Poison Bay Read online

  North and the El Dorado of Milford Sound had failed, so they were heading east, towards the sunrise and Lake Te Anau. Somewhere out there.

  Seaweed would be off the menu once they left the ocean behind. They were unlikely to run out of ferns any time soon, but the crunchy curly tips seemed to be the most palatable, and they weren’t on all ferns at all altitudes, so everyone agreed to gather as many as they could carry when they were easily available. Rachel filled her pockets with them so she could nibble constantly, in an effort to make the most of the sparse carbohydrates they provided.

  With the extra distance of another night’s sleep between them and Bryan’s death, everyone’s spirits seemed stronger—everyone other than Sharon. She had drawn Jack aside before they broke camp, to record a message for her son. Callie had tried to talk her out of it, but Rachel had intervened with a fierce look: “Don’t you dare stop her!” Callie had felt rebuked and frustrated.

  When they stopped for a midday break, Callie watched Sharon with concern. Her movements were sluggish. She mentioned it quietly to Jack.

  He said, “She doesn’t complain but I reckon she must be in a lot of pain. Her feet and her back are a mess.”

  “She’s in emotional pain as well. She had a crush on Bryan. Did you know?”

  Jack raised his eyebrows. “I thought it was just the worry about her child. You should have seen what she said to him on the video this morning. The way she tried to look positive and strong for him would break your heart.”

  The vexation of the morning resurfaced. “It seems to have broken her heart too. I don’t know why you had to do such a thing.”

  “Steady on, Cal. She asked, and I wasn’t going to turn her down. If she doesn’t get home, do you want to be the one to explain to her son why you denied him that piece of his mother?”

  “Are you sure that’s the only reason you did it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That video’s going to make a great story.”

  “So that’s what you think of me?” He stared at her, and he looked sterner than she’d ever seen him.

  But she still didn’t stop. “I guess I’m just hoping you haven’t turned into one of those journalists who feast on human suffering. Like carrion.”

  He stared at her in silence, then turned away. She felt confused and annoyed. And bereft.

  13

  Ellen Carpenter woke bathed in sweat, early morning sunlight pouring in the window of her Brisbane bedroom and baking her rumpled sheets. She fumbled for her glasses and looked at her clock radio. Only a couple more hours before she was due to collect Rachel from the airport.

  The humidity was suffocating, and a nameless dread sat heavily on Ellen’s chest. Her daughter’s flight from Christchurch was already in the air. Was she having a premonition of some disaster?

  Probably just a hot flush. She sat up and shook her head to try to clear the anxiety, dislodging Mango, the ginger cat, from his place of honor on her bed. The dark hair that usually waved softly round her face was plastered to her neck with sweat, and she flicked it with her hands, trying to get some air onto her skin. Mango stalked off down the hall as she trudged to the bathroom with a cooling shower in mind.

  She thought of how the cat was never allowed on the bed when Roger was alive. A shaft of grief hit her as she got in the shower, and she wept. Oh Roger, I miss you. Rachel, get home safely.

  The weeping was therapeutic, and Ellen was in a much better frame of mind by the time she arrived at the airport. She’d even had a good breakfast, something Roger always insisted on. She saw “LANDED” beside Rachel’s flight number on the airport monitor. Premonitions were nonsense.

  Over the next two hours, her relief evaporated, one drop at a time. Time after time, the doors from the Customs area swished open complacently, but no Rachel walked through, only more strangers wheeling luggage-laden trolleys. Again and again, Ellen saw delighted recognition as travelers caught sight of their loved ones. But it was never her turn to wave and call out. At first, she was irritated. Why are they keeping her so long? I’m going to be late for my two o’clock lecture! But as the morning dragged on, her students were forgotten.

  “I’m sorry madam, your daughter wasn’t on this morning’s flight,” confirmed the airline official. “She probably just missed the plane. Do you have a contact number for her in New Zealand?”

