Hindsight (14 page)

‘I don’t know.’ She looked around for dates that would change every day, moving along the aisle slowly, and as the shades around her also shifted, she lost her balance.

‘Steady,’ Ben said as he caught and supported her against his chest. He didn’t ease up on his grip, even after she regained her balance, but Mira took her time, enjoying the feel of her cheek against his chest.

‘Hey, buddy! No drunks in here!’ called an invisible man near the counter.

‘Sea legs,’ Ben said. ‘She’ll be fine.’

‘I need newspapers,’ she whispered. ‘Or a desk calendar.’

‘Newspapers are at the front, where it’s hectic. How about some fresh air?’ Ben didn’t wait for an answer. He ushered her out of the store, into the umbrella shade of a jacaranda tree where she could sit on a park bench and watch the front window featuring posters of the daily headlines with their dates. ‘We should have done this to start with.’

Mira felt for the seat herself, still dizzy and needing to ensure it was exactly where it appeared to be before making herself comfortable.

Ben’s weight made the seat creak as he sat close to her. ‘Tell me what you see?’

She tried again with smaller adjustments. ‘I see the ninth, fourth, eighth … Sheesh! I can’t keep my fingers steady!’ Yet the sensitivity of controls wasn’t her only problem. The longer she played, the greater her headache and the more that her hands trembled. ‘Tenth …!’

Mira gritted her teeth, determined to bear the pain in the hope of seeing Ben sitting next to her in real time. ‘Nearly night … Today must be here somewhere.’

Pain pierced her eyes like hot needles, burning white hot into the back of her brain.

‘Ah!’ She cast off the sunshades, her body hot, trembling and sweating. ‘I can’t do it!’ She buried her face in her hands. ‘I can’t catch up to you. I can’t even glimpse us going in.’

He pulled her against him with both arms and brushed the hair out of her face. ‘You don’t need to, Mira. I’ve caught you.’

She sensed the warmth of his breath drawing closer to her cheek.

He’s aching to kiss you
, Gabby had said.

Heat flamed up from within her and she felt drawn to kiss him too, but the memory of her first kiss on the patio flew up with her hands. She remembered his body jerk against her as the bullet struck his shoulder from behind. Then him slumping. Falling. Her arms failing to hold him. Hearing that terrible crack as his head struck the rail, and her hands finding his blood as it began to spread all over his chest.

‘No. Please …’ She shivered. ‘I can’t go back there. I thought I could, but …’

‘Where?’ He released her, keeping only one arm about her shoulders, leaving his other hand free to find hers. ‘You always see the same place, don’t you? Only the time changes?’ His fingers tried to mesh with hers. ‘Do you need the other glasses?’

‘It’s not that.’ Pulling away with her eyes closed, she stood and steadied herself against the wrinkled trunk of the tree. Beneath her new soft-soled sandals, she could feel a thin mattress of fallen flowers. ‘I don’t want you to get hurt again.’

Ben laughed. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re the one who needs the painkiller.’

She shook her head, hearing him come to her again, and raised her hands to help keep him at arm’s length. ‘I can’t see the future whenever I want. I can’t even catch up to you, so I can’t see where this will end!’

‘Hey, hey! It’s okay.’ He took her hand and led her back into the shade. ‘You don’t need to see at all, if you’re not ready.’

‘I
want
to be ready. I do!’

‘It’s just too much sometimes. I know. Sit down again if you need a break. Yesterday will always be there for you.’

She nodded and sank back onto the timber seat. ‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’

‘How close did you get?’

‘Hours. I glimpsed today’s date. Only briefly before it hurt too much. The headline was something about a third body found on a beach. But the sun was still low out at sea, and the shop was just opening. So ten hours maybe, or a little more.’

‘That was today’s headlines. No doubt about it. But how close did you get before it hurt too much? I’m talking tolerable levels. A setting you could live with for hours?’

‘I don’t know. Yesterday, maybe?’ She pressed her palms against her eyes to push away the lingering pain, then asked for the sunshades. ‘Let me try again?’

