Bay of Fires (2 page)

At the bottom of the track she kicked off her sneakers and leapt across the smooth granite rocks and onto the chilled sand. The storm had cleared and the beach was empty, a slender pale arm curling between spiky yellow sea grass and the ocean under a scrubbed-clean blue sky. Curly brown seaweed and twists of orange string, driftwood and fishing line, broken shells, globs of smashed jellyfish, and bits of plastic littered the beach beneath the shacks. The sea was too rough for swimming. The usually clear green water churned sand. Clumps of dirty yellow froth like beer scum stained the beach. If Erica were here, she would crinkle her nose and say it smelled like raw sewage, but Sarah liked the salty, fishy smell that remained after the storms, that pungent aroma of decomposing seaweed. It was good for fishing.

Twenty minutes’ walk down the beach, the dune flattened around a purple lagoon. Sarah tossed her towel on the sand and waded into the swimming hole without fuss. Smashed sticks, gum leaves, and other debris flushed from the gullies floated on the surface. She scooped water over the goose bumps on her thighs, wetting her sagging nylon one-piece, splashing her shoulders and face, smoothing her unbrushed hair back into its ponytail. The sun rose slowly in Tasmania and a chill breeze rippled the water. A school of tiny silver baitfish darted toward her, then away. She took a breath and dived. Underneath, she opened her eyes. The water was so cold it felt like her eyeballs had frozen.

The storm had created a new deep pool at one end of the lagoon, conveniently near a good jumping rock. She swam toward it. The distant sound of breaking waves was accompanied by the high screech of seagulls and the gentle lap as Sarah sidestroked through the water. For a moment she forgot everything. The lagoon was wrapped in quietness now, though before long it would be as noisy as a public swimming pool. Sarah had mentioned this to Erica last night and her sister had agreed, cheerfully, as though this was a good thing about the lagoon. Sarah couldn’t stand it. The men in new Christmas board shorts following kids flapping on blow-up fluorescent-colored toys; mums yelling instructions; old women keeping their hair dry breaststroking up and down; and that awful blind friendliness of people who think they know you and want to ask stupid questions when all you want to do is press your shivering body flat against a hot rock and close your eyes.

When she got out she was cold. Wrapping the towel around her shoulders she walked along the beach, away from the shacks. The sand was warm under her icy feet. A man was coming toward her. As she got closer she realized it was Roger Coker. He swung his fishing bucket with his good hand, his rod wedged tightly under the other arm. She couldn’t remember the last time she had spoken to him; it had been years since she had spent more than a weekend here. Roger was an awkward man, and she had always made a point of being friendly to him, conscious that it took him a certain amount of effort to initiate a conversation. Sarah curled her lips into a parched smile.

“There is a girl. Down half a mile. Dead.” He blinked and looked out to sea.

“What are you talking about?” Sarah resisted the urge to take a step backward; Roger was standing too close to her.

“Smells bad, worse than rotten squid.”

“A dead person?”

“Murdered.” His breath smelled like sour milk.

“On the beach?”

“Stabbed.”

His long white finger pointed to the unprotected end of the beach. With the rough swell that lingered after the storm, the only other person who might walk that far would be a shell collector. But there was no one else wandering along the tideline picking up polished creamy cowrie shells, Chinaman’s fingernails, or the flat shells with a hole perfect for threading fishing line through. Apart from Roger, Sarah was alone on the beach.

“The Shelleys’ is the closest phone,” Sarah said.

“No. No. I’ll use the phone box at the shop.” Roger’s gumboots dragged through the sand toward the shacks.

Sarah watched him for a moment, then followed his boot prints back along the shoreline. In the morning sun her shadow was long, a thin black ribbon that moved one step ahead of her toward the dead woman.

The smell hit her first; rotting flesh, as foul as road kill festering in the sun. Her stomach heaved but she didn’t slow her pace. From a distance the body looked like a seal, curled and dark on the sand, the outgoing tide lapping her legs. Up close the blackened and bloated body was swollen around bikini bottoms. Her top half was naked.

A crab crawled out of the raw tissue. The stench was unbearable, but Sarah couldn’t turn away. Covering her nose and mouth, she walked around the body. Roger’s footprints formed a circle in the sand; none came close.

