Bay of Fires (28 page)

Jane was drinking on the patio as she did every night. She poured him a generous measure of gin, ignoring his halfhearted refusal. An hour later Hall felt calmer. He smoked Jane’s cigarettes as she remembered better times. Jane talked about the days when politicians were motivated by a desire to represent the people who elected them. Hall was agreeable. It was unusually warm, even for January, and the midges weren’t biting.

“Well I’ll be,” Jane said when they realized they had attended the same tiny primary school in Buckland, at different times, of course.

It was unlikely their families were friends. Jane’s father was a logger; Hall’s parents organized logging protests from their self-sufficient farm.

“I didn’t pick you for a greenie,” Jane said. “Although you’ve got the right car for it.”

“Should I be insulted by that?”

“I always think it strange that greenies drive old cars which are more polluting than newer models.”

“What I find hard to understand are people who don’t look past their next paycheck. You can’t replace the old growth.”

“Where do you want to get your newspaper pages from? Brazil? You reckon they practice sustainable logging?”

“Logging here is not the answer.”

“It’s easy to criticize people who can’t wait for payday when your own lifestyle is secure. I bet you had lots of meat on the farm. Sausages and mince, that’s all my mother could manage.”

“Let’s agree to disagree.”

One of the dogs howled at something moving in the bushes.

“Diesel. Been jumpy since that fat penguin attacked him.”

Hall laughed. Don Gunn did resemble a well-fed penguin. “You’re not worried someone’s skulking around here?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time. I caught Simone Shelley’s son over here more than once this summer. Last time he climbed up on the tank stand and was looking through the bathroom window at one of my guests.”

Hall sucked his cigarette the wrong way and wheezed. His mind churned through unclear thoughts. Why had she not mentioned this before? Sam Shelley. Hall hadn’t considered him as a suspect. Had Hall been blindsided by the attention his story about the bikini top turning up had brought? No. That wasn’t it. A seventeen-year-old boy with no friends who wanted to look at women in states of undress; it might not be socially acceptable, but it didn’t make him a murderer.

Jane was watching him. “Was before Anja got here.”

“What did you do?”

“Let the dog off. He won’t do it again.”

Jane’s laughter rattled from her body. This was not the first time Hall had seen her sense of humor accessed by tales of boyhood foolishness. Maybe she would have been less sour if she had raised a child.

“You would have been a good mum,” he said without thinking.

Jane tried to pour herself another drink but the bottle was empty. She lit a cigarette and sniffed. “Story of my fucking life.”

In hindsight, Hall should have said good night then. Instead he found himself talking about the novel he wrote after Laura left. He had typed until his eyes were bloodshot every night for three weeks straight. Nearly two hundred pages about a sheep farmer whose wife slept with his best friend, a contract shearer. In the end, the farmer ran over the shearer with his tractor.

“It’s fiction. I never tried to kill Dan.” Hall caught himself slurring; he was drunker than he had realized. He tried to remember what he’d had for dinner but nothing came to mind. Nauseated from the cigarettes, Hall went inside for a glass of water. When he returned, Jane was sliding her flip-flops on.

“Better call it quits,” she said. “Got work to do tomorrow.”

He only meant to press his lips briefly to her ruddy cheek. As he leaned forward, Jane turned and their lips pressed together. Two seconds was all it took; her tongue felt furry in his mouth. His snorted laughter surprised them both.

“For God’s sake!”

It was unclear who she was admonishing. The bottle and glasses clashed as she scooped them up and the screen door slammed behind her.

Half-drunk, half-stunned, Hall listened to his phone messages, his pen tapping on a fresh page in his notebook.

Elizabeth had called at ten p.m. Working late. Her message effectively put to bed a series of terse e-mails she had sent. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the property glut story, Elizabeth said; she was just hoping for more blood and guts, wanted him to come down hard on the police and their ineffectual effort to date. Get investigative, she suggested. He knew what she wanted, something gritty enough for the subs to slap a sensational headline across the front page. The message ended with Elizabeth’s needling voice saying, “This is your chance.”

For Christ’s sake, did she want him to make something up?

