Bay of Fires Read online

  Several people were sitting in front of the shop, under a plastic banner saying Real Espresso Coffee, $2. Sarah vaguely recognized them; they belonged to an extended family who had camped at the back of the lagoon from Christmas until Australia Day ever since she could remember. The woman straddled the picnic table’s wooden bench. She held a pie in front of her mouth with two hands and a can of Coke was wedged between her sprawling thighs. Her wide bra straps cut into sunburned skin flaking off her shoulders. Unfortunate looking, or salt of the earth, was how Mum or Erica would describe a woman like that.

  Everyone did it, made assumptions without bothering to find out the truth. Until she moved up north she had thought it was a Tasmanian characteristic, the result of living in an insular place. Of course it wasn’t. More than once Sarah had been mistaken for a lesbian. She kept her shoulder-length hair slicked away from her face and held back with a plain rubber band. She never wore makeup, and her clothes were functional: bobbled T-shirts left over from her university days or aquaculture conferences. Jeans and old clothes were practical when you were feeding fish.

  The woman outside the shop was speaking through a mouth full of pie. It was hard to tell if the two men were listening. They smoked and drank iced coffees while looking down the road. The short man finished his drink and popped the carton under his foot. He tossed it through the air toward the bin as Sarah approached. Milk droplets rained in front of her.

  “Bunghole, you’re a bastard,” the woman said, adding for Sarah’s benefit, “Sorry, love.”

  “No problem.” Sarah forced a smile.

  Keith Gibson, known to everyone as Bunghole, was jockey-small with a solid beer gut. He wore a blue wifebeater and tight grubby jeans that slunk down over his flat bottom. He wasn’t looking at Sarah; he was distracted by something happening on the other side of the road. A policeman Sarah had not seen before leaned on the open door of his car, staring down the gravel toward the boat ramp. There was nothing to look at except an empty paddock of yellow clumpy grass on one side and shabby peeling paperbarks hiding the beach on the other. Parked in the black sand at the top of the boat ramp was an empty boat trailer attached to a dusty sedan. Sarah pushed her way through the multicolored fly strips; Pamela would know what was going on.

  Coins clunked on Pamela’s counter. “Here’s your change. Sixty cents. Where are your manners? Good boys. Thank you.” Pamela spoke to the young boys she was serving as though they were her own children. She turned to Sarah, her blond bobbed hair swinging as she shook with excitement.

  “Sarah. Sweetheart. Your mother told me what happened. I can’t believe it. You poor thing.” Her fingertips were flashes of vermilion darting through the air. “You know, I saw Roger Coker lurking in the phone box when I opened the curtains this morning.” Although there was no one else in the shop, Pamela lowered her voice. “I said to Donald, he’s probably ringing the sex line.” She put her hand over her mouth and laughed. “I can’t believe I said that, given what’s happened today. No one can believe it; murder in paradise. Two murders in paradise.”

  Sarah picked up a bottle of Hartz mineral water. There was no point trying to speak until Pamela had finished.

  “My heart goes out to the Crawfords. I can’t imagine how they’re feeling. The same beach where Chloe was last seen. The same jolly beach.”

  Australia had fixated on Chloe Crawford’s disappearance. Her family had rented one of the fishing shacks down at the wharf for a week last summer. Sixteen-year-old Chloe had taken one of the shack’s surfboards down to the beach late one afternoon, the hazy hour before dusk when anyone who knew better would not dare to swim for fear of sharks. From what Sarah could remember from the news coverage at the time, Mr. and Mrs. Crawford were bush folk. He had a massive beard; she wore her hair in two long plaits. Chloe was their only child.

  The surfboard was never found, nor were Chloe’s shorts, T-shirt, towel, and sunglasses which her mother had seen her leave with. It was unlikely that Chloe was simply lost at sea. Sarah’s parents and Pamela and Don had helped search; everyone had. They had not found a single trace of the girl.

  Pamela took a deep breath and exhaled with both hands on the counter. “Everyone is saying there’s a serial killer. I’m not joking, Sarah.”

