Snowy Summer

by Patricia Weerakoon

  ‘What did he do, Dan?’

  ‘When you left the tea plantation, Sunil panicked. He dashed off to Colombo, and met your uncle, Inspector HJ, and his wife at your home.’

  ‘Wasn’t Amma, my mother, there?’

  ‘She had already left.’

  ‘Did my uncle arrest Sunil?’

  ‘No, Inspector HJ gave him a choice and Sunil chose to become a police informant. He says in the letter, he did it for you.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘This is where it starts getting complicated. He knew, even before Inspector HJ told him, that your leaving would be suspicious, and the people he worked with in Sri Lanka would somehow want to find you, so Inspector HJ hatched a plan with our people here. They decided to drip feed information to the gang, through Sunil and other sources, lead them on a proverbial wild goose chase and get the heavy weights from Sri Lanka, here to Australia, where they could be arrested.’

  ‘Roy was right.’

  ‘Roy. What about him?’

  ‘He said you—well, your people—were using me as some sort of bait. What is the word—honeypot?’

  ‘He’s wrong. We never meant it to happen. It never was our intention to let them anywhere near Jindabyne, but this is where things fell apart.’

  ‘The picture of me and Roy.’

  ‘Yes, Sunil writes how one of the higher ranking crooks, a current politician in Sri Lanka, had informed tourists travelling to Australia to watch out for a recent expat from Sri Lanka. When they saw the picture—’

  ‘I guess I look more like Annie than we thought.’

  ‘They are smarter than we assumed. Apparently, one of them worked in computers and was running facial recognition on all the pictures people brought back from Australia.’

  ‘So, they brought in the cavalry to Jindabyne, just on one photograph?’

  Dan shook his head, ‘Like I said, Sheva, we underestimated the tentacles of the Australian operation. There is a guy, or was until we picked him up an hour ago, who acted as their liaison person here in Jindabyne. During summer and winter vacations, he provided women to tourists and winter ski field workers. This guy checked you out and reported back. I am still kicking myself for not picking him.’

  ‘I know almost everyone in Jindabyne. Who would possibly—’

  ‘Your patient, Tom.’

  ‘But he’s a homeless man, and mentally ill.’

  ‘Tom played a skilful role, and we fell for it. Anyway, Sunil writes that to prove he was still with the gang, he took on the job of coming to Jindabyne to stop you from being a witness.’

  ‘He—he was going to kill me?’

  ‘No.’ Dan shook his head. ‘He was leading them into a trap set by our people, and he had written you the letter to warn you. The bushfires got in the way of the operation. If it all failed, and they got to you, he was going to turn his gun on them. He was willing to die to protect you, Sheva. Now,’ he pointed back up the stairs to the bedroom, ‘go have a nap. I’ll call you if we get any news from the hospital.’

  ***

  The shadows lay long across her bed when she opened her eyes. An appetising smell of lamb and herbs wafted up the stairs from the kitchen. Sheva sat up in bed, disoriented. Her mind was hazy as to what had happened. The bushfire. Edward. Sunil, here in Jindabyne. Roy. It all came back.

  Sunil had been ready to lay down his life to protect her, but he still might die. She glanced at the bedside clock: it was five in the evening. Dan should have an update from the hospital’s burns unit. She climbed out of her pyjamas, slipped on her jeans and t-shirt and ran barefooted down the stairs.

  Rosie and Dan sat with their heads bent together, huddled at the dining table. Dan held his phone in his hand. They both looked up when she entered the dining room.

  Rosie pushed her chair back and stood up. ‘Sheva, are you hungry? I’ve made a lamb stew.’

  Dan remained silent.

  Sheva looked from one to the other. ‘Thanks, Rosie. Dan, have you heard from the burns unit?’

  Dan and Rosie exchanged glances, Dan came around the table, stopping before her. ‘Sheva, I am so sorry.’

  She knew what that meant, but she didn’t expect the sobs that racked her body and came from deep in her soul.

  Dan pulled her into his arms and rubbed her back. ‘He had another cardiac arrest soon after they admitted him. They were unable to resuscitate him.’

