Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

“Didn’t want to go. Did he have a good reason?”

“He said he doesn’t like his teacher because she isn’t nice to her husband.”

“Not nice… to her… what? I don’t get it.”

“Nels said she was married to her husband but kisses another man.”

Suzette’s new coffee arrived, and she tried not to watch the taut young waiter saunter away. “I still don’t understand. Did he see her kissing another teacher?”

“No.”

“Then how-”

She suddenly understood. Nelson just knew.

“Aaah.”

“Yep,” agreed Bryan.

Inklings. Feelings. Nelson had them. Quincy didn’t. She shivered at the prospect that Nelson might turn out like Nicholas.

“He’s napping now,” explained Bryan. “I guess gutting a two-hundred-dollar phone takes it out of a bloke. Maybe call later, explain to him some stuff about women and kissing and misplaced love and all that stuff I don’t understand because I’m married to the woman of my dreams?”

“You’ll go far, charmer. I’ll ring and tell him he’s going to school or going to sea.”

Bryan laughed. “How’s Nicholas?”

“He’s… I honestly don’t know. Sick, Mum said.”

“Hm. And you?”

She could hear the caring gravity in his voice. She knew what he meant. The image of Gavin’s broken teeth in his shattered jaw leapt again into the front of her mind and her stomach tightened.

“I’m okay.”

“Okay. Call later. Come home soon.”

They said their goodbyes, and then Suzette was staring at the cooling coffee with the disconnected phone on her lap. The thought of Gavin Boye crumpled on the porch stole all the joy out of her conversation with Bryan. There were a thousand reasons a man might kill himself, from tax fraud to child porn and everything in between. But this man was no stranger in the papers; this was someone she’d once lived near to. Why had Gavin Boye shot himself in front of her brother?

Tristram. Tristram was the link. She was sure of it.

She sipped her coffee and started to put away her paperwork. At the bottom of the pile was the small notepad she always carried with her. This was the last job she’d left for herself. Two nights ago, she’d been excited about this, but now, for some reason, it was a task she felt like avoiding. She flipped open the pad. Drawn there was the strange mark she’d copied from the doorway of Plow amp; Vine Health Foods. Quill’s shop, she thought.

She clicked open her Internet browser and started to hunt.

N icholas couldn’t help but admire the clerk at the convenience store. The young Filipino man managed to scan, bag, and total Nicholas’s purchase of milk, bread, peanut butter, toiletries, and a newspaper without once looking up from the swimsuit pictorial in the men’s magazine he held between his face and Nicholas’s.

Nicholas carried the bags out into the angled afternoon light. The pearly clouds had cleared and faintly warm sunlight fell softly between the leaves of jacaranda and satinwood trees. In sober daylight, the Myrtle Street shops held no menace and the nostalgia he’d expected here with Suzette two evenings ago finally arrived-the excitement about what sweet treasures would be in forty cents’ worth of mixed lollies (Cobbers? Freckles? Milk bottles? Mint leaves?) or how many pecans Mrs. Ferguson the greengrocer would sell him for a dodecagon fifty-cent piece, or the tactile pleasure of stroking a burnished silver chrysalis found in the oleander bushes out front, now gone and replaced with topiary trees.

Nicholas strayed to the door of Plow amp; Vine Health Foods. The shop within was dark. A Closed sign hung inside the door, with the shop’s hours handwritten on it: 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. He checked his watch. It was five to ten. His eyes slid up to the doorframe. In the flat, friendly light of day, the mark was invisible under layers of gloss white paint.

He walked over to the curved galvanized steel handrail that separated the tiles outside the shops from the footpath, and then-with an easy swoop that defied the quarter-century since he’d done it last-he grabbed the rail in an underhand grip and swung to sit underneath it, legs dangling over the concrete buttress. Quietly pleased, he opened the newspaper on his lap.

A low sports car buzzed lazily past, chased by its longboat bass drumming. High in shadowed branches, a family of noisy miners quarreled with a magpie, forcing it to fly beyond the distant rooftops.

Nicholas felt slightly cold and a little light-headed, but his flu symptoms seemed to have eased. He opened the paper and flicked through to the personal advertisements section and scanned for funeral notices. The page was full. Dying, he thought, remained as popular a pastime as ever. He followed his finger to the middle of the first column and found what he was looking for: “Gavin Boye. Suddenly passed. Son of Jeanette. Husband of Laine.”

Nicholas blinked. Christ, Gavin had a wife. He read on.

“Loved and missed. Relatives and friends are respectfully invited…” He skipped to the end. The service would be at the local Anglican church the following morning. Nicholas’s stomach tightened involuntarily. The same old stone church where Tris’s funeral had been held.

Laine Boye. Could she shed more light on why her gray-faced husband had risen early two mornings ago, grabbed his favorite sawn-off, and gone to the home of his long-dead brother’s best friend to deliver a message…

It should have been you.

Was that Gavin’s own wish, that Tristram had lived and Nicholas had been found with his throat opened up like a ziplock bag?

No. Those weren’t Gavin’s words. Gavin couldn’t have known about the bird. The day Nicholas told Tristram about the talismanic bird, Tristram never returned home. And after his death, Nicholas never found a way to tell the Boyes about the tiny, mutilated corpse that Tristram had touched just before Winston Teale stepped from his olive sedan and strode like a golem toward them. The only person who could have told Gavin about the bird was the one who’d set the dead thing as a trap.

Nicholas checked his watch. It was after ten. He turned and saw that the sign on the health food shop door had been flipped and now read Open. He went to the door and pushed it inward. As it angled away from the light, the mark fell into relief-a vertical slash with a half-diamond. He felt the soles of his feet tighten vertiginously. He bit down the feeling and stepped inside.

As he looked around, his apprehension dissipated. The shelves were stocked with handmade soaps, cloth trivets stuffed with aromatic herbs, small wooden barrels of seeds with brass scoops stuck in their surfaces like the bows of sinking ships. The store smelled of mint and cloves and honey.

The pleasantly fragrant air was broken by a silvery crash of tin hitting tiles in the storeroom behind the counter, followed by the ticking skitter of tiny spheres skimming across the floor.

“Shit!” A woman’s voice, followed by a stream of breathy words that could only be swearing.

“Hello?” called Nicholas.

Silence. Then a head poked out through the storeroom door. Her hair was blond and her eyes were dark brown. Her eyes and mouth were rounded in three embarrassed O s.

“Oh, bum,” she whispered, and disappeared again from sight.

Nicholas set down his bags and picked up a few of the tiny objects that had rolled under the counter. They were wooden beads, not unlike those on the necklace Suzette had given him.

The woman stepped from behind the counter, tucking her hair behind one ear. “Such a klutz,” she said.

Nicholas tried to guess her age. Twenty-five? Thirty? Her skin was milk pale and clear, lips red and pursed as she stooped to collect the errant beads.