Bay of Fires (11 page)

Anja Traugott had not been killed for her money. Police found her wallet containing fifty dollars in her bag at the rock pool. Her attacker was creepy; he had taken the bikini top as a memento. Unless it had fallen off in the ocean. Maybe he had wanted to take the wallet but was interrupted. Perhaps she fought back harder than he anticipated. Hall reckoned it was an accident that the Swiss woman’s body was found. The murderer might have thought that currents would drag the body out to sea, where the great whites would eat it. There were often shark sightings around here. Hall’s theory could be correct, but it depended on where exactly Anja entered the water. From the headland near the rock pool the current sucked straight out to sea. Closer to the shore was a trough that swept directly along the coast. Based on this, you could rule out Roger Coker, Bunghole, and anyone else who knew how the currents ran. Any fisherman worth his weight in mullet understood the complexities of the currents.

In the canopy above, the bush birds had halted their eerie calls. Sarah slowed her breathing and tried to hear what had silenced them. Sometimes the appearance of a black snake quieted the birds. Apart from dry winds rustling leaves there was nothing. And then she heard it. Rubber sliding on sand; it was unmistakable and it was getting closer. Someone was riding up the track behind her. She changed down a gear and picked up speed. They wouldn’t catch her, not likely; she had plenty of energy. The problem was this road was a dead end. The bridges had burned years ago, and it was impossible to cross any of the rocky gullies with a bike. Unless she ditched the bike and went cross-country, the only way out was the way she had come in.

Her fear felt strange; it was laced with excitement. She continued riding, listening to the sound of the stranger closing in on her. Where the road widened, she stopped. Through the bottlebrush she glimpsed the cyclist pedaling hard with his head down. He was moving quickly, not an easy thing to do on the sandy track, which meant he was as fit as Sarah, if not fitter. He emerged, and she wished it were the murderer.

Sam slammed his brakes on and skidded the back wheel sideways, spraying her legs with warm black sand.

Since Christmas Day she had seen him three times. At the boat ramp they had said hi, nothing more, and on the beach and at the Abalone Bake she had pretended not to see him. Embarrassing details fizzed through her head. Worse were the details she could not recall. These could not be dismissed with a sarcastic comment. She turned to face him. Get it over and done with.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“I owe you an apology,” Sarah said.

She avoided looking him in the eye. Instead she looked down, at his legs, which were muscled and shaved. His arms and laterals were as thick as an adult’s. She remembered her mother saying Sam rowed and swam for Hutchins, the private boys’ school in Hobart where he boarded. She had seen him surf; he was obviously a natural athlete.

“What for?” Sam said. “Coming on to me?”

“You wish. It was the other way around.”

This time she watched his face. Her comment had been a worthwhile punt. He reddened and scuffed his toe in the dirt sheepishly. His shoelaces were not done up properly. Man, he was young.

“You’re too young to drink,” she continued, ignoring the feeling of déjà vu that occurred so frequently these days. “Not that I care. Some people would give a shit, though.”

“Who gives a damn?”

“Yeah. Have you told anyone?”

“Who am I going to tell around here?”

There were other things she wanted to know, physical details such as who had made the first move, and how much she had told him about herself, and whether he had still been there when she crawled up into the dunes. No way was she going to ask him any of that.

Phlegm caused by the cigarettes she had smoked the night they hooked up—Sam’s cigarettes—irritated the back of her throat. Even though it was now five days later, she could still feel the tobacco’s effect. She wasn’t used to it. She coughed, but that did not dislodge the mucus, and she had to use more force, which made a rude hacking sound.

“You’re all class, aren’t you?” Sam said as she spat into the dirt behind her.

It was a fair call, and one that she would usually enjoy retaliating to. Given the circumstances, it was better not to push her luck. Little shit.

Sarah said, “Tell me, where were you when that backpacker was murdered?”

“What?” Sam was startled.

“I’m asking everyone. Just wondering.”

“Don’t know. Probably surfing.”

“What break?”

“Are you Inspector Gadget?”

Sarah ignored the question. Everyone knew where they were when Anja Traugott went missing. It was like when Princess Diana died, or the Twin Towers collapsed. Judging by how flustered he looked, he was probably doing something embarrassing.

