The Shattering (4 page)

‘Not loaded,' he protested. ‘Just . . . we do okay.'

‘Felise Finance,' Janna said. ‘For all your investment needs.'

He pulled up the spreadsheet and spun the laptop around to face the girls, glaring at the back of it. There was nothing to say to people about the money. He didn't have money; his dad did. And he couldn't exactly choose for his dad
not
to have it, could he?

Keri's green eyes focused on the spreadsheet. ‘Okay,' she said. ‘What am I looking at?'

Now that was something he could talk about. Sione shifted his chair closer to hers. ‘They're arranged by year.' He pointed at the columns. ‘That's the name. That's the date they did it. That's the location. That's the . . . uh, method.'

‘Strangulation,' Keri read. ‘Poison. Exsanguination?'

Janna made a slashing gesture down the inside of one wrist and grimaced.

Keri's mouth twisted. ‘Strangulation . . . that's popular, three entries. I guess that's hanging? Poison again. Carbon monoxide. Gunshot.' Her voice was as flat on that as on the others, but the table rattled as her hands pressed convulsively against the edge.

‘Do you see the patterns?' Sione asked.

‘These all look like guys' names. The locations are all over the place, but the dates are pretty close together. One most years — you've got a few gaps here — and two this year.'

‘We're pretty sure there's at least one every year, around the middle of winter,' Sione told her. ‘But I wasn't able to confirm for these three. I didn't want to add unconfirmed data.' He pointed at the entry above the last one. ‘That's Matthew.'

‘And that's Jake. And Schuyler up here at the top.' Keri looked up. ‘So these are all supposed to be suicides, I get it. But it doesn't say anything about murder.'

‘No,' Sione agreed. ‘But in the year they killed themselves, every one of those guys was in Summerton for New Year's Eve. And not one of them left a note.'

Keri's gaze jerked up from the screen to meet his. There was a noise outside, and they all went still, but the waitress's voice said, ‘It's just me. I can't open the door, could you —'

Keri got the door and took her own plate from the waitress, freeing one of her hands. ‘Thanks, Emily,' Keri said.

The waitress leaned over Sione's shoulder to put down his plate and then paused, blinking at the laptop screen. Sione swung it closed, feeling an uncertain smile tug at his mouth. Even a fast reader couldn't have seen much, he told himself; just a spreadsheet with some boys' names.

At any rate, the waitress only wished them happy eating. The door closed behind her with a soft click, and they all looked at one another. Sione was dying for one of the girls to break the silence.

‘So what I think you're saying,' Keri said at last, ‘is that there's a serial killer in town.'

Keri didn't seem to be a very trusting person. She had questions. Lots of them. As they picked at their food, Sione and Janna tried to answer them to her satisfaction.

‘He e-mailed me,' Janna said. ‘When Matthew . . .' She made a waving gesture. ‘And I said, that's awful, Schuyler, too.'

Sione nodded. That e-mail had been so stupid — a sort of long, heartsore wail to a girl he'd kissed once and thought about ever since and talked to only a couple of times on im.

But after that e-mail, Janna had been kind.

Sione tried to ignore the mixed guilt and triumph in that thought and spoke again. ‘It was only a coincidence until I met Tarquin.'

‘
Tarquin?
' Keri said. ‘Did his parents hate him?'

‘From what he said, pretty much. We met at a grief support group for teenagers.' Keri's eyebrow flickered, and he figured she was one of those people, the tough-it-out-yourself kind. ‘My mum's a psychotherapist,' he said, trying not to sound either defensive or preachy. ‘The group helped a lot. Anyway, he talked about the last family holiday he had with his brother, before he killed himself last year.'

‘It was in Summerton,' Keri said flatly.

‘And I said, hey, me too, what a coincidence. And he got really freaked out.' Sione remembered Tarquin's sudden interest interrupting his perpetual stoner haze. It had been about the only emotion Tarquin had ever shown in the group sessions. He had been a really good example of how not to deal. ‘Because it turned out —'

‘He knew someone else whose brother had killed himself, who'd spent New Year's in Summerton.'

Janna grinned. ‘I told you she was smart.'

One of those girls. ‘Yes. Five years ago.'

‘So you asked around,' Keri continued, ‘and you found the others.'

‘Well, it wasn't as easy as that.' Sione rubbed his lip. Months of checking obituaries in the library, of calling families, claiming that he was doing a project or posing as someone from the Ministry of Health — whichever lie had fitted the situation. Months of lying to strangers and keeping secrets from his parents. He'd hated it; he hadn't even known if he could do it. If Matthew hadn't died, he might never have known.

‘But that's how it turned out,' Janna said, grimacing. She'd done even more of that work than he had, listening to strangers cry on the phone.

‘There are other patterns,' Sione said. ‘Matthew was the only one who lived in Auckland. Tarquin had moved to Auckland from Blenheim when his folks split up after his brother died; the guy he knew was from Wellington. Schuyler and Jake are the only Summerton residents. All the other victims lived in separate places, scattered all over the country.'

‘How's that a pattern?'

‘It's too neat. A quarter of New Zealand's residents live in Auckland, and almost a fift h of Summerton's yearly visitors are from the Auckland region. But only one victim – Matthew. Three-quarters of the population are in the North Island, and well over half of Summerton visitors are from there, but the victims are spread almost evenly between North and South Islanders.'

‘Deliberately spread out. Got it.' Kerry tapped the screen, leaving a greasy fingerprint. Sione winced. ‘What's this number?'

‘Number of younger siblings.'

Keri's eyebrows twitched. ‘They
all
had siblings?'

‘They were all brothers and all the oldest. No girls, no middle or youngest children, no only children.'

‘Why?'

