Hindsight

by AA Bell

  ‘I think it’s worth the time to test-drive at least — and if it is comfier over ruts, you have to let me pay for it to save my poor little body from getting jolted to pieces each way.’

  ‘Nice try, but if you must have a four-wheel drive, I’ve got a better idea than buying one. The Straddie Classic is a fishing competition that starts this weekend from the hotel at Point Lookout. First prize is a fancy black Hilux — and my dad once showed me a fishing spot that’s a dead cert for the winners in most categories.’

  ‘No thanks. My father used to take me out fishing too and his little boat always gave me the creeps; invisible and rocking. Brrr … There’s no faster way to get sea sick.’

  ‘I never said we’d need a boat.’ He knew the cosiest cove around the shore, plus a few places upstream, inland at the south end.

  Trees closed in on the lane ahead, leaving barely enough room to take the next corner, but just as they came to the small clearing where his two-storey A-framed brick home came into view, Ben slewed to a halt, keeping it shielded from her by a dense thicket.

  ‘Uh oh,’ he said, and backed up enough to put the house out of sight completely. ‘We’ve got visitors.’

  ‘Police?’ Mira could see the ghost of a police bike in the paved driveway between the gravel road and the house — still rolling as it disappeared down a garden path on the far side of the building — and while she knew Ben’s mother had a cop as a boyfriend, she also knew how Ben felt about anyone who wore that uniform, which probably explained why this one was stashing his quick getaway. Diplomatic, no doubt, since he looked quite big and strong enough to take care of himself.

  ‘Worse,’ Ben replied. ‘It’s a dark four-wheel drive with trouble written all over it.’

  Mira shivered and gripped onto her seatbelt. ‘Military plates?’

  He answered with silence for a long moment, then unclipped her belt buckle. ‘Probably just the docs,’ he said, using their pet name for the two kindly scientists who had investigated Mira’s condition and made the discovery that changed her life. ‘To be safe, wait here while I check it out, please.’

  ‘Hide, you mean? In the trees?’

  ‘Yeah, sorry.’ He leaned across and opened her door. ‘You can see the forest ten days ago, right? I doubt anything’s changed. Just find a nice thicket and wait until I’m sure it’s them.’

  ‘Welcome home,’ she muttered and climbed out to the tune of waves breaking against a nearby shore. She closed the door as quietly as she could manage and felt pebbles and sand skitter over her shoes as he accelerated away. Behind her, she caught the sound of another engine, but it evaporated just as swiftly amid the trees. A neighbour, she guessed, and hurried behind a wattle thicket, in case.

  Ben’s engine backfired and died as his wheels bumped over a sand trap onto the driveway. His door clunked open and closed, but Mira heard no voices greet him. Just the creak of the security screen and sounds of a timber door consuming him. Then silence for a long time.

  A very long time.

  Ben could have crawled backwards into every room three times and once more around his house already — but still no sound from him.

  He had to be in trouble. If it were only the two military doctors who’d helped her to figure out how her eyes really worked then Ben would have been out already to fetch her. But she knew going in blind, hoping to help him, could make things even worse for him.

  A kookaburra laughed at her from the canopy overhead, its eerie cackle setting her nerves on edge. Ants climbed her shoes and ankles. Stamping shook them off, but they soon returned with many friends. Slapping them released an acrid smell that would attract more of them.

  That’s it, she thought. I’m not staying here.

  Taking her time and pausing often to listen, she crept forward until she could see down the driveway to the front door, which was recessed into a formal portico, then further still until she saw how big the house really was — not just shaped like a giant capital A, it was more like two A’s connected by a three-storey stack of built-in balconies. Down the far side of the house, she noticed the path where the ghostly police bike was now parked in the shade of a palm grove.

  No sign of the ghostly cop, though. He’d left his helmet hanging from the handlebars.

  A twig snapped a short distance away from it, near the rear corner of the house where the patio elbowed to maximise ocean views from the surfside, around the sandy point to the tranquil lagoon. Voices muttered in the garden, a short distance from Ben as best she could tell without seeing them. Both men.

