Bay of Fires (5 page)

“Be alert, not alarmed,” Sarah said.

“They’re not going to catch anyone.” Erica shook her head. “There are posters up in every small town from the Fingal Valley to Bicheno and up to Ansons Bay and they still haven’t found a trace of the Crawford girl. There’s always something on television about her. This is just a tourist. As if the police have a chance.”

Everyone paused. From the road came the sound of male voices, raised in anger. Erica ran into the bedroom to look out the window.

“It’s Don,” Erica said. “He’s yelling at someone. Funny. I’ve never heard him shout.”

The shack shook as the three women ran outside to see. Sarah remained at the table, eating another slice of Pamela’s cake. If Don was going off his rocker, he would be embarrassed afterward. He certainly wouldn’t want an audience.

At the bottom of the beach track Sarah paused to breathe in the cool, calming air. Beyond the rush of the ocean and the cawing seabirds she heard someone cough. There was no sign of another human; no shoes or folded towel.

She weaved through the rocks toward the sound. As she drew closer, she rethought her decision. Approaching a person you couldn’t see was a mistake. She should have either walked straight back up the track or bolted across the rocks to the open beach, where at least the visibility offered her some kind of protection. Here, locked between giant boulders, no one from the shacks could see her. Each breath she took felt strained, as though she were at altitude. Someone was there; she could hear the sound of feet sliding in the sand. She took another step closer and saw the bag. It was a plain green cloth bag, the kind people use to carry their groceries. Poking out the top was fishing line, a weathered milk carton, and, chillingly, an old-fashioned corrugated fishing knife with wide-set, rusted teeth. It was not sharp enough to make a swift, clean kill. When she was a girl, she had seen her father use one like that to dislodge abalone. She looked around, but the beach was empty.

As she moved away, a hand landed on her shoulder. She screamed. A man shouted. Sarah spun around, fists clenched and rising.

It was her father. “What are you doing?” she said.

“What?”

“Dad, you fruit loop. Is that your bag?”

“I beg your pardon,” John said. “Yes, that’s my bag.”

Sarah marched to the bag and peered in. As well as the knife and fishing line there were scraps of fishing net, a plastic ice cream container, a collapsed sandy beer can, and pieces of different-colored glass. He was picking up rubbish. She sat down too quickly, like wet sand being dumped out of a bucket. It hurt her coccyx.

“You scared the hell out of me,” she said.

John glanced at his rubbish bag. “Why?”

Sarah started to laugh. “Don’t worry.”

It was not worth trying to explain her brief suspicion. It was ridiculous. Her father shrugged and continued with his rubbish-collecting mission.

Hundreds of footprints dimpled the icing sugar–white sand, and discarded police tape flickered in the dune grass. A gentle onshore wind hummed into a discarded polystyrene coffee cup. There were no other signs that the dead woman, Anja Traugott, had lain there.

Sarah picked up the coffee cup and strode into the dune, ignoring the grasses swatting her legs. Behind the rise the terrain flattened. Banksias and pigface clung to the sandy soil. She stopped in a small clearing which was accessible from the gravel road that ran along the back of the beach. A low wooden sign announced
No Camping. Day Use Only.
Tires had torn the white sandy surface, the weight of several cars ripping into the ground so the black undersoil showed through like a bruise.

Balancing on the sign, Sarah scanned the coast. Dainty clouds rushed south high above the horizon; beneath it the sea had the calmness of a barramundi pond. A pair of hooded plovers circled her, their distance reassuring.

Sturdy, steady waves broke at the place where the sea had delivered itself of Anja Traugott. Impulsively she ran toward it. At the ocean’s edge she stripped away her clothing until she was naked, throwing it in a pile on the sand. She dove under the first small wave, enjoying the coldness. Mistaking her father for a killer was not a good move. Maybe she and Erica would laugh about it later. Or maybe, with the benefit of hindsight, she would pinpoint it as the moment when she started to lose it. Calm down, she told herself, and allowed the undertow to suck her body in.

The undertow was stronger than she’d anticipated. It sucked her down to the bottom, each wave tumbling her in a death roll. Blinded by the stirred-up sand, she flailed her arms as she struggled to find the surface. She swallowed water and her chest burned. It was uncomfortable but she didn’t panic. The key was not to swim for the safety of the shore but to give in to the ocean and swim with it. She pushed through the back of each wave, and eventually, in what she hoped was a diagonal direction, she swam out to sea until she felt the pressure ease. Behind the billowing greenness the ocean was as it looked from the beach, and she floated on her back until her breathing slowed.

