Poison Bay (25 page)

Callie was still puzzling over Erica’s outburst when Jack moved close to her and spoke so that only she could hear. “Were you offended by what Kain said?”
 

She shook her head. “Kain can be a bit old-fashioned about women, but I don’t think that’s what caused that. It’s just tension between the two of them. And there’s something else as well.” She glanced across at Erica, busying herself with Rachel’s sleeping bag. “She’s trying to divert attention at the moment. Like a cat that’s done something embarrassing and then starts washing itself.” Callie narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. “I actually have a hunch it was the mention of Adam’s death that set her off.”

“Really? You think it’s grief? What a strange way to show it.”

“She could hardly say ‘I can’t stand it when you talk about Adam’, could she? So she said the next thing that came into her head. But I think it’s more than just grief. It looks like guilt, to be honest. But whether it’s because she actually did something, or just a general feeling of responsibility, I don’t know.”

He stared at Callie, and then at Erica. “She’s certainly been very weird about Adam. Ever since he first went missing, in fact. All that hanging back and long silences. We were all scared, but there was something different about her reaction.”

“I know. She knows something, I’m sure of it. But how do we get her to tell us what it is?”

“Why don’t we just ask her?”
 

It was a revolutionary idea to Callie. “But why would she tell us the truth?”

“I have a strong feeling that Erica is longing to tell someone the truth. It’s eating her up from the inside. She wants it gone from her body.”

And so they waited until Rachel was resting, wrapped in her sleeping bag in the fitful sunshine. They’d already chosen a position about ten meters away, where each could sit on a small boulder, keeping Rachel in sight, while avoiding disturbing her too much with their voices. Erica crouched on a rock adjusting the straps on her rucksack. Callie hung off at a slight distance while Jack walked up to the other woman.

“Erica. Can we talk to you please? It’s important.”

She looked up at him, and then beyond him at Callie. Both continued to regard her silently. She seemed to sense their serious intentions, and drew a deep breath, but raised no protest. “Okay.”

Once they were seated in a circle, Callie looked at Jack, his signal to take charge. Direct confrontation was his gig. She was just waiting to see how it unfolded.

Jack took the hint. “Erica. What happened to Adam?” He looked at her steadily. She blanched visibly and stared at her hands, now twisting in her lap.

“What do you mean: what happened to Adam? Why do you think I know anything you don’t?” Her voice quivered. Exhaustion? Anger? Nerves? Fear?

“Erica,” he said again, leaning just a little forward. “What happened to Adam?”

She gulped a huge breath, her glance flickering around the mountain slopes, and burst into a torrent of sobs. She hunched over her knees and covered her face with her hands, weeping uncontrollably. Callie began to move, ready to console, but Jack caught her eye and shook his head, just once. She subsided back onto her boulder, even though withholding comfort when another person’s grief was so violent was as piercing as a physical pain. She decided to trust him.

Gradually, Erica’s sobs softened a little, and Jack spoke again. “Erica.” His voice was gentle now. “What happened to Adam?”

The words were wrung from her; little more than a guttural whisper. “It was an accident.”

43

Callie was glad Erica couldn’t see the expression of utter shock on her face, and she turned her head to stare at Jack. He raised his eyebrows a millimeter.
 

“I was just checking the gun, and Adam walked up and saw me... and the landslide... and it went off... and I didn’t know what happened... and then we couldn’t find him.” Erica’s voice broke into shards on the last words and she fell again into sobs, deep and grating, her eyes squeezed closed, her face awash with tears, her nose a dripping mess.

Jack looked at Callie and inclined his head towards Erica. She took it as a signal to follow her earlier instincts. She moved alongside, and wrapped her arms about the other woman. Erica turned into the embrace and clung like a small child, her weeping becoming even more visceral for a time, and then slowly subsiding.

Jack rummaged in his pocket and fished out a handkerchief, the same one he’d been washing out in streams and drying on a rock ever since they’d entered Fiordland all those eons ago. It was not a pleasant looking square of cloth, and he quirked his mouth at Callie, his eyes questioning. She grinned briefly and reached for it, offering it to Erica. “It ain’t beautiful,” she said to Erica, “but it might be better than turning into a glazed donut.”

