Bay of Fires (13 page)

“What’s it like being so popular?” Sarah said.

“I am?”

“A journalist. I don’t think anything so exciting has happened here since, well, since a body washed up on the beach.” Sarah tipped eight sets of cutlery into the empty sink. “I’m crass. I shouldn’t joke about it.”

“Being a journalist doesn’t impress everyone.”

“Neither does being a fish farmer, trust me.”

“I’ve got a story to follow up near the St. Columba Falls in the next day or so,” he began.

He had not planned to ask her to come with him. He wanted to. It was a country pub in the nearby Pyengana dairy farm region, somewhere on the road to the St. Columba Falls. The map showed gravel roads crossing cattle bridges and a green dotted line climbing through a national park. Tasmanian roads were notoriously underused. If he got lost on one of the forestry roads, if he got a flat tire, it could be days before someone else drove past.

In the shack’s silence the gas lanterns buzzed. White moths beat the glass like butterfly whips. Sarah opened another beer, her cheeks billowing as she swirled the liquid in her mouth.

“I’ll buy you lunch,” he said.

“Got nothing else to do.”

Erica giggled, and Hall realized everyone was listening to them.

“Hush, Erica,” Steve said.

Sarah glanced across the room to the dinner table. She spun the beer cap on the bench. Hall worried that she was changing her mind.

“Thanks for asking.” Sarah slung a green satchel over her shoulder and picked up her fishing rod. At the same time John poured a glass of port and handed it to Hall.

John started talking about his book, and Hall remembered why he was there. He tried to concentrate, but all he could hear were Sarah’s feet thudding down the ramp into the night.

“Johnny, aren’t you concerned about her being down there alone?” Pamela bustled into the kitchen and pulled on pink rubber washing-up gloves.

“When did anyone in this shack ever listen to me?” John read the time on his watch. “I’ll go for a walk in a little while, make sure everything is safe.”

Hall considered following Sarah to the beach. Fishing by moonlight with Sarah was infinitely more appealing than drinking port on a stomach full of seafood. But it was John who had invited him for dinner, and it would be rude to leave now. He would finish the drink and excuse himself.

Before he left, Hall had another look at the fishing poster. He searched for the snotty trevally. Earlier Sarah had confessed her secret for catching snotty trevally. She used raw chicken breast. Underwater, raw chicken resembled jellyfish which the fish usually ate.

“Don’t quote me. It’s never been scientifically proven. But it’s the only explanation anyone can think of, because a snotty trevally who only eats chicken is going to be one very hungry fish.”

Hall had laughed; it was the kind of fact he liked.

The snotty trevally was silver with a blue and green back and small rubbery lips. She had a black dot on her cheek, like a beauty spot.

Pamela’s huge four-wheel drive headlights were inconsequential under the late night sky. Their bucketed light was dwarfed by the immense blackness. Sitting beside Pamela as she drove him back to the guesthouse after dinner, Hall tried to remain impartial as she explained exactly how obese the Averys’ Labradoodle was. Apparently Henry ate scraps from the table during every meal.

“Henry is so fat he’ll get arthritis. It’s in their genes. I’ve told Flip.”

“Well, you’re not helping. I saw you feeding him crayfish tonight.”

“Cray meat doesn’t keep.” Pamela waved a hand in the air indifferently. “We get so tired of it. I’ve got nine in my freezer. Nine! They take up too much space.”

If he was talking to a bloke, another journo or any of the guys he played pool with on Wednesday nights, he would have questioned the sense of continuing to drop pots when they had already caught so many. You’re fucked in the head, mate, he might comment with a grin, and the other guy would shrug and tell him where to go. He’d get the point, though.

Instead Hall said, “I heard there was a murder in your crayfish pot.”

“No. I haven’t put my pot out for days.”

“That’s funny. I was at the boat ramp yesterday morning and Erica said an octopus broke into your pot.”

“I’m too busy working to put my pot out.”

It was easier to tell if someone was lying if you didn’t look at them. Practiced liars knew about holding eye contact and maintaining a calm expression. Their voices were harder to control. Pamela’s voice changed just enough to confirm what Hall already knew. He exhaled, slowly, and let the topic slide. It was cruel to have a go at a woman who had just had a public row with her husband.