After a pause that revealed his reluctance, he obliged. ‘Don’t push it,’ he warned. ‘I feel guilty enough already.’

‘Guilty?’ She rolled back through too many yesterdays to avoid the worst of the pain, then toggled forward with greater caution, keeping watch for the headline. ‘Got it!’

‘How much does it hurt?’

‘Like pool water. Feels like I’m straining through chlorine. But don’t try to stop me, Ben. I want this, especially if I can get your sun and moon in sync with mine … more or less.’ She shook her head, realising how bizarre that sounded.

‘That doesn’t excuse my motives, Mira. I’m sorry I brought you here. I would have anyway, I suppose, as part of your rehab, and I did have every intention of becoming your only guardian as soon as I’m able. It’s just the timing. I won’t blame you for hating me now. It’s too selfish.’

‘If you don’t start making sense,’ she said, playfully threatening him with a fist, ‘I’m gunna have to ask you to step into this.’ He did anyway, pushing his cheek against her fist until she smiled.

‘Okay, if you’re really up to it, please read yesterday’s headline story. I left my copy at the hospital this morning.’

Mira looked that way again. ‘Suspects arrested for beach murders … So? It can’t have anything to do with the bodies I saw this morning. They killed each other.’

‘So I knew them — the ones in the paper.’

‘Which ones? The victims or the suspects?’

‘All of them, Mira; the girl in this morning’s headlines too. They were my friends.’

Mira dashed to the window to read the fine print.

She couldn’t stand directly in front of the postersized display of the newspaper, without standing in the ghostly lap of a long-haired bongo busker. Yesterday, he’d been rapping out fast tunes with two other male musicians, playing the strange combination of bongos with a banjo and didgeridoo. Their ghosts were silent now, yet still energetic, so she stepped over them to read the body of the article.

Being front-page news, the headline and images consumed most of the room, leaving space for only three teasing paragraphs which said little more than she already knew, aside from the names of the first two victims: Shelley Grey and Josh Markovic.

‘What are you doing?’ Ben asked.

‘Reading about Shelley and Josh.’

‘Don’t bother. It’s all rubbish. The cops can’t possibly have all the facts yet, and they never will if they keep pursuing the wrong suspects.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘I knew them too well, Mira. I know I’ve been away a long time, but some things never change. That story was all puff and no guts to it. Smacks loud and clear of another set-up.’

Mira touched the glass, feeling a little weird to be reading without Braille. ‘I wish I could see what you mean.’

The last words on the front page were:
Continued page two.

‘Hang on,’ she said, glancing across the street through shades of yesterday to the park, where four people sat or lay about, reading newspapers.

She hurried to find Ben’s hand. ‘Is there anyone at the big rock over there?’

‘The memorial to Captain Cook? No. Why?’

‘There was yesterday. Come with me.’

She waited at the kerb for the sound of a skateboarder to pass, then took a step.

‘Wait!’ Ben tugged her to stop. ‘Big dog. Okay … go.’

‘Every step is an adventure. I haven’t felt this excited since you smuggled me out of Serenity for my first day trip!’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’ He led her around puddles of tourists on picnic blankets and locals on towels to the granite memorial which was shaped like a rectangular mushroom upside down; smooth and somewhat cooler than she expected due to the shifting shade from a large tree that also cast speckled shadows over the rocky cliff to the bay.

‘Seventeen-Seventy,’ Mira read aloud from the plaque, ‘bi-centennial commemoration of the naming of Point Lookout by Captain James Cook. I’m tempted to glance back and see what he really looked like, but there’s another guy up here at the moment — I mean, yesterday — who’s more interesting for the moment.’

A skinny old man with a bald spot and long beard was irreverently using the memorial as a table and seat to spread open his newspaper, a late edition.

‘Sports fan. He’s on the wrong page.’

Adjusting the shade and colour took her back too far in time, but minor manipulations of intensity swept him back enough pages. ‘Found it. Third victim was in yesterday’s late edition too — Chloe Greppia, beaten and left to die — and until then, the two suspects were Jake Markovic and …’

Baldie turned the page, losing his interest too soon.