‘We have no idea. But working out the motive might help us work out who the murderer is, and how they did it,' Sione said. ‘And looking at patterns, seeing why these guys were picked, might help us with motive.'

‘Why don't you take this pattern to the police? They could do who and how.'

Sione looked into Keri's eyes. She had brown flecks around the pupil of the left one, he noticed, even as he made his voice very calm and very quiet, willing her to believe. ‘They'll laugh at us. Or they'll be very nice and very concerned and call our parents, who will be very nice and very concerned. And then I don't know what will happen to you guys, but my mum will slap me back into therapy so fast my head will spin. They'll say it's just a weird coincidence. A lot of people come to Summerton for New Year's, and a lot of New Zealand teenagers kill themselves. New Zealand males between 15 and 25, especially.'

‘You can't tell anyone,' Janna said. ‘Some of what we did to find this out — Keri, we can't tell
anyone
yet, especially not the police. We'll call them in when we find real proof and cope with whatever punishment we get then.'

‘It
could
be a coincidence,' Keri said.

‘You don't believe that,' Janna told her, with more confidence than Sione felt.

‘No. I know he was killed. Jake wouldn't go without saying good-bye.'

Sione finally relaxed back into the chair, only realising then that there was a thick line of sweat right up his back.
Real cool,
Felise.
‘Do you know if there was anything unusual about the murder scene?'

Keri shook her head. ‘I don't remember.'

So she'd found her brother, too. Sione did remember, but he made himself think about Janna's strapless dress instead. He'd put everything he knew into Matthew's file; it was there, he could look at it when he needed to, but he didn't have to think about it right now.

‘My eyes are up here,' Janna said, but not like she was offended. He blushed anyway. She'd grown a bit over the year, too.

‘When we find the killer,' Keri said abruptly, her soft, furry voice intense with purpose, ‘we are going to destroy him. Completely.'

Janna didn't even blink. ‘You bet.'

When Sione was honest with himself, in the dark hours of the night, he had to admit that he hadn't liked Matthew very much. He'd loved him, but that was just a family thing — biology and proximity and shared memories mostly. If they hadn't been related, they wouldn't have gone anywhere near each other. Matthew's friends were either morons or too cool to bother with Sione, and Sione didn't exactly have any friends. But that could have changed; Matthew might have stopped being a homophobic dick who thought caring about clothes made Sione a fa— a gay person, and maybe Sione would have developed an interest in sport or cars, and they could have been mates as well as brothers.

Sione hadn't got a chance to like him, and now he never would.

‘Yeah,' he said, and stood up. ‘Whoever murdered them will pay.' He shoved the chair away a bit harder than he'd meant to and looked out the window as he righted it.

The Kahawai was set into one of the three hills, high enough to look down on the town and the bay. It was getting late, but it was the high days of summer, and the sun was just setting over the water.

Sione went dead still. ‘Wow,' he whispered, knowing what was happening but unable to drag his eyes away. It was the same gut-wrenching awe that had grabbed him when the bus had gone over the hill. ‘It's so beautiful.'

The girls exchanged looks. ‘I guess, yeah?' Janna said. ‘It's a nice evening.'

It was the kind of thing she'd said last summer, the same uncaring incomprehension whenever he'd tried to talk about Summerton. Other visitors seemed to understand, but the locals walked around in this paradise every day without paying any attention. Mum said they were just used to it, but how could anyone get used to this?

He tried again. ‘You don't get it. I've been back to Samoa with my folks and to the Twelve Apostles off the Australian coast, and they're really great
.
But this . . .' He waved at the view: the green curve of the bay; the neat lines of the white buildings all aglow in the dying light, in sharp contrast with the soft grey-white sand of the beach; and beyond, the shimmering, red-gold sea. ‘Summerton is the most beautiful place in the world.'

There was a brief pause.

‘My parents say the Steps to Heaven were a little bit like the Apostles,' Keri off ered at last.

Janna laughed. ‘Remember how, just after they came down, the council was like, “Let's rebuild them in plastic”?'

Keri snorted. ‘Some tourist attraction that would have been. The idea was to get people to keep coming, not scare them off.'

‘Why were they worried?' Sione asked. ‘This is enough by itself. For anyone.' And he breathed deeply, trying to inhale all the beauty and calm of the sun-drenched bay.

CHAPTER THREE

JANNA

Janna considered telling Sione that taking deep, patient
breaths was distracting and not very attractive, but that might
have given him the wrong idea.
It was summer, and there were tourists — new guys,
different
guys — who could appreciate a girl with a sense of style and a mean knack for bass. Not that Sione didn't appreciate her — he was just kind of like, well, not a puppy, because she didn't like dogs, and she liked Sione. A kitten. Who needed to stop shedding on her clothes.

Of course the
main
priority was getting even for Schuyler, and Jake, and Matthew, and the others she hadn't even known. But she couldn't be focused on that all the time, because it would look suspicious and also because she would go completely mental. Emily Rackard rang up their bill.

Emily had been a few years ahead of them at school and she'd gotten some crap there. She wasn't pretty, she wasn't smart, she wasn't sporty, and she was a teacher's daughter. Janna liked Mrs Rackard okay, but she wasn't everyone's favourite teacher. Janna wondered if it was weird for Emily to carry drinks and clear plates for kids who were younger than she was or maybe even for the people her own age who had bullied her and then gone on to better-paying jobs. It would be super weird for Janna, which was yet another reason for her to get out of Summerton.

‘Did you enjoy your meal?' Emily asked, red lipstick flashing on her crooked teeth. Janna felt even more sorry for her. Janna had a Grape Dracula shade of lipstick that she'd worn only once. Awesome colour, but it had rubbed off on her teeth and smeared around her mouth like a big clown smile.