  Sarah tried not to laugh. There probably was a serial killer out there, but Pamela’s blatant excitement about it was comical. It was as if she had won one hundred dollars on a scratch-and-win ticket.

  “I feel sick thinking about it. I need something to do.” Pamela ducked her head under the counter and pulled out a green bottle of disinfectant. Citrus-scented vapor rose as she sprayed the counter in fast bursts.

  Pamela wiped the counter, speculating on how authorities would contact the dead woman’s family in Switzerland and describing the reactions of customers as she told them the news. One woman had wondered if the ocean was now contaminated and whether it was safe to swim.

  “I don’t understand why you went up there. It’s not what anyone needs to see,” Pamela said. “You’ll have nightmares.”

  “I’ll be all right.” More than once Sarah had wondered how her mother could stand being best friends with Pamela. Gossip dressed up as concern never fooled Sarah.

  “Anyway. You saw Roger…at what unearthly hour were you on the beach?”

  Measuring her words in terms of how they would sound repeated to the next customer, Sarah told her the story. For once Pamela listened carefully, nodding as she slid candy cobbers, teeth, bananas, freckles, and milk bottles into piles for her one-dollar lolly bags.

  “It’s awful,” Pam interrupted, raising her voice as an elderly man and woman entered the shop. “I’ve been coming here every summer since I married Donald, and I cannot believe that someone could be killed—murdered, for goodness’ sake—in a sleepy holiday village like this one.”

  The couple looked up from the ice cream freezer. Sarah pretended to be fascinated by the overpriced tackle. There was no way she was going to be drawn into a discussion about Roger Coker and Anja Traugott with strangers.

  The man paid for two Billabong ice creams and they stood there eating them as Pamela repeated the story. She was unstoppable.

  “The police think she was dumped out at sea in a boat. They’re down there now, talking to the fishermen,” Pamela concluded.

  “You’ll scare your customers away,” Sarah said when the couple finally left. “If people think there’s a psychopath living here, they might all pack up and go back to town for the summer.”

  “Good. I’m sick of everyone already and it’s not even January. Take them.” She waved away payment for the fishing hooks.

  Pamela followed Sarah outside. The police car had gone, and the sunburned woman was climbing into the passenger seat of a sky blue Hilux, indifferent to her floppy shorts riding up so the baggy beige cotton of her underpants showed.

  “Make sure your father locks the front door tonight, sweetheart. It bothers me that they sleep with it unlocked.”

  “You too, Pamela. Keep safe.”

  “Please. No one’s going to be messing with an old girl like me.”

  In the driver’s seat of the Hilux, Bunghole pressed his cigarette to his mouth with curled fingers. Ferret, Sarah thought, and then caught herself. She sounded like Mum and Erica and Pamela. The woman slammed her door shut, and they all gave the thumbs-up as the truck skidded onto the road.

  “Aren’t those campers revolting?” Pamela waved as the Hilux jolted away.

  There was a ledge at the southern end of the gulch where Sarah had once caught seventeen cocky salmon in one afternoon. Many summers had passed since. The orange lichen–covered rocks were smoother against her bare legs, the water colder and clearer than she remembered. She took a squid tentacle out of the bait container and slid it onto a hook. The second hook she baited with a pilchard. She cast out and waited.

  In her twenties when she used to fish here, she had nothing more pressing on her mind than the fish she would catch. Sure, s
he worried about pointless things, people usually. Jane’s sad smile when children stopped to pat one of her dogs as she walked by the lagoon; her mother’s need always to check with John before she did anything; Pamela’s tendency not to listen properly, which Sarah felt was caused by her thoughts being helplessly elsewhere. A person’s dignity was fragile, capable of being fractured by a glance or the wrong word. She used to worry about other people; now it was herself she could not stop thinking about.