“Were you choking the chicken?” Sarah grinned.

“You’d know.” He stepped toward her and she could see the acne scars on his cheeks. A flashback from that stupid night appeared in her mind; his face was so soft that at one point in her drunken stupor she had thought she was kissing a girl.

“What’s wrong?” Sam asked.

“Nothing.”

“You look like you’re about to have a big cry over something.”

He grinned, and she remembered when he was nine or ten and had turned up at the lagoon with a hessian sack clutched in his hand. Sam had held the bag up, shaking it, and told everyone there was a blue-ringed octopus in there. When he threatened to set it free in the lagoon, everyone screamed and raced up onto the rocks to get away. Sarah had kept her distance. She liked blue-ringed octopuses, but their bite was fatal. There was no antidote for their paralyzing venom, which would kill an adult in three minutes. Sarah had always felt a bit sorry for the soft-bodied creature. The male died soon after mating, and the female, who laid fifty eggs and carried them around under her arm, died months after the eggs hatched. Blue-ringed octopus were intelligent animals and not aggressive unless they were threatened. They should never be put in a bag. When Sarah told Sam this he had laughed. Dangling the sack, he halfheartedly chased people farther up the rocks. Eventually he stopped. It turned out there was nothing in the bag but a pile of seaweed.

Sarah thought of reminding Sam about the incident but changed her mind. She did not want to prolong the conversation.

“Race you back,” she said.

“Want to bet on it? Ten bucks.”

“I don’t want your pocket money.”

She could have whipped him—not easily, but she was pretty fit at the moment. Instead she let him ride ahead so that he would think he was beating her.

Sarah thought over the conversation as she packed her fishing gear that afternoon. Sam’s cockiness was unnerving. Usually, younger guys were easy to be around. Their self-absorption was a buffer to Sarah’s insecurities. They didn’t expect anything from her. They were into the same things she was. Lots of men her age liked to watch motocross or boxing on television; not many wanted to have a go themselves.

Jake was a natural athlete. He had a welted scar that twisted down his bicep like mangrove roots, collected during a mountain bike race. It was when he told her he raced that she’d decided to hire him. His previous job experience on the salmon farm at Tickera was not extensive.

If she was honest, part of the appeal of younger men was their lack of inhibition. Like her, most young guys drank unreservedly. That was how she had ended up in the disabled toilet at the Pineapple Hotel the first time she went there with Jake. In the bathroom, which smelled of piss and shit and vomit, Jake told her she was a great fuck. The band was blasting a song from Hunters and Collectors, and she heard him only because he repeated it several times.

But Sam Shelley was seventeen years old. Most women her age were married with children, worrying about things like how to pay a mortgage on one wage and which kindergarten to send their kid to. Not dwelling on what an idiot they’d been on the drink the other night. Sarah Avery needed to get her shit together.

Onshore gusts clipped the tops off majestic sets of six-foot waves and veiled Sarah in sea spray. Sand swirled, and the water twisted into an undertow that sucked at the beach. It was just the sort of place you wouldn’t want to swim; perfect for chasing salmon. Schools of black back salmon were visible in the water, clouds of dimpled silver riding in the crest of each wave. She grunted as she swung the rod, sinking the surf popper lure bang in the gutter twenty meters offshore.

“Got a fright the other night. Night you all were cooking abalone it was.”

“Stop sneaking up on me.” Roger must have come down from the dunes; she would have noticed him if he were on the beach.

“There was a thump out the back.”

“Possums?”

“I thought it was.” He sat down cross-legged and cupped sand in his hands. His arms were thin, too thin to restrain a strong woman.

“Sounded loud, like a V8 taking off up the driveway. I got up to have a look.”

She felt the bite and played with the fish, gradually bringing him closer to the shore. It was likely she would get a few bites today. Black back salmon and the younger, feistier cocky salmon fled when the ocean was flat and bright. On days like this, unsettled swell washed food into the water colony and the salmon followed. She admired the cocky salmon. He swam with the waves, used their force to propel him to prey. She was only half listening when Roger spoke again.

