Authors: Belinda Pollard
Ellen’s window was fogged in places. Raindrops ricocheted off the glass like pebbles. Ting ting ting ting. Across the lake, only the foothills were visible, flat and one-dimensional against the low cloud.
Somewhere, Rachel was out in this.
The hotel room was warm and cozy, and Ellen could no longer bear to be so comfortable when Rachel was so cold and so lost. She grabbed her rain jacket and headed out.
She walked blindly for about an hour, along the lake-front at first, and then through residential streets. The raindrops driving into her face felt like slivers of ice. They found their way around the hood of her jacket, insinuating themselves into the collar of her shirt, starting a trickle down her back, one vertebrae at a time. Her cheeks burned with the cold, but then stopped hurting. She realized with a start that her face was numb.
Suddenly, Ellen was outside the police station. The lights inside looked warm and appealing, and being cold and wet didn’t seem such a good idea any more.
She dripped onto the entrance floor, teeth chattering. Through glasses that had instantly misted with the sudden temperature change, she saw a foggy facsimile of Peter Hubble walk from the back office. He saw her and stopped dead. “Ellen.” As her spectacles cleared, she registered that there was something about him, a tension.
“What’s happened?” Her lips were numb. “I’m not drunk, just cold.”
Oh good grief, I must sound like a jibbering idiot.
Peter grabbed her arm and steered her towards his office. “Hey Amber, would you mind getting Ellen a blanket and a coffee—she’s frozen!”
A few minutes later Ellen was drinking sickly sweet instant coffee, wrapped in a gray government-issue blanket that was starting to smell like a wet dog.
Her sodden jacket hung askew on a coat-stand, shedding drops of water from its lowest corner, one at a time. Every now and then it would be a double drop: plit-plit. She could hear it in spite of the buzz of the police station, and the electronic hum of Peter’s computer. She didn’t usually take milk in her coffee and it felt gluggy and thick in her mouth. She didn’t usually take sugar either. Sweet drinks were for shock. So they thought she was in shock. Or soon would be.
Her face was burning as the blood started to flow again, and her fingers looked weird around the coffee mug in the fluorescent light. Blotchy.
She had to know what Peter’s news was. And yet she could wait about 100 years for it. Until he told her, it wouldn’t have to be true.
“It’s not Rachel.” He began at the most important fact, with the wisdom of a man who’s had to give a lot of bad news. “A man’s body has been found.”
She swallowed and said nothing. It wasn’t Rachel. Her heart soared. And then she felt guilty. What had it come to if she could be happy about someone else’s grief?
“It was seen washed up on rocks along the coast by a tourist vessel. The rescue chopper is bringing it here now.”
“Was it one of Rachel’s friends?” Why were they calling the body “it”? Surely it should be “he”.
“We don’t know who it is yet.” He drew a deep breath. Perhaps he couldn’t decide how much to tell her. How much he was allowed to tell her. How much she could take, more likely. “It’s the body of a man in tramping clothes. With a pack still attached. Nothing much in the pack—it’s all fallen out. No ID on him that they could find so far.”
A thought coagulated in Ellen’s mind. She tried to sound intelligent. “If it’s one of Rachel’s friends, I might recognize him. It’s been a few years since I’ve seen most of them, but maybe I can help.” Inside, she recoiled from the thought of having to look at a dead man, especially one so young. But if it might help her daughter…
Peter paused. He seemed to be making a decision again. “It seems he’s been in the water a few days. He won’t be easy to identify.”
Apparently, Peter was trying not to be gruesome. “Oh. Will you… will you do a post mortem here?”
“Invercargill. But they’re bringing him here first in case he’s a local and we can make a preliminary identification.”
“He” now. Not “it”. But how could they identify him if he wasn’t recognizable?
“Peter, please tell me the truth. Believe me, I’m not as crazy as I seem, and there is nothing you can tell me that will be worse than what I can imagine all by myself.”
He sucked in a breath through his teeth, and then shrugged. “Okay Ellen, I’m trusting you to take this in strictest confidence. I’m being open with you because if it was my kid out there, I’d want to know what was going on.” She nodded.
