The Shattering (2 page)

No, Jake was dead. He wasn't in a better place. Everything left of him was in the ground, where it would rot.

Two weeks after the burial, I was in Summerton's only department store, trying to find a replacement pair of jeans. Janna van der Zaag walked up to me and said, ‘If you want to find out who murdered your brother, follow me.'

So I did.

Janna was short and cute when she was seven. At seventeen, she was tall and skinny and gorgeous in a perky blonde-and-milky-complexion way, which was probably one of the reasons why she put on eye makeup like she was painting the house and dyed her hair every two weeks (right now it was shiny purple-black) and wore black velvet blazers and plaid skirts.

The other reason was that she was in a band.

She looked right at home in the alley between Lauer's Department Store and Mimi's Muffins, leaning up against the red-brick wall behind the rubbish-filled skip, wanting to talk to me about murder.

‘Hi, Stardust,' I said. ‘I thought you only came out at night, with the other vampires.' Ever since primary school, everyone had called Janna Stardust: van der Zaag
Zigzag
Ziggy Stardust
Stardust. So it's not actually a cool nickname, but she acts like it is.

Normally this is the sort of thing that gets me a reputation for being a bitch, but Janna didn't seem to care that I'd just called her a bloodsucking creature of the night. She probably thought it was a compliment.

‘Do you believe me?' she said. ‘About the murder?'

I looked at my fingernails, all bitten down to raw nubs. ‘Not yet. But it makes sense.'

She nodded. ‘No note, right? No warning?'

My interest sharpened. ‘Right.'

‘I knew it. Exactly the same thing happened to Schuyler.'

I very nearly said, ‘Who's Schuyler?' but then my brain got in the way. Schuyler was Janna's older brother. He'd killed himself ten years ago by hanging himself in the garage. It happened about three weeks after I broke my arm on the flying fox.

‘Someone murdered your brother?' I said instead, and Janna nodded again, tugging at her collar with black-painted finger-nails. Hers weren't bitten at all.

‘And yours.'

I leaned my head to one side. ‘Huh.'

‘You're weirdly calm about this,' she said.

‘I'll cry later,' I told her. She rolled her eyes, so she might have thought I was being sarcastic, but I was telling the truth. I felt like a girl-shaped open sore, walking through a world made up of salt and lemon juice. But there was a limit to how much anyone could cry in public, and I'd reached that limit at the tangi, tears rolling down my face while the aunties clustered around me.

I refocused. ‘If you think they were murdered, shouldn't you go to the police?'

She laughed. ‘In this town? I don't know who the murderer is, but he'd know I'd been talking in about ten minutes. Twenty, tops.' She made a gesture at her throat.‘ And then I might “suicide.”'

She had a point, even if she was being typically melodramatic about it. It didn't take long for gossip to get around Summerton.

‘I want you to meet someone,' she said.

‘Who?'

‘This guy I know. He gets here from Auckland tomorrow.'

I choked on a laugh. ‘Wait, he's a tourist?'

‘Sione's a really good guy!' she said, defensively, as if being a tourist and being a good guy were mutually exclusive. As far as I could tell, they were. Summerton is a tourist town. People got worried a while ago when an earthquake destroyed the famous limestone Steps to Heaven, which stood just off the coast, but the tourists keep coming every summer, and the money keeps rolling in. In fact, there are more visitors now than ever before. Other towns on the coast have lost young people to the cities and old people to retirement. Thanks to the tourists, Summerton's still going strong.

But no one actually likes the tourists, though people like Janna are happy to party with them. In my experience, most of them are rich snobs, and the ones our age are only interested in surfing, snogging people of the opposite gender (mostly other tourists), and leaving puddles of vomit drying on the streets for me to dodge when I did the paper run.

‘He lost someone, too,' Janna said.

‘Has he looked under the couch?' I asked.

Janna gave me a look that said I wasn't following the script, and then proved she had a sense of humour by giggling. But she looked guilty afterward. ‘Are you doing okay?' she asked, and her voice was soft and kind.

