Bay of Fires (22 page)

Not far out was the granite island where, Sarah had said, the Aboriginal people had caught seals. Apparently the people from the Tasmanian east coast were the only Aboriginal people in Australia who swam. Sarah reckoned that underneath the farmer’s rock walls had been the middens. It was the right location for a shell midden site. Hall had seen some on the southwest coast. They were deep round pits, ten feet wide and ten feet deep, and contained thousands of sun-bleached mussel and abalone shells. Sometimes they contained the remains of cooking fires, tools, bird or animal bones. They were an archaeological treasure chest; you could tell what time of year the Aboriginal people used the midden from the type of bird bones found there.

He stared at the man-made rock wall, imagining the site of feasts and long-forgotten conversations. As well as being a dining room, the middens doubled as an animal trap. The Aboriginal people used to arrange bait along the edge of each pit and hide inside. When an unsuspecting seabird set down on the bait, it would have been thumped on the head.

Sarah said she had seen the middens there, had walked up to them every summer until the farmer covered them. Hall believed her. Unfortunately, the only way to confirm a shell midden had existed there would be to remove every rock. Even then, if the farmer had any brains, he would have bulldozed the original formation and destroyed the pits. In reality whoever owned the farm had little to fear, so the destruction would have been pointless. It was unlikely an Aboriginal land rights claim would be made, as there were not many, if any, survivors of the east coast tribe. Fear fostered such an ugly reaction.

Hall drafted the lead in his head, then the second and third paragraph, and listed who he would speak to before he acknowledged the futility of writing a story like this. Destruction of the middens would be impossible to prove and defamatory. Hall’s political leanings had caused trouble in the newsroom before. He already had two letters of warning sitting in his desk drawer. Last year when he received his first warning for his editorial on the Franklin River loop road, he had thought the chief of staff was fooling around. Even when he received the second written warning, he had found it hard to be apologetic. This time it was clear-cut; he had refused to write a story about a woodchip company donating money to a primary school. Elizabeth did not see his point that the story was an advertorial.

Three warnings and you were out. Hall didn’t love his job as much as he used to, but he didn’t want to lose it. He photographed the rock walls with the ocean behind them, and then again with the paddocks behind them, and recorded a description of the area in his notebook. That was all he could do for now.

Jane poured a large serving of gin over ice cubes and added a drizzle of water from the tank-stand tap. She took a sip and smacked her lips.

“Good. I needed that.”

Hall arranged sausages and onion rings on the barbecue plate. It was handmade, a blackened metal square resting on three walls of charred bricks. He had spent twenty minutes arranging wood underneath it, trying to get the temperature right. Jane didn’t offer advice and he was glad. The sausages were the cheap supermarket variety, he noted from the packet. He should have organized some fish. Never mind. Food tasted better when it was cooked outside. The meaty smell reminded him of camping trips by the farm dam during school holidays. One of his brothers would simmer lamb chops on an open fire while the rest of the brothers swam and built wobbly rafts from dead wood.

Jane hadn’t mentioned it, but he knew she was worried. Agitation motivated each movement she made—the steady gulps of gin, the flick of her finger as she tapped ash from her cigarette. Nothing about her was still. When she wasn’t drinking, she propped her glass in a potted plant and added wood to the fire or flipped the onion rings around the hot plate. Even her hair kept moving, the wiry coils undulating out from the bun.

He felt sorry for her. There was talk her estranged husband had been seen near the old jetty in a faded bronze Ford utility with unpainted panels on one side. He was hard to miss, a beefy redheaded bearded man. Apparently he had driven up the tip road. Several people had noted the dust cloud rising behind his car as it traveled down the straight road running beside the beach.

“Can anyone believe that man turning up now?” Pamela had said. “You wouldn’t read about it.”

John Avery said Gary Taylor had been working in the mines on the west coast. Erica Avery thought he was doing time at Risdon, a maximum security prison near Hobart, although she was not certain of his crime. No one said anything pleasant about the man. Years ago when Gary Taylor lived at the guesthouse he owned a runabout dinghy. More than once he had been spotted lurking near other people’s buoys; those were the days when empty pot after empty pot was pulled and nobody caught anything.