Stories that would never be written had always teased Hall. The facts would remain with him, forming into impotent leads in his mind as he tried to fall asleep at night. Knowing that something needed to change and there was nothing he could do about it was irritating. When Sarah had complained about how many pots everyone was throwing in, Hall knew he was onto another story that was dead before it started.

The road curved steadily past the wharf and Pamela slowed down. The headlights picked up a figure moving down the beach track to the water. It was Don; his bald head was unmistakable.

“Was that…?” Hall said.

“No.”

“I thought I saw Don.”

“I thought I saw something too, but it was an animal, a wallaby perhaps.”

Hall waited in the dark garden of the guesthouse. When her lights vanished, he walked back the way they had come. At the top of the wharf track, in the shadow of an old boathouse, Hall stood. He listened to the boats creaking on their ropes, the slip-slop of the waves. This was silly. He didn’t know where Sarah had decided to fish, and it was unlikely Don Gunn was a murderer. Still, he held his breath for a minute longer and tried to hear something more sinister than the rustling of bush rats feeding on fishing scraps.

In bed that night Hall’s mind was too alert to let him sleep. He had not drunk too much, but he felt overstimulated as he tried to correlate the conversations with the work he needed to do. Anxiety, a long-absent yet familiar variety, also nagged at him.

Thankfully he hadn’t felt that unpleasant undercurrent for a long time. For pretty much two years after Laura left, disquiet had gnawed him, at any time, whenever anything reminded him of her. Certain books or films he knew she would like, the smell of the Nivea body moisturizer she used, women who wore their hair long and untied, and songs by the Waifs. The Waifs were a band he hated, but for a long time, if they played on the office radio, he feared he was going to cry. It would be seven years since she left this February. The first few years had been very dark for Hall. It was a long time to get over a breakup. Some of his friends had given up on him. They were the ones who were still mates with Dan.

He hadn’t thought about Dan and Laura for ages, not in a loathsome way. He had seen Dan a couple of months ago, outside the Penny Royal Arcade. Dan had waved, Hall had crossed the road. And why shouldn’t he? Dan was a man who’d waited until Hall had an out-of-town assignment and then got himself invited for dinner at Laura and Hall’s home. They had been sitting at the little wrought iron table on the sunny side of the veranda, eating cornflakes, when Hall returned earlier than expected that terrible morning. The casualness of the scene, Laura wrapped in Hall’s dressing gown, Dan wearing an old tracksuit, suggested to Hall it had been going on for longer than he wanted to know.

There was an old joke about a man whose wife runs off with his best friend. Someone asks him, “How are you coping?” “Pretty bad,” the man replies. “I really miss him.” But it wasn’t like that for Hall. Once he got past the wretched, cruel business of being heartbroken, the humiliation as he pieced together the puzzle to discover that quite a few people knew about the affair before he did, the violence he wanted to inflict on Dan, his final suffocating pain when he realized Laura would never beg Hall to take her back; when all that was out of his system, he had missed them both, in different ways.

And here he was again, feeling nervous, like he was bushwalking and could not find his location on the map. But the feeling was not as sickening and helpless as how he had felt when Laura left. Just like being lost in the bush; his anxiety was laced with endorphins, the sweetness of a challenge that was almost, but not quite, beyond him. He had asked Sarah to come for lunch with him. It would be good for him. And, he hoped, it would be nice for her too.

He opened John’s book, grateful for a constructive diversion. The book contained maps of the area, some dating back to the late 1800s. Others were more recent, detailing the mines that had been rehabilitated in the 1990s. The government-led initiative had seen some shafts filled in and others gated or blocked to protect humans and animals from danger. Hall would get an expert to suggest that a body could be disposed of in one of these mineshafts, get the police to comment on it, sex it up with an emotionally loaded quote from someone like John Avery, and there was a nice story. Better check the copyright issues related to John’s book. There were the pictures, too. A good Saturday double-page spread.

He wound down the reading lantern and closed his eyes.