She noticed the man only as she emerged from the water. He was watching her from the dunes, hands on his hips, legs apart. She didn’t know him. He looked scruffy. His shirt was tucked into his pants, not in a fashionable manner but in a way that revealed he wasn’t interested in how his clothes looked. He ducked his head, and she remembered she was naked. Pervert. If he wanted to have a go, he would want to be quick.

She started dressing herself. He had his back to her. She was aware of a weird thrill that started in her stomach and pumped out to her extremities. Even her fingertips tingled. It reminded her of the artificial adrenaline rush she experienced the one time she had taken acid at university. He was probably a tourist. If so, he was a moron, lurking around the murder scene like that. She decided to tell him so. Without taking her eyes off him, she marched up the beach. Her shirt stuck to the wet salt on her skin. It made her back itch. Old mate up there was going to get an earful.

H
all Flynn turned left off the four-lane Midlands Highway and onto the crumbling Fingal Valley Road. The sun was too low to be shielded by the visor, and he squinted through the shards of light, trying to anticipate corners he could barely see. The seventies-style sunglasses he had found outside the Gunners Arms on Saturday night did nothing to help. He slowed as he drove through each empty little town, considering buying some better frames from a petrol station, but nothing was open; even the bakeries had yet to position their
Open
signs.

In sprawling clear-felled paddocks on either side of the road, the occasional lone tree was dwarfed by its own long shadow on grass in the last stages of greenness. Early graziers cut down all the trees except a few, which they left to shelter the sheep. What they did not know was that a tree left alone in the middle of the paddock would die. Trees needed shelter too. Sheep trampled the ground around a single tree, affecting its roots, making it susceptible to bugs and disease. Hall sighed. By February the ground would be dry, the sheep’s white fleeces dusty and blending with the dirt. Hall would report the usual drought stories, interviewing cattle and sheep farmers who complained about not having enough feed to last the summer and the cash crop farmers who moaned about diminishing yields of potatoes, carrots, or canola. He found it hard to be sympathetic; the farmers who cleared every last acre of their land were the same ones who wondered why precipitation levels were falling. Not that he would ever say that outright; it was a journalist’s job to keep his opinions to himself.

The road curled away from another empty main street, mimicking the leafy line of the South Esk River. Hall wound the window down carefully so it wouldn’t get stuck. The morning air chilling his face carried the sweet wetness of rotting river bracken. Damn, it was good to get out of Launceston.

When his editor called him late last night with the assignment, she had tried to sound detached but she couldn’t hide the anticipation in her voice. A murder. Near the very beach a pretty teenager had disappeared from last summer. This was a story that sold newspapers.

“Serial killer is the obvious angle, of course. Inept police, inept local MP, too. Who’s next? Focus on their fears. Vox pop the man on the street. Set the agenda,” she said. “And I need a photo of the dead woman.”

“I think I know how to handle it, Elizabeth,” Hall said before thanking her for the story.

He was surprised that she had chosen him to cover it. Why hadn’t she handed it to one of her favorites, kids with double degrees and shorthand so shoddy they had to record their interviews on their mobile phones? They were the ones getting all the good assignments. Last year someone retired and the state political reporter position came up. Hall had applied. Over the twenty-three years Hall had been on the
Voice,
his assignments had included council, police, courts, state parliament, agriculture, and arts. His CV was quietly impressive, and he had assumed that the job would be his. But Elizabeth hadn’t even given him a formal interview; she had handed the job to Ned Keneally. The guy had worked on the paper for less than two years, for Christ’s sake.

“You’re too good at what you do,” she had said when Hall fronted up to her office. “You’re good with country people. They trust you. You know all the councilors, from Break O’Day to The Nut. All the issues. We can’t lose you.”

Elizabeth had tossed him a heap of front-page stories to compensate: a murder-suicide up at Mathinna; a garage amphetamine factory in Trevallyn; the Victoria Museum theft of seven nineteenth-century stuffed animal specimens, including a Tasmanian tiger, which his reporting had helped recover. This barely assuaged him. Hall had restrained his bitterness, but it remained within him, quietly malignant.

