Bay of Fires Read Free Page B

reason.”
    “She was raped?” Erica said. “Oh my God.”
    “That’s a guess until the autopsy is completed,” the older policeman cut in. He stepped forward, and Sarah was out of the shadow of his body. Sun pierced her eyes and forced her to squint. “If you remember anything…”
    “This is like in the movies,” Erica said. “If we remember anything, we’ll come down to the station.”
    “Yes, Erica. It’s just like in the movies, except it’s not, and someone did actually die,” Sarah said.
    Embarrassment flushed Erica’s face. She blushed easily. Cried easily, too. Everything came easily to Erica. The only thing Erica struggled with was failure. Sarah had often tried to assuage her younger sister’s disappointment. The desire to protect Erica remained in Sarah, but right now it was dormant, too deep to be tapped.
    Ashamed and unable to apologize for her meanness, Sarah turned away.
    Not long after the police left, the shack became crowded. Elbows resting on the veranda railing, Sarah watched through the binoculars as the police removed the body. She ignored the chatter and the feeling that she was just another nosy resident. The forensics people worked slowly. One person was taking photographs. Another, crouched beside the body, was writing in a notepad. More men, in plainclothes, watched. There were no women documenting the crime scene.
    Behind Sarah, her mother and Erica bustled about with the teapot and leftover Christmas cake and shortbread biscuits, as though this was a high school parents and friends fundraising morning tea and not the aftermath of a murder. Slurping tea from chipped cups, the visitors swapped bits of information with barely contained excitement.
    It seemed the Swiss woman had been walking to the rock pool in the middle of the day, a few days before Christmas, when she was killed. No one even knew she was missing until Roger found the body. If he hadn’t found her, there was a chance she could have washed away on the next high tide. Someone said that she had sunbathed topless every afternoon at Honeymoon Bay and laughter simmered through the crowd. They became silent when someone else added that the woman’s parents would probably fly out from Switzerland to take her body home. Sarah was the only person who had spoken to the woman, a fact she didn’t volunteer.
    Anja Traugott was alone in the Bay of Fires Guesthouse when Sarah strode in, looking for Jane. Anja had tried to speak to her. She was not Sarah’s kind of woman. Her accent, dumb and sexy at the same time, was irritating.
    Sarah had been back in Tasmania for less than a day. Everything felt irrelevant except her own reeling sadness. Sarah told herself her unfriendliness had nothing to do with the woman’s pale, pinup girl prettiness, or the fact that her clothing, tiny cutoff shorts with breasts almost falling out of her red and white bikini, was better suited to the Gold Coast than a Tasmanian national park. She wasn’t jealous, she was just preoccupied.
    But as Anja had traced her finger along Jane Taylor’s wall map of the local coast, shades of blue pillowing out from the long curving beach to the continental shelf, Sarah had stood mutely, the plastic bag of mullet she was bringing Jane hanging limply by her side.
    “The rock pool is a two-hour walk from here,” Sarah had said before leaving the woman staring at the map.
    Sarah had been to the rock pool that morning, and the water, usually so clear you could see the delicate seaweed fronds growing on the bottom fifteen feet down, was blurred with fish guts and scales. Gulls scratched over bloodstained rocks where someone had cleaned fish. But Sarah had not mentioned this.
    Sarah gripped the binoculars with damp fingers. Her hands were sweating. There were other walks she could have suggested; traversing the nearby apple and turnip farm to see the wild northern beach or hiking along the sandy Old Road past the local rubbish dump, known as the tip, and up to the