Poison Bay (36 page)

“When did you become aware Kain was involved in Bryan’s plans?”

“We didn’t know for sure until we found that survival gear in his rucksack after he was dead.”

“Why did you leave the locator beacon behind?”

“It didn’t work,” Jack said. “I wrestled with it for a couple of minutes.”

Callie looked at Jack. “I think they might be telling us it did work.”

Jack stared at the two men opposite, then sighed and leaned on his knees, his head in his hands. “You’ve got to be joking.” His voice was muffled. “I probably should add that I’m terrified of heights, and I was about to wet myself on that ledge. Perhaps it interfered with my fine motor skills, or just, you know, my general sanity.” He looked up again.

Hemi grinned at him. “I’m not scared of heights, mate, and I was about to wet myself on that ledge.”

“The PLB activated yesterday afternoon,” Peter said. He smiled. “We weren’t best pleased when we found it with no one beside it, I have to say.”

“Yesterday afternoon? But we were miles away by then.”

“We think some keas got at it.”

“Oh great. So a parrot could turn it on, but not me.”

“A parrot and a seven hundred meter drop,” Hemi said. “I took it apart last night. It’d been sabotaged. A strong metal pin straight through the mechanism. You’d never have managed to activate it. Not without a sledgehammer.”

“And it’s just as well you left it behind for a parrot to drop, as it happens,” added Peter. “A survivor from a rock fall once waited seven days at Altham Hut before a boat came by. We found you today partly because the beacon helped us work out where you might be heading.”

“Oh. Well that’s a good thing then.” He thought a moment. “So why torment me with it?”

“Didn’t mean to do that. But we were curious why you left it and kept the other gadgets, if they weren’t working either.”

“They’re a bit more complicated. I didn’t know if I might be doing something wrong and the others could get them to work. The instructions on the beacon were so simple a trained monkey could have followed them.”

Hemi grinned. “Or a parrot.”
 

Jack laughed.

Peter handed the satellite phone and GPS to Hemi from a bag at his side. “Can you tell what’s wrong with them?”

Hemi looked towards the bag, expecting more. “Got the battery for the phone?”
 

Peter in turn looked at Jack, and Jack frowned. “Isn’t it in it?”

“Nah, mate. This is an old model. Has a separate battery about the size of a house brick.”

Jack looked at Callie and raised one eyebrow. “More of Bryan’s mind games.”

“Looks like it. That’s definitely the way the phone looked when Bryan showed it to us that first night and told us how wonderful it was,” she said. “There was nothing else with it.” She sighed. “I guess he could count on us not to know what it was meant to look like. We were so passive in so many ways. We put ourselves completely in his power.” She shook her head, rueful and reflective.

Jack said, “Yes, but we weren’t to know how he was going to use that power.”

Hemi was fiddling with the buttons of the GPS. “Completely stuffed. It’s like there’s a virus in the software. I can have a closer look at it when I get home if you like.”

“No doubt it will turn out to be sabotaged too,” Peter said. “So it seems Bryan gave a set of survival gear to Kain that didn’t work. Any idea when Kain found out it didn’t work?”

“We’re not sure, but it may only have been in the past couple of days that he tested it, after Adam turned up with a bullet in his head. Kain would have suddenly realized Bryan must have had a Plan B, if there was someone out there with a gun. And then later he realized Bryan might know he’d slept with Liana, and whatever Bryan had promised him took on a different light.”

“Bryan did know he’d slept with Liana,” Peter said. “He’d checked the post mortem report a few months ago. The blood type of the baby didn’t match Bryan, but it matched Kain.”

“I see. And you probably know Bryan asked for our blood types on the emergency information form he sent with the invitation.” Peter nodded. “Well, not long before Kain died he found out we suspected him of killing Sharon.”

“So you knew she was murdered?”

“Not straight away, but Callie realized later what the bruises on her face meant. I assume that’s why you’ve taken all our gloves.” Peter nodded and Jack told him Erica’s fears about that night and what she’d seen.
 