  Mira drew back into a thicket and stopped very still, listening. Blank slates, the pair of them, but she could often get a picture of what some people looked like from their smells, strides and voices, so she paid closer attention.

  ‘No signs anywhere,’ said one who sounded like he gargled gravel for breakfast, his voice typical of a heavy smoker, and deep like the many staff she’d struggled with over the years who were also commonly short, but solid with muscle. It would be another ten days before her sunshades helped her to see what he really looked like, but she could already picture him as thick-necked with dry, leathery skin. ‘We’ve searched everywhere.’

  ‘What if he’s lying?’ Acidic-sounding voice. Mira pictured him as taller but younger, with a paler complexion like rancid butter.

  ‘I’m not lying!’ Ben replied. ‘I was standing right here. Mira heard a sound over that way and the next thing I knew, he’d winged me and I fell that way. Come see for yourself. You can still see some of my hair caught here on a splinter of the railing.’

  Plants rustled, steps clomped and shoes scuffled across bare timber that Ben had been progressively sanding and staining since his first day out of gaol.

  ‘So you fell at forty-five degrees to the bullet’s trajectory?’

  ‘I suppose,’ Ben replied. ‘Can we wrap this up, please?’

  ‘Soon,’ replied the other. ‘She’s blind, so the movement she heard could have been anything: a scrub turkey, wallaby, or even a four-wheel drive using the beach as a highway.’

  ‘I don’t get any beach traffic past my place,’ Ben argued. ‘There’s no point. Off-roaders stick to the inland tracks around here so they can get past the rocky cliffs and outcrops at Dead Man’s Beach and Point Lookout.’

  ‘That still means the bullet could have come from any direction, no matter which way you fell — and the shooter didn’t have to be land-based. Perhaps a jet ski or boat? Either of which is looking more likely than anywhere out there in the dunes or garden.’

  ‘Maybe he took his empty cartridge with him,’ Ben said. ‘How should I know? You’re the MPs. You tell me if that’s standard practice when you’re sniping. And how much harder is it to hit a target from a boat than a beach?’

  ‘We need evidence either way,’ said the gravel gargler. ‘We need to wrap this up so we can get back to base.’

  ‘It would help if she was here,’ added Mr Acidic.

  ‘Yes, where is Miss Chambers? We heard she’d be coming home with you today?’

  ‘Ah, yeah.’ Ben flustered. ‘You heard that? … She’s out shopping for clothes and such. Not my thing, really … and she can’t just browse. She has to feel everything. She’ll call in a few hours when she’s ready for me to pick her up.’

  ‘Call us then,’ said the gravel gargler. ‘Blind or not, she might be able to remember something to keep the colonel in the stockade for life.’

  ‘Why isn’t that a done deal already?’ Ben asked. ‘He was caught in the act of selling military secrets — at your own base no less — so what else could Mira tell you, that could possibly top that?’

  ‘That’s what we want to know, but we haven’t been able to speak to her. That Matron Sanchez is a pit-bull. She wouldn’t let us anywhere near her. Lucky for us now, she’s no longer the only guardian.’

  ‘It’s pointless talking to her,’ Ben argued. ‘So much had already happened that day, she was too upset to remember anything — border
line hysterical, and that was even before we knew the colonel had followed us. Besides, she can hardly get over it if you force her to relive it, especially dragged out in court.’

  ‘Call us,’ insisted the gravel gargler. ‘Or we’ll drop in every day until she shows up.’

  ‘Take your time,’ added Mr Acidic. ‘The fishing is fantastic and that pub at the point is hosting the Straddie Classic. We may stay anyway.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ Ben replied. ‘I’ll call you.’

  Mira could tell from his tone that he had no intention of it. She didn’t know what he was planning, but she could also tell that hiding her from them was never going to get rid of them.

  You’re leaving today, she thought and snapped off a branch from a sapling to use as a cane. She marched out of the scrub, across the road and down the driveway.

  Using the cane, she found two invisible vehicles parked side-by-side and navigated between them to the front door, where she knocked loudly.

