Poison Bay Page 12

  Despite her shock and grief, she was able to think clearly enough to tell Peter about the umbilical cord blood stored at Bryan’s birth by his scientific parents. Only a day or two now, and they would have firm DNA confirmation of the body’s identity.

  25

  Jack was bringing up the rear in his now-default position as sweeper. They were strung out across the jungle-clad mountainside, Kain pushing far ahead as scout. Kain’s ties to the group were becoming more frayed each time another of his suggestions was rejected.

  Callie had indicated she wanted to talk to him again, about Sharon. They needed to allow a good gap to open between them and the rest of the group, since the pounding rain that masked their voices from eavesdroppers also forced them to speak more loudly to each other. They found a large boulder with an overhanging tree fern that provided a measure of shelter.

  Jack began. “Horrible as it is, I think it’s most likely the culprit is one of us, even though the other two ideas are possible. I’ve been looking at everyone differently today. And I don’t like the way that feels.”

  “I even had a moment’s thought about Rachel,” Callie said, “because she was right on the spot—even though I can’t believe she would ever actually do such a thing. She’s got such a soft heart.”

  “Sharon was in the middle near the tent opening. Easy to reach. We all knew that, because we’d been helping get her settled and warm. Sneaking around the camp wouldn’t be that hard for any of us. Just leave your tent for a toilet break and do the deed on the way back. And we’re all so used to the sound of a tent zipping in the middle of the night now. It might have woken one of us the first few nights, but not now.”

  “We were so outrageously tired as well,” Callie agreed. “A herd of elephants could have been break dancing out there and we wouldn’t have known.”

  He smiled at the image, in spite of himself. “I reckon we’d all have been physically capable of the job. She was so weak, a five-year-old could have done it. And it would have been even harder for her to struggle, swaddled in the sleeping bag.”

  “And wedged between me and Rachel. That was one very crowded tent.”

  “We end up having to decide which of us is most likely based on what we know of everyone’s character, and that’s hardly a scientific way to investigate a murder.”

  “Ugh, that word.” Callie grimaced. “Murder. I’d rather call it almost anything else. I find it hard even to say it in my head, let alone out loud.”

  “Yeah, I know. But no one’s hands ‘accidentally’ went round Sharon’s face and held her mouth and nose closed.”

  “Ugh,” Callie said again, raising her shoulders in a shiver. “So, do you think we should tell the others?”

  “I’ve rolled that one round and round in my head. On the plus side, it would put everyone on their guard. But it could also plunge the team into despair. And do serious damage to our relationships with each other—suspicion, competition, survival of the fittest, who knows what else. We don’t want this turning into Lord of the Flies. It’s bad enough as it is.”

  “But what if they do it again?”

  “If anyone is weeding out the weak, that would make Rachel the next target. She’s okay right now, but how long can that last, now that she’s so low on insulin?”

  “Oh God.” Callie put her head in her hands. It wasn’t until her shoulders shook with a small sob that it dawned on Jack that she was crying.

  Stupid fool, he thought, wincing at his careless words. So focused on analyzing the facts he’d forgotten people’s feelings, as usual. Aloud he said, “I’m sorry. I’m sure I could have put that a lot better.”

  He reached out awkwardly to squeeze her arm in an attempt at comfort, and then wondered if she even felt it under the squeaky wet sleeve of her rain jacket. She must have done, because she looked at him with eyes full of tears.

  “It’s just that Rachel has been such a good friend for such a long time—my only true friend, if I’m honest—and I really, really, really don’t want her to die. And this whole thing is so draining. I keep trying to think sensibly—be objective, don’t let it get on top of me, work towards a positive outcome. But sometimes it seems to have sucked the whole ‘me’ out of me. Like I don’t even know who I am anymore.” She wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hands. “As if it wasn’t hard enough already, without a murderer in our midst.”

  “I know. And I don’t think it helps that because we’ve been around bad people and dangerous situations before with our work, we expect ourselves to cope with this. But reporting the news isn’t the same thing as being the news.”

