

  Sam slumped his face toward the ground. Right then he didn’t look like a soon-to-be eighteen-year-old man—he was a frightened boy.

  “Sam. Just tell the truth.”

  Walking down the gravel road, Sarah vowed never to drink rum again. She had made the promise before, usually during the nauseous wakeful sleep, the prelude to a violent convulsive vomit. This time she was sober and she meant it.

  People said when you asked for forgiveness, you felt lighter. Sarah didn’t feel lighter. She felt focused. Her mind was not convoluted with anxious kaleidoscopic emotions and nervous thoughts colliding. She was thinking straight. Sober, in control of her thoughts, and all she could think of was Hall.

  Chapter 13

  Under a gloomy sky, far out where the continental shelf dropped away and the ocean turned from turquoise into a dark watery void, Roger caught a blue-eye trevalla. According to Don, who watched with unconcealed envy as Roger showed it off down at the boat ramp that morning, no one had come home with a trevalla that big since 1993. It had to weigh twenty-five kilograms at least.

  “Where’s the press when you need them?” Don said. “This is front-page stuff.”

  Hall had been gone for a week, and for a moment Sarah thought Don was talking to her. Then Roger swiveled around, his whole face squinting in the sharp morning sun. He laughed a snorting laugh. It was the first time she had seen Don speak directly to Roger.