  ‘You’re here?’ asked his mother in her distinctly British accent. Mira had seen her ghost in the house on the day Ben had been shot, so she knew for sure that she was dark-skinned and petite with partly African heritage — Mellow by name and mellow by nature, according to Ben, but the greeting was no more welcoming than it ever had been, each time Mira had visited Ben in hospital: ‘You’re here?’ As if blind was the same as stupid.

  ‘Yeah, I think so,’ Mira replied, same as always. ‘Is Ben?’

  ‘Here!’ he called and the sound of his footsteps brought him in swiftly from the rear patio, past a pale coloured piano and brick pillar. ‘Mira, what are you doing here so soon?’

  ‘You can’t guess? I didn’t see anything I liked out there,’ which was the absolute truth.

  Ben forced a chuckle as he stopped beside her, while a stiffer-sounding set of shoes and boots followed him in and stopped near the brick pillar.

  Mira stashed her makeshift cane at the door and wrinkled her nose at the smell of duelling aftershaves, sea breeze and musk, like whales humping.

  ‘Emmett Patterson,’ said the gravel gargler, who smelled of cigarettes as well as musk aftershave. He grabbed her hand and shook it as if she was a rag, ‘… and this is Jo Pobody.’

  ‘Ma’am,’ said Mr Acidic, tight-lipped and without touching her. His was the sea breeze aftershave, which iced up his narrow pocket of air like the arctic, and Mira shrank from him, knowing he’d taken an instant dislike to her too.

  ‘Relax,’ she said as much to herself as to him. ‘My kind of blindness isn’t catching.’

  ‘We’re field investigators for a special division of military police,’ explained Patterson, causing Mira to wonder why they hadn’t mentioned any military ranks. ‘Nothing to worry about; just here to wrap up some loose ends on the case against —’

  ‘No,’ Mira said as she moved past them to the piano. ‘Don’t say his name.’ Her fingers found the keyboard and caressed a few slow notes from Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, her mother’s favourite, which sounded sad and surreal now as she considered the past and how it continued to haunt her in so many ways. No matter how hard she tried to turn her back on it, she kept living it, like a perpetual flashback. Not for the first time, she felt grateful that she’d never have to explain her real story to any more psychologists. She never knew where to begin anyway. Not that it mattered either, since past and present blurred often enough to make any normal timeline for her life seem less relevant. ‘I had my chance to kill him,’ she said flatly. ‘I didn’t, and now I have a psychiatrist who insists on seeing me every week …’ Not that she thought of Matron Sanchez as a psychiatrist first or foremost either, but they didn’t need to know that much.

  ‘As you wish,’ Patterson replied, sounding a little rattled, ‘however, we haven’t found so much as a toe-print out there, and …’

  ‘They’ve been here all week,’ Mel complained as she brushed Mira’s hands off the piano and slammed the keyboard cover closed. ‘Between them and the local cops, there have also been forensic teams, divers, water rats and a policemen’s ball of spectators for nearly the whole fortnight. Now this pair won’t leave it alone!’

  ‘Not if you want evidence that your shooter was who you say he was,’ Patterson said. ‘You were shot in the back, buddy — and she’s blind. So without any hard evidence …’

  ‘He’s still guilty of everything else,’ Ben replied, ‘and life’s still life in gaol no matter what the conviction is for. So let that be enough. I’m not putting Mira through all the distress of a court case as my witness, when no more good can come of it.’

  ‘No more good?’ Mira asked, surprised. ‘Ben, you’ve been a victim of crime too many times already. You did six years for somebody else’s murder and robbery — and the colonel shot you! So don’t be a victim again for my sake. I can show them exactly where he was standing, and where he came over the railing to get me.’

  ‘How?’ asked Pobody. ‘Nobody has hearing that precise, and smells can waft around. They can also be faked.’

  Mira chewed on her lip, unsure of how she could answer that and still keep her secret. ‘Okay, so I can point you in the general direction. That’s better than nothing, right? Narrows your search area?’

  ‘We’ve already searched every grain of sand out there,’ Pobody said.

  ‘How can you be sure it was the colonel who shot your companion?’ asked Patterson. ‘When you can’t see anything?’

  ‘Well, I … I heard his voice when he grabbed me.’

  ‘That may place him at the scene,’ Patterson argued, ‘provided you can be sure it was his voice, but even so, it’s not proof that he was the shooter.’

