Authors: Belinda Pollard
38
Friday, Six Days Lost
Jack was just standing from strapping his injured knee with duct tape as a makeshift support when Callie approached him, quiet and intense.
“Have you got Adam’s hunting knife? I can’t find it.”
He shook his head, and then stared at her as an awful thought crept in around the edges of his exhaustion. He hadn’t had the heart to wake Callie, and so he’d kept watch the whole night, amazingly managing not to fall asleep. And no one had attacked Rachel. But now as they packed up camp, he was paying for his chivalry with leaden arms and legs and a sluggish brain tickled by paranoid thoughts.
He decided to take a forthright approach to the missing knife. “Has anyone seen Adam’s knife?” he asked loudly, feigning unconcern.
Everyone paused in their duties, looked around and shook their heads. The women started looking at the ground, searching for it. Kain cast a glance around the area, but then resumed his packing up.
“Who had it last?” Jack said. “Who gutted the fish?”
“I did,” Rachel said. “But I rinsed it off and left it here on this rock to dry. The sheath was over there, I think.”
A search of the rocky clearing and even up into the edges of the trees failed to turn up the knife. Jack was left with two equally unpleasant possibilities. Either someone was indeed following them, and had managed to take the knife from right in their midst without being seen—probably in the night, if it had been left out.
Or one of the team had it.
***
“What do you make of the knife situation?”
Jack was bringing up the rear again, and Callie had angled the question back over her shoulder, her voice quiet.
They’d moved out above the tree line into alpine scrub that was tearing at their clothing and tangling around their feet. The sky had lifted enough to give a panoramic view of the the lofty rounded cirque at the head of the valley before them and the sharp mountains marching away into the distance behind them. With the rest of the team still in view, the discussion—even the fact they were having one—had to be discreet.
“I guess there are limited options,” he replied to her back. “Either, one of us took it, or someone else who’s following us. And it was taken either to be used as a weapon, or to stop us being able to use it for food.”
“I’ve been racking my brains, trying to remember when I last saw it. It was on that rock while we were eating, I’m sure of it, because I can see it in my mind, over Erica’s shoulder… but when we were rinsing off the dishes, I don’t think it was there any more.”
“If that’s right, it would probably mean one of us has it. But it’s hard to know how we prove it, short of insisting that everyone empty their packs.”
“And whoever has it could slip it into someone else’s pack too. To divert suspicion.”
Jack raised his eyebrows. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Probably just me being paranoid anyway. I don’t trust anyone now. Even Rachel. My best friend.” She stopped a moment and half-turned to look back at him. “Do you know, this morning I was even wondering if she might have more insulin than she said.” She lifted her hands up in an expansive gesture. “She could even have some extra energy snacks squirreled away in her pack.”
He stared at her, thunderstruck.
“Yeah, I know, crazy stuff.” She turned and continued clomping her way up the mountain.
But Jack found the thought taking insidious root in his mind, and beginning, just slightly, to grow. “What if it’s not crazy?” he said. “We’d virtually ruled her out because of it—I mean, why would she put herself in mortal danger? But that’s based on the assumption that she didn’t know about it beforehand. That she wasn’t prepared. I think we’ve got to let go of that idea and rethink the whole situation. Not just for Rachel, for everyone.”
She stopped abruptly and turned to look at him again, her mind obviously crowding with thoughts. “You’re right! If one of us knew Bryan was going to do it, it changes everything. But why would Bryan tell someone what he was planning, that’s what we need to figure out. And who.”
Up ahead, Jack saw Kain stop and turn to look back along the line. He’d stayed close to them today, not gone ahead on his own, and Jack hoped that was a positive sign of reconciliation, although sometimes little insinuating thoughts suggested there might be a different reason for it. “Keep moving,” he said to Callie. “We’re being watched.”
She set off again, and soon after, so did Kain further up the mountain, but it was a while before she spoke. “You know what we’ve got to do, Jack? We’ve got to go right back to the beginning. The death of Liana started all this. We’ve got to stop thinking about what we know about everyone now, and trying to interpret little hints and looks which lead us nowhere, and go back to what we knew about everyone ten years ago. If Bryan took someone into his confidence, who would it be, and why? That’s where we’ll find the answer.”
