The Shattering (6 page)

‘Is that a Japanese name?' she said. That was not the best line in the history of ever, but she figured that you had to expect your flirting to be less than ideal right after a brush with death that destroyed your four-wheeled baby.

‘Yes. I am an exchange student from Japan.'

Janna swept her hair out of her face with one hand and offered him the other, grateful that she'd put on the booby dress. ‘Hi, Takeshi. I'm Janna.'

He bowed slightly when he shook her hand.
Cute.
‘It's nice to meet you, Janna.'

Janna gave him her most dazzling smile and felt a thrill go right up her spine as he smiled back, crooked teeth flashing. She could feel Sione staring from his seat on the kerb, legs stretched out over the gutter, but she didn't turn to look. The hot guy was in the right age range to be a victim, so it was really vital that she make successful first contact. At the thought, she felt her smile fade a little.

There were blue lights flashing off Takeshi's shiny, shiny hair, and Janna turned around as the cop car pulled up, ready to lie her ass off and to cry if things seemed to be going badly.

But when she touched her face, the fingertips of her gloves came away already wet and smeared black, too. She wasn't really
crying
, she decided. Just sort of
g
leaking, all the delayed stress of the moment spilling down her cheeks.

And what a crappy mascara.

Waterproof, her exceptional ass.

CHAPTER FOUR

KERI

I usually like my paper run.
Cycling's good cardio training, in-season and off. Even on the frigid days of ice rain, when my fingers go numb to the knuckles and cold track pants flap wetly about my calves, I know that I can get back to the house for a hot shower and breakfast before school. There's a rhythm to it, clutch and flick, brake and glide. It switches off my brain, and when you've got a brain that's always calculating the worst possibilities of any situation, that can be good.

But I also like sleep. And when I don't get enough, getting up at six to do the run is torture.

I stared at my ceiling for most of that night. Sione didn't seem like someone playing mind games — just a nervous boy in expensive clothes and a crush on Janna so obvious that it was hard not to feel a bit sorry for him. I trusted him and, more important, trusted his spreadsheet.

And what the spreadsheet implied was very clear. Someone had murdered my brother. Very possibly someone I knew.

So it wasn't a restful night, and when I made myself get out of bed and onto my bike, I discovered that some morons had crashed on the main road. All the safety glass had been pushed to the side, where I had to cycle through it.

I got home just as Mum was leaving for work. ‘Morning, Keri. How was dinner?'

‘Good,' I said. ‘The snapper was great.'

‘Oh, lovely. Is Janna's friend nice?'

‘Yeah. Bit flash, maybe. He's staying at the Chancellor.'

Mum nodded, a gesture that might have meant she wasn't paying attention, but could equally have meant she was taking it all in for use at some later date. ‘Your dad called while you were out. He sends his love.'

Dad was at a major roadwork site three hours into the centre of the island, on one of the mountain passes. It was too far away for easy commuting, so he and his mate Hone were staying in Hone's caravan.

‘Oh. Good.'

‘And I said hello from you.'

‘Won't you be late?' I said, making motions toward the door. All this conversation was starting to wake me up, and I had plans to sleep for another hour. I sure didn't want to do any more lying on my back and looking up. I'd already memorised the position of every glow-in-the-dark star.

Mum patted her French roll and gave me a professional smile. I didn't like the face she put on for work: smooth foundation, pale pink lipstick, and carefully arranged dyed hair. With her laugh lines and crow's-feet neatly concealed, she seemed much less my mum and more a construct of some sort — a champagne-blonde Chancellor cyborg.

‘Keri, love . . . are you sure you don't mind about Christmas?'

No Christmas this year
, she'd said when Nanny Hinekura asked us about it after the burial.
No, I can't do it, no
.

‘I don't mind.' This was sort of a lie. I understood what it was to want everything to stop, but even if we didn't have a tree in our own house, we couldn't avoid Christmas, because it was everywhere else. The streetlights had their tinsel decorations, and the hotel lobbies all had massive displays, and all the trees along the waterfront were strung up with lights. Christmas came up every time we turned on the tv or the radio or stepped into a shop. We'd even got two days into our own home Advent calendar, opening the little cardboard doors for the chocolates inside.

