Poison Bay (26 page)

Peter swore, his tone fierce. “So now I have to figure out who did it, and find a way to prove it. Unless they’re all guilty somehow. And if not, I wonder if they knew she’d been murdered when they packaged her up.”

“Not necessarily. The bruising doesn’t come out straight away. Even if any of them could have recognized what it meant. She was found in snow wasn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“They could have thought it was just hypothermia. Her gear isn’t very good. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had some trouble staying warm, the poor little sweetheart.”

“And now I’ve got a murder investigation to run as well, in the middle of the biggest search we’ve ever had.”

***

“I wish we could find that knife,” Jack said. He looked at Kain’s pack, resting against a rock only a few meters away.

“You think it’s in there?” Callie said.

“Don’t know.” He swung to look at Erica. “Have you got the knife?”

“Absolutely not!” Erica was affronted by the question.

“Don’t be precious. You just told us you had a gun until yesterday. We need to be totally open with each other if we’re going to survive. And you were the last one to use the knife last night. I didn’t see you use it because I was quite busy sulking at the time…” He shrugged in self-deprecation. “But judging by the results, you must be pretty good with a knife. All that medical training perhaps. You could have taken the knife for security, not necessarily to use it on anyone.”

Erica’s temper flared. “So now that I’ve told you the truth about Adam, you’re going to suspect me of everything else as well, are you?”

Jack wrinkled his nose thoughtfully, and stayed quite calm. “Well, wouldn’t you do the same if the positions were reversed?”

She thought about that for a moment, and her anger subsided. “Well, probably, yes I would. But I seriously didn’t want to kill Adam, and I didn’t kill Sharon, and I don’t have the knife. Truly.”

Callie was now staring at Kain’s pack. “Do you think we could?”

Erica said, “Could what?”
 

“Search Kain’s pack.”

She swung round to look, and now three pairs of eyes were fixed upon it. Wondering.

“How would he react if he knew we’d done it?”

“If there’s a knife in there, and we get it back, I don’t really care how he reacts,” Jack said.

“No, me neither,” Callie said. “Although… we probably should think about what he might do. He’s pretty strong, even without a knife. If it does turn out that he’s dangerous, and we confront him, what might happen?” She looked at Jack, but it was Erica who spoke.

“If we found the knife, we could just take it, and not say anything. He wouldn’t even know until he went looking for it later. And he could hardly say anything about it, could he?”

Callie laughed briefly. “Yeah. Who stole the knife I stole earlier? But it might make him a bit weird, when he realized it was gone.”

“But would he realize?” Erica said. “It’s so hard to find things in these stupid packs. They’re so long and narrow. Whatever you want, it’s never on the top. He might just think it had slipped down to the bottom. He’d have to take every single thing out to be absolutely sure it wasn’t there.”

“I don’t like the idea,” Jack said. “I’d rather be honest about it with him. But then you know what I’m like. Blundering in and just saying what I think.” He shook his head. “But think about when he’d be able to check the contents of his pack without us seeing. When he’s alone in his tent. At night when we’re all asleep, and vulnerable. Surely it’s better to get his reaction at a time that we control, when we’ve got the best chance of managing it.”

Callie nodded and sighed. “Of course, we’re assuming the knife is in there. What if it’s not?”

Erica gasped. “You’re right. It might not be Kain at all. It might be someone following us. This whole thing is making me so paranoid. He’d probably be able to tell we’d been through his stuff, and imagine how that would make him feel. He’s already feeling left out as it is.”

“Has he told you that?” Callie said.

“Not in those exact words. But yes, he feels it.” She glanced at Jack. “He knows you don’t like him.”

Jack felt the rebuke, and it was justified. “I’ve been trying a bit harder with him since last night.”

“Yes, I know,” Erica said. “I think he’s been trying a bit harder too. What do you think?” The question was for Callie.

“He’s been a bit different since the plane,” she agreed. “Something changed.”

Jack was alert. He’d noticed a difference too. “What did you think it was?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe the conversation about Liana,” Callie said. “Or the plane itself? The thought of how hard it is to get rescued out here, and the fact that we need each other if we’re going to survive. But he was thrown by my question about whether Bryan knew he’d slept with Liana. The look in his eyes. It was like I’d hit him with a taser.”