“Dead devil. Road kill. A week old, from the way it smelled.”

Stunned, she allowed the line to slacken. “Someone threw road kill at your house?”

Roger described the black furry animal he had found sprawled beside his doormat, its mouth and eyes wide open. In the morning he grabbed the stiffened devil by the back legs and dropped it under the paperbarks behind the fence. Hot soapy water and a hard-bristled brush couldn’t remove the brown bloodstains from the timber planks on his deck. The tufts of fur caught in the wooden cracks reeked with the putrid smell of a carcass rotting for days in the sun. Burnout marks remained on his driveway. Roger grinned as though the story was a joke he was part of.

“I can still smell it on me.” Roger sniffed his fingers.

“You going to tell the police, Roger?”

“I hear plenty of noises around my place and none of them get to me.” Roger’s chapped lips twisted over his broken teeth as he imitated the noises made by various animals that lived around his house. Possums thumped up and down his pitched roof, fighting with catlike screams; a bird’s nest stuck to his kitchen window was full of whimpering baby sparrows; rats scratched under his floorboards.

“A blue-tongued lizard, this big, lives under the tank stand.” Roger grinned. “I call him Louis. He likes sausage mince the best.”

“Tell me. The skid marks on your driveway. Were they continuous or broken?”

“Continuous.”

Sarah nodded. “You’re a good man. You don’t deserve this.”

The cocky salmon was losing energy. Her finger monitoring the tautness of the line, she could sense his surrender. She wound him in slowly. Roger held the surf rod while she slipped the hook out of the fish’s mouth. They grinned at each other, silent acknowledgment of their teamwork. There was something about Roger that attracted and repelled her. He was not her intellectual equal. Physically, he was strong but not well built. His arms were too long for his body, his legs and neck so thin they appeared to undulate like sea grass. He would never meet someone who would love him. It wasn’t possible. Sometimes she thought about being his wife, and the thought made her sick.

“I’ve seen you outside at night, fishing, whatnot. And I saw you up at the tip yesterday,” Roger said. “You were wearing a yellow shirt with a white bear on it.”

Using both hands, she broke the fish’s neck with a quick twist. It stiffened and she held it until it spasmed.

He thumped her fishing rod handle in the sand. “Don’t go up there on your own.”

Hall had written two articles for the day’s newspaper. Sarah supposed they were what he had referred to as a beat-up. Basically the murder investigation was not progressing. In the first article the police claimed that with so many tourists in the area, it was difficult to confirm possible sightings of Anja Traugott. The second article referred to a police statement issued back when Chloe Crawford vanished.

“At this stage we are treating this as a missing person and are trying to locate the young girl concerned. At the moment there is nothing to suggest she is not alive.”

The police refused to confirm whether the two cases were linked. Someone in the Bay of Fires had to know something. Jane Taylor had said it from the start: a person doesn’t just walk onto a beach, kill someone, and walk off without a single person seeing or hearing something. Perhaps someone knew something and didn’t know it was important. People were hopeless; you could not trust them.

Sarah had learned this the hard way. In November, when the pumps had kept shitting themselves, Sarah had not allowed herself to go home for more than an hour at any stretch. Anxious that the emergency alarm would not transmit to her mobile phone, she slept on the couch in her office. Pump failure meant no oxygen and the fish would die. The fish farm had emergency oxygen, but those pumps had played up too. Every time she left the farm, she feared she would return to tanks full of dead fish. It would be devastation—she could lose all her stock, from babies to adult fish. Human error on a land farm could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a few minutes. She had vowed not to take another land farm job again. An ocean-based fish farm was quite different. Farming was safer at sea; if something went wrong, the ocean protected the fish. At sea the oxygen never ran out.

Sarah gripped the edges of the newspaper. The headline blurred. Her head hurt in a dizzy, disorienting way, as though her skull contained a swarm of wasps. As she pushed the paper away, she glimpsed herself in the window reflection. She looked haggard, gaunt, ugly. Unblinking, she stared at herself. This was what a person capable of being heinous looked like. She didn’t want to think about Jake, but images from that final night in Eumundi forced themselves on her.