Hall had mentioned to no one his suspicion that Gary Taylor was living a lot closer to the Bay of Fires than anyone realized. He still had not been able to confirm whether Taylor was the twice-convicted crayfish poacher the police were interviewing in relation to the murder investigation. There were several unemployed men in the area with this type of record. Certainly Pamela was right in saying it was a bit strange, Gary turning up now after all these years. But there was a difference between news and gossip. Jane’s bitterness suggested to Hall that Gary Taylor had left her for another woman. If this was the case, he didn’t know why everyone persisted in discussing him. It was cruel; losing your partner to someone else was a pain Hall understood all too well.

The heat from the wood fire hurt his legs and forced him to stand back. He drank beer and watched fat stream out of the sausages. Jane folded a slice of white bread around a sausage, squirted tomato sauce on top, and handed it to him.

“Sorry,” Jane said.

“It’s fine. I like sausage sandwiches.”

She frowned. “No. Sorry I’m not much fun tonight.”

“What’s on your mind?” Hall felt disingenuous. Casual dinner conversation was not the entire reason he had agreed to eat with her.

“Nothing.”

Jane finished her drink. She held her liquor well. He had noticed her sipping gin during the afternoon while she washed salt from the windows. It was understandable she would want a drink. That morning her final booking had canceled. She had asked Hall to proofread a flyer offering her services for ironing and cleaning.

They talked about the middens while they ate. Jane didn’t blame the farmer for covering them up; Hall was not interested in arguing. She snorted when Hall mentioned Sarah’s concern that certain people in the area took more than their fair share of sea spoils.

“I don’t have a lot of time for Pamela and Don Gunn but I can tell you this: their catch is not a drop in the ocean. They don’t eat that much. And it’s not like they’re taking it to sell in their Chinese restaurant or something. Sarah Avery was complaining about that, was she? Everyone’s got their axe to grind,” Jane said.

Eventually the conversation returned to the murder.

“You know,” said Jane, scraping the spatula along the barbecue plate, “some of the bus drivers coming down from Launceston have been telling people where the beach is. They’re making a big deal out of it, like it’s a tourist attraction.”

Hall stoked the fire but watched Jane’s face as he said, “I’m more interested in that fellow driving the bronze utility.”

“You know who it is.” Jane sucked her lips in.

“Why do they call him Speed?”

“Don’t be mistaken. He’s not stupid. Gary’s got it all happening up here.” She tapped the side of her head. “Everyone from Ringarooma speaks slowly.”

Without prompting, Jane outlined the brief, bitter history of her marriage. Gary Taylor could be blamed for pretty much all of Jane’s problems, from her childlessness to the backbreaking hours she worked to keep the roof over her head.

“Nineteen is too young to marry,” she said. “Look at me now. I’m stuck here.”

“How did you meet?” Hall asked.

“God, a long time ago.” Jane poured herself another drink. “Raspberry picking. Sounds bloody romantic, doesn’t it? It was a summer job for a gang of us kids. You picked all day, drank all night. We all camped out in the farmer’s shed and I tell you, once the lights went out, some of those blokes were like a bunch of goanna lizards, crawling over each other trying to get a bit, not caring who it was with.”

Hall cringed. It sounded dreadful.

Jane laughed. “Gary took me under his wing. He was older, twenty-two. He said, ‘You’re too special for those louts to get their hands on.’ We liked each other. Had the same sense of humor.”

Her cheeks flushed, which Hall assumed was from embarrassment at having spoken so candidly.

“‘Special.’ I’m not the first girl to fall for that line.”

“I’m sorry that your marriage ended.”

“I don’t even think about it anymore,” Jane said. “Don’t worry about me. I still have a personal life.”

“Do you think it is strange that Gary has turned up after so long?” Hall knew more about Gary Taylor than his question implied, but he was undecided on how much to tell her.

“Do I think it’s strange Gary turning up now? Nothing that man does will amaze me. Look, he read something in the paper… something I said. He’s full of it.”

“So you’ve spoken to him?”

“Yeah.”

“What else did he say?”

“Drop it. You’re barking up the wrong tree. Gary’s not your man.”