At dawn Hall met Sarah and they walked around the top of the headland and down an overgrown beach track to Eddystone Cove. From where Hall stood beside Sarah on a flat rock he could see no shacks, no dirt roads, nothing but pristine sand and water. Hall watched Sarah slide bait onto her hook and then did his own, attempting to copy her deftness. The ocean surface swirled in response to a deep current. Cold air and his relief at having slipped away from the guesthouse without seeing Jane tempered Hall’s hangover.

On the beach a dog dodged the white water. It must have escaped its owner. The distant snap of the dog’s bark was the only sound in the quiet dawn.

Fishing in silence, Hall envied Sarah’s ability to focus. Elizabeth and Jane had kept him awake well into the night.

Hall’s line pulled. Was that a bite? Peering past the kelp into the deceptively tropical water, he looked for the end of his line. Imitating Sarah’s smooth technique, he wound the line in. Something bounced out of the water and he furiously spun the reel.

“Got one!”

He swung the rod around and the fish flapped on the rock. It was ugly with brown blotches and big red eyes.

“I got one!” Hall shouted again.

He squatted beside his fish. It was swelling up, its mouth opening and closing with a strange sucking noise. Sarah clambered down the rocks to look.

“Chuck it back, mate.”

“You can’t tell me that’s too small.”

“It’s a toadfish.”

“What’s wrong with a toadfish?” Hall pulled the line toward him and the fish flipped a meter in the air.

“Poisonous.”

Hall was surprised by how disappointed he felt. “I could take it back for the dogs.”

“If you want to kill the dogs. We can’t even use that one for bait. Careful. He bites. Those little teeth can bite through fishhooks and bones.”

Hall held the toadfish while Sarah slipped the hook out of its mouth. She flipped it with the toe of her sneaker into the sea. It floated on the surface as though it were dead before disappearing into the shadowy water.

“Don’t chew your fingernails or you’ll get sick,” she added.

If Hall ever went to a fishing trivia night, he would want Sarah on his team. In the fortnight since he had met her, she had taught him more fishing secrets than he reckoned the
Voice
’s fishing editor knew. One of her tricks was to scatter diced steak into the water. When she did this, the surface erupted with tailor, pretty fish with blue-green backs and forked tails. She explained the secret was to scatter only tiny pieces of steak so you weren’t feeding the fish, just tempting their taste buds. Sometimes she used cuttlefish or squid. Tailor were greedy; in a feeding frenzy they regurgitated so they could eat more.

Hall had not yet caught a fish he could keep, but if he did, he knew what to do. She had shown him how to hold a fish against the rock and cut under its throat in two decisive movements, letting it bleed before putting it in the bucket.

The sun was a dizzyingly bright ball above the horizon when they finished. Sarah had caught six tailor, which Hall carried back to the beach in the bucket. Up near the high-tide line a person wandered, stooping to pick up long fringes of seaweed which were shoved into a garbage bag. It was Jane. Hall recognized the skinny white legs and uncombed gray hair poking out of her black cap. He hesitated; there was no way to leave the beach without her seeing him. Unencumbered by the heavy bucket, Sarah was striding up the beach toward Jane. She was too far away to hear his weak call to stop. He repeated her name but she didn’t hear. Any louder and Jane would hear his panic. By the time he caught up to them, Sarah and Jane were side by side, watching the dog.

“How are you, Hall?” Jane didn’t look at him.

“Good. Tired. Got a lot of work to do today, you know how it is.”

“I wouldn’t actually.”

Jane whistled with two fingers in her mouth. The dog didn’t respond. She wiped the saliva on her shorts and shook her head. Hall squinted down the beach. The dog had something in its mouth. Driftwood or possibly one of the dead fairy penguins that had washed in with the storm. The dog tossed the thing up and pounced with his front paws, barking. He leaned down and rolled his toy on the sand. He looked like a black dingo, his hind legs straight and his tail beating the air.

Sarah handed her rod to Jane. “I’ll get him.”

“I’ll go,” said Jane, but Sarah was already jogging down the beach.

Uncertain of what else to do, they followed her. Jane swallowed and exhaled; the sounds uncomfortably human on the empty beach. She wasn’t going to pretend that nothing had happened. Damn it. She wasn’t that type of woman.

“I enjoyed talking to you last night,” she rasped. She must have smoked almost a packet of Holidays as they sat on her patio. “I don’t get much chance for conversation with an intelligent man.”