  ‘We need hard evidence,’ said Pobody, as he crossed the room behind her. ‘That’s something we can bag in plastic and label Exhibit A during the court martial.’

  ‘So before we start our search over from scratch,’ Patterson said, ‘we need to debrief …’

  ‘Interrogate,’ Ben corrected. ‘If you’re going to bullshit us, at least do it in the garden where the compost is appreciated. Kitching confessed, didn’t he?’

  ‘Not exactly. So we’ll conduct each debriefing today as a walk-through. A re-creation. All three of you separately, starting with her.’

  Mira assumed he was pointing at her, but she didn’t move.

  ‘Lead her out will ya, buddy? Or I’ll have to.’

  ‘Not by herself,’ Ben said. ‘She’s a ward of the state. That means she’s not medically fit for any legal interview without her official guardian, psychologist or other legal representative. Ma, give me a hand here, please, and show these gents to their car? They’ve got no warrant, and until they do, they’re no longer welcome on my property.’

  ‘But Ben!’ Mel complained. ‘If I didn’t think they could help, I wouldn’t have let them in the first time!’

  ‘I’m done with the whole deal, Ma. It’s time to heal.’

  Mira held her tongue, tempted to side with Ben’s mother, but torn by her loyalty to him and the need to keep her mouth shut about her real condition. If a colonel had gone through so much trouble to get her when she could see the past, she shuddered to imagine how far others might go if they suspected she could, in rare painful moments, glimpse the future through her tears. That was one secret she felt compelled to keep entirely to herself.

  ‘Let me?’ Mira said and turned for the front door. ‘At Serenity, there was always somebody else who got to take out the trash.’

  She heard Patterson mutter something under his breath, but he offered her no resistance until he passed her in the doorway.

  ‘Give it up,’ he whispered to Mira. ‘You came home from shopping with nothing? And no luggage? Better set your story straight with us soon, Miss Chambers. We’ll be watching you.’

  ‘What did he say?’ Ben asked as soon as they drove away. ‘Are you okay, Mira?’

  She opened her mouth to reply, but she could hear his mother trudging upstairs, muttering something about washing hands fir
st before playing piano, while the ghostly sarong-clad version of her appeared from the kitchen with a mug of coffee in one hand and a ghostly broad-shouldered cop in the other.

  Case closed, Mira read from her lips.

  I wish, replied the ghostly cop. But murder usually reveals more skeletons from closets than it buries.

  She couldn’t see Mel’s reply, but they both took a seat at the violet piano and began caressing a silent tune, which played smiles onto their faces and drew them together slowly into a kiss.

  ‘Mira …?’

  She shook her head. ‘Oh, sorry, Ben. He said they’d be watching me.’

  ‘Well, don’t let it shake you up like that. He said the same thing to me. It won’t be worth their time or efforts, though. I promise. Tomorrow, I’ll lodge a statement in writing that we won’t be pressing charges, so there’ll be no doubt left in the world that we’re completely done with the military.’

  ‘Better use capitals,’ she said, ‘and big writing.’ Shaping her thumb and forefinger into an L, she measured the air to show him how big.

  Ben chuckled and drew her against him in an awkward hug. Her cheek relaxed onto his chest and she felt his heart beat — and didn’t know what kind of response he needed from her, then realised he must be holding his injured arm out at an uncomfortable angle to make room for her.

  ‘No, please,’ she said, pushing gently away and beating him back inside. ‘Just point the way to my room and I’ll get myself settled.’

  ‘With what? You’ve got no luggage. Unless you count that certain box in my car?’

  ‘I knew it!’

  ‘Here!’ called his mother from an internal balcony that serviced all of the bedrooms upstairs. ‘She can use these for now. I had to clean out my closet anyway and there’s no point wasting fuel taking her shopping on the mainland. Not until you find a job, anyway.’

  Mira heard a soft bundle hit the floor between the piano and brick pillar, and then a door slammed shut upstairs.

  ‘Don’t mind her,’ Ben reassured her. ‘Mellow by name, mellow by nature. She’s just venting. Those MPs must have rubbed her the wrong way before we got here.’