“The body is a tall, thin man with dreadlocks. It may take several days to get a positive ID, and we may be wrong but… there’s a possibility it’s Bryan Smithton. That’s why they’re bringing the body here first. We may be able to tell, to a reasonable degree of certainty, whether it could be Bryan, as several of us know him fairly well.”
Ellen let the words filter through her consciousness. Her mind ran aground on a piece of verbal debris. Dreadlocks. Straggly, messy thing to do with perfectly nice hair. Long was okay. She was at uni in the seventies after all. But since when did clean cut Bryan Smithton go in for dreadlocks?
The facts, Ellen.
“If it did turn out to be Bryan,” she said, careful to use the same kind of indirect, non-committal language Peter was using, “then that would probably mean the rest of the party were still out there, because otherwise they would have reported the death.”
“Yes.”
“They would be in difficult and unfamiliar terrain, without a guide.”
“Yes.”
“They may not have been able to contact us because the communications equipment was in Bryan’s rucksack.”
“Yes. Or they might not know how to operate it.”
“And whatever event caused Bryan to fall into the water could have affected other members of the party.”
He looked straight at her. “Yes, it would be a matter for serious concern. But on the upside it would also release us to start some serious search and rescue.”
Ellen wrapped her hands around the coffee mug. She absolutely must stay calm, and so she studied the way the light from the window was hitting the mug, a chunky graceless thing in mustard yellow, with a chip out of the rim right where you wanted to put your lips. She took a sip and felt the heat run down her throat and pool in her stomach. Sweet and milky. She concentrated on the sensation of it until the fear steadied.
“So we wait for that helicopter,” she said.
“Yes. And then we’ll know what to do next.”
21
Callie had maneuvered herself near the back of the lineup, right in front of Jack, as they continued their rainforest scramble. She slowed her pace so the others would pull ahead of her, as she looked for an opportunity to talk to him alone again. When she stopped and turned, he looked at her intently.
“Are you very, very sure about those marks on Sharon’s face?” he said.
“I wish I was just imagining it. But I’m absolutely certain now that they match what I saw on that girl. Someone deliberately suffocated Sharon. While I slept right there beside her.”
Jack rubbed his face vigorously. “Do you have any theories about who might have done it?”
“None that make me happy.”
“Let’s hear them.”
“It’s one of us. Or it’s someone else, maybe someone acting on Bryan’s orders. Or it could even be Bryan, I guess.”
Jack tilted his head and gave her a funny look. “Are we being chased by the undead now?”
“Hardly, Jack. But what if he—I don’t know—had an oxygen tank ready where he jumped in. Something like that.” She lifted her arms in a large shrug. The suggestion was foolish, embarrassing almost, and yet it had to be said.
Jack opened his mouth to speak, and she could tell his instinct was to say it was a crazy idea, but then his face changed, and he paused. “I suppose he was pretty organized. It’s not completely impossible. Not that much crazier than everything else that’s happened.”
He was silent for a minute, thoughtful. “So… Bryan, if he had the oxygen tank thingy, would have done it because he wanted us all dead. Wouldn’t it be better though to leave her alive to slow us down?”
“Look at how her death has affected us. It’s slowed us down emotionally. When we were trying to save her, we at least had a united purpose.”
“And someone he set up to do it might have done it because…?”
“He could have paid them. Money is a powerful motivator.”
He nodded and chewed his bottom lip. “Bryan certainly has access to plenty of motivation. And one of us… why would we do it?”
“Because she was a liability,” said Callie, softly. “She was slowing us down, making it harder for the rest of us to survive.”
“I could have done it, you know. Did you think of that, before you came to me?”
“I did, actually. But the fact is, I just don’t believe it was you. I don’t know if I’m being irrational, but if you ever decided to kill someone, I can’t imagine you bothering to hide it.”
He gave a wry smile. “Yeah, if I’m always belting people over the head metaphorically, why not physically?”
She laughed, and then became earnest again, with an edge of awkwardness. “Anyway, I’m willing to trust my gut on you. For what it’s worth. I do trust you, Jack. And I’m sorry about those things I said about your video.”