  Three lines later she saw Roger Coker, high on a rock above a swirling kelp eddy. His presence startled her; she had thought she was alone. He waved a finger before turning away and hiding his face toward the ocean. Roger was strange, but not as strange as everyone enjoyed believing. He wasn’t that much older than Sarah, maybe forty, but he had the surrendered, hunched posture and parched skin of a man who had lived for much longer. Sarah remembered him wandering the beach when she was a child, wearing a long-sleeved shirt and trousers even in the middle of January, never swimming, sometimes sitting shyly near the mothers or paddling in the shallows. He became even more self-conscious when Sarah and Erica turned into teenagers. He still waved and smiled but didn’t try to speak to them anymore, often spending hours crouching half hidden in the dune grass, watching the families splashing in the lagoon.

  Slowly reeling in empty line after empty line, checking the baits and recasting, Sarah began to breathe more easily, and each swing of the rod became smoother. Her eyes slid along the watery horizon to Sloop Rock and the point where the wooden jetty, built for the trains carrying tin, once stood. Everyone said that was where the woman had been murdered and thrown into the sea.

  Her finger felt the line tighten and she wound it in. The cocky salmon had gone for the pilchard. Its mouth opened and closed, its body writhed, as she slipped the hook out of its flesh. A quick twist to the neck and it was dead. The fish stiffened and spasmed; she tossed it in the bucket. She removed the squid tentacle. When she cast out again, both hooks were loaded with a pilchard.

  The salmon were funny like that. On any given day they would prefer either one bait or the other. It depended on what was around; if they had been feeding on a school of pilchards, they would take the squid bait. If, like today, she was catching them with pilchards, it meant the ocean was probably full of squid. It would be a good idea to return with the squid jig tonight.

  Sarah squinted to see through the haze caused by shiny afternoon light. The water slapped the rocks with more insistence, the black mass of kelp shifting and folding with the waves. She didn’t hear Roger climb down the rocks.

  “I didn’t have nothing to do with that girl,” Roger said. “Nothing.”

  “You scared me,” Sarah said.

  He grinned, showing the blackened broken teeth, reminding her of the nickname Smiley they had secretly called him since they were teenagers.

  “Murderer. They called me a murderer. I know them. I’ve seen them with their parents.” He was muttering and looking out to sea, so it was difficult to understand what he was saying.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Those kids.” He gestured beyond the lagoon, toward the camping ground.

  He produced a shell from his pocket, one of the common sturdy crustaceans that the tide left in arcs along the beach. It formed a creamy circle in his dry, leathery palm. He slapped his back and the top of his head, demonstrating where the shells had hit him.

  Sarah finally understood. “They’re children. Don’t worry.”

  “I never met the Swiss woman. When the first one disappeared, I was up in the Douglas Aspley chopping wood with Uncle Les. Don from the Bay of Fires shop saw us getting petrol for the chainsaw in Douglas River. Can you tell them?”

  “No one thinks it was you, Roger.”

  He crouched down to inspect the contents of her bucket. The top of his bent neck was dark red and freckled; beneath it was a slender stretch of delicate skin so pale it was possible it had never been exposed to sunlight.

  “Cocky salmon. Pilchards will catch something. Squid’s running.”

  His way of articulating her thoughts rattled her. He was peculiar. She didn’t mind talking to Roger Coker here on the rocks in sight of the shacks, or anywhere on the main beach, but she wouldn’t want to be alone with him any other place. One summer when she was seventeen or eighteen he had followed her across the rocks.

  “I’d make a good husband,” he had said as though they were continuing a previous conversation. “I own the house. I don’t drink like some blokes. I’d let my missus work and go into town…whatever you wanted.”

  She had told him she had a boyfriend. It was a lie, but he had nodded as though he expected this, squatting with his hands cupped around his eyes. She could see the reddened skin of his stumpy hand, chafed where his fingers should have been.

  “If you’re not interested, you can tell your sister. I don’t mind,” he had said.

  As creepy as the conversation was, it still made Erica and Sarah laugh.

  His was a lonely life. He lived in a blackberry vine–covered cottage with old newspapers for curtains and rusting car skeletons in the yard. No one cared how many fish he had caught when he came home each night. She imagined having sex with him before she realized what she was thinking, immediately halting the image of his inexperienced panting, his dirty fluids contaminating her body.