“I have never said he was.” Hall sighed. “All this angst. If only beautiful young girls didn’t go walking on the beach alone.”

“Well, they shouldn’t. Girls who don’t want trouble shouldn’t go running around screaming for attention.”

There was a hard edge to Jane’s voice. Hall waited for her to say more, but she only shook her head. She flicked her cigarette lighter on and off and smiled for the first time that evening. “I nearly forgot. I was talking to someone who is angry with you.”

“Yeah?”

“Apparently you weren’t supposed to put that thing about Roger Coker in the paper. Vigilantes throwing Tassie devil road kill at people’s places.” Jane laughed and lit a half-smoked cigarette she had put out when they started eating. She blew smoke toward the ocean. “You reporters, you’re all the same. I better be careful what I say.”

Hall swallowed the froth in the bottom of his stubby. “What else did Sarah say?”

“She was yapping on. Reckoned you tricked her into saying something. She’s worried Roger Coker’s going to be hassled even more now. It was all over the TV last night. I said who gives a rat’s? You can’t worry about other people.”

Jane propped her pointed boot on a stump of wood. He hadn’t picked her as someone who enjoyed telling a person something they wouldn’t like to hear. A mosquito pricked the back of his neck and he slapped at it in disgust.

“If people don’t say it’s off the record, how the hell am I supposed to know?” he muttered.

A fat round moon was high over the ocean horizon. Darkness, unfortunately, was hours away. Hall opened another beer and sat down next to Jane. There was no point taking his frustration out on her. Her wanting to talk about someone else’s problems for a change, he couldn’t hold that against her.

It was nearly midnight and Hall was getting ready for bed when he heard a male voice coming from somewhere in the guesthouse. It was muffled and for a moment he could not be certain he had heard anything at all. He opened the door to his room carefully, so it wouldn’t squeak, and listened. From deep within the guesthouse he heard the shuffling of furniture on floorboards, followed by Jane’s laughter. Perhaps she was listening to her transistor radio. He shrugged off the thought that something was not quite right and leaned out his window.

Ten minutes later he was still gazing at the night sea, conscious that the guesthouse was now silent, when he saw a solitary figure moving down the empty road. In Launceston he wouldn’t have noticed a person walking at night on an unlit street. Here it was clearer. He recognized her posture first; striding out, her back erect. It was Sarah. Her fishing rod bounced against her shoulder as she walked.

By the time Hall had tied his bootlaces and crossed the guesthouse yard, she was no longer in sight. He waited until he was well away from the guesthouse to call out.

“Anyone feel like coming fishing with me?” His voice sounded strange in the silent night, as if it belonged to someone else. There was no answer and he couldn’t help feeling foolish.

“Hello?” he called less confidently.

At the shortcut to the gulch, she was waiting for him. She must have been standing there for several minutes, listening to his footsteps crackle on the gravel, hearing him breathe and cough and look for her.

“Boo,” she said.

“Hope I didn’t scare you.”

“You wish.” Her teeth gleamed in the moonlight; he liked the way they weren’t perfect, one front tooth leaning against a corner of the other. Her sister had perfectly straight teeth. Sarah had told him that her sister had worn clear braces, which cost twice as much as normal metal ones, but they had been necessary as Erica was a promising ballet dancer as a teen. Apparently metal braces could be detrimental to a dancer’s prospects in competitions.

“You’ve got balls, wandering around out here by yourself at night.” Immediately he wished he had not used that expression. “You’re gutsy.”

“Not gutsy. Just extremely fit.” She had mentioned that one of the reasons she had been unconcerned about approaching him on that first day on the dune was that she knew she could outrun him. Did that mean she thought he looked unfit? He touched his stomach; it wasn’t as hard as it used to be, but it wasn’t all that soft, either. Maybe she noticed the move for she added, “You look pretty fit yourself, so I guess we’re safe tonight.”

They walked past the gulch and onto a slender stretch of sand called Witch’s Cove. At the end of the beach they sat on a rock, facing the sea. Sea lice glowed like tiny fairy lights in the body of each wave.

“That article about Roger. I regret that it ran.”

He explained about his impatient editor and the news cycle pressure. He kept it brief; he didn’t want to give her the impression that his work colleagues did not respect him.