Poison Bay Read online

  And those marks on her face. Something was bothering Callie about those marks. It nibbled away at the back corner of her consciousness like a little mouse; whenever she tried to pounce on it, it darted away.

  She didn’t want her mind to be filled with Sharon’s face. Because it made her want to weep and weep and weep. So she focused with all her might on the burning pain where the melted snow was soaking through to her knees.

  And took another step.

  And then it hit her, with awful clarity.

  ***

  Miraculously, they’d finally found a pass over the mountain’s shoulder into the next valley, and were back below the tree line at last, and out of the snowdrifts. Jack had been longing for this moment. Under the trees, there would surely be less snow, less undergrowth, and it would be much easier to walk. Surely.

  For two hours they had been fighting snow-laden mountain scrub that ripped at their clothes, snagged on their rucksack straps, dragged them backwards. Sometimes it was knee-high, other times right up to their armpits.

  Bringing up the rear, there were times Jack found it easier because the others had trampled the wiry vegetation ahead of him. Sometimes it was harder because they had ground the snow and earth to slippery mud.

  Now, under the trees, instead of the clearer path of Jack’s daydreams, they encountered even worse conditions. Slippery rocks, tangled tree roots, dangling moss slapping at their faces, ferns and undergrowth clawing their bodies.

  And the worst of it was that, for each excruciating fifty meters of mountainside, they didn’t even know if they were headed in the right direction.

  They could be heading away from help, away from rescue. Away from medical people with fresh medical supplies for Rachel, who was scrambling over a vine-entangled rock just ahead of him. Away from life and into disaster.

  Yesterday morning, it had seemed so clear they needed to keep moving, that inactivity was the fastest way to certain death. But now, Sharon lay still and silent in yesterday’s valley, and Jack wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Maybe it really was his fault that Sharon was dead. He’d been so focused on Rachel he’d forgotten about Sharon. How could he face her motherless little boy? Maybe it would be better if he didn’t survive either.

  His dark thoughts were interrupted by a shout from up ahead. Adam, today’s trailblazer, had found a useful clearing and called a halt for lunch. Not that there was much to eat, just more stupid ferns—but they definitely needed the rest.

  Jack also needed a toilet break—the world might be ending, but the body kept processing. He ditched his rucksack and started staggering off into the rainforest. As he tried to cross the small stream whose course they were following, he noticed his leg trembling—with fatigue? Grief? He lost power as he committed his weight to a mossy rock, and skidded sideways, breaking his fall by grabbing a slimy vine on the way through. Oh God, I need your help. Please get us out of here. Show me what you want me to do. He became aware of noises behind him, and looked over his shoulder to see Callie following.

  “Ladies loo is thataway, Cal,” he said, pointing in the general direction of anywhere else.

  “I’m not looking for the loo, I’m looking for you.” She swayed vaguely for a moment, and said with raised eyebrows, “That rhymed.”

  “Well, I am looking for the loo, so if you don’t mind…” He left a meaningful pause.

  “I do mind. I need to talk to you. Now.” The vagueness had disappeared.

  “What’s up?”

  “Not here. Walk a bit further.”

  They struggled over the tangled terrain for several minutes more, until at last Callie was satisfied. The rest of the group was out of sight.

  “What is it, Cal?” He sank down onto a fallen tree. She slumped against a slimy boulder and wriggled her shoulders, massaging them. The heavy vegetation hung all around them, eavesdropping.

  “Have you got your camera?” She must have seen him tense, because she added, “I just want to see something. From the funeral-thing we did for Sharon.”

  He pulled the camera from his pocket and began locating the correct recording. “What is it you’re looking for?”

  “There were marks on her face, and I didn’t know why they were bothering me. But now I’ve realized they were bruises.”

  “We’re all bruised and battered.” He didn’t feel very patient just now, especially with anything Callie had to say about his video. And he wanted the loo.