  Sheva fisted her fingers on Dan’s shirtfront. ‘I should have—’

  ‘No, Sheva. Peter was with him. He monitored him all the way. I talked with Peter and there was nothing anyone could do.’

  ‘Peter is an attendant—’

  ‘Peter is a fully qualified paramedic, Sheva. He worked with the Flying Doctors. Sunil was in good hands.’

  Sheva took a deep breath and breathed out through clenched teeth. ‘Just another piece of information I was unaware of.’ She pulled out of Dan’s arms and dropped into a chair.

  ‘When we were growing up,’ she whispered, ‘he was the brother I longed for. I called his parents Ammi and Thathi, and he called mine Mum and Dad.’ She paused and smiled at the memory. ‘When I was fifteen, my classmates would talk about kissing their boyfriends. I asked Sunil to kiss me. It was so gross, I swore I would never kiss a boy again.’

  Her hands clenched on the table. ‘Now, I have to tell his parents I betrayed him, drew him to follow me to Australia and let him die.’ She dropped her head on her hands. ‘Maybe I should have told Sunil—confronted him with what I saw that day in Colombo. Maybe he would have given it up for me.’

  ‘Sheva, you know it wouldn’t have happened. He couldn’t move out of the business. They would have killed him, and you.’ He continued to rub her back. ‘Thanks to you and Sunil, we have the whole torrid trail of Flycatcher. The business is more than sex tourism; it involves drug smuggling and gun running. The four who were caught at the bridge opened up like tin cans when they learned we had Sunil in custody. One of them was the politician from Sri Lanka. Your old friend Palitha was in one of the houses we raided in Sydney. We got him too. HJ and the Sri Lankan authorities have Charlie and the rest.’

  His phone pinged. He read the update and smiled. ‘Right now, Sheva, there are twenty-eight young Sri Lankan women freed from a life of sex slavery in Australia.’

  She remembered the faces in the pictures she had seen in Sunil’s safe. They were young, innocent, vulnerable girls. ‘What—what will happen to the girls?’

  ‘They are in a safe house. We have counsellors and psychologists with them. They’ll be looked after.’

  ‘Thank God. Dan, can I go back to Sydney? When can I speak to my mother?’

  Rosie and Dan exchanged glances. Dan cleared his throat. ‘We have discussed it, Sheva. You can speak to your mother.’

  ‘You know where she is.’

  Dan smiled sheepishly. ‘She’s having a great time on my parents’ vineyard in the Barossa Valley. Everyone thinks my mother’s sister is visiting from Sri Lanka.’

  ‘She’s in Australia, thank goodness.’ She reached for her phone.

  ‘No—’ Dan covered her fingers with his — ‘you can call on my phone, but before you do that, we need to discuss your future.’ He glanced at Rosie. ‘Sheva, we would like you to stay here and continue working in the medical centre for a few weeks. For you to leave immediately might—might—be suspicious. We can’t risk it.’

  Sheva took a deep shuddering breath. ‘You aren’t really certain that you’ve snared all parts of the operation, are you?’

  ‘Sheva, we believe we have them all, but we need to be absolutely positive.’

  Sheva shut her eyes. Memories of the last weeks flashed through her mind. The love and caring she had felt from everyone around her far outweighed the sadness of the last eight hours.

  She looked across the table at Rosie
and Dan who, she now realised, together with Peter, would have protected her with their lives. ‘I do love working with you guys. And the people here have been so accepting and so generous. Somehow, Sydney seems so far away. Another life. I have been happy here.’

  Dan stood up. ‘Rosie will spend tonight here with you.’ He cut off her protest with, ‘Please, Sheva. I need to talk with the team. Surveillance will be continued around you for a while more, but it will be more overt now, so don’t let a few cops and a police car spook you.’

  She walked to the front door with him and they hugged before she opened the door.

  ‘Sleep well, Sheva,’ he said as he gave her a squeeze, ‘and I may have a surprise for you tomorrow morning.’

  Chapter 39

  Roy sprinted up the mountain. Ares and Tyche trotted at his heels.

  The wind whipped around him, carrying remnants of the bushfires of three days ago. Specks of ash and fragments of burnt eucalyptus leaves stung his eyes. Blinking, he rubbed his eyelids, tired and heavy after another sleepless night.