  Think of something else, quickly. Pamela said he had had a girlfriend once, a shy, chubby woman who bought toilet paper and kitchen cleaning spray at the store. Someone saw them walking on the beach. Apart from that, no one had seen Roger with anyone, except the uncle who came down to fish a couple of times each summer.

  “Any idea who murdered that woman?” Sarah said.

  “Nope.” He replaced the lid on her bucket. “It’s not hard to kill a person. It is harder to kill a snake than a person.”

  A larger wave washed up behind her, cold seawater smacking over her head and shoulders, so she yelped. Roger laughed his high-pitched giggle, eerie in the long, quiet afternoon.

  “Don’t worry about a bit of water. The only thing a pretty lady like you needs to worry about is that you’ll be next.”

  When he was gone, Sarah turned back to the ocean. After every encounter she had with Roger her skin felt damp and prickly. Although she hadn’t touched him, had never touched him, he left her with a foul residue of intimacy that made her guts slide.

  Knee-deep in the shallows, Don wore the flaccid expression of someone lost in thought. Sarah splashed water at him and he startled. Amicably he splashed back. He had seen dolphins. There had been a pod of them, maybe as many as seven, pirouetting out of the waves. It was worth waiting for. They watched in silence for a few minutes.

  “Pamela said you had a boyfriend up in Queensland?” Don said.

  “Not anymore.”

  “Oh. What happened?”

  “You know. Ended.”

  “Got it. Some blokes don’t know a good thing when it’s staring them in the face.”

  “Something like that.”

  She waved good-bye and continued making her way to the point where she planned to swim. The hard wet sand felt pleasant under her bare feet. Sarah was glad that Don didn’t ask any more questions. He never said much; it was one of the things she liked about him.

  Initially, that had been one of the things she liked about Jake. As she got to know him, his silences lost their sexiness. Jake was dissatisfied with everything: his car that kept breaking down; his flatmate who earned more than him doing fly in, fly out for a coal mine up north; his dog that wouldn’t obey an instruction; and, eventually, he was dissatisfied with Sarah. She should have realized what was happening sooner, taken a gauge from the increasing tension of their squabbles or the lack of real conversation between them. Instead, his discontent had festered until it exploded that night at the Pineapple Hotel. Maybe if she had had someone to mull it over with, things would have turned out differently. But she was hardly a woman who found the dissection of a relationshi
p to be a worthwhile conversation topic.

  Sarah had little time for talk. Consequently she had few female friends. That didn’t bother her. She was comfortable in a world where neurotic conversations about weight, husbands, job stress, or other people’s business, followed by confidence-boosting pep talks, did not exist. She would miss that about the fish farm, where insults about one another’s weight, attractiveness, or genitalia were routine. Nothing was off limits. Even others’ families were targets. If the guys became too revolting, she concentrated on the computer spreadsheet or double-checked that the automatic feeder was set correctly and pretended she hadn’t heard.

  Sometimes they tried to shock her.

  “You ever been put on the spit, Aves?” one of the guys asked one day.

  Sarah had a thick hide; she wouldn’t have lasted fourteen years in the industry otherwise.

  “I’m not giving you visuals for your wank bank. Get back to work.”

  She was the boss, so the blokes had no choice about that.

  Thirty meters offshore was a rock reef covered in shiny black mussels. To harvest the mussels, you had to float across slippery fingers of bull kelp and haul yourself onto the rock. As kids Sarah and Erica had often dared each other to jump over the tangling kelp fronds and into the sea. Sarah climbed up and surveyed the tightly packed shellfish. Panfried in butter and sprinkled with chopped parsley, they were a snack Erica and Flip enjoyed. They were too chewy to be Sarah’s favorite food, but her mother often commented on how well they went with champagne. Sarah chose ten of the biggest, ripping them off the rock with a firm hand, and placed them in a plastic bag, which she tied onto the strap of her bathing suit. They would enjoy the treat.

  As she prepared to dive back in, a childhood memory halted her. Once, on this very rock, Erica had shoved her. She had lost her footing, rough shells grating the skin off her thighs as she slid into the sea. In those terrifying minutes as she sank and struggled in the kelp, Sarah had thought she was going to drown.