Concentrate, he told himself as he steered his car onto a narrow crumbling road that curled around a eucalyptus-covered cliff face. He grinned as he drove past a sign that announced
You Are Now Entering St. Mary’s Pass.
Someone had scratched the “P” off. There were more signs within the pass, warning of falling rocks and active wildlife, and enlisting large vehicles to sound their horn before each blind corner. Hall’s Holden was not that big, but he followed the instruction anyway, honking continuously and keeping his foot on the brake until he rolled out the other side of the pass. He didn’t want to speed, but he needed to get to the Bay of Fires by ten a.m. According to his editor, some locals were gathering at that time to perform an emu parade on the beach where the woman was found. The emu parade involved participants lining up shoulder-to-shoulder and slowly walking the length of the beach, searching for clues. It was called an emu parade because participants resembled emus pecking the ground for food. Obviously they hoped to find something that the police might have missed in their line search the previous day. Hall doubted they would find any new evidence, but it would be an easy way for him to make some contacts.

At the entrance to Bay of Fires National Park, the road turned to gravel and his radio lost transmission. A cloud of dust hovered behind Hall as he steered his jarring vehicle along the rutted surface. Fire had ripped through toward the end of last summer, and the blackened eucalypts were woolly with new leaves. If Hall recalled correctly, the local community had enacted emu parades back then, traversing the burned landscape in a human chain, looking for remnants of the missing teen. They found nothing, not even her surfboard, let alone her bones.

Hall breathed in the charcoal-clean scent of burnt bush. There was the faintest trace of salt on the air, an aperitif to the ocean which the flashes of blue shining through the canopy told him was not far away. He emerged through the trees and onto a long straight road running beside an empty white beach. It looked about four or five kilometers long, curving around the sea and ending beneath a rocky headland. Somewhere on this beach the dead woman had washed in.

A serial killer made for copy that was human interest, crime, and politics. He had a lot to do. So far all reports, newspaper and radio, were based on a police report and a couple of phone interviews. Hall began going over the different angles in his head and then stopped himself. The angles would appear on their own after he started interviewing. This was a good story. No, this was a great story.

Moored in the wind high on the headland was the Bay of Fires Guesthouse. Hall parked beside a battered Land Cruiser and walked up the ramp. He liked the place immediately. It was an old Nissen hut, the kind built to withstand tropical storms. The faded green corrugated iron roof was curved like a giant beer barrel. It looked like it had withstood its fair share of bad weather. He walked up and down the veranda, inspecting the building, wondering how it had come to end up on the Tasmanian east coast.

Inside it was larger than he anticipated. Bench seats fit snugly beneath the curved roof, and tall windows overlooking the ocean were decorated with shell and driftwood mobiles. The furniture was dingy, the yellow rug stained, and the green linoleum peeling, but the sky and sea lit up the room. No one answered his greeting. Downstairs, the dormitory-style rooms all appeared to be unoccupied.

He found a tall thin woman in the side yard, pegging towels on a Hills Hoist swirly washing line. She wore skin-tight jeans and a snakeskin belt.

“Morning,” called Hall.

“Oh, hey.” She spoke holding a clothes peg between her teeth. “You the journo?”

As he moved closer, he breathed the sweetness of her last cigarette coming off her clothes and skin.

“I guess I am.”

“Well you either are or you’re not.”

Hall laughed, but he wasn’t sure if she was trying to be funny. Inside the guesthouse a telephone rang. The woman tossed the pegs on top of the washing basket and marched toward the back door.

“Come on, then.” She didn’t check to see if he was following.

“Bay of Fires Guesthouse.” As she answered the phone, she shoved a form and a pen at him. Her rings were loose on her fingers. “Yes, I’m the manager.”

Her voice remained unfriendly; the wrinkles around her lips rose and sank as she spoke. “Suit yourself.” She hung up the phone. “Okay. Grand tour. Get your bag. There’s no valet service here.”

Her name was Jane. She showed him around, describing the facilities in a rehearsed manner. Downstairs there were two bunkrooms, two bathrooms, and Jane’s private quarters. Hall averted his eyes from her denim-clad buttocks as she took the stairs two at a time. “How long are you staying for?”

“A few nights to start with. Not sure. Depends what my editor wants.”

“The room’s yours for as long as you want it.” Except for the distant roar of the ocean, the guesthouse was quiet. Jane paused in the doorway of one of the upstairs bedrooms. “I take it your wife doesn’t mind not knowing when you’ll be back.”

Hall repressed the twitch of a smile. This gruff woman was sussing him out. If this was how she behaved toward potential suitors, he wouldn’t want to see how she treated men she didn’t like.