  Callie looked thoughtful. “I think you’ve hit on something. The first time I covered a murder, I couldn’t sleep for days—but gradually you find mechanisms for dealing with it. Distance yourself from the events… refuse to absorb the relative’s emotions… hang out with other people who know what it’s like. But I don’t think I’d realized that wouldn’t work with this one.”

  “The events and the emotions are happening to us, not someone else.”

  “So it’s okay, really, if I can’t cope some of the time.” She smiled a watery smile at him.

  “We just need to keep on trying to encourage each other, and work together.”

  “And keep an eye on Rachel. I’ll find a way to booby-trap the doorway to our tent, so that they have to make enough noise to wake me if they want to get at her.”

  “Good idea. Hopefully no one will try anything in daylight, but just in case, we can make sure she doesn’t get cut off from the rest of the group.”

  “So I guess that’s our project for today then: try to keep Rachel safe.”

  “We’d better hurry and catch up with her. We can’t keep her safe if she’s miles ahead!”

  26

  Ellen took the scenic route to the police station—a long, brisk walk along the shores of the lake to blow the cobwebs out of her brain. She tried to make it last as long as possible, so that it would fill some of the seconds and minutes and hours that stood between her and news of her daughter. She even stopped in a little church along the way. She knelt for a while in one of the pews, unsure what or how to pray, but comforted nevertheless by the quiet calm of the place. Since Roger’s death, she’d been finding herself drawn back to spiritual memories from childhood.

  “Hello Ellen.” Peter Hubble loomed large in the crowded search room. “Good to see you looking better today.”

  “I’ve had sleep and food and exercise. It’s amazing what it can do for the human body.”

  Peter nodded in agreement and gave her a meaningful look. “And the human mind.”

  She smiled. “It doesn’t hurt that the weather is so much better today, too. It’s hard to imagine bad things happening on a day like this.”

  “Yes,” said Peter after a microscopic pause, and then his eyes slid away from hers. She was instantly alert.

  “What is it?”

  He seemed to be thinking about how to answer. That couldn’t be good.

  She decided to take the proactive approach. “Peter, would it be possible to have a private chat with you? I know you’re very busy but I promise it wouldn’t take long.”

  He lifted an arm to indicate back along the hallway. “Let’s go to my office.”

  When they were seated either side of his desk, Ellen drew her thoughts together and summoned her most sensible and credible face, the one she used when she was nervous about giving a major presentation at a conference.

  “Peter, I’m aware that it’s extremely unorthodox to have the ‘frantic mother’ involved with your search team, and I appreciate the problems that could cause for you if I abused the situation. I also know that… well, that I must have seemed deranged when I came in here that first day. I’d had no sleep, and I was desperate to get someone to take me seriously.” She paused and pursed her mouth. “And yes, I probably looked like a bit of a loon again yesterday. But that was caused by an excess of rain and imagination.”
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br />   She saw the corners of his lips twitch to suppress a smile. Heartened, she went on.

  “I respect your right and duty as a professional to manage the investigation in whatever way you see fit, and so I recognize that you could refuse the request I’m about to make. But I’d like to ask you to tell me the truth about the things you discover about Rachel and her friends, even if it’s bad news. I’ll handle it better if I actually know the details—it’s something about my personality. I’m asking you to do this for my own sake, but I also hope it might benefit you. I do have skills and knowledge that I can contribute to the investigation, if you’re willing to treat me as one of the volunteers instead of as an hysterical relative who needs to be managed.”

  She sat back and waited.

  Peter leaned his elbows on his desk, and bent his head to look at a paper clip he was pushing around on the notepad that lay there. He was using his poker face—a useful skill in his line of work—but Ellen could almost hear the mental cogs whirring.

  After a few moments, he looked up at her from under his eyebrows, a long stare. She didn’t flinch. He sat back. “Okay.”

  She smiled. “Thank you. So…” She raised one eyebrow. “What’s wrong with the weather?”