  Ellen knew it wasn’t sensible to get too frightened about Rachel just yet. I’ll go home and wait for her to call, she told herself firmly, even gathering enough presence of mind to phone the university and cancel her afternoon lecture, so she’d be free to collect Rachel from a later flight. There’s probably already a message waiting for me at home.

  There was no message at home.

  The New Zealand contact numbers Rachel had left on a neat list yielded no information, just the disturbing news from the youth hostel that Rachel had not checked in last night, nor did she have a reservation. Ellen gave the names of Rachel’s companions. None of them had reservations either, any time this week. It didn’t make sense.

  14

  They made their way steadily back up the valley they’d descended two days ago. Callie watched Adam, in the lead, search for a stone impressed into the mud here, a broken branch there, to show which way they’d come. Their tracks had been largely erased by the torrential rain.

  After he spent an hour leading six people up and down the same section looking for a passable route, Adam called a team meeting. “When we hit the tricky bits, I’d better go on ahead. It’s stupid for us all to be scrambling around and wasting our energy.”

  In that moment, Callie realized just how much knowledge of these impossible valleys had died with Bryan. She felt their lostness deep in her bones.

  Jack had his camera out again during the discussion, and when their eyes met for a moment, she saw no friendship, just cold defiance. She felt even more lost.

  Mid-afternoon, Adam stopped and waited for the rest of the group to draw level. They shuffled among mossy tree trunks, slippery rocks and dense undergrowth to find a spot close enough to hear easily.

  “Up there,” Adam indicated with his arm through a gap in the tree canopy, “I think we might find a way over into the next valley. What does everyone else think?”

  There was a murmur of agreement.

  Five minutes later as they headed for this new valley, a bird—fluffy, brownish, the size of a small hen—startled from the ground near Adam’s feet. He reacted quickly, began to run after it, and chaos ruled as others joined the pursuit. The bird was nowhere to be seen, but there were altogether too many hiking boots pounding the ground, thundering under the weight of loaded rucksacks.

  Callie shouted, “Stop running! Don’t move.” Her voice carried authority, and they all stopped dead and turned to stare.

  “That bird was nesting,” she said.

  “So what?” Erica demanded.

  She ignored her, and addressed the group as a whole, her arms stretched wide. “What do birds do on nests?”

  It took a moment or two, but Rachel got it. “They lay eggs!”

  They stood still as statues while Adam carefully retraced his steps, and began probing the undergrowth where the bird had risen. And there they were. Three beautiful, mottled eggs. There would be protein for dinner tonight.

  ***

  Callie wanted to cry or throw up as she absorbed the report from their scouts, but she tried to look calm instead.

  Adam and Kain had looked for a mountain pass to lead them eastwards, from this valley to the next one.

  There was no pass. Not for people of their ability.

  Adam was limping badly from a fall down part of the rock face, and negativity radiated from both men.

  Adam addressed the group. “We have to decide what to do today with the daylight we’ve got left. And that probably depends on what we’re going to do tomorrow.”

  Kain said, “If everyone is determined to stick together, I think we should either try to
find Bryan’s route home, or set up a decent camp and wait to be rescued. These mountains are crazy. They’re going to kill us.”

  Callie realized with a start that what she was seeing on Kain’s face was fear. For the first time, he was transparently rattled. Why now? Why not yesterday or the day before? What happened up there?

  “Maybe it would be better if we stayed in one place,” Erica said hesitantly. “I didn’t think it was such a good idea last night, but I didn’t realize how hard it would be to find a way.”

  Jack said, “We’re a million miles from anywhere, we’re hard to see from the air, and Bryan would have made sure that if they do look for us, it will be in the wrong place. It could take weeks for them to find us, and Rachel has only a few days’ worth of her medical supplies left.”

  “Yes, but we shouldn’t risk everyone else’s life for the sake of mine.” Rachel’s voice broke a little, but she pulled herself together. “We should do what’s best for everyone.”