“I was pretty fuzzy when I woke up this morning. Can’t remember much. Sorry if I was out of line.”

“Cut it out.” Her lips were slack, her eyes hidden behind her black Ray-Bans. “I misread the situation. All that gin didn’t help. Sorry.”

“Jane…”

“Don’t.” She stopped him with the palm of her hand. “Something else I wanted to tell you. The other day you were asking why I didn’t tell everyone where Gary was?”

“I shouldn’t have asked. It’s not my business, Jane.”

“Well, you did ask. So you can listen. There’s no big mystery. It’s simple. The man hated being married to me so much he had to go and live in a tin shed up the back of Goulds Country for ten years. No running water. Long drop—no septic tank. Gary doesn’t even have a window to look out of. I didn’t want everyone knowing.”

Hall felt for her. No wonder she was so bitter. All this time, knowing her estranged husband was a few hours’ drive away. He didn’t know who had it worse—Jane, so lonely in her empty guesthouse by the sea, or Gary, hiding in a humpy up in the sticks with only the other misfits and social rejects for company.

Down the beach, Sarah held the dog by the neck. She was waving. The wave went on and on. Jane dragged her garbage bag toward Sarah faster. Hall followed in the foul wake of decomposing seaweed.

Under Sarah’s firm grip on its collar the dog jerked its head upward. A polished white bone was clenched between the dog’s teeth.

“Help me get this out of his mouth.”

Around her the sand was ripped up from the dog’s game. Half a dozen white bones lay where the tide had dumped them.

“It’s just a bone,” Hall said.

“Are you an idiot? It’s human.”

Stung by her unexpected vitriol, Hall gaped as Sarah whacked the dog on his snout. The animal ducked and ran backward in a circle, his jaw clamped on his prize. Jane kicked the bones into a pile and protected them with her garbage bag.

Feeling hopeless for just watching, Hall jumped on the dog and wrestled it between his legs. Slippery with saliva, the bone was locked by the dog’s jaw.

“Drop it.” Hall tugged at the bone.

“You’ll break his teeth,” Jane shouted.

“Whack him on the nose, Hall,” Sarah said.

Hall let go, feeling foolish. The dog backed away, growling through clenched teeth at Hall, and sprinted up into the scrub at the back of the beach. Jane followed.

Sarah carried the bones up into the soft sand, away from the next high tide.

“What do we do now?” she said.

“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” Hall said. “Nothing. The person is dead. Another day won’t hurt them. I will notify the police by close of business today. I promise.” This was front-page breaking news if he managed it properly.

“Jesus, Hall.”

Hall took a deep breath. “If we ring the authorities now, it will be all over the evening news. I’m just proposing that we delay telling them by a few hours.” He held out the bucket of fish to Sarah. “Please.”

She yanked it from his hand and he exhaled. “I’m not hurting anyone,” he said as he picked up Jane’s garbage bag of seaweed.

“Where are you going?”

“I have to make sure she doesn’t tell anyone,” he yelled over his shoulder as he started running.

Hall wrote a draft of his story about the bones, ate lunch, wrote some questions for his next interview. He called the police at three p.m., too late for the prime-time evening television news to scoop his story. As he filed the story, after adding the standard police response, he decided that in fact he should call one of the radio stations. A radio interview would be a fantastic teaser for his story.

When he saw the police car speed past, he took his camera and walked down to the wharf. A crowd was gathering on the jetty. It was the best vantage point to watch the local police cordoning off the beach. Judging by the excited commentary, it was not fear or concern that motivated them to come out of their comfortable shacks and campsites but a macabre voyeurism.

“Human bones have washed up on the beach,” Pamela told him. “That’s the police there now. That could be our missing girl, Chloe Crawford.”

“I heard there were serrated cuts on the bones, like someone had had a go with a saw,” Bunghole said.

“Two words for you, Keith. Shark bite,” John said, and he shared a chuckle with Don.

“Jane Taylor’s dog was playing with them. Isn’t that disgusting?” Pamela said.

“Who said that?” Hall asked.

“Sarah told us,” Pamela said.

“I didn’t say it like that.” Sarah acknowledged Hall with a nod and then returned her attention to the beach.