Callie took up the tale. “Our gloves were one of the things Bryan supplied when we got here. And we all had the same brand and color except for Kain. Bryan said the shop didn’t have enough pairs in that brand. Kain joked about how his were better than ours—the lining was softer. I bet he thought he was getting special treatment. Imagine how he must have felt when he realized Bryan was just creating an evidence trail in case Kain did anything criminal with gloved hands.”

“As a lawyer, it’s surprising he didn’t think about that,” Peter said.

“When you’re in that situation out there, it gets very primal,” Callie said. “You start to feel as though none of the normal rules apply.”

“Callie also thinks Kain might have committed berry suicide when he realized Bryan had set him up, and he wouldn’t be able to get away with it,” Jack said. “The more I think about it, the more it explains the way Kain looked and acted that afternoon. You know, it was Bryan who recommended those berries in a private chat with Kain back at the beginning of the hike. Told him they were ‘almost a perfect food’.”

Peter looked grim. “That’s an especially sick thing to do. They’re probably the only deadly plant out there.”

There was a lull in the conversation while each member of the group absorbed the new information they’d learned.

Callie said, “Have you found out how much Bryan offered Kain for being his henchman?”

Peter made a quick decision to be open with them, even about this. “Kain had a copy of a will in his house leaving Bryan’s estate divided equally between the seven of you who went on the hike, or however many of you outlived Bryan by thirty days.”

Callie and Jack stared at him as they processed the implications, then looked at each other. “No wonder he wanted to get rid of the rest of us,” Jack said. “Although it’s strange he wasn’t more proactive about it.”

“Maybe he didn’t have the stomach for it, after Sharon,” Callie said.

“Or it might have dawned on him that the will would make him a suspect, so the other deaths had better be natural.”

Callie said, “But it was a fake will of course. Another trick.”

“Not fake,” said Peter, “just superseded. He made another one a few days later.”

“Leaving it all to Greenpeace.”

“No, not Greenpeace.” He weighed up whether to tell them, what to tell them, and how to tell them. “Leaving it to the six of you, excluding Kain, and if none of you outlived Bryan by thirty days, it all went to a little girl called Lily Granton. She’s the daughter of the bloke who shot Erica this morning, and she’s dying of cancer.”
 

Jack and Callie stared at their feet as a few more pieces slotted into place.

“It doesn’t justify Tom’s actions,” Peter said, “but I’ve known him eight years, and he’s always been a good guy. He thought there was a treatment in the States that might save Lily, but he couldn’t afford it. And Bryan told him you lot had murdered a girl ten years ago and got away with it. I think he lost the plot.”

Callie shook her head sorrowfully. “I can see how someone could get sucked into a thing like that, especially when they’re desperate. And now he won’t even be around to help his daughter.”
 

Jack’s voice when he spoke was low with anger. “Bryan really knew how to tap into the weakest and the worst in everybody. I felt sorry for him you know, but some things are just plain evil.”
 

“The puppet master,” Callie said. “He pulled the strings and everybody danced.”

Jack said, “Strings with hundred dollar bills twitching on the end of them.”

“So what will you do with the money?” Peter said, watching closely for their reactions. “If you live a few more weeks, you become two of the four heirs.”

They stared at him, shocked. It was obvious that neither had comprehended that part of the situation.

“As if we’d want his money.” Callie almost spat the words.

“Speak for yourself,” Jack said.

She swung on the bench seat to face him. “You’re not seriously going to take his filthy money?”

Jack’s expression was mild, as was his voice when he spoke. “It might help Sharon’s little boy. And there’s Adam’s fiancée. They had a business together. How will she cope in the next little while? Plus there’s the organizations that helped search for us—I imagine they run on donations. And there’s the little girl with cancer.”

Callie’s indignation deflated like a punctured balloon. “Oh. I hadn’t thought of any of that.”

Jack shrugged. “It’s probably all academic anyway. There’s probably no money left, or his aunt will challenge the will, and so she should, when the whole purpose behind it was so immoral. But in any case, the money itself isn’t evil. It’s just a thing that can be used by people whose motives might be good or bad. Or a mixture of the two.”