  “To hell with that!” Callie said. She didn’t feel like crying anymore; she felt like punching someone. “Everyone includes you. Even if no one else wants to help you, I’m going to do whatever I can to get you out of here in time to save your life.”

  “Settle down, Callie,” Adam said. “No one wants anyone to die.”

  Jack sighed in a way Callie recognized as a warning: bluntness was coming. “Look, no one ever likes the way I put it, but it’s time to start saying the hard things. We absolutely must see what we’re choosing. If we try to go back the way we came, Rachel will die, because even if we can find our tracks, it will take too long. If we make camp and live like castaways, Rachel will still almost certainly die, because it’ll take them too long to find us.”

  Kain said, “No disrespect to Rachel, but there’s risks for everyone else too.”

  “I agree,” Jack said. “There are plenty of risks in trying to hike out, especially now we don’t have Bryan to help us recognize danger. For most of us it might be less risky to stay put, although we shouldn’t kid ourselves that it’s ‘safe’. This isn’t Gilligan’s Island. There’s all sorts of hazards, even when we’re just looking for food—don’t forget yesterday’s avalanche.”

  Adam said, “So what are you suggesting?”

  “I volunteer to help Callie try to get Rachel home alive. Most likely, we’d head south in the morning and look for another valley going east, although that’s open for discussion. Everyone else must make up their own mind. I’d rather we stick together, because there’s more of us to help each other when things go wrong. But I can see the case that Kain is making, too. If we do split the group I think we should keep the sub-groups as big as possible. Erica and Sharon might be better off to go back to Poison Bay and camp near the ocean, but they’re not that strong and both injured, so they need at least one man with them to do the heavy lifting.”

  The silence that followed swirled with uncertainty, but Callie was glad to see Jack and Kain making an effort to work together for once.

  “What about this for an idea?” she said. “There’s not much light left, so we make camp now, and rest, and decide in the morning when we’re fresh.” Jack made eye contact with her, and nodded. She felt a tiny surge of joy at the reconnection.

  “Yeah, and don’t forget we’ve got eggs for dinner.” Adam attempted a smile.

  But the thrill of the eggs as a triumph of survival had worn off. They now looked more like a condemned man’s last meal.

  15

  Ellen didn’t get a call from Rachel. At 2.00 p.m. she didn’t call. At 3.00 p.m. she didn’t call. At 4.00 p.m. she didn’t call. At 5.00 p.m. she didn’t call.

  At 6.00 p.m., Ellen called her local police station.

  The constable who answered was pleasant and sympathetic, but Ellen could tell that not much would be done yet. There would be a protocol to follow. People went missing every day, and most of them turned up.

  How could she persuade them that Rachel would have found some way to get a message home? That she wouldn’t leave her mother waiting and wondering all this time, not after the hellish year they’d had since Roger’s death.

  But then again, maybe the stress and loneliness of the past year had driven her nuts. Maybe Rachel was actually coming on tomorrow’s flight. Maybe Rachel was at this minute laughing with her friends, unaware of her mother’s fear. Maybe.

  At 2.00 a.m., Ellen went online and bought a ticket on the morning flight direct to Queenstown.

  ***

  Ellen stared down at snowy peaks from her window seat, 66G, back near the toilets. She and Roger had been to these very mountains long ago, before they were married. Such a chaste holiday, by modern standards. They had slept in separate dorms at the youth hostel, hiked around the impressive lake holding hands, smiled shyly at one another, and declared these to be the most astonishing mountains in the world.

  Today they just looked cruel.

  She knew, geologically speaking, that they had been thrust upwards through the earth’s crust. But from the air, they looked as if they’d been clawed from the earth by the fingernails of a giant hand.

  Three hours to go, she thought, counting down to the time she could reasonably expect to present herself at the front counter of the Te Anau police station. The tiny town where Bryan Smithton lived was the closest center of population to the wilderness Rachel had hiked into. Surely the police would find it harder to stick to cold protocol with her standing right in front of them?