  Over the last two years, early morning walks had cleared his head of cobwebs and prepared him for the day. It had worked until today. Roy shivered and rubbed his palms together. He hadn’t bothered with a coat and he welcomed the biting cold of the early morning breeze whipping through his light cotton shirt. It gave his body something to feel and his mind something to think about other than the memories that clutched at his heart, like the memory of her sweet face, with eyes full of pain and fatigue.

  There would be another unseasonable snowfall on the high peaks today. The thought brought back the vision of Sheva’s joy on Mount Kosciuszko, of her snuggled in his arms, happy, trusting, and carefree.

  He had destroyed it all by his inability to trust her. He had shattered the beautiful fragile intimacy they had shared by his tainted and twisted view of women. Roy took a deep quivering breath. His mother and Charlene. He had allowed his dreadful hurt and warped experiences to cloud his judgement.

  Turning off the main path, he trudged through the bush up the hill, his boots slipping on the rough soil and gravel. The dogs whined and scrambled after him.

  Rubbing his chin, he remembered Dan’s response when he had accused him of sleeping with Sheva. Dan had called him an arrogant fool who could not see beyond his own selfish needs, though his actual words had been less polite.

  ‘She trusted you,’ Dan had bellowed at him. ‘She shared with you as much as she was able, as much as we gave her permission to tell you. We thought—no, we believed—that you would support her and be there for her if things went pear-shaped, as they did today.’ Dan’s blue eyes glared into Roy with a deep, fiery anger. ‘I should have known you were there only for what you could get out of her. You don’t care for her or what she is facing.’

  The finger pointing away from Sheva’s cottage and towards Roy’s car had trembled. Dan’s voice was ragged, audibly exhausted for the first time since the fire. ‘Get out of her life Roy. Let her heal. Let those of us who care for her help her.’

  He had complied by bundling his father into the car and driving away. He saw no choice.

  He had listened to the tortured and broken words his father vocalised as he drove back to the farm, not needing to listen to understand what his father wanted to communicate. He knew he had disappointed his father with his actions.

  Even Samson was hardly speaking to him. ‘You’re an idiot Roy,’ had been his response when he heard what had happened.

  He looked down at Ares and Tyche. ‘You two must be the only ones in Jindabyne who still believe in me.’ The dogs wagged their tails in response. ‘And that—’ he smiled at the memory of Sheva’s first encounter with the hounds— ‘is only because you haven’t gotten to know her yet.’ He looked away and across he paddocks. ‘After what I did, I don’t think you ever will.’

  The wind died down. The sun sent its rays over the charred remains of what had been a thriving eucalyptus forest. A smoky haze hung over the bare blackened branches that reached up to the sky in silent supplication.

  Black and scorched on one side and green shrubs and grass on the other, the line at which the fire had been stopped was clear from where he stood on the mountain. It was just a paddock away from the Alpaca enclosure.

  Samson had rubbed salt into the open wound by telling Roy, ‘We only managed to save the animals because Rodrigo and I were working side by side with the rural Firemen. And, we couldn’t have done it if the good doctor hadn’t come and taken your father to Jindabyne.’

  Roy sat on the ground and put his head in his hands. He needed her forgiveness.

  He heard Sheva’s words in his head from when he said he didn’t want to be genetically tested, didn’t want to know if he had Huntington’s disease. She had said, ‘I’ll help you deal with it, whatever happens.’ She had promised. She was a woman of absolute integrity.

  He had to try. What did he have to lose? He had to give their relationship—their love—a chance.

  He glanced at the time on his mobile phone. Six forty-five. She would be awake, dressing for the morning. He should wait till evening to call her—no—he needed to know if she ever wanted to see or speak to him again.

  She picked up the phone on the second ring. ‘Dan, sorry. I overslept.’ The weariness in her voice shot a sharp arrow through his heart. ‘I called Sunil’s parents after you left last night. They want me to come with the body to Sri Lanka. They—oh, I don’t know what they think.’ Her voice caught.

  Sunil was dead, he realised. ‘Sheva, it’s Roy,’ he cut in, knowing how much she would hate knowing she had laid bare her emotions to him.