One for me. One for Jake.

After we got back from the tangi, I took the calendar into my room and ate every piece, including the big chocolate manger behind the door for Christmas Day. It made me sick, which felt right. The crumpled calendar was the only piece of Christmas left in the house, and it was lying under my bed like a piece of rubbish.

‘I hadn't got around to getting presents anyway,' I added, and that was completely the truth.

‘Me neither,' she said, which I knew for a fact wasn't true at all. ‘But I mean . . . you can still go down to your grandmother's, if you like. It's not too late. All the cousins would be happy to see you.' Mum and Nanny Hinekura did not see eye to eye, so this off er was a big deal.

But now I had to stay to find out who'd murdered Jake. Even before, I hadn't wanted to go. I couldn't think of anything worse than being surrounded by all those family members, so conscious of the one who was missing.

‘Nah, it's okay,' I said.

‘Well . . . I'm working on the twenty-fift h.'

‘But you had the day off.'

She checked the fold at the back of her collar. ‘It's triple time. We could use the money.' She didn't meet my eyes, and I thought,
Whoever did this to my mother is going to pay.

So when she left, I didn't crawl back into bed. I took a shower and put on my inferior jeans and the blue T-shirt Jake had given me last Christmas and got back on my bike.

Iron Road is the main road into town — it's State Highway 100 until it passes the summerton welcomes you!! sign. Because the road's steep all the way down, the hotels crowd around it, each promising bay views. I raced down to the esplanade, happy about the breeze off the sea tugging at my shirt. In the brief time since I'd finished the paper run, the traffic had thickened. It was mostly tourists: big cars with tinted windows and cute, bright-coloured hippie cars. Every now and then some idiot would look at the bay and get caught in the Summerton Effect, freezing instead of going at a green light.

And that pile of broken glass was still there.

I should have gone the back roads, but since I was there, I moved my feet in slow, lazy circles, looking at the mannequins in the windows of Lauer's and the crystal display at Inner Light and the Beach Bash posters that plastered the library and art gallery outer walls. The air was loud with seagulls and little kids chattering and people honking at the green-light gazers. The traffic cleared as I headed south, where the bay curved out again, and I sped up, standing on the pedals as I turned inland to go up the hill to Janna's house.

Both of Janna's younger sisters were in the front yard, playing some complicated game that involved digging around the roots of trees with pointed sticks. They looked up when I sailed into the driveway, and Petra bent over her stick without meeting my eyes. Fift een. Not too old for pretend games but old enough to know she was supposed to be too old, especially in front of the team captain. She'd be a good forward, if she grew into those wide shoulders.

I braked. ‘Is Janna home?'

Mariel rolled her eyes. ‘She's still in
bed
. You should go wake her up.' She wasn't much like Janna — little and dark, and I'd seen her reading at lunchtime.

‘Sorry about your brother,' Petra said, and Mariel lost her smile.

‘Me, too,' I said, and did that one-legged flamingo hop over the bar of my bike, which was a boys one. Girls bikes didn't have that bar, which was just more evidence of how badly organised the world was. The last thing guys needed was to land hard on a bar if they missed the seat, and yet there it was. ‘This okay here?' I asked, and waited for Petra's nod before I kicked the stand down and walked around the house to the back door.

I hadn't been to Janna's house since I was ten or eleven, when we'd drifted from each other, and I was surprised how much of the house was still the same. The kitchen had a dishwasher now, rumbling beside the sink, but the peeling pink Formica was the same shade I remembered, and the dark panelling in the hallway was still there. So were the pictures of the Virgin Mary holding a baby and Jesus with a bleeding heart, and the crucifix above the mirror at the end of the hall.

I knocked on the door of the room that had been Janna's and, when I got no answer, pushed it open. It had a crumpled, empty bed with pink covers, and Petra's most improved player trophy on the dresser.

I pulled back, disoriented, and knocked on the door of the next room. It had still been forbidden to everyone the last time I'd come over.

Inside, someone groaned.

It must have been okay now, if Janna was in there, but I still took a deep breath before I opened the door to Schuyler's room.

