The Shattering (17 page)

Keri's place was a white weatherboard house with a wooden fence. There was a rock garden in the front and a trampoline in the back, with worn blue pads, and a vegetable garden. There was a man working in the vegetable garden, too, solid, like Keri, but bigger and a bit darker, with a square face and heavy hands. He straightened as soon as he saw Sione and lowered his spade.

‘You're the Felise kid,' he said.

‘Yes, sir.'

‘I'm not a sir.'

‘Sorry, Mr Pedersen-Doherty.'

‘Just Doherty. It's Lillian and the kids with the double barrel.' For a moment his face went hurt and tired. ‘Lillian and Keri, I mean.'

‘I'm sorry,' Sione repeated, and meant it this time. The man's face had closed up again, but he gave Sione a small nod.

‘I hear your brother died earlier this year.'

So, not really a family for light conversation.

‘Yes.'

‘Pretty rough, isn't it?'

‘Yes, sir.' He winced at the slip, but Mr Doherty appeared not to notice.

‘They say it gets easier.'

This was awful. He should have asked Keri to get her dad out of the house. ‘Kind of. It still hurts. It gets easier to do other things, that's all. And you do more of those and you, um . . . you don't forget, exactly. You can't forget. But it takes up less space in your head. You can concentrate more on your life.'

‘Is that right?' Mr Doherty said, like it was some new and fascinating revelation. ‘Keri's inside.'

Sione blinked at the abrupt change in conversational direction, but started to escape while he could. Mr Doherty already had the spade back in his hand. ‘Thanks, kid,' he said, and stabbed the rich earth again before Sione could work out if he was meant to respond.

Keri's inside
wasn't much of a direction. ‘Hello?' he called down the dark hallway. There were only a few doors, but he didn't want to open them. Keri had told them what she could about the crime scene — that was what she called it,
the crime scene
, like something separate from herself — and he didn't want to walk into a room where someone had been murdered. It wasn't like he could go into the garage at home, either.

‘I'm here,' Keri yelled, sounding impatient, and he followed her voice to the right door. ‘Just . . . fuck!'

He pushed the door open as a series of thumps punctuated Keri's curses. She was standing, good arm over her head, books tumbled around her feet. The top shelf of the bookshelf she was standing in front of was completely clear.

‘I just tugged one down and they all fell!' she complained. ‘I don't know what's wrong with me. My sense of balance is way off.'

‘Here, let me,' he said, and knelt to gather them up. The books were serious-looking nonfiction books with titles such as
The
N Z Army Guide To Wilderness Survival
and
Without a Doctor:
A Home Health-Care Handbook
. They were all hardcovers, and heavy. No wonder Keri had yelled. He looked up at her. ‘You're bleeding!'

She touched the corner of her mouth and looked at her fin gers. ‘One hit me in the face.'

‘Sit down,' he suggested, and grabbed a tissue from his messenger bag. He bent over her and moved her chin so that her face was in the sun, dabbing at the cut. She made a protest sound and closed her eyes against the light.

Keri had a pretty mouth, he thought. Not full, like Janna's, but neat and tucked in at the corners in a way he liked. He hadn't seen her smile that much, but she looked good when she did.

He was suddenly very aware that he was alone with her in her bedroom. Unwillingly, he remembered the swell of her breasts beneath her bra as he'd tugged that terrible polyester shirt over her head, the firm muscles outlined under the skin of her stomach. That skin would be soft if he touched it, and the muscles strong underneath.

Keri opened her eyes and took the tissue from his hand. ‘Thanks.'

‘I think you're going to have a bruise,' he said, proud of how steady his voice was.

‘I'm collecting them,' she said. ‘I fell on my ass again last night and whacked into the door handle twice this morning. If this keeps up, people are going to start thinking my parents hit me.'

‘Hard to know what to say when you really did walk into a door,' Sione agreed, and was rewarded with one of those rare smiles.

It vanished immediately. ‘Give me the myths and legends one?'

It was the thickest, with a worn blue cover — if that had been the one to smack her in the face she'd have more than a little cut on her lip. He was surprised she had anything on that topic and wondered if she'd thought about Janna's black-magic theory, too, but she took it from him, frowning, and flipped it open.

Sione blinked. Someone had cut out the centre part of the pages and glued the outsides together to make a box. Nestled in the space was a slim black cylinder of ridged rubber. It looked like the handle of a tool without the tool part.

‘Extendable baton,' Keri explained, and flicked her wrist. The sections hissed out, like a low-tech lightsaber.

‘What are you doing with that?' he blurted.

She gave him a careful look. ‘Self-defence. I don't want to go prowling around Rafferty's house unarmed.'

‘So why is it in the box?'

The look got more careful. ‘Mum doesn't always like the way I see things.' She tilted her chin. ‘It was a birthday present from Jake. He knew I liked to be prepared.'

‘That's useful,' Sione said. It was a dumb thing to say, but Keri nodded, looking slightly relieved. She collapsed the baton again and put it on her desk, where it joined a selection of plastic bags in three sizes, a pair of tweezers, a pen torch, hand disinfectant, four pairs of latex gloves, and a little blue toolbox labelled latent print kit no. 1. Keri pointed at everything in turn, obviously checking off an internal list, and then opened a desk drawer, muttering to herself.

Keri had clearly put way more thought into the logistics than just making an entrance plan and deciding what to wear. Sione could feel his eyebrows trying to crawl up his forehead. He turned away before she could see his expression, and went to put the books away. There was half a shelf of fiction, all things like
The Whale Rider
and
To Kill a Mockingbird
— school books. The rest was nonfiction. Survival manuals, true-crime stories, disaster histories. Biographies of rugby players, triathletes, and swimmers, which he supposed were for fun.

‘Aha!'