‘Oh, no you don’t!’ Mira adjusted her sunshades and found her place.

‘… and Dean Grey, both arrested for the first two beach murders. But then down here it says they were in custody when Chloe died, so police now suspect they had an accomplice.’

Two of the four inset photos were faces she recognised, and shockingly they
were
the two she’d seen that morning, post-mortem from ten days ago. Stunned, she didn’t tell Ben. She shook her head, trying to get her thoughts straight. ‘Hang on, Markovics and Greys as both victims and suspects? That can’t be coincidence.’

‘Josh and Jake were brothers. And I’m pretty sure they’re the two friends who set me up for armed robbery, using Josh’s birthday party as their cover and alibi.’

‘Sounds more like ex-friends. One dead and one in gaol. Good riddance to them.’

‘Ordinarily, I’d agree, Mira. But there has to be more to it. Shelley was Josh’s girlfriend as well as Dean’s sister. So I think Shelley and Dean might have been active in framing me too, not just drunken idiots who failed to back up my alibi by confirming that I was at the party all night. But Jake and Dean loved Shelley as much as Josh did. So why would either of them hurt her?’

‘They didn’t,’ Mira said, remembering what she’d seen. ‘Josh and Shelley killed each other.’

‘Like the two bodies you saw this morning near the bridge to Likiba Isle? But the paper at the hospital said they were murdered a few miles further north, at Steiglitz.’

‘That’s not where they were killed, Ben. It’s where the other two were arrested.’

‘A frame job. It has to be. They all lived more than an hour away, much further south, and nearly never strayed north of the Gold Coast in all the years I knew them.’

Mira glanced back to the newspaper, needing to flip back from the horse racing section again to ensure she hadn’t misread it. ‘This article is certainly sparse with its details, but I’m sure of those two faces. They’ll haunt me for a long time.’

‘Then I wonder what took them there?’

Mira turned her back and took off her shades, causing the purple haze to turn blue as she gazed out over the ocean. She heard waves crashing against the rocks below, almost synchronous with the waves from yester-century. The crescent beach was a little slimmer but still beautiful one era, perfect the next. People came and went from the island, lived and died, and what did any of them really matter, when diluted in that eternal ocean of time?

‘Mira …?’ Ben said, moving closer.

‘Does it matter?’ She couldn’t bear the thought of going back there. Just the idea of getting that close to Serenity again made her stomach churn. She slumped against the monument. ‘Seeing the past can’t change anything.’

‘It doesn’t have to. It can guide our next steps into the future.’

‘How? They’re dead — or done for in gaol. They’re nothing more to do with you, Ben.’

‘Not necessarily. Listen, Jake and Chloe were lovers too, and now Chloe’s dead. Three guys and two girls, Mira. Do the maths — all friends with me, and all at that party with me seven years ago. So what does that tell you?’

‘Ha!’ she laughed, trying to lighten his mood. ‘That you weren’t the only one without a date that night.’

‘Bingo,’ he said, surprising her. ‘Dean and I both asked the same girl, which sparked an argument, so she stayed home, away from both of us — and can you guess who we asked?’

‘Ben, I didn’t know you had any friends at all, until I met Gabby.’

‘Bingo again.’

Stunned, she couldn’t say anything for a long moment, until a terrible thought struck her. ‘Surely, you don’t think Gabby is the killer? I mean, just because Chloe was murdered after Jake and Dean were arrested … You said you trusted Gabby with your life, and she seemed so honest.’

‘She is. I’ve known Gabby forever, and I know how close she used to be to Dean, which is why I’m so worried about her now. I know he tried to see her a few times, while I was in gaol, but she accused him of falling in with a bad crowd — and if he’s in trouble—’

‘You think she may be in danger too? That’s a stretch. That party was seven years ago, Ben — and even if the murders are directly related to the guest list or the robbery, you should be more worried about yourself than a girl who didn’t turn up to the party.
You’re
more likely to be next — especially if you go poking your nose around the people who set you up the first time. You might as well go poke at a red-bellied black snake.’