Jack thought for a while. “We’ll be stopping for a break soon. Why don’t we just ask everyone what they remember?” He was looking at the ground, searching for the next secure foothold among the scrub, so that when Callie stopped and turned he almost cannoned into her. He staggered back a little and looked at her face.
“No Jack, don’t do this one your way. The direct approach won’t get us what we want this time. They’ll just clam up. They already think we’re investigating them all. We have to be subtle—make them think it’s their idea to talk about it.”
He frowned. “You think?”
She nodded. “Yes, I do. Trust me.”
39
The search radio exploded into life so loudly that Peter heard it all the way down the corridor in his office, although he couldn’t make out the words. When the excited exchange stretched on for several minutes, he decided to investigate. He arrived in the search room in time to hear Hawk saying, “We’ll get a chopper out there straight away.”
“What have we got?”
“A tourist plane has sighted what could be a body in one of those big orange bags, way up here.” He pointed to the colored pin he’d just stuck into the map. The northern section of the map. Nowhere near the search area. Neither mentioned the debate between Amber and Tom two days earlier.
“High elevation.”
Hawk nodded. “They flew back over it for a second look. It’s lying in fresh snow, with what looks to be a rucksack alongside.”
Peter narrowed his eyes in thought. “Yesterday’s rain would have washed away any tracks.”
“Yep. But they saw a faint track heading south east.”
“Are we relocating the search to that area?”
“Already happening.”
Amber spoke. “Peter, I finally heard back from the marine search advisor. Bryan Smithton most likely went into the water in the north of the park, possibly Poison Bay or a little south of there.”
Peter’s mind swirled with possibilities and uncomfortable recollections. Would this nameless body inside the orange bag still be alive if they’d started from the north instead of the south two days ago? “Where’s Tom?”
“He went out in a search plane.”
40
When they stopped within view of what they hoped was a usable mountain pass, the cloud was beginning to break up and jagged peaks loitered at a discreet distance. Alpine daisies bloomed around them in the tussocky grass, making Callie wonder if Julie Andrews might leap out from behind a bush and start singing. Even Jack was apparently struck by it and his camera was out again. The venue for their snack was glorious; the snack itself, less so. Even shafts of otherworldly sunlight glistening on the scurrying river far below couldn’t make up for the taste and texture of yet another handful of crunchy ferns.
“You know,” Callie said to no one in particular, “when I was busy neglecting my potted fern at home, I had no idea one could save my life one day. I’ll be more respectful after this. Anyone else got ferns at home?”
Erica laughed, but it was not an entirely happy sound. “I’ve got one on the kitchen bench, but if I get home again, it’s going outside.” She stared at a fern tip in her hand, turning it over. “You know what they remind me of? That fern Liana used to keep in her bedroom. She made such a fuss of it. She even gave it a name—the sort of name your elderly uncle might have. The stupid things that go through your head out here... just this morning I’ve been walking along trying to remember the name of that fern.”
“Reginald,” interjected Rachel.
“Yes! That was it!”
A little smile of shared memory went round the group.
And there it was. The conversational opening. Liana. Jack got so far as to open his mouth, but Callie shot him a warning glance, and he closed it again.
And so Rachel spoke instead in the gap. “I’ve been thinking such a lot about Liana today. And what Bryan said. Do you think it’s our fault she died? Even Liana blamed us.” Rachel’s eyes became focused on a point a few meters in front of her, but they seemed to be seeing not the alpine scrub of Fiordland, but a Brisbane living room buzzing with mosquitoes on a hot November night, and a small and delicate teenager, holding a shotgun jammed under her chin. “ ‘None of you will help me’, that’s what she said.”
Silence. Finally, Erica spoke. “I actually think Callie was right in what she said back at Poison Bay, when Bryan was about to jump. It stuck in my mind, and I keep going back to it. We didn’t kill Liana. Liana killed Liana.” She sighed. “We could have all done better than we did, of course.”