Erica snorted a quick laugh despite her distress, and took the proffered hankie gratefully, wiping the worst of the mess off her face, then blowing her nose lavishly. She sat back weakly, her grief spent. “I can’t believe you guys are still sitting here, after what I’ve just told you.”

“What else would we do?” Callie asked. “Walk off and leave you?”

Erica raised her eyebrows. “Or throw me in a lake.”

“Yeah, well, let’s stop talking that sort of rubbish,” Jack said. “How about you tell us how you came to have a gun.” Callie moved back to her own rock, so she could see Erica’s face better, but leaned towards her in wordless support.

Erica sighed. “Bryan gave it to me.” She rested her forehead on her right hand, still clasping the sodden hankie, staring at the ground near Jack’s boots.

“When?”

“The day before he jumped. He told me to put it in my pack, and use it ‘to make sure I was the only one’—and then he’d make sure that I got the money I needed. I had no idea what he was talking about—the only one what?—but I just put it in the bottom of my rucksack. He was completely off his trolley and I figured we’d be in a hotel the next night. And then after he died it dawned on me what he wanted me to do.” She shook her head slowly. “Man, that was one crazy guy.”

Jack said, “Did you tell him you needed money?”

She nodded. “After I got the invitation, I thought, well... he’d got in touch, and he had money, and, you know, maybe this was a way out of my problem. So I rang him in New Zealand, and asked him to help me. I have... gambling debts. Really big gambling debts.”

“How big?” Callie said.

Erica glanced at her face. “About a hundred and thirty thousand, give or take.”

Callie inhaled sharply. “Wow.”

Erica replied with an ironic tone and a roll of her eyes. “Yeah, tell me about it. At least I excel at something.” She stared at the ground again. “And I didn’t borrow it from a bank.”

“Who then?”

“Some low life I met at the casino. Acted like my best friend. But he wasn’t.”

Jack pulled the discussion back to the first topic. “So what did Bryan say when you phoned him?”

“He told me he’d think about it, and then he called me back a couple of days later, and he gave me these specifications for a particular type of gun. I had to go to a gun club—he even gave me the details of the club—and practice firing this particular gun. It seemed really creepy at first, like it might be something to do with Liana’s death, but it was a completely different kind of gun. So I thought it must be so we could shoot food or something.” She rolled her eyes. “I had no idea what it would be like out here, so that seemed the best explanation. And Bryan was always asking us to do such crazy things. Anyway, I had to learn to use the gun and then I had to come on the hike. And then he said he’d give me the money. Or ‘that I would be provided for’ were the words he used, I think.” She raised her hands in a helpless shrug. “I had no idea what he was on about, but I was desperate, so I figured, just do what the rich loony says, and you’ll get your money, and everything will be okay.” She shrugged again. “And here I am.”

Jack said, “So, what exactly happened yesterday?”

Erica sighed. “I’d been trying to figure out if I should tell everyone I had the gun, so we could use it to shoot some food or something. I’m not a very good shot, but I figured Adam would be able to use it. But I just didn’t know how to tell everyone why I had it in the first place.”

“Had you been tempted to do what Bryan said?” Callie’s tone was not judgmental, just curious.

“Well, no... but then there were moments in that first day or so when I wondered if I really could do such a thing...” She looked from Callie to Jack, and shrugged her shoulders again. “I was just so desperate. The guy who lent me the money… he was a very scary guy, and he was getting pretty intense. He told me I could either pay up immediately, or he’d send the boys round. Or I could work it off in his brothel.”
 

“Oh!” Callie was horrified. She reached across and squeezed Erica’s arm in sympathy.

“I told him I was expecting money soon, and he gave me a few more weeks, and then when this all happened… I wondered… But after Sharon died, and I saw her lying there so cold, and I thought about her little boy and her parents seeing her off at the airport, I knew that I could never take a life no matter what I had to face back home. I knew it right inside my bones. And so then I had this piece of metal burning a hole in my rucksack, wondering and wondering what to do with it.”

“But you’d taken it out, just before the landslide?” Jack pressed for the full details.