“I saw that too,” said Erica. “I’ve been wondering, the last couple of hours… Well, you know how Bryan spoke to me before we left Australia? I was part of Bryan’s plan somehow, even though I didn’t understand it at the time. What if I wasn’t the only one? What if he spoke to Kain as well? If he had, what might he have promised Kain? It would make all the difference in the world, if Bryan knew about Kain and Liana. You can’t trust a man who knows you’ve betrayed him.” She sighed. “But then, it’s probably just more paranoia.”

Or maybe not
. Jack felt the suspicion flower within him all over again, and longed to search that pack. But, looking up the mountain, he saw Kain returning. Still about twenty minutes away over rocky moraine, but the little group would be fully visible to him. They couldn’t search his pack now.

44

Erica’s confession had to be shared, and there was no easy way to do it. At least, not one that Jack could think of.

He said, “Just before you tell us about the route, Kain, we need to tell you and Rachel something important we’ve just found out.”
 

He looked at Rachel. The rest seemed to have revived her, but she was definitely weaker than on previous days.
Then again, aren’t we all?

“The good news is, there’s no sniper following us,” he said. “The bad news is, Erica shot Adam. Accidentally. With a gun Bryan gave her.”

Rachel gasped in shock and turned towards Erica. “No. You didn’t! You couldn’t!”

Kain stared at Erica, his eyes narrowed. “Why did Bryan give you a gun?” He emphasized the word “you”.

Callie gave Jack a look that didn’t seem entirely supportive.
 

Erica struggled under their scrutiny. “It was just… I asked Bryan for money, and he said… Well he gave me… I didn’t understand… and then there was the landslide and the gun went off…” She became incoherent and trailed off miserably.

“Money!” Kain exclaimed. “So, you killed Adam for money!”

“I didn’t! It was an accident. You don’t understand…”

“And you slept with me and said you loved me and all the time you had a gun under your pillow, did you, thinking about how to kill me for money?”

“No! It wasn’t like that.”

“And you let me hunt for Adam and worry so much about him, and all the time…” Rachel trailed off and stared at Erica, her eyes brimming with tears. “How could you make us all search and wonder, when all the time you’d killed him yourself?”

“I didn’t know. I knew the gun went off, but I didn’t know it hit him. I didn’t.” She buried her face in her hands and began to weep without inhibition.

Callie frowned in distaste and stared at Jack. “Well, that went well, Einstein. Perhaps we’ll nominate you for a Nobel Peace Prize.”

“I was trying to cover the main points quickly,” he muttered. “We’ve got to get back on the trail.”

“And now we’ll spend twice as long putting the group back together. Ever heard of ‘more haste, less speed’?” She stood, and spoke briskly. “Okay, listen up, you lot. Erica, stop blubbing. Rachel and Kain, you’ve got the wrong end of the pineapple, so stop calling Erica a murderer, and listen.” Everyone looked at her, even Erica, though she still sobbed quietly. She pulled Jack’s grungy hanky out of her pocket and started to wipe her face.

Callie gave a more detailed explanation of Erica’s story, one that covered motivations and feelings. Her embarrassment about the gambling debts. The uncertainty of how to admit she had the gun. The shock of the landslide and its aftermath.
 

A long silence followed, but Rachel’s expression had softened a little. “I guess I can see how you could get yourself into a mess like that.”

Erica shot her a thankful glance, and fresh tears began to well in her eyes.

“I can’t,” Kain said, his face hard. “We only have her word for how it happened. How do we know she didn’t shoot Adam on purpose?”

“It’s a reasonable question,” Callie said, her voice mild. “But then, why would she shoot Adam? He was our best asset, with all his wilderness skills. If I was going to cull this group, and I wanted to make it out of the wilderness alive, I wouldn’t start with Adam.”

“Maybe not,” said Kain, his voice silky and dangerous as he gave Erica a poisonous stare. “But you might start with Sharon.”

Rachel inhaled quickly. “Did you kill Sharon?” Her expression was agonized.

“No!” Erica said, desperate. “I swear to you, I’m not the one who killed Sharon. I tried so hard to save her. I did everything I could.” She gave Kain a hard stare. “But we could ask where you went that night, Kain.”

“Oh, what, so the little murderer wants to blame me now, does she?”