  He felt her apprehension building in the pause before she replied, ‘I didn’t look at the screen. Given the time, I assumed it was Dan.’ She took a deep breath; let it out in a shudder. ‘What do you want, Roy? I believe you said all you needed to tell me when we last met. When was it? Oh, yes, just three days ago!’

  ‘Sheva, please, we need to talk.’

  ‘There is nothing more to say, Roy. You made it crystal clear how you feel about me.’

  He hadn’t cried when his father told him the diagnosis, or when his mother left. He hadn’t shed a tear over Charlene. Today, the realisation that he had lost Sheva made his eyes well up with tears that he tried to blink away.

  ‘Sheva, I am sorry. I have no excuse for what I said. Please, we need to meet, even just once, Sheva.’ She had to know how desperate he was. ‘We can’t just end it like this, Sheva. Please, you can’t want us to end like this.’

  Her sharp intake of breath rustled through the phone. ‘I guess we both need some closure. I am in the clinic from nine to eleven, but I am free after that shift.’

  ‘I’ll get Samson to fix us some lunch.’

  ‘No, Roy. I’m having lunch with Dan and Rosie. Come by at eleven and we can talk before I meet with them.’

  Dan, Peter, Rosie—people who cared about her and protected her. He needed to make her understand that he loved her more than all they could offer her. He needed to convince her to give their love a chance. He would even get himself tested. He would do it for her. Maybe – just maybe they had a future?

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  Chapter 40

  Sheva was seated at her computer, entering patient notes at the clinic when Dan walked in. ‘Are you sure you want to speak to Roy alone?’ he asked. ‘I can stay with you.’

  Sheva smiled. ‘Dan, you have been an amazing support to me from the moment I came back to Australia and I am truly grateful. Nevertheless, I have to move ahead with my life. To begin that journey, I have to meet Roy and get some closure with him.’ She stood up and looked up at him. ‘And, I have to do it alone. You can’t protect me forever, Dan.’

  ‘You’ve been through hell and back. He’s just an opinionated, irrational bas—’

  She shook her head. ‘Dan, I know what
you think of him.’

  Later, she watched outside as Dan walked to the car, raising his hand to her as he drove away. She walked across the road to her house.

  Shutting the front door, she dropped her bag, kicked off her shoes, went through to the kitchen, and switched the coffee percolator on.

  There was a muted tapping on the front door. ‘Just a minute,’ she responded and padded barefoot to the sitting room.

  She opened the door and stifled a gasp.

  Red shadows rimmed Roy’s eyes and a purpling bruise rippled from his chin to his left cheekbone and lower eyelid. Although clean-shaven and well-groomed as always, Roy looked like a man who was barely holding himself together.

  ‘Roy, you look terrible. Are you unwell?’

  The lips turned up in the slightest of smiles and he stretched out his right hand.

  ‘Red roses.’ She glanced at the glass jar and the flowers. ‘Snowy mountains cookies, double chocolate and walnut, my favourite.’

  ‘I am sorry about Sunil.’ The hand holding the flowers trembled slightly.

  Sheva accepted the gifts. ‘Come in and sit down, Roy. I’ve got the coffee brewing. God knows we both need it.’

  After setting the flowers up in a vase, she came back with two mugs of coffee and Roy’s cookie offering on a tray. Roy sat on the corner of the couch. She handed him his coffee and held out the open cookie jar. When he refused with a shake of his head, she selected one and, picking up her own mug, sat down opposite him.

  Their eyes met and held. Words weren’t necessary.

  Moments passed. They sipped on their coffee. Sheva licked the cookie crumbs off her fingers.

  Anger at what he had said in the clinic warred with sympathy for the weariness and despair in Roy’s eyes. ‘Roy,’ she prompted, ‘why are you here?’

  Placing his coffee mug on the centre table, Roy crossed the room to drop on his haunches by her chair. ‘Sheva,’ his voice was low and hesitant. ‘Can you forgive me for what I said? What I did?’

  She took a deep breath, and shut her eyes to pull her thoughts together. ‘You were willing to believe I lied about being a virgin and that I’d had sex with Sunil. You even accused Dan of sleeping with me. Did you really think I was that deceitful?’