  He smiled slightly at her perceptiveness, and then became serious. “It’s good this side of the range. If they’re on the west, it’s a different story. There are weather warnings out for that region. Very severe and sustained rainfall predicted, with the possibility of flash flooding and landslides.”

  “I see.” She looked out the window at the dappled shade being cast by a tree in the warm sunlight. “It’s very weird country this, isn’t it? If you don’t like the weather, drive for a minute.”

  “But on the plus side, yesterday the western side had great weather while it was pouring here.”

  “And we have no way of knowing which side they’re on.”

  “No, but we do know that they’re well equipped. We’ve checked the items on the purchasing list that your daughter received, and tracked down what Bryan himself ordered for the expedition from a place in Dunedin. They had the full survival kit for extreme conditions. And it seems likely that Bryan would have had time to teach them how to use it all before he died.”

  Peter scratched his ear, and Ellen instantly recognized the “tell”. “What is it?”

  “Well… in the interests of full disclosure, there were some blizzards in the tops a couple of days ago.”

  “Blizzards? It’s nearly summer!”

  “We can get blizzards in high summer up there. It’s not that unusual. But they were equipped for those too. As you say, interesting country.”

  “Heavens above. You know that old Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times? Perhaps it should be: may you live in interesting country.”

  “Perhaps. But let’s get back to that search room and find you a job to do.”

  27

  It happened so quickly that Jack struggled to take it in. One moment he was clambering over a fallen tree in Callie’s wake as they struggled to catch up with the others now so far ahead of them up the valley. The next moment the ground was shuddering and a noise like apocalyptic thunder filled his senses.

  “Is it an earthquake?” Callie cried, looking back at him with fearful eyes, clutching at a bush to try to keep her balance.

  Jack looked up towards the top of the mountain, and what he saw was impossible. His mind was suddenly and absurdly flung back into high-school Macbeth: Birnam Wood was on the move. And headed straight at them. The tree tops he could see were writhing, and through their trunks he glimpsed a moving wall of mud. Beneath their feet, the very earth was sliding.

  “Callie! Run!”

  He grabbed her hand, leapt past her and began dragging her, clanging his shins painfully on a fallen log. Behind him, she tripped and fell, but he just kept pulling until he wondered how her arm was still in its socket and his heart hadn’t burst with the effort.

  She regained her footing and staggered awkwardly behind him. His fingers stayed locked around her hand like a vice, and he pulled and ran and leapt and ran. Time slowed to the speed of treacle, and they seemed to gain no ground no matter how much they tried. The noise was now enormous, and yet somehow Jack could still hear his own breathing, ragged and violent in his throat.

  Fractions of a second passed like hours, and they gained two meters, three meters, four meters, though the ground was like jelly. They were finally in rhythm, and as Jack launched his weight off a rock, Callie’s boot landed in its place.

  Jack could see a clear spot ahead where the mountain didn’t appear to be moving, and he dragged Callie towards it in desperate, mindless fear. Run and pull and leap and gasp for air. And again.

  Nearly there. Don’t stop.

  And then he felt a powerful jerk through his shoulder and swung around in time to see Callie’s hand wrenched from his grasp, her eyes wide with terror, her mouth open in a scream that he couldn’t hear over the roaring monster. Tree branches and tendrils closed over her face like evil fingers, and she was swallowed whole by the falling mountain.

  ***

  Surfing. Like that horrible day, her thirteenth Christmas, back before Callie was afraid. A girl her age should never have been in that malevolent, cyclone-whipped sea. Flung from her surfboard, tumbled and pulverized and dragged across sand and rocks, her lungs aching for oxygen, her equilibrium struggling to find Up.

  Her mind exploded with the pain of a sickening blow across the side of her head.

  And everything went black.