  “Not like that. Rachel and I were fixing her hair, trying to make her look nice. The stupid, pointless things we do for someone who doesn’t care anymore.” She stopped and drew a deep breath. “Anyway, I was looking at her face. Up close. For quite a while. And it had these strange marks on it. I thought they were just the cold, the hypothermia, you know?” She ended on an upward inflection, asking for a sign that he understood.

  Jack nodded.

  “But it has been bothering me ever since. I couldn’t get the picture of her face out of my mind.”

  “None of us can get Sharon out of our minds, Cal,” he said gently.

  “No, it’s more than that.”

  “Here it is.” He’d reached the shot of Sharon’s face as she lay in her bag. A close-up he almost hadn’t been able to bring himself to record. But his job in the moment was just to observe the reality. The decisions about how to use it would come later.

  “See these marks either side of her nose, and this one under her chin. Her eyelids were kind of red too.”

  He toggled the controls and zoomed in on the image. “I see what you mean.”

  “I couldn’t figure out why it bothered me, and then suddenly I remembered. Like my brain had been downloading a photo for hours and then suddenly there it was in front of me.” She shook her head in amazement, but Jack was still mystified.

  “Sorry, I’ll try to make more sense. A couple of years ago, I went on a three-day course in forensic pathology, you know, a course for journalists. So we’d know what we were reporting and not write so much nonsense.”

  “Ye-es.”

  “They showed us photos of murder victims. Those shots they take up close, showing the gunpowder residue, the angle of the knife cuts. Not just crime scene photos, but the pathology ones as well. Somehow they’re even more creepy when all the blood’s been washed away. Some people were fascinated, but it made my skin crawl.”

  “Sounds gruesome. But where are you going with this?”

  “They showed us a couple of bodies as well, just people who’d died in hospital, so we could get a feel for what it was like for them to handle dead bodies. And then there was this murder victim. Laid out there on a metal table with a sheet over her. They’d saved her for last, like she was a prize or something. It’s half the reason I switched to making documentaries instead of news. I’ll never forget it, Jack, I had nightmares for weeks. A young girl, only twelve years old, and she’d been suffocated by some pervert.”

  Jack stared at Callie, and he felt a trickle of fear run down his spine and hit his adrenal glands with a slap. Tired though his brain may have been, it rebooted and started to make connections that he really didn’t want it to make. “You’re not saying…” he began, unable to finish the question.

  “Jack, that little girl had the same marks that Sharon had on her face. Exactly the same marks.”

  20

  Ellen stared out the hotel window at driving rain. The surface of the lake was covered in whitecaps. It looked like whipped lead. A tiny floatplane bobbed erratically at its moorings. The hotel’s “No Vacancy” sign swung crazily in the wind. Despite appearances this was the tourist season; she’d been lucky to get this room.

  She had actually gone to sleep last night despite her expectations, but it had been a restless, dream-filled slumber, where shadowy figures moved through her room, and she couldn’t always judge the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness.

  She’d also ordered a full dinner last night as instructed, even though she didn’t think she’d be able to
eat until she knew Rachel was safe. But the words of the policeman had been so like what Roger would have said, it gave her comfort. They also recalled the command of a wise medical specialist at the beginning of one of Roger’s long stints in intensive care: “This will be a marathon. Sleep. Eat. Keep your strength up. It won’t help him if you end up in the bed next to him.” The doctor had been proven right, and she knew the policeman also would have seen what happened to family members who neglected their own physical needs during an extended crisis. And so she’d obeyed.

  Ellen had been ambushed by the appetite that returned in a rush after the first two reluctant bites. She’d wolfed it down, the whole enormous plate of roast lamb and vegetables, and then to her own astonishment ordered apple strudel for dessert. She felt guilty enjoying it, but then imagined Roger in the seat beside her. “Good girl,” he would have said with a sharp nod. He encouraged rational behavior in times of tension, the wonderful, stupid, absent man. And so she’d focused her mind on evaluating textures and flavors, forcing all other thoughts out for at least a few minutes.