On the morning of New Year’s Eve, Hall’s battery-operated alarm clock rang at five a.m., rattling the wooden nightstand. He was at his desk in the office in Launceston four hours later. The first part of the drive had taken him longer than he anticipated. He slowly negotiated the unlit gravel roads, mindful of wombats, wallabies, and devils. He was thankful he hit nothing except that which was already dead. In hindsight, he should not have left so early. It would have been more sensible to wait until the sun came up, but he was anxious to finish his work in town and return before nightfall.

Driving back to Launceston, Hall was conscious that there was something eluding him, a piece of information he needed to consider. The first thing he did when he arrived at the office was examine a map in John Avery’s book that depicted the coastal hinterland. There it was: Atherton’s Lookout, a village on the other side of the Blue Tier mountains, roughly one hundred kilometers from the Bay of Fires. Once prompted, the facts snapped mechanically through his mind. Five or six years ago a teenage girl vanished from Atherton’s Lookout. She had ridden a horse up the forestry roads. The horse returned, but she didn’t. Hikers stumbled across an old timber hut, high in the mountains, recently used, recently abandoned. Police had looked into the possibility that a deranged hermit had abducted the girl and was keeping her for company.

Hall looked up the article. The photo was not particularly clear, but the girl was uncannily similar to Chloe and Anja, the same fine features, the pale good looks. To this day she had not been found. There was no escaping it; it looked like paradise, but the east coast was rotten at the core. He put the information in a folder to think about later.

The office was pleasantly quiet with only a skeleton staff present due to it being New Year’s Eve. Elizabeth didn’t speak to Hall when she walked past his desk. His index fingers whacked the keyboard as he pretended to be consumed by his notes. He spent the day on the phone, typing as he interviewed, following up on old stories. A family who survived carbon monoxide poisoning after firing up a barbecue inside their house; a light rail linking Riverside with Invermay (despite the
Voice’
s persistent campaign, an expensive light rail was never going to happen); and the residents of Peace Haven nursing home had finally raised enough cash to start building their smoking gazebo. Good on the old fellows; that was the only story that made Hall smile.

As Hall proofread his smoking gazebo story, it occurred to him that one of the gentlemen driving that gazebo agenda had a brother who reared racehorses on the east coast, not too far from the Bay of Fires. Bennett was their surname. If Hall remembered correctly, Allan Bennett was the name of the horse trainer. Perhaps a man involved in the shadowy business of horseracing might have knowledge of the local fishing underworld and be able to help Hall locate the crayfish-poaching suspect the police spokeswoman had mentioned. It might not come to anything, but it was worth a phone call. He looked up the number and dialed. No answer. He would try again later.

There was a Post-it note on his computer reminding him that he was welcome at a party that evening at the home of one of his colleagues. He would make his apologies another time. There were a lot of people going and the friend would not mind if Hall was absent. In any case, Hall had arranged to interview Sam later in the day.

Tonight, Simone had invited everyone to her beach house for champagne. Hall had not asked if Sarah would be there, but it sounded like Simone’s invitation was inclusive. Driving him home last night, Pamela had told him that she and Don, and the entire Avery family, were going. The party was a Bay of Fires tradition.

“She’d be so upset if we didn’t go it wouldn’t be worth it,” Pamela had said.

At two p.m. Hall turned his computer off and wandered out casually, hoping it would appear that he was on his way to the bathroom rather than leaving the office. There was no need to go home. When he had popped in that morning, Marsha, his cat, had ignored him from the neighbor’s sunny veranda. Inside his house, her biscuit bowl remained full; she had not been home for a few days either.

Light summer ocean sky welcomed him when he pulled onto the Bay of Fires road several hours later. Wide sky, acres of ocean, and smells that were now familiar: salt, seaweed, seafood cooking outside one of the shacks, rusty fishing gear and old boats and diesel.

Simone and Sam Shelley’s holiday house, or shack, as they called it, was built from glass and untreated cedar weatherboard that had faded to gray. It had expensive green copper pipes. It was a misfit with the scrap metal and recycled timber construction of the neighboring fishing shacks, Hall thought as he knocked on the door. When Simone opened it, barefoot and wearing a white sarong, she tipped her head to the side and smiled as though they had known each other for a long time.