Sarah wasn’t squeamish. Crouching down, she rolled the dead woman over. Her head was floppy like one of the dead fairy penguins tossed onto the beach by winter seas. Her empty eye sockets stared at the new sky. Sarah registered the polka-dot pattern of the bikini bottoms and reeled backward, her hands clawing at the sand as she scrambled away. Adrenaline shot through her system, at once sickening and strangely pleasing. She had not expected to recognize the corpse.

She sprinted toward the shacks, ignoring the splintering sensations in her ankle tendons as she pounded across the hard sand.

O
cean swell muffled the police car’s engine. The windows rattled and the chimney pipe swayed and tapped against the tin roof as two policemen came up the ramp. Erica tied a sarong around her waist. Sarah sat on the banana lounge and inspected her hands. Every nail had broken unevenly. Two nails were split up the center, ruined from repairing filter systems and replacing gutters. What could she tell the cops? She had been anticipating their arrival, had silently rehearsed what she would say; now they were here, her thoughts were beyond her control.

They took her statement while she sat there in her Speedos and a T-shirt that said
The Liver Is Evil and Must Be Punished.

“I saw her in the guesthouse. I might have said hi.” Sarah didn’t elaborate on the conversation she had had with the Swiss woman. “I took Jane Taylor, the guesthouse owner, some mullet a few days ago. Can’t remember when exactly.”

She wasn’t lying. What passed between her and the pretty backpacker was nothing. It wouldn’t interest the police. Thinking about it made Sarah’s stomach churn sluggishly. The younger, gravel-voiced policeman demanded to know why she had tampered with the crime scene.

“The danger is you destroyed evidence.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.” Sarah tried to read his face but it was inscrutable, his pen poised over his pad as though he expected some kind of confession. “She’s been soaking in the ocean for God knows how long. You won’t get the killer’s DNA.”

The older policeman stood with the sun behind him so that a shadow fell across her body. He had his hands deep in his pockets and his hips thrust forward. She wasn’t intimidated. Sarah had been the only woman on the barramundi farm. She had been in charge of eleven men; hard-living, hardworking blokes who didn’t hold back. She had been one of two women in her year studying aquaculture. At Hash House Harriers running club she was the only woman. She could hold her own from the ponds to the pub and anywhere else it counted.

“I am sorry I touched her.”

“It’s all right.”

Sarah reached for a glass of water beside the banana lounge. She rolled the water around inside her mouth. It was warm and had a faint taste from the tank. They were correct; she shouldn’t have touched the body.

“I felt sorry for her.”

If she started describing the twisted bikini, the legs splayed revealing unkempt pubic hair, the crawling lice, or the sand caked in her fingernails, there was a chance she would cry. If she started crying, there was a chance she would not be able to stop.

“What do you think happened to her?” Sarah asked.

“Too early to say. The forensics personnel will take the body to Hobart, and the postmortem will take place in a week or so. We’ll get the toxicology reports first. The cause of death always takes longer. Of course, we can’t release the findings until the family is located,” the older cop said. “If she is a Swiss national, as the guesthouse owner suggests, that could take time.”

The younger cop added, “But young women don’t get killed for no reason.”

“She was raped?” Erica said. “Oh my God.”

“That’s a guess until the autopsy is completed,” the older policeman cut in. He stepped forward, and Sarah was out of the shadow of his body. Sun pierced her eyes and forced her to squint. “If you remember anything…”

“This is like in the movies,” Erica said. “If we remember anything, we’ll come down to the station.”

“Yes, Erica. It’s just like in the movies, except it’s not, and someone did actually die,” Sarah said.

Embarrassment flushed Erica’s face. She blushed easily. Cried easily, too. Everything came easily to Erica. The only thing Erica struggled with was failure. Sarah had often tried to assuage her younger sister’s disappointment. The desire to protect Erica remained in Sarah, but right now it was dormant, too deep to be tapped.

Ashamed and unable to apologize for her meanness, Sarah turned away.

Not long after the police left, the shack became crowded. Elbows resting on the veranda railing, Sarah watched through the binoculars as the police removed the body. She ignored the chatter and the feeling that she was just another nosy resident. The forensics people worked slowly. One person was taking photographs. Another, crouched beside the body, was writing in a notepad. More men, in plainclothes, watched. There were no women documenting the crime scene.

Behind Sarah, her mother and Erica bustled about with the teapot and leftover Christmas cake and shortbread biscuits, as though this was a high school parents and friends fundraising morning tea and not the aftermath of a murder. Slurping tea from chipped cups, the visitors swapped bits of information with barely contained excitement.

