Nicholas 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 & 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 Os.
“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.
“I fall down stairs,” he said.
She scooted about energetically, in and out of Nicholas’s sight, picking up beads. “Ah, but then you’re only hurting yourself. These, now …” She stood and poured them from her hands into the tin. “These can trip people very well.”
“What are they?”
She affected a wise expression as she slyly turned the tin’s label toward herself to read furtively: “ ‘Willowwood beads—for Dreameing, Inspiration and Fertility.’ ‘Dreameing’ spelled with an extra e for Olde English Effecte.”
Nicholas nodded.
The young woman smiled. It was a pretty smile. She shrugged. “People buy them.”
“I have some myself.”
“Willow beads?”
“I think they’re elderwood.”
She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, then shook her head and shrugged again. Nