by Poppy Gee
“But you’ve got a deadbolt.”
“Upstairs. That’s the key for downstairs.”
“Does anyone know it is there?”
Jane frowned. “Why would anyone need to know that?”
“May I suggest you find a new hiding spot for it,” Hall said. “Just until the police sort this case out. Peace of mind.”
“Why?” Jane took the bottle.
Hall sighed. He didn’t want to frighten her. Remaining an impartial observer was becoming a challenge with this story. But it would be remiss of him to say nothing.
“What is it?” Jane said. “Spit it out.”
“I saw John Avery doing something with the key.”
“Something lewd?”
“No! I saw him crouched down here, probably putting it back. You were on the beach with the dogs. I didn’t realize the key was here when I saw him.”
Jane shoved the key back into its tank stand nook. She shook her head.
“I’ve known John a long time. I’ll have a talk with him. Sometimes he checks on my gas bottles for me. Maybe that’s what he was doing.”
Appeased, Hall went back inside the guesthouse to tidy up some work. His gut instinct had told him he was on a wild-goose chase as he poked around under the tank stand. He called Elizabeth and ran one of his latest theories by her. Based on Sarah’s description of how the currents around the rock pool point worked, the idea of no foul play, accidental drowning, was worth considering. Elizabeth snorted.
“Until it’s confirmed,” Elizabeth said, and he imagined her flicking her pen in the air at him, “until we have an autopsy result, which could be another five to seven days according to your own reports, we have got an apparently defiled body and a murder. That’s not being sensationalistic, that’s the facts.”
He didn’t admit it during their phone meeting, but she was right. Fifteen minutes later, glancing out the window, he saw Jane. She was still seated on the patio. She held no drink or cigarette, was not pulling weeds or poisoning bull ant nests. For once Jane sat, hands folded in her lap, staring at the ocean and beyond.
Hall filled the next few days with interviews. Elizabeth was harassing him for copy even though she had not printed several of his warm fuzzies, including Sam Shelley’s message in a bottle story. Hall drove two hours north to Anson’s Bay to investigate the serious erosion issues faced by a seaside cemetery. He also had a list of easy news stories he had been neglecting in favor of the murder story. Local planning issues, irate neighbors, human interest; stories that involved long phone calls listening to interminable backstories.
One morning he took a phone call from Allan Bennett, the retired racehorse trainer he had spoken to about Gary Taylor. Bennett had a story for Hall. His horse had escaped its paddock. What made it newsworthy, apart from the fact that Bennett was a well-known and popular racing personality, was the fact that the horse, Marbles, had won the Launceston Cup four times. No other horse had achieved this. The story probably would run on the merit of the headline alone, Allan Bennett’s Lost His Marbles. Hall reminded himself to mention the story to Sarah when he met her later that evening—it would make her laugh.
It was late and the gulch was silent except for the ocean slapping the rocks. Hall held the net ready to scoop the squid before it fell off Sarah’s jig. Bristly fibers from her fishing jacket brushed his bare arms. He could smell the back of her neck. She never smelled of shampoo or perfume, but of wool and sand, fresh bread and campfire. It was an organic scent that reminded him of the pleasant smell of his cat’s fur after she had been sleeping on grass.
Hall had wondered why they weren’t using a torch to catch the squid. He had heard that was what you used. Sarah explained that there were two kinds of squid, calamari and arrowhead. It was the arrowhead squid, which lived in deep water, that were mesmerized by torchlight. The calamari squid they were hoping to catch tonight were curious enough to come look at the light, but it wouldn’t hold their interest.
“Squid jig works for me,” she said, checking it. It looked like a prawn with barbs on its tail.
“I see.” Hall tried to sound convinced.
“Concentrate,” she murmured, “or we’ll lose it.”
In the water the jig dipped. Hall scooped the net. The creature he lifted was translucent, tentacles wriggling from a cone-shaped head. Sarah slid it into the bucket and dropped the squid jig back into the water.