It seemed the Swiss woman had been walking to the rock pool in the middle of the day, a few days before Christmas, when she was killed. No one even knew she was missing until Roger found the body. If he hadn’t found her, there was a chance she could have washed away on the next high tide. Someone said that she had sunbathed topless every afternoon at Honeymoon Bay and laughter simmered through the crowd. They became silent when someone else added that the woman’s parents would probably fly out from Switzerland to take her body home. Sarah was the only person who had spoken to the woman, a fact she didn’t volunteer.

Anja Traugott was alone in the Bay of Fires Guesthouse when Sarah strode in, looking for Jane. Anja had tried to speak to her. She was not Sarah’s kind of woman. Her accent, dumb and sexy at the same time, was irritating.

Sarah had been back in Tasmania for less than a day. Everything felt irrelevant except her own reeling sadness. Sarah told herself her unfriendliness had nothing to do with the woman’s pale, pinup girl prettiness, or the fact that her clothing, tiny cutoff shorts with breasts almost falling out of her red and white bikini, was better suited to the Gold Coast than a Tasmanian national park. She wasn’t jealous, she was just preoccupied.

But as Anja had traced her finger along Jane Taylor’s wall map of the local coast, shades of blue pillowing out from the long curving beach to the continental shelf, Sarah had stood mutely, the plastic bag of mullet she was bringing Jane hanging limply by her side.

“The rock pool is a two-hour walk from here,” Sarah had said before leaving the woman staring at the map.

Sarah had been to the rock pool that morning, and the water, usually so clear you could see the delicate seaweed fronds growing on the bottom fifteen feet down, was blurred with fish guts and scales. Gulls scratched over bloodstained rocks where someone had cleaned fish. But Sarah had not mentioned this.

Sarah gripped the binoculars with damp fingers. Her hands were sweating. There were other walks she could have suggested; traversing the nearby apple and turnip farm to see the wild northern beach or hiking along the sandy Old Road past the local rubbish dump, known as the tip, and up to the burnt bridge where wildflowers were in season, tiny pink and lemon petals among parched banksia and wattle. Any of those would have made a nice walk for a tourist.

Through the binoculars Sarah watched as two people in white jumpsuits lifted the body into a bag, and then onto a stretcher, and carried it to a white van parked behind the grassy dune.

“It’s quite disgusting that you touched that dead woman,” Erica said with a grin. “Mum’s worried they’ll make you a suspect.”

“Mum’s got no idea.”

“Yeah.” Erica took the binoculars. “Oh. She’s gone.”

There was disappointment in her voice as she turned and announced the news to the people gathered on the veranda.

A solitary bodysurfer hurtled down the face of a seven-foot wave in the post-storm swell beneath the shack. The wave crashed, and he disappeared into the beating foam. Sarah counted silently. It was a good thirty seconds before he emerged from the white water. It would be like being inside a washing machine in there. He stood up, twisted around, and dived under an incoming wave, just before it exploded with a force Sarah could hear from the veranda. His forceful strokes were those of someone who had done years of swimming training in the pool.

She had not seen him since Christmas night at the wharf. She had woken the next morning on cold sand, daylight penetrating her closed lids. She could smell something acrid and hear flies buzzing. Her hair stuck to her face, pasted across one eye, and she desperately needed a drink of water. She sat up, squinting in the overcast morning glare. She was in a sand dune. Her fly was undone and one of her sneakers was not on her foot. She could not remember passing out.

She was alone, her skin clammy and her guts sick. Her head reeled when she stood up. She peeled the damp clump of hair off her face and pushed it back. The ocean and rocks fluctuated and she felt seasick. It looked like the sand dunes beyond the wharf, although her hungover mind was not sure. She couldn’t remember walking up there. The last memory she had was of being in the car, listening to the clinking of moored boats and rain on the roof. Sam, her seventeen-year-old one-night stand, had left, of that she was fairly certain. She could not remember leaving her car.

Flies buzzed around something at her feet. Creamy vomit, a chunky pile of regurgitated Christmas lunch, sat centimeters from where her head had been. She fingered her clumped hair; the smell was foul. She retched, stomach muscles convulsing in a bid to dredge her guts. Yellow bile came out, acidic and rancid.

Erica’s voice brought her back to the present, the hot veranda and the swirling swell below.

“Sam Shelley.” Erica leaned on the railing beside her. “He is H.O.T. Hot.”