  ***

  The rain had not stopped falling, but the mountain had stopped moving, more or less. Jack’s brain could not accept what his eyes were seeing. Where dense rainforest had filled the mountainside moments earlier, there was now bare rock. A vertical strip wide as a football field, and possibly hundreds of stories high—the low cloud made it hard to judge. Ahead, where the rest of the team were presumably still walking unaware, everything looked normal. Behind, a steep and heartless rock face, being washed shiny clean by the torrent from the sky. A deep gash in the mountain, all the way to the bone.

  This had to be one of the tree avalanches described by Bryan on the first day. The rainforest now lay below him in a massive ugly pile of tangled tree limbs, mud and shredded vegetation. Parts of it were still settling, and as he watched, a mighty tree that had been perched precariously on top of the mound slowly, regally tilted sideways to a 45-degree angle, and slid from sight beneath the mess. Nearer to him, he saw mud shift and begin oozing downhill, lured by gravity, searching for a way to insinuate itself into the debris. The rain was so heavy he couldn’t see the far end of the landslide, let alone the other side of the valley.

  Jack lay askew on top of the muddle of rocks and battered greenery where his downhill slide had finally ended, staring at the chaos, his heart pounding in his ears, his lungs burning in his chest. Somewhere down there, Callie was caught in all that. He had to find her, before the mass shifted any further. But he also had to breathe. He had to find her, but he had to get some fluid into his searing throat.

  He groped behind for the water bottle in the side of his pack, shoving the rain cover aside. As he gulped thirstily, it gradually registered that his hood had come loose in the fall, and the downpour was now flooding down his back, inside the jacket, drenching his clothing, making him cold. Cold. His sluggish mind finally grasped that this was not a good thing for a man in shock, and he fumbled to reinstate the hood.

  Jack’s right shoulder throbbed and his left knee seemed to be on fire as he began the difficult descent down the slope. As he went, he searched for a relatively firm and safe place to discard his rucksack, and at length found a large flat boulder a few meters from the edge of the slip zone. It would have to do. He fumbled with the harness clip with fingers that had lost all dexterity, and finally shed the load with relief. The screaming in his shoulder lowered about five decibels. As an afterthought he grabbed the water bottle and shoved
it in his pocket before setting off again. He felt the camera in there, and pulled it out, started it recording, pulling the head strap into position so it captured more or less what he was seeing.

  Lighter now, he could move more swiftly down the mountain into the danger zone. He crept on all fours, crab-like, eyes seeking out the next reliable hand- or foot-hold, while constantly glancing down the mountain at his goal. The whole enormous landslip was still desperately unstable, and he could see trees and boulders shifting, now just a small nudge, now as much as a meter in one big jolt.

  He thanked God for Callie’s revolting orange rain jacket that she’d joked about back at Bryan’s house in Te Anau. It seemed like centuries ago. “Orange is the color of fear, Jack,” she’d teased him. “Are you afraid, Jack?” Yes, Callie, I’m so very afraid. But if anything will help me find you in all this mess, it’s that awful jacket.

  He drew level with the heap of displaced mountain, and began searching in earnest. God help me. Where is she? If he couldn’t see her near the surface, he couldn’t imagine knowing where to start. Even a bulldozer would take days to shift the immense pile of debris. He moved gingerly onto the unstable mass, still on all fours, and peered down through any gap or cavity he could find.

  Within two minutes he saw it just ahead: a glimpse of orange. It was the sleeve of Callie’s jacket, emerging from a muddle of torn branches and mud, flung across a pile of tattered vegetation. The fingers of the protruding hand were completely still. Jack maneuvered carefully and discovered he could also see one of her boots and part of her leg. Yes, she had come to rest near the surface! She appeared to be lying face down, partially buried to a depth of no more than about thirty centimeters.

  He adjusted his balance and started lifting rainforest trash from where her head and upper body must be, working fast, carefully, always looking around to check what the mound was doing. Please God, let her be alive. He kept repeating the words in his head like a silent chant, his breath coming fast and shallow. As he lifted one of the larger branches to toss it aside, his vision was engulfed by gray fog, and he nearly toppled.