  As her flight descended, a metallic glint caught her eye. Could it be a search plane? Patience Ellen. Not yet, but soon.

  ***

  Sergeant Peter Hubble willed himself to relax his white knuckles, to allow his lungs to inflate with air, and then expel it, in and out, in and out. The plane lurched as a thermal updraft caught it, and he grabbed the door handle, even though it was such a stupid thing to do. As if a flimsy metal door handle would save him from becoming a smear on a mountain. More likely he’d accidentally open it.

  In his line of work, he knew only too well how many light planes crashed in these crazy-beautiful mountains. He looked with envy at the huge airliner descending into Queenstown. This little thing was smaller than the old Mini Minor he’d driven in his student days, and rattled even more loudly. At least a big plane offered safety in numbers. You could all go down together, singing Kumbaya.

  His long legs were folded awkwardly into the cramped footwell, and the narrow seatbelt cut into his beer belly, but he wouldn’t have minded making it tighter. At least this meant I could be at Tahlia’s birthday party. It’s worth a couple of hours of near-death experience to spend time with my little girl. My little girl who just became an adult, and barely knows I’m alive.

  Ted the pilot turned his way and grinned. “We could fly over the Fiordland mountains too. Great day for thermals. Nice bit of rock’n’roll.”

  “When we get home I’m going to find some pretense to arrest you. A night in a cell would be just the thing.”

  Ted chuckled and shook his head. “That’s a very dangerous thing to say while you’re still in the air.”

  Peter closed his eyes and groaned.

  16

  Tuesday, Three Days Lost

  The first snowflakes drifted out of a lowering sky, landing soft and cold on Jack’s face as they struggled out beyond the tree line.

  He was at the back of the line again, with six people ahead of him. This morning’s decision had ended up being unanimous. They would stick together.

  And then they’d discovered this shy little valley, with what looked to be a fairly civilized mountain pass at its head. Everyone’s spirits lifted as they made good progress, hopeful of crossing to the next valley before nightfall.

  Until the weather closed in.

  Now, the temperature was dropping fast and Jack watched Sharon with concern. Every inch of progress over the uneven ground was more of a stumble than a step, and the twisting action on her ankles and knees had to be agonizing, but she just kept moving
, seemingly oblivious.

  Jack grabbed a strap dangling from Callie’s rucksack, just ahead of him, and tugged on it. She turned and looked at him with tired eyes, her breathing audible with the exertion of the steep incline. He nodded in Sharon’s direction. Callie turned just in time to see Sharon fall sideways against a large boulder. She slid to the ground and crumpled, defeated.

  Callie shouted, “Erica!”

  Further up, Erica turned around, took in Sharon’s situation at a glance, and began to clamber back down those hard-won meters of mountain. “Sharon!” she called, but there was no response.

  Progress stopped. There was now something more urgent than getting over that mountain pass.

  ***

  Jack watched Callie and Rachel huddle close to Sharon, wrapping their arms around the foil first-aid blanket that enveloped her, willing her to warm up. She showed little sign of life other than the staccato shivers that shook her body in waves. Erica and the men discussed the prognosis as though Sharon wasn’t there, and in a way, she wasn’t.

  Erica said, “I’m pretty sure it’s hypothermia, plus probably shock. It’s serious stuff. We’ve got to get her warm. Those damp jeans of hers aren’t helping.”

  “She shouldn’t be up here at all,” Kain said, with a venomous look at Jack.

  Adam said, “It wasn’t Jack’s decision.”

  “Oh really?” Kain said. “Are you quite sure we’d be here right now if he hadn’t said all that stuff about me when we were back at Poison Bay? And now we all die because Sharon can’t keep going.”

  “Stop it, Kain!” Erica hissed. “What’s wrong with you? She’s sitting right there!”

  Adam said, “Let’s figure out an answer that helps us all survive. Will she be warmer if she moves, or does she need to rest?”