“Yeah.” He looked her in the eye. “That hurt like hell.”
“I know. I just don’t get it, the way you can do it, because I’m different. I get too caught up in the emotion of the moment.”
He shrugged. “Makes you good at the human interest stories.”
“Whereas you’d make a good war reporter, like those ones embedded with the troops back in World War I. You’re the real thing. I know so many journos who feed on other people’s pain, and for a minute I was afraid you’d become one of them. But that was stupid. There’s nothing cynical about you.”
He shrugged again, but his look was warm. “I just think the truth is worth telling. Whether I like it or not.”
“And you have to keep telling it, Jack. If we don’t get out alive, that video is our message to our families and the world. They have to know what really happened out here and why.”
***
There were still several hours of daylight left, but the rock bivvy they’d found on the side of the valley was just too perfect to pass up. A dry and flat platform for six sleeping bags, no need to set up the tents. Extra undercover space for their cooking fire, and even some dry twigs and leaves, caught in the crevices, that they could use to get a fire started and dry out some wood. The gas was all gone now, but they still had matches.
Ironically, it was Bryan, the man who wanted them dead, who’d trained the group to recognize a good natural camp when they saw it. Callie caught herself wondering yet again:
Did he train us so we’d have a sporting chance, or could he just not stop himself from teaching? If Ranger Bryan and Murderer Bryan were to arm-wrestle, which one would win?
Kain was silent as he laid out his sleeping bag, radiating frustration. He’d argued they should keep going while the light and the weather were good, but he’d been outvoted. Again.
Everyone was exhausted, and wanted an end to this woeful day. And it was so much harder to keep on going, when they didn’t even really know where they were going. Another tree, another log, another rock. Were they closer to the end, or just circling?
Maybe sleep would erase the mental pictures Callie wanted to delete. Sharon in her orange body bag. So still and so alone, as they all trudged off and left her with only the indifferent mountain for company.
Callie was longing to speak to Jack again, to work out what they were going to do with her discovery about Sharon’s death. Most particularly, whether they would tell the others. But Jack had gone off with Adam to look for wood and perhaps, maybe, hopefully, something to eat. They’d taken the spear that Adam had fashioned yesterday, sharpening a long, straight stick to a vicious point with his hunting knife. So far, he’d not managed to skewer anything on it, despite several lunges at startled birdlife. But there were fish in the river. They’d seen them, a silver glimmer here and there in the sunlight. The water was too deep at that point, but there must be some shallower parts. And if anyone could catch some food, it had to be Adam the outdoorsman. Callie sent up a message to whoever might be listening:
Please let us be lucky today
.
They would need some greenery to go with whatever the two men brought back. “Anyone wanna help me go choose some veggies?” Callie asked. “The lads have gone to the meat department.” She wasn’t sure she should ask Rachel to move again, with carbs in such short supply. However, she also wasn’t sure if she should leave her there alone to play gooseberry with Kain and Erica. Even if the lovebirds were still sharing a tent, the flirting had stopped and they were not that nice to be around. Sore feet and chronic B.O. were a bit of a romance killer, apparently.
In the end, both Rachel and Erica went with Callie, leaving Kain to his dark thoughts. Ferns were plentiful at this altitude, so they gathered a good supply, including some for tomorrow.
“I’m getting pretty tired of these, three meals a day,” Erica commented, as she snapped off another tip.
“I know what you mean,” Callie replied. “But the risk of trying something else just doesn’t seem worth it, if we’re only doing it for variety. At least we know these give us something in the tummy without killing us.”
Erica inspected a couple of the curly tips lying in her hand. “There must be at least a few carbohydrates in them, since we’ve got a certain amount of energy each day. But they’re hardly a balanced diet.”
“They say people can survive for weeks without food, so long as they’ve got water,” Callie said.
“Hopefully we’ll be found before we get too skinny,” broke in Rachel, a sharp edge to her voice.
“What’s wrong?” said Callie in quick concern.
“I’m sorry. It’s just that… well… I can’t survive for weeks on nothing.” Her eyes filled with tears. “And I’ve had to use so many test strips to keep track of my blood sugar since we stopped having regular food… If they run out…”