Everything had changed. I remembered faded yellow wallpaper with a pale green rose pattern, almost covered with meticulous star maps and posters of the planets. Schuyler had wanted to be the first New Zealander on the moon.

Janna had painted the walls — not black, I saw, as my eyes adjusted to the light filtering in around her curtains, but a very dark purple — and stuck up posters of Hole and Bikini Kill and Mindless Self Indulgence and Elemeno P. Her cherry-red bass was on a stand in the corner, on the only piece of floor clear of magazines and clothes and scraps of paper. One bookshelf leaned into the other, and the air was thick with the burnt flower smell of cheap incense.

Janna lay facedown on the bed, which was jammed under the window, with her head buried in the white pillow. She was naked. I blinked at the dust motes dancing in the shaft of sunlight that fell on one long leg and decided not to be embarrassed.

‘You better get up,' I said, closing the door behind me and turning on the light. ‘We've got work to do.'

She hunched away from the light and then jerked awake, scrabbling for the sheet, which had fallen off the bed during the night. ‘Jesus, Keri!' she hissed, and wrapped dark blue cotton around her like a towel. ‘We were going to meet at the hotel at nine!'

‘I knocked.'

‘Did the brats let you in? I swear, I'm getting a guard dog.'

I snorted. ‘Liar. You hate dogs.' It was surprising how easy it was to fall back into being friends with Janna. She was good at friendliness, and I was too bloody-minded to care what I said, and somehow the combination worked out okay. ‘You know that if we'd waited for you there, you'd be late.'

She groaned but shuffled off the bed and yanked the wardrobe door open. ‘You could have more pity on an accident victim.'

‘What?'

‘You didn't hear?' she said, as if everything she did should be on the front page. To be fair, during the holidays I would normally hear all the town news through Mum, but her gossip-relaying abilities had taken a whack recently. ‘The poor Corolla is
totalled
.'

I sat on the edge of Janna's bed and let her tell the story while she put together her costume for the day. This involved a lot of taking things off hangers and out of drawers and throwing them on the floor, but eventually Janna settled on a white T-shirt decorated with a sparkly unicorn (I was informed it was an
ironic
unicorn) and a black-and-grey pleated skirt.

‘Sergeant Rafferty asked about nine million questions. He was pretty nice, though. I think we got away with it.' She sighed. ‘My darling car. I'm totally gutted.'

I had stopped paying much attention to her tale of woe after she'd mentioned this Takeshi Hoshino.

‘He's the right age?'

‘Yep.
Andd
he's an oldest brother, with a younger brother and a baby sister.'

‘You two compared family details at a car crash?'

She fished out a pair of purple knickers from the top drawer, frowned, threw them back in, and grabbed a red pair instead. ‘No. Sergeant Rafferty asked him.'

My head came up, and the thought must have hit her at the same time because she swivelled, smudged eyeliner making her wide eyes look even bigger.

‘Not Rafferty,' she said.

‘It could be anyone.'

‘He was just asking. Like, oh, welcome to New Zealand, do you like it, does your family miss you. He asked us all questions. Normal questions. He was checking we were okay.'

‘Did Rafferty ask how long the family was staying?'

She nodded.

‘We'll put him on the list,' I said, and ignored the face she made as she grabbed clothes and the towel lying over her desk chair and left for the bathroom. I understood: Sergeant Rafferty was the
good
cop, who inched up to parties with the siren blaring, so that underage drinkers had time to get into the bushes. He wasn't exactly soft, though. He did the dare program at school with an expression that said he knew some people smoked weed and he wasn't that happy about it. Also, tourists who tried to bring in meth or cocaine or anything harder got arrested if the police could prove it, and got the hard-ass treatment if they couldn't. And the hard-ass treatment was pretty intimidating from a guy taller than six feet four with hands like legs of mutton.

Janna was singing loud enough to be heard over the clanking pipes. I listened for a minute, hoping for a Vikings to the Left scoop, but it was that Shihad song about coming home again. I poked around her bedroom instead. The shelves were mostly full of cds. The few books seemed to share a theme: dusty paperbacks on the Goddess Within and the pagan tradition. It was a shame Janna and I hadn't been mates during her witchy stage. Her fights with her Catholic mother must have been legendary.