Up until then, I had been just about enjoying the conversation. Sure, Jake had been a big part of it, like every other conversation I'd had for the past few weeks. But Janna hadn't bothered to keep her voice low and her gestures gentle or even, right up to that point, ask me how I was.

‘How do you think I feel?' I said.

‘How I felt,' she said. ‘How Sione feels.'

I rocked back on my heels and considered it.

‘We'll meet tomorrow at the Kahawai to show you something,' she said. ‘Eight pm. Okay?'

‘Okay.'

‘Well,' she said, and made a sort of uncertain gesture. ‘And . . . I can't believe I didn't start by telling you that I'm really sorry. Because I am.'

‘It's okay. We're not exactly friends.'

‘Well, we used to be. And Jake was always nice to me.'

Jake was always nice to everyone. I took a deep, deep breath against the hurt and the tears. ‘See you tomorrow.'

Other people might have tried to hug me, but Janna just nodded and walked away, the thick soles of her red platform shoes making no sound on the bitumen. I sniffled for a while, then took more deep breaths of leftover-food stink. How could anyone wear black velvet in this weather? She must have been sweating like a pig under all that makeup.

I wondered if she was pulling some kind of joke. I didn't really know much about her now, and people change a lot from when they were seven. We didn't play pretend anymore; I played rugby and she played bass. Not that you couldn't do both, but we didn't. We were in the same English class (I was okay; she sucked), and we knew each other enough to say ‘Hi' and ‘Good game' and ‘Good gig.'

That was about it.

But I was pretty sure she wouldn't do this to me, not after Schuyler. Her intense face had said she believed every word coming out of her mouth. So she was delusional or had been fooled by this Sione guy — or she was right. Jake had been murdered.

I scrubbed my eyes with my T-shirt hem. I didn't have what I'd come for, but I didn't want to go back to Lauer's and buy inferior jeans from Candace Green or let anyone in Summerton see me and think, ‘That poor Keri, she's been crying again.'

I had to get through the holidays. The holidays and then one more year of school and the holidays again. Then I could get out of here. Go to uni in Christchurch, or head to London for a working holiday, or anything to get away from Summerton and the room I couldn't go into and the memory of Jake laughing all over town and heavy and wet in my lap.

I rode home with the sun on my back, warm through my T-shirt. It rains a lot on the West Coast — outsiders joke that it should be called the Wet Coast — but Summerton has the kind of summers you read about in books. Long, warm, dry days, perfect for swimming or lazing around with a book or doing a bit of a hike in the green and shady bush. But maybe not so good for biking along Iron Road, up the hill, past the fancy hotels and time-share apartments, to the places where real people actually lived. There was sweat pooling unpleasantly at the base of my spine.

I coasted down the concrete driveway, leaned the bike against the garage, and slammed my way into the kitchen. I needed a shower, a cold drink, and some quiet to think about what Janna had said.

Mum was waiting for me, still in her clean white blouse and black trousers, but her sleek, blonde hair was falling out of its French knot, and her eyes had that red pinched look.

‘Where have you been?' she snapped.

‘I went to buy jeans.'

‘You didn't tell me you were going out!'

‘You were at work.'

‘You could have dropped in. You have to tell me when you go places, Keri!'

‘No, I don't,' I said, and she reached across the kitchen island and slapped me. I stared at her for a moment, then slapped her back.

‘Oh,
God
,' she said, and spun away to lean over the bench.

‘I won't do it, Mum,' I said. ‘Not ever.'
Damn Jake anyway
, I thought, and then felt guilty for the rage. My hand was stinging, and pain and anger and guilt went around and around in my brain. Grief was so exhausting.

‘I know.' She gulped and wiped her eyes. ‘I'm sorry. I had a tough day at work, and then you weren't here and I worried. I shouldn't have slapped you.'

‘I'm sorry, too,' I said. I was wondering about evidence. Maybe there'd been something peculiar about Jake's body — a dropped cigarette butt or something, anything to point to a murder and not a suicide, something to prove that Janna wasn't being weird and crazy. The police had investigated, of course, with officers coming across from district headquarters in Nelson to assist the locals and everything, but they'd mostly seemed concerned with making sure that Dad had his firearms licence and had followed the safety rules.