  Sergeant Peter Hubble had phoned this morning, even though he had little to report. He seemed to be telling her everything there was to tell, and that helped.

  They hadn’t yet found anyone who’d seen Bryan Smithton return from the hike. They had talked to the boatie who’d taken the group across the lake, but he had no booking to bring them back. This was unusual but not unheard-of; they might have been planning to walk out via the southern shore of the lake, a possibility given their timeframe. A group of young people just returned from hiking the same area for the past four days, and now doing laundry in the youth hostel, hadn’t seen any of Rachel’s group. Peter was going to try some of the various associations that used the wilderness. A group of eight was a good-sized crowd—people would remember it.

  Ellen’s window was fogged in places. Raindrops ricocheted off the glass like pebbles. Ting ting ting ting. Across the lake, only the foothills were visible, flat and one-dimensional against the low cloud.

  Somewhere, Rachel was out in this.

  The hotel room was warm and cozy, and Ellen could no longer bear to be so comfortable when Rachel was so cold and so lost. She grabbed her rain jacket and headed out.

  She walked blindly for about an hour, along the lake-front at first, and then through residential streets. The raindrops driving into her face felt like slivers of ice. They found their way around the hood of her jacket, insinuating themselves into the collar of her shirt, starting a trickle down her back, one vertebrae at a time. Her cheeks burned with the cold, but then stopped hurting. She realized with a start that her face was numb.

  Suddenly, Ellen was outside the police station. The lights inside looked warm and appealing, and being cold and wet didn’t seem such a good idea any more.

  She dripped onto the entrance floor, teeth chattering. Through glasses that had instantly misted with the sudden temperature change, she saw a foggy facsimile of Peter Hubble walk from the back office. He saw her and stopped dead. “Ellen.” As her spectacles cleared, she registered that there was something about him, a tension.

  “What’s happened?” Her lips were numb. “I’m not drunk, just cold.” Oh good grief, I must sound like a jibbering idiot.

  Peter grabbed her arm and steered her towards his office. “Hey Amber, would you mind getting Ellen a blanket and a coffee—she’s frozen!”

  A few minutes later Ellen was drinking sickly sweet instant coffee, wrapped in a gray government-issue blanket that was starting to smell like a wet dog.

  Her sodden jacket hung askew on a coat-stand, shedding drops of water from its lowest corner, one at a time. Every now and then it would be a double drop: plit-plit. She could hear it in spite of the buzz of the police station, and the electronic hum of Peter’s computer. She didn’t usually take milk in her coffee and it felt gluggy and thick in her mouth. She didn’t usually take sugar either. Sweet drinks were for shock. So they thought she was in shock. Or soon would be.

  Her face was burning as the blood started to flow again, and her fingers looked weird around the coffee mug in the fluorescent light. Blotchy.

  She had to know what Peter’s news was. And yet she could wait about 100 years for it. Until he told her, it wouldn’t have to be true.

  “It’s not Rachel.” He began at the most important fact, with the wisdom of a man who’s had to give a lot of bad news. “A man’s body has been found.”

  She swallowed and said nothing. It wasn’t Rachel. Her heart soared. And then she felt guilty. What had it come to if she could be happy about someone else’s grief?

  “It was seen washed up on rocks along the coast by a tourist vessel. The rescue chopper is bringing it here now.”

  “Was it one of Rachel’s friends?” Why were they calling the body “it”? Surely it should be “he”.

  “We don’t know who it is yet.” He drew a deep breath. Perhaps he couldn’t decide how much to tell her. How much he was allowed to tell her. How much she could take, more likely. “It’s the body of a man in tramping clothes. With a pack still attached. Nothing much in the pack—it’s all fallen out. No ID on him that they could find so far.”

  A thought coagulated in Ellen’s mind. She tried to sound intelligent. “If it’s one of Rachel’s friends, I might recognize him. It’s been a few years since I’ve seen most of them, but maybe I can help.” Inside, she recoiled from the thought of having to look at a dead man, especially one so young. But if it might help her daughter…

  Peter paused. He seemed to be making a decision again. “It seems he’s been in the water a few days. He won’t be easy to identify.”