“No wife, so no problem,” he said, making sure to avoid her gaze. He didn’t want to give her the wrong idea. Hall recalled a frightening Stephen King novel about a nurse who kept a man captive in her house. If he remembered correctly, that man was a writer too.

“Right. This is you,” Jane said.

“Good day for the beach,” Hall said as Jane winched open his bedroom window and shoved a piece of wood in the frame to hold it there.

“Don’t talk to me about it. I should be turning people away.” She swiped her hand across the bed, dusting something off, before she spoke again. “No one’s staying. I had a group of ten here last night; they all left this morning. Women decided they didn’t want to stay. More people are coming on the weekend, at least. Right now I’ve got twelve beds, one guest. You’re it.”

“That’s hard,” he murmured in the voice he reserved for grieving families and business owners going broke.

“Summer’s our make or break down here. Easter to the November long weekend this place is dead. High season now and they’re not coming. It doesn’t help; all your muckraking.”

“I haven’t written a word on Anja Traugott,” Hall said truthfully, meeting her gray eyes.

Strands of salt-and-pepper hair had fallen out of her topknot. She tucked them behind her ears, and the end pieces of hair scooped out to the sides.

“Her parents are coming to get her stuff. You tell me what I’m supposed to say to them.” She crossed her arms.

“You tell them she was a lovely person and that you are sorry for their grief. That’s all you can say.”

“I don’t want this to be happening.”

“Sure.” Hall unzipped his laptop case.

“I suppose you’ll want to interview me, seeing as how I was the last person to see her and that. The coppers say I’m an important witness.” Her laugh was bitter. “I can only tell you what I told them. She took her camera, went out for a walk at about one p.m. Didn’t come back. You want me to tell you what she was wearing?”

“Listen. I’m not interviewing you now. I need to make notes. We’ll sit down later. Do it properly. Where did you say the men’s room was?”

She stepped past him and into the hallway. With her thumb, she jabbed toward the stairs. “Down to the left. Make sure the button pops up when you flush; it’s almost had it. You want a cup of tea when you’re done? Come outside and I’ll talk. But don’t mess around. I have to go to town to meet the bus.”

“Okay,” he relented, and she finally smiled, showing teeth that looked like they had never been cared for by a dentist.

Walking carefully so the floorboards didn’t creak, Hall bypassed the bathroom and entered the first bunkroom. The beds were made, white sheets folded back over gray blankets. Otherwise the room was empty. The next room was set up the same except one bed was unmade. A backpack leaned against it and a book was on the nightstand. Hall picked it up.
Bruchstucke des Zwielichtes
was the title. He couldn’t read German, but it looked like a work of literary fiction rather than a romance, which he had half expected it to be. Did that mean Anja was an intelligent woman? He looked at the backpack. There wasn’t time to open it now; if he asked nicely, Jane might let him have a look. If not, he would investigate the bag when she went to meet the bus. The room wasn’t locked.

Hall peered out the narrow window. It looked over a succulent garden and a paddock in which a chestnut mare stood beside a barbed wire fence. A cul-de-sac on the point gave access to several new shacks. You couldn’t correctly call them shacks; their sharp lines and walls of glass positioned to frame certain views suggested the clever touch of an architect, unlike the original Fibro dwellings. In the other direction he could see the lagoon, a purple smudge on the edge of the beach.

It must have been winter when he came here with Laura, for it was too cold to swim. A family of black swans had watched as Laura waded in the lagoon. With her floral skirt hitched around her waist, her face drenched in dappled autumn sunlight, she had looked like one of Renoir’s women. One of the birds had thought she was too close and flapped and hissed with its neck stuck out. At the time Hall had been frightened for Laura; now he wished it had bitten her.

In his notebook Hall wrote the date and time. Perched on the bench seat opposite him, her back to the ocean, Jane ineffectively swatted the cigarette smoke floating in the air.

“So.” Jane propped her lighter on top of the Holiday cigarette packet. “Where do you want me to start?”

“Start at the beginning, when she first got here.” He sipped the tea. It was too hot and burned his lip. Jane didn’t notice.

Anja Traugott had arrived on the bus from Launceston five days before Christmas. She had spent her time reading in the garden, sunbathing, taking walks around the beaches. One afternoon she hired snorkeling equipment; another morning she joined a couple of other guests and canoed around the lagoon. Jane had been grouting her window ledges and saw Anja leave the guesthouse on the day she went missing.