Callie was gazing off into the distance. “Just like those mountains. I really thought they were evil some days, and Bryan certainly tried to use them as a murder weapon, but they don’t actually have a morality. They just did what mountains are meant to do.”

***

William Green, television star, stood in the parking lot at the head of the jetty with his camera operator, watching the launch approach. A young police officer had asked them to wait there, but he knew there’d be no difficulty slipping past him when the time came. There never was, in these country towns. Unsophisticates always yielded to the boldness of the media.
If you act like you have the right to be somewhere, most people believe it
.

He glanced at his reflection in the window of their hire car, and gave his hair a refining tweak. It had been an effort to get the boss to agree to this particular overseas excursion. In these times of budget cuts, it was a long way to go for an uncertain story. Who knew if they’d ever even find the bodies?
 

But the missing included one of their own. And so the boss had approved it, though he gave William only three days on location, and no sound engineer.

They’d done the shots of aircraft and search teams, and interviewed experts. Most importantly, they’d got William’s face on screen—windswept on the lake shore, and in pseudo survival mode over in the dense rainforest (he hadn’t needed to go more than a few meters in).
 

Their three days had expired, but William had called Sydney and persuaded the boss to extend that by just one more day, and
voila
! The story had happened, just in time, and his “exclusive” was moments away.

There was a slight commotion at the gangway and William said to his cameraman, “Here we go!” They walked forward, the red “record” light already showing in the camera viewfinder.

William saw Callie Brown coming towards them, some unremarkable guy in a strange, one-armed jacket limping along beside her. He narrowed his eyes, gave her a considering look. The hair was a fright, but nothing a couple of hours in a salon couldn’t fix. And he noted with approval that she was supermodel thin, even thinner than the blonde he’d taken to Italy. For a few weeks at least, she’d be quite the celebrity. Perhaps he had missed her after all.

***

As she emerged from the gaggle of people helping them off the launch, Callie looked up along the jetty and saw William Green, with a little power-socket-shock of recognition. How unfamiliar he looked, even though his face had been so dear for so many months. Had he actually been worried about her?
 

Then her eyes shifted to the camera beside him. Oh. She was News now. And he’d want to exploit their previous connection to get the story that might just win him an award, or at least get him a gold star from the boss. William was wearing moleskins with an outdoorsy jacket and shirt—obviously his interpretation of wardrobe for a story set in the wilds of New Zealand. His beautiful hair was just slightly mussed—another outdoorsy touch. The corners of her mouth twitched in the tiniest of smiles.

William stepped forward with his television face and voice on. “Welcome back, Callie Brown. How does it feel to be safe at last?”

Callie felt rather than saw Jack step away from her side and edge past the television crew. Getting out of the firing line of the camera lens, yes, but also an emotional withdrawal. She could see him now past William’s shoulder, standing at a slight distance behind William, his body angled away from them, his hands in his pockets, gazing up the lake.
 

Their relative positions made it easy to look from one to the other, comparing the two men. Two journalists. One gorgeous, successful and supremely confident. The other not very tall, not very good-looking, not very anything.

The strength of her own reaction took her by surprise, and brought with it self-knowledge. She held William’s eyes in a steady gaze, and spoke to him, just two words, then pushed past him.

William stared down the jetty after her, uncharacteristically speechless. It was hardly the first time he’d ever heard those two words, but to get them from this woman, and now, of all the times! “No comment.” Had she actually said that? To him?

As Callie drew level with Jack, she lifted her hand toward him, hesitantly, suddenly unsure. Jack reached out and grasped it in his own strong hand, and looked her in the eye for a long moment. They turned together and walked down the jetty towards the shore, and Jack’s face split into an enormous grin.

***

In Poison Bay, dark water seethed and hissed over boulders, in and out, in and out, as though the ocean was breathing. Above, mountains stood back, watchful, brooding. And then they hid their heads behind a cloak of silent cloud.

THE END

Acknowledgments

It takes a village to raise a child, and a global village to produce a book. Thank you to my dear friends, family and blog readers around the world who have encouraged and challenged me through the process of creating this debut novel.