  Apparently, Peter was trying not to be gruesome. “Oh. Will you… will you do a post mortem here?”

  “Invercargill. But they’re bringing him here first in case he’s a local and we can make a preliminary identification.”

  “He” now. Not “it”. But how could they identify him if he wasn’t recognizable?

  “Peter, please tell me the truth. Believe me, I’m not as crazy as I seem, and there is nothing you can tell me that will be worse than what I can imagine all by myself.”

  He sucked in a breath through his teeth, and then shrugged. “Okay Ellen, I’m trusting you to take this in strictest confidence. I’m being open with you because if it was my kid out there, I’d want to know what was going on.” She nodded.

  “The body is a tall, thin man with dreadlocks. It may take several days to get a positive ID, and we may be wrong but… there’s a possibility it’s Bryan Smithton. That’s why they’re bringing the body here first. We may be able to tell, to a reasonable degree of certainty, whether it could be Bryan, as several of us know him fairly well.”

  Ellen let the words filter through her consciousness. Her mind ran aground on a piece of verbal debris. Dreadlocks. Straggly, messy thing to do with perfectly nice hair. Long was okay. She was at uni in the seventies after all. But since when did clean cut Bryan Smithton go in for dreadlocks? The facts, Ellen. “If it did turn out to be Bryan,” she said, careful to use the same kind of indirect, non-committal language Peter was using, “then that would probably mean the rest of the party were still out there, because otherwise they would have reported the death.”

  “Yes.”

  “They would be in difficult and unfamiliar terrain, without a guide.”

  “Yes.”

  “They may not have been able to contact us because the communications equipment was in Bryan’s rucksack.”

  “Yes. Or they might not know how to operate it.”

  “And whatever event caused Bryan to fall into the water could have affected other members of the party.”

  He looked straight at her. “Yes, it would be a matter for serious concern. But on the upside it would also release us to start some serious search and rescue.”

  Ellen wrapped her hands around the coffee mug. She absolutely must stay calm, and so she studied the way the light from the window was hitting
the mug, a chunky graceless thing in mustard yellow, with a chip out of the rim right where you wanted to put your lips. She took a sip and felt the heat run down her throat and pool in her stomach. Sweet and milky. She concentrated on the sensation of it until the fear steadied.

  “So we wait for that helicopter,” she said.

  “Yes. And then we’ll know what to do next.”

  21

  Callie had maneuvered herself near the back of the lineup, right in front of Jack, as they continued their rainforest scramble. She slowed her pace so the others would pull ahead of her, as she looked for an opportunity to talk to him alone again. When she stopped and turned, he looked at her intently.

  “Are you very, very sure about those marks on Sharon’s face?” he said.

  “I wish I was just imagining it. But I’m absolutely certain now that they match what I saw on that girl. Someone deliberately suffocated Sharon. While I slept right there beside her.”

  Jack rubbed his face vigorously. “Do you have any theories about who might have done it?”

  “None that make me happy.”

  “Let’s hear them.”

  “It’s one of us. Or it’s someone else, maybe someone acting on Bryan’s orders. Or it could even be Bryan, I guess.”

  Jack tilted his head and gave her a funny look. “Are we being chased by the undead now?”

  “Hardly, Jack. But what if he—I don’t know—had an oxygen tank ready where he jumped in. Something like that.” She lifted her arms in a large shrug. The suggestion was foolish, embarrassing almost, and yet it had to be said.

  Jack opened his mouth to speak, and she could tell his instinct was to say it was a crazy idea, but then his face changed, and he paused. “I suppose he was pretty organized. It’s not completely impossible. Not that much crazier than everything else that’s happened.”

  He was silent for a minute, thoughtful. “So… Bryan, if he had the oxygen tank thingy, would have done it because he wanted us all dead. Wouldn’t it be better though to leave her alive to slow us down?”