Erica stared at him, her expression intense. “Please look me in the eye and tell me you didn’t kill Sharon. Please Kain. I have to know. You went for a pee in the middle of the night, but you wore your gloves.”

He huffed. “So what? It was freezing that night.”

“I think that’s a weird thing for a guy to do, and Jack agreed with me.”

Don’t bring me into this
. Jack cringed internally. But it was too late. Kain turned on him.

“Oh, so you’ve all been yarning round the campfire and deciding that good old Kain’s a murderer have you, just because he gets cold hands?”

Callie said, “Erica, why did you bring Jack into it? It was your idea, so own it. Don’t go making even more trouble between Kain and Jack. How are we going to keep this team moving if you stir them up like that?”
 

“I’m sorry,” Erica said. “I didn’t mean to…”

Callie turned to Kain. “What actually happened was that Erica mentioned it, because it had been playing on her mind, like lots of things are playing on our minds out here, and when she asked, Jack agreed that he probably would find it inconvenient to wear gloves when going for a quick slash in the middle of the night. Stop thinking you’re so important that we can’t stop talking about you. We’re all wondering about each other, and it’s making us crazy, which is exactly what Bryan wanted. So how about we stop fighting and suspecting each other, and get on and decide what we’re going to do next.”

There was a long pause while everyone readjusted their minds, and then Callie spoke again. “So, Scout, what did you find up the mountain?”

Kain stared at her for a long moment, his eyes steely, and then apparently relented, at least a little.

“It’s a hard climb,” he said, his voice flat and controlled. “Very hard for non-climbers carrying rucksacks. Past that cliff-edge we can see, there’s a fairly long section where we’ll need to sidle along a narrow ledge. I’ve been right along the ledge and you can get around the end of it onto a boulder field. Some hard scrambling there—pulling ourselves up by our arms, a lot of it. But once we get past that, I can see a section of that tussocky stuff, quite a large area, and I hope it should take us over into the next valley. Or at least give us somewhere reasonably flat to camp the night before we come back down, if we have to.”

He’d been looking at all of them during the speech—except, significantly, Erica—his eyes flicking from one to the other, but now his stare settled on Jack.

“So, what’s your recommendation?” Jack said.

“I don’t make recommendations. I’ve learned that much.”
 

Rachel frowned, and Erica stared at her feet, but Callie spoke up.

“Oh, stop being such a grump, Kain.” She sounded irritable. “We’re all just doing the best we can.” She looked from him to Jack and back again.
 

Kain redirected his stare to her, and remained silent.

Jack sighed and rubbed his face with both hands. He felt constrained, as though he couldn’t take part in the decision. But then, that was undoubtedly Kain’s goal, so he decided to proceed as though the discussion had been civilized. He struggled for a mild expression to paste onto his face.

“Do you think the ledge is wide enough for us all to manage it?” He kept his voice neutral.

Kain shifted his stare back to Jack, but didn’t reply immediately. In the end, he settled for a neutral voice too. Some kind of detente. “If we’re careful, we should all be able to do it. There’s a bit of a swing to get off the other end of it, which I found easy enough, but it will be harder for a shorter person.” He didn’t look at Erica, the shortest person there.

Callie joined in. “And the drop from the ledge?”

“Ten meters or so. Not huge.”

Jack looked around them at the sweep of cliffs. The shadows were beginning to lengthen, but the long summer twilight and the thinning of the cloud cover gave them extra time. “What are our chances of making it to that grassy area before dark?”

“It looks to me like we could probably do it in two or three hours. But it won’t be easy.” Kain’s eyes slid to Rachel. “And it may tax our strength quite a bit.”

“I couldn’t bear to go back the way we came,” Rachel said, her voice catching. “We have to get out of this valley.” Her glance flickered round the group. “Please.”

Jack gave her an assessing look, and then glanced at Callie, who raised her eyebrows briefly. They couldn’t navigate by emotion if they wanted to reach the lake and safety. But they also couldn’t keep going if they were utterly demoralized. Whoever said an army marches on its stomach only had half the story; an army marches on its spirits, especially when there’s next to nothing in its stomach. “If we went back, we’d have to go the other side of the river anyway,” Jack said, squinting down the valley. “That major landslide would be hard to get around. And the ocean is that way. We don’t want the ocean, we’ve been to the ocean. We want the lake.”