“Did she talk to you about the baby?” Callie said.
“Yeah.” She sighed and shrugged. “I was supposed to be her best friend, but I was pretty disgusted with the whole situation, to tell the truth. The night she died she made that big speech as though she was in the deepest despair, but she didn’t say any of that stuff when she spoke to me. I wish she had. It all just seemed to be about convenience. Her life plans and how they couldn’t be messed up. Not missing the start of the year at acting school. Keeping her figure. I couldn’t see why it was such a big deal—as if she wouldn’t have sprung back into shape anyway, at that age. So I told her she should have thought of all that before she got herself pregnant. And…” She slid Kain a significant look. “Well, Kain probably knows what else I was disgusted about.”
He stared at her. “How would I know what you were disgusted about?”
“Are you really going to pretend you don’t know?”
He remained silent and became very still.
Erica turned to the others and lifted her hands in a broad shrug, but she seemed to relish the telling. “Liana said she didn’t know if the baby was Bryan’s or Kain’s.”
Rachel inhaled sharply, and put her hands over her mouth. Callie stared at Erica, then Kain. His nostrils flared slightly, but he looked away, staring down the valley.
“But she… I thought she loved Bryan,” Rachel said. “She said… that night she looked straight at Bryan and said, ‘You say you won’t love me any more if I don’t have this baby.’ If she didn’t love Bryan anyway, why would she care what he thought?”
“She needed his money to do it,” Erica said. “Bryan wouldn’t give it to her, and everyone else seems to have said no as well.”
After a pause, it was Rachel who spoke. “Did she ask you for money, Kain?”
He was silent so long they all wondered if he’d even heard, but he did answer at last. “No, she didn’t. I didn’t even know she was pregnant until that night.” He raised an eyebrow. “But maybe she asked Adam.”
“What do you mean?” Erica’s tone was sharp.
“I caught them at it one time. At her place, when her parents were away. On a sleeping bag up the back garden behind the fruit trees.”
“Yeah, Adam told me he’d had a fling with Liana,” Jack said.
“What a mess,” said Rachel.
Callie said, “Can we be certain that she didn’t love Bryan? People do funny things sometimes. And from what I’ve seen, people don’t sleep around unless something’s a bit messed up in their lives.”
“In Liana’s case, probably just practicing for future movie roles,” said Erica, and Rachel gasped. “Oh come on, didn’t you ever wonder what a girl like Liana was doing with a weirdo like Bryan? A
rich
weirdo like Bryan.”
Callie said, “Yes, I admit I did wonder. But then, love is blind and all that.”
“I’ve always thought love had its eyes wide open, where Liana was concerned,” Erica said. “Bryan was besotted with her, and he could pay her way through college, give her all the things she’d need to get her career started. Maybe I was just jealous of her, but I thought she was a bit of a calculating bitch, to be honest, even though she was my friend. And I still think it, even though it makes me feel horrendously guilty.”
Kain said, “She
was
a calculating bitch. The only thing she ever loved was Bryan’s money. She just used the rest of us for fun.” There was a deep current of bitterness beneath his words, and the thought landed in Callie’s mind:
Kain really loved Liana. Is that why money is so important to him? Because it was the thing she wanted that he didn’t have?
“What would you have done if she’d asked you for help, Kain?” said Erica.
“I’d have asked her to keep the baby. I’d have offered to marry her. I was that much of a fool back then.” Erica looked like he’d just punched her.
Callie said, “Did she ask you for help, Jack?”
“Hardly. She’d have known what I thought. But Bryan asked my advice. I told him to stand firm.” He grimaced. “That worked out well.”
“You couldn’t have known what was going to happen,” Rachel said.
“No, but I could have tempered my ideals with some common sense. And given him a few hints about how to make her feel like it was a blessing instead of the end of everything.”
Another silence stretched, until eventually Callie spoke. “I just don’t know how to make all of this fit with the picture of someone so desperate they’d blow their brains out.”
Jack said, tentatively, “I’ve wondered, sometimes, if she really meant to do it.”
The group stared at him. Rachel said, “Do you think the gun went off by mistake?”