Hall’s brothers enjoyed shooting possums; Hall found it abhorrent. He imagined his brothers marching through the bush on the farm, rifles resting on their shoulders. Outdoors under a huge night sky they would have heard nocturnal scrambling and wind churning through the treetops.
Reading and writing were Hall’s hobbies, solitary pursuits pursued in privacy and indoors. Lately the only time he had been out at night, apart from walking home from work or the pub, was to attend the protest camp against the West Coast Ring Road. But even then, camping in the Tarkine, the night was never silent. People sat around the fire singing or moved around the camp, making placards and plans.
High inside the Walls of Jerusalem National Park, or on Lake St. Clair’s pebbly beach, Hall had listened to the night. Hiking alone in the wilderness had been his tonic after Laura left. Often he had not built a fire, just sat in his sleeping bag in the doorway of his tent and listened to the nocturnal sounds of an ancient yet young wilderness. Up there in subfreezing temperatures and unpredictable weather patterns, the remoteness of the campsite reduced a man’s loneliness. Waking up in the Upper Florentine Valley was infinitely better than waking up after a night at the Gunners Arms Hotel.
Listening to the hush of old-growth forests breathing or the ocean heave was similarly soothing. Sarah stared out to sea, her hands twitching the squid jig automatically. Calmness replaced the worried concentration so often present in her expression. Her hair had fallen loose from its ponytail and brushed each cheek. If he touched it, he knew, it would feel creamy in its softness.
“What are you thinking about?” Hall said.
“Murderers and horror movies. In horror movies, you only stay alive so long as you preserve your virginity.”
“If the last thing I do is make love to you before I die, I’ll die a happy man.”
“You’re full of shit, Flynn.”
He could see her smiling through the darkness.
They cooked the calamari on the electric barbecues in the park. It would leave too much mess, they agreed, to build a fire on the beach. Sarah cut the squid into rings and rolled each piece in flour, salt, and pepper. She didn’t cook them for long, just enough to brown them. They ate them sitting on a blanket Sarah had arranged on the mossy grass growing between the ocean rocks and the scrub. Hall could easily get used to this. It had been hours since he thought of work and his empty house in Launceston.
When he remembered the evening later, he was surprised at how easily everything happened. Her body was softer than it looked in her bathing suit, the strong muscles on her arms yielding to the pressure of his fingertips. She closed her eyes every time he kissed her.
They did it in the missionary position, his shirt a pillow beneath her head. It was different from the first time in the guesthouse. Sober, his senses were heightened; he could hear the soft sound of her hair slithering across the blanket, he could smell salt water on her skin. Not since Laura had he made love sober, and it was like swimming naked; illicit yet pure. With each breath the ocean became an inaudible whisper and the stars dimmed behind the creeping sea mist.
Afterward, lying beside her, looking up into the starless sky, Hall sang. She knew the song—it was a Cold Chisel love song.
Sarah sang the next line. They laughed and started singing the chorus, forgetting the killer lurking somewhere on the land behind them.
Hall woke early and planned to walk along the beach to clear his head. Jane had other ideas for him. She was in the yard, moving a huge pile of chopped wood and stacking it under the Nissen hut’s veranda. Hall did not mind helping
. He whistled as he worked. His phone beeped three times, but he ignored it. It wasn’t even eight o’clock.
“You don’t want to answer that in front of me?” Jane said.
“It’s not that,” Hall said. It was too early to allow Elizabeth to ruin his day.
Jane watched him, chewing her lip. “Gary’s your suspect, isn’t he? The one helping police with inquiries.”
Hall shrugged. “You know you never mentioned he lived near Goulds Country.”
“You never asked.” Jane shook a huntsman spider off a piece of wood and crushed it with her boot.
He watched her split another log with the axe. Why would she let everyone think Gary was in jail, or traveling overseas, or living with a girlfriend on the mainland, when in fact he was living no more than a couple of hours’ drive away? Goulds Country was practically a ghost town, in dense bushland more than one hundred kilometers inland from the coast. Hall had accidentally-on-purpose driven up the unsealed logging road that led to Goulds Country with Sarah on the way home from their pub lunch. What had she said that day? The wilderness around Goulds Country was where someone would go who didn’t want to be found.