He turned around. Keri was triumphantly brandishing a Leatherman multi-tool. She beckoned him over, and he obediently opened the messenger bag for her to throw everything in. At least now he knew why she'd asked him to bring the bag. Keri generally had reasons, he was realising, but she didn't always get to the part where she made them clear to you. The baton she kept, sliding it into the long calf pocket of her worn cargo pants. It was swallowed by the fabric, so you could barely tell anything was there.

Someone knocked on the door, and they both jumped. ‘You kids want a cuppa?' Keri's dad called.

He's checking on us
, Sione realised, and thought again that they were alone together and of what that could mean. It was less urgent than the sick panicky desire that sometimes grabbed him around Janna. More . . . nice.

‘No, thanks,' Keri yelled back, looking entirely unbothered by any thoughts along those lines. ‘We're heading out.'

Her dad opened the door. He looked even bigger in the door frame. ‘Aren't you grounded for leaving on Christmas without telling anyone?'

‘No.'

‘Really.'

‘I have to get permission from you or Mum before I go anywhere,' she said reluctantly.

Her father tilted his chin the exact same way she did and waited.

‘So can we go?' Keri asked at last. ‘I left a note for her, I didn't just
leave
.'

Her dad grinned. ‘Be back by five. Your nanny's calling then. I told her you'd be here.'

Keri made a face. ‘We'll be back ages before that,' she promised, and hustled Sione out of the house. She tripped on a fold of carpet on the way out and stumbled into him. He caught a whiff of something in her hair as she steadied herself on his shoulder, mumbling apologies; a scent like chemical apples, not the burnt flower smell that hung around Janna. She smelled fresh and clean, and he hoisted the messenger bag, smiling to himself, and followed her down the street.

Sergeant Rafferty lived next to one of the primary schools, only a few blocks from Keri's place, exactly as Keri's map had shown. It was a sturdy house made of grey slate, with a green painted roof.

It didn't really look like the home of a serial killer — or a wicked witch — but what would? A garden with skeletons for scarecrows? A house made out of gingerbread?

Keri didn't want to enter the yard from the street, in case someone was watching, so they went into the school playground, which was full of kids trying out their Christmas presents and parents squinting in the bright light. Nobody seemed to be paying them much attention. Sione had been told to watch them anyway, in case someone did start to stare. It was easy to pick locals from tourists, he found; local kids played nonstop, yelling and running around with kites and water pistols and scooters, but tourist kids and their families, however energetic, would all occasionally pause, and, at different times, take a moment to gaze at the deep-green tangle of bush or the translucent blue sky, or the shimmering bay, and breathe in the beauty of Summerton.

It was creepy, he thought, and then did it himself, completely unaware until Keri tugged impatiently on the strap of his bag.

‘Round here,' she said, and Sione obediently followed her around the corner of a classroom block and into a little alley created between the classroom walls and the sergeant's wooden fence.

‘Give me a boost,' she ordered, and he tossed his bag over first, then cradled his fingers for her foot. She was lighter than he'd braced for and cleared the fence easily. Sione considered the problem for a second, and then got himself over at the cost of wood dust smudges on the knees of his jeans, powdery brown visible against the dark denim.

The backyard had a vegetable garden, which was losing a fight for ground against some redcurrant bushes, a green swath of grass, and a washing line, with a row of big blue shirts ruffling in the light sea breeze. Sione wished they wouldn't move like that — it made him think more about being caught by their owner.

Keri was crouched between the leafy potato plants, working her hands into a pair of latex gloves and watching the house. He thought of nature documentaries, and leopards sitting in trees — it was the same kind of restless anticipation. If she'd had a tail, it would have been twitching.

Keri considered the back door for a moment. Sione had been startled when she'd put lockpicking on the backup plan list. He wasn't keen to try it, no matter how sure she was she knew what she was doing. Luckily, there was a small window high on the wall, cracked open a couple of inches. Plan A it was.

‘Toilet window,' Keri whispered, kicking off her shoes, and Sione made a foothold for her again without being asked. He was worried about Keri's arm — and after all, she'd said her sense of balance was off — but he didn't think it would be a good idea to point that out. She was looking really unstoppable.

Keri got the window open by bracing her good hand under it and shoving up from the shoulder, which really meant she was shoving down into him. Sione stood firm, surprised at the way he didn't wobble. He hadn't been certain he was strong enough for this. He'd always been the weak one. The little brother.

Keri slithered in cast-first, without any sign of the clumsiness that had attacked her at home. He waited for thumps and bangs, but there was nothing but silence until the back door suddenly swung open, nearly giving him a heart attack right there. He picked up her shoes, and walked into the house, taking the pair of latex gloves she handed him without comment.

And that was it. They were in.

The house was quiet and warm and neat. A bachelor pad, Sione thought, looking at the leather La-Z-Boy in front of the tv, with a hollow worn into the seat. There were lots of cds and dvds in the living room and not many books, and in the kitchen there was a clay plaque with unsteady letters declaring the sergeant the world's best uncle above the fridge, which held cheese, half a container of takeaway lemon chicken, and an unopened six-pack of beer. In the single bedroom were lots of uniforms, and polished shoes, and socks and underwear, and a couple of jerseys stuffed into a training bag with rugby spikes and a ball. On the wall was a framed diploma proclaiming Francis Rafferty the holder of a bachelor's degree in Russian issued by the University of Otago on the third of July in the year of our lord 1978, and a Royal New Zealand Police College certificate from 1979.

There wasn't a wall of hair clippings. Or a careful collection of the dead boys' possessions. Or pictures of them in a file anywhere. Keri got grimly excited over a little locked box in the office desk, but Sione found the key in a saucer on the fridge, and the box turned out to hold a picture of an old lady and a gold ring. Probably Rafferty's mum and her wedding ring.