There was a country song about Earl in a car trunk. After stopping at a Countdown for frozen pizza and a birthday bottle of wine, Alexa found the song on her phone and listened to it as she drove to Arrowtown. The body was wrapped in a tarp, not a shower curtain.
In the cottage she kicked off her Keds and preheated the ancient oven for the pizza. She chose two hundred and fifty degrees Celsius. Her phone buzzed.
Dad—FaceTiming from Florida. He sat on a couch, his arm around her stepmother Rita, who wore a white spa-like robe. “Alexa. Look at that. What time is it in Australia?” he asked.
“New Zealand, Charles,” Rita said. “Alexa lives in New Zealand.”
The Beatles started crooning “The Long and Winding Road.”
“No, Alexa. We don’t want to play music,” Dad yelled.
The song ceased. “Hi, Dad. Hi, Rita. It’s eight p.m. What time is it there?”
“Four a.m.”
“You don’t have to shout,” Rita said.
“You didn’t have to get up in the middle of the night to call.” Despite the witching hour, they looked good, Dad a little grayer, Rita’s bob a tawny brown. Dad had retired from the civil engineering company he’d worked for and they’d moved to Naples, Florida, a few years ago.
“It’s your birthday,” Dad said. “Happy birthday.”
“Thank you.”
“I remember when you were born. Eight pounds, eight ounces. Your red hair stuck out all over. You got it from your mother.”
“I had red hair?” Alexa conjured her mother, holding her newborn against her skin. Oh, Mom.
“It fell out and then you were bald.”
Alexa snorted.
“How did you celebrate your birthday?” Rita asked.
Her stepmother’s face made her back scars tighten. For the longest time she had held Rita responsible for the scalding, but she’d been wrong. “I’ll celebrate later. I’m on a travel case, and it’s been crazy busy.”
“Taking a bite out of crime,” Dad said. “When are you coming home?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Charlie said you have a boyfriend, a nice police officer,” Rita said.
“A detective inspector,” Alexa clarified. Her heart did the foxtrot. Bruce had called. She had texted that she would call him back.
“We’ve booked a cruise to come see you,” Rita said. “In November. Early in the season, but prices are better. Our ports are Akaroa—am I saying that right?—Bluff, and Bay of Islands.”
“We’ll tag on Auckland and visit you,” Dad said. He covered a yawn and said he loved her. “How do we end this thing?” he asked Rita.
“Goodbye,” Alexa said to a blank screen. She wondered if her dad had forgiven her for the decade she’d shunned Rita, her heart shellacked against all her stepmother’s overtures. Dad had been caught in the middle.
Forgiving herself was another matter, for another day.
She’d picked up a package of Tim Tams too. She ate a cookie, put the pizza in the oven, and poured herself the wine. She didn’t have to marry Bruce. She didn’t have to move in with him. She didn’t even have to trust him; that might build with time. Or not. She didn’t have to commit to anything but seeing him.
Now or never.
Now or Scotland.
She dialed and he answered as if he’d been waiting. “Alexa.”
Her greenstone pendant, warm against her skin, pulsated like a second heartbeat. Say It Say It Say It. “Bruce. I miss you.”
He was silent. She’d botched it. Waited too long. His voice, when it came, was husky. “What took you so long to call?”
She laughed and said it again, joyful. “I miss you.”
“What do you want to do about it?”
“See you.”
“That can be arranged.”
“It’s my birthday,” she said.
“It is? I’ll cook you a steak when you get back in town.”
He made her mouth water.
“I got the memo about Earl Hammer,” Bruce said. “The big announcement is tomorrow morning, right?”
She sipped her wine and didn’t mind veering into police biz.
“The scuttlebutt is that you did the fingerprint comparison,” Bruce said.
“They’ve been verified. Twenty-five years locked away and Hammer’s innocent.” The weight of that pressed on her shoulders. “What if that so-called expert witness sent other people to jail too?”
“Every case he testified in will be dissected,” Bruce said. “Any suspects for who killed the principal?”
She told him about the Tandys, about Martin blocking her from leaving, about the pending blood test, about their daughter. “She’s Denise’s age.” Denise was Bruce’s older daughter. “I can’t bear to think about what this will do to her.”
“Kids are resilient,” he said softly. “Where is the DI on who killed Cindy Mulligan?”
“She’s busy with the Tandys. She assigned it to some guy from the Armed Officers Squad. DI Unger had been looking at a man at her workplace and some woman too.” The aroma of melted mozzarella filled the little kitchen. Her stomach growled. “I’ll track down her DNA profile in the morning. It might hold some clues.”
“With the announcement tomorrow, the killer might panic,” Bruce said. “Be careful.”
Her eyes landed on the file of newspaper clippings and photos from the museum she’d left on the table. She told Bruce about the Chinese miner. “He’s going home.”
“That’s a happy ending,” Bruce said.
“I’m no longer a prime number.”
“Got me there. What do you mean?”
“I’m thirty-eight. I’m divisible now.”
The crust was burning. She reluctantly disconnected.
Washed down with another glass of wine, the pizza didn’t taste so bad. She browsed through the gold rush articles from the museum: bone-cleaning, rice bowls, missing miners, floods and blizzards, the Ventnor sinking. It took her mind off her Susie worries. She looked for the photos. There had been two. One showed three Chinese men leaning against the fence. She found it and stared into their stalwart faces. Then she looked for the other photo, the one of a Chinese man holding an umbrella for a European woman. He’d been dressed in a suit with one of those chains leading from a buttonhole to his vest pocket. The woman had been identified on the back. She checked again and again.
The photo was missing. When the back door was wide open, the articles and photos had scattered across the kitchen floor. Her eyes darted around the room. She felt the presence of hungry ghosts, trying to tell her something.
Science. I believe in science, not ghosts.