“Did he do it?” Hall said as Jane stacked wood onto his arms.
“Don’t ask me.”
It was her standard response. There were many things about Jane that Hall was curious to have explained. She didn’t respond well to personal questions. He carried the wood to the stack, wondering what had made Gary Taylor move to Goulds Country. And what had made him come back?
“If you don’t mind me saying so, people are going to think it strange, him turning up now,” Hall said.
“Gary is many things, but he’s not a murderer.”
Hall could see Jane was firmly convinced of this. “Fine. But you understand that’s what people will say.”
Jane used her index finger to give the finger to an imaginary audience.
“You know that’s the wrong finger.” Hall raised his middle finger and showed her the right way to give the finger. “You’re supposed to do it like this.”
“Says who?” Jane practiced giving the finger using Hall’s technique. “Doesn’t feel right.”
“You’re old school.” Hall laughed.
The six o’clock news ran Sam’s letter in a bottle story straight after the weather. There was no television at the guesthouse, so Hall did not see it. Pamela did. They had recorded it on the Shelleys’ front deck, and Simone had been done up to the nines, Pamela told Hall when he entered the shop to buy a coffee. The Voice was spread across the counter. With the tips of her French-manicured fingers Pamela tapped the newsprint photo of Sam on the rocks. It was a rotten coincidence. After holding Hall’s story for over a week, Elizabeth finally decided to run it—the day after Apple Isle TV broadcast their own version of the story.
“I know how your deadlines work, but other people won’t,” Pamela said. “It looks like they had the idea first.”
Hall left the shop without buying anything. He was furious. Damn that Simone, and damn this stupid job. He damned himself for caring. Christ, it was a warm fuzzy, not worth getting angry about. But he was; anger twisted through his gut and he cursed Simone, and Apple Isle TV news, and Pamela for knowing that it would upset him. As the speedometer on his Holden reached fifty, he didn’t ease the pressure on the accelerator. The wheels jarred over the corrugations and he took it up to sixty, then seventy. Only when the stick reached eighty-five and the expanse of ocean beyond the shoulder of the hill moved too fast for him to see it properly did he ease his foot back.
Four beers into the evening and Hall still hadn’t filed the copy he needed to. He leaned back on his chair to view the fishing boats anchoring for the night. Three shacks stood between him and Sarah. Three Fibro, weatherboard, and tin dwellings and a couple of acres of saltbush. You could walk it in less than ten minutes. And then what? Stand outside in the dark peering in at the lantern-lit shack and the family sitting around the table playing Scrabble and sipping cups of tea? One of the Good Samaritans around here would report him for sure. Anyway, Sarah had probably gone to bed. She had told him she wanted an early night. They had plans to meet at the boat ramp just before dawn. That was hours away.
Pressed against the neck of his stubby, his lips curled into a wry smile. Take it easy, mate. You’re getting soft in your old age. Images flickered through his mind: the shadows beneath each ribcage bone, the stretch marks like creamy spider webs on her breasts. In the darkness she was friendlier to him than she was in the daytime. Outside the shop the other day she had stiffened when he tried to hold her hand. She even pretended to search for something in her pocket. By the beach last night it was she who moved his hands across her body, madly, as though his touch was the only thing that she had ever wanted. She liked him, and the knowledge undid his doubts.
The computer screen turned to black and he rapped the keyboard. For the best part of the last hour he had labored over a boring story. It was a complex dispute between two shack owners concerning an illegal addition. His best quotes were possibly defamatory and he had spent too long trying to tweak it into something publishable. Earlier in the evening he had filed a story on the property glut which had taken just ten minutes to knock up. He was fast when he had the right material. Now that was a decent story. Real estate agents with windows full of coastal property and no buyers, land going cheaper than it had for a decade. No one wanted to buy in an area where a serial killer was at large. Surely that would feed the beast for today. He switched the computer off.
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.”