“You’re learning to spell. Don’t tell me Qantas are educating their trolley dollies these days? It’s really great.”

“We’re not just there for our looks.” Erica laughed; meanness was wasted on her. “Go and get the binoculars so we can have a closer look.”

“No.” Sarah felt saliva spray from her mouth. “Someone is dead, Erica. Get a hold of yourself.”

In the surf, Sam was being pummeled in knee-deep water. He braced his hands on his knees and bent forward, probably hacking salt water out of his nose.

Sarah went inside and lay on the couch. Erica and her mother treated her like she was ill, offering her toast and watching her closely for signs of something. Signs of what, she didn’t know. Did they expect her to break down in floods of tears, shaking with shock at what she had touched? That wasn’t going to happen. At least they weren’t asking any more personal questions. She closed her eyes as Erica placed a cup of tea beside her. The attention was pleasing.

The scent told Sarah the tea was Earl Grey, her favorite. Without tasting it, she knew it would contain one sugar, and have been topped up with cold water so it was barely hot, just how she liked it. Jake didn’t know how to make her tea; he had always needed to ask her. These were things sisters knew about each other.

The thought saddened Sarah. It was only because she was feeling so horribly wretched that she felt this antagonism toward Erica. Over the years Sarah had made compromises for her younger, less resilient sister. When she was ten, Sarah had nodded mutely as Jane Taylor yelled at her for telling Pamela that Gary Taylor had been seen in town buying head lice shampoo. In fact it was Erica who had spotted Jane’s ex-husband in the chemist’s and shared the information.

“We don’t need talk that the guesthouse has a nits epidemic,” Jane had said as Sarah stood stunned beside the lagoon one day. “Shut your little gob.”

They had looked alike then, before puberty hit, two chubby, curly-pigtailed girls, and many times one had been mistaken for the other. As puberty arrived, Sarah took up rowing, developing her thick-muscled arms and legs, while Erica played tennis socially and maintained a girlish figure. These days no one would mix them up, although people did comment, pleasingly, on their similar catlike brown eyes.

Sarah had lied, concealed information, remained silent, for Erica. At seventeen, when Erica crashed their parents’ car driving drunk, Sarah took the blame. At twenty-two, when Erica and her boyfriend accidentally left a condom wrapper underneath the hammock at the shack, Sarah had pretended it was hers. Sarah wasn’t a hero. She just didn’t care what other people thought of her. Erica, on the other hand, crumbled at a whisper of disapproval.

There were things about Erica that Sarah would never understand. For instance, Erica had currently taken four weeks annual leave and planned to spend the entire time at the shack. Steve would come and go as his pilot schedule allowed. Who would choose to spend four weeks in a two-bedroom shack with their parents? Sarah was only here until she worked out what to do next. Sarah told herself she should be grateful Erica was here—at least she would have company.

“Thank you for the tea,” Sarah said, sitting up. “It’s nice.”

From the shack’s veranda Sarah watched the road. She still felt ill. It wasn’t the revolting smell, or the mutilated flesh, but the thought of that woman’s final hours that gripped her. There were kind ways to kill, if you wanted something dead. On the barramundi farm, fish that were to be processed were put on ice to slow them down. Sometimes they put a mild anesthetic in the ice slurries to slow them down even quicker. Sick fish that needed to be destroyed weren’t treated so kindly. Sarah preferred to put sick fish on ice, but some of the staff were ruthless and chucked the fish in the trash bin alive. For twenty minutes the creatures would flap away on top of one another until they ran out of air.

Walking on the other side of the road in the gutter beside the farm’s barbed wire fence was Roger. If he had looked down toward the shack he would have seen her, motionless on the swing she had built herself when she was nine years old, her fists balled on either knee. Sarah watched him pass, a solitary shape huddled under the morning’s expansive pale sky.

The fishing section of the Bay of Fires general store was a mere shelf. There were several bags of hooks, floaters and sinkers, reels of line, some butterfly nets, and an overpriced Alvey surf rod that had been there almost as long as Pamela and Don Gunn had owned the shop. Sarah knew the contents of that shelf as well as she knew the contents of her tackle box, and as she walked down the hill toward the shop, she envisaged which size hooks she was going to purchase. The wind had dropped, and there wasn’t time to muck around if she wanted to catch anything today. She also didn’t want to get embroiled in a long conversation with Pamela.