“Yes, I’d almost decided to tell everyone, and Adam had gone on ahead, and Rachel was somewhere behind me, so I took the chance to get it out, and I was leaning on a log and I just had it in my hand, looking at it, and I’d been slipping the safety catch on and off, kind of fidgeting with it, and Adam walked up, and it was pouring rain, so it was hard to see very far, and he suddenly saw what I had in my hand, and the look on his face, the
look
on his face... and I was about to explain, and then suddenly the ground just gave way and something hit me in the back, a tree or something maybe, I don’t really know, and the gun went off and everything was chaos, and I just couldn’t find Adam, or the gun.” She was silent for a moment, staring into space, ambushed by remembered trauma. She pulled herself together. “I kind of surfed down the landslide, on the top of it. My rucksack landed quite close to me when everything stopped moving, thankfully, or I’d never have found it again, but I don’t know where the gun ended up. It’s somewhere back in that horrible mess. And I didn’t even really look for it because I didn’t ever, ever want to touch it again. Oh, poor Adam. And his girlfriend!” She began to weep again.

Callie moved back alongside Erica and put her arm around her.

But Jack hadn’t finished. “Erica,” he said, and waited till she looked up. He looked her full in the eye, but spoke gently. “Did you kill Sharon?”

“No!” Her answer was violent. “No way!” She began to splutter and the words got stuck. “I didn’t… I couldn’t.” She shook her head repeatedly. “I tried to save Sharon. I tried so hard.”

“Back when we found Adam, you wanted us to believe the same person had killed them both.”

“That was so you’d look for Sharon’s killer, and not be looking for me. I was so shocked at first, when you said she’d been murdered. But then I realized…” She shrugged. “It could work to my advantage. Stop you finding out about what I’d done. If you thought there was just one killer.” She looked him full in the face again. “Because I definitely did not kill Sharon.”

He stared at her for a long moment. “Do you know who did?”

She looked away. “How could I know who did?”

“I had a feeling you might have seen something that made you wonder. That’s all.”

“Well I did. But I don’t really know. And I wouldn’t want to accuse someone when it might be quite wrong. It just seemed odd, that’s all. And then with everything else that’s been going on…” She sighed.

Callie said, “What did you see?”

“Well… I woke up that night, when Kain went for a pee. I mean he sometimes goes for a pee in the middle of the night. But…”

Jack said, “Yes?”

“Well it’s stupid. I mean, it was freezing that night. The snow had stopped, but it gets even colder when the snow stops.”

Callie frowned. “So what did he do that seemed strange?”

“Well, he put his gloves on. That’s what woke me up actually, because he was rummaging for them. It’s been in my head since you told us, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it last night.” She shrugged. “I mean, I know it was cold. It’s just…” She looked at Jack, questioning, almost hoping he could refute what she was thinking. “Well, you’re a bloke. Would you wear gloves, if you were popping outside for a quick pee?”

“Well, no. I wouldn’t,” he said, looking uncomfortable. “They’d, um, hinder dexterity, shall we say. It’s odd. Suspicious even. But it’s not proof. I’d suggest we be wary of Kain. But keep our minds open. Assumptions can be deadly out here. If someone else is following us, we don’t want to miss it because we’re all looking at Kain.” He nodded, suddenly realizing something. “But it’s good to know there’s no sniper after us.”

Callie said, “Yes! That’s one less complication for us to deal with. But then,” she glanced at Erica, “you already knew there was no sniper.”
 

“It wasn’t exactly a comfort to me. You can’t begin to understand what it feels like to know you’ve taken someone’s life. And they can never ever get it back.” She shook her head slowly and sighed. “I hardly slept at all last night. My head was just full of this horrible emptiness where Adam used to be. And pictures of that hole in his head. I tried so hard not to look, but I saw it, and I can’t stop seeing it. And it’s all my fault. Just because of worthless money.”

***

“That was quick,” said Peter, when he picked up the phone. He’d been surprised when Amber told him the pathologist had called—he couldn’t have had the body more than half an hour at best.

“I haven’t done the post mortem yet. But I thought you’d like to know straight away that this girl didn’t die naturally.”

“How can you be sure?”

“She has bruising on her face that you only get when someone uses their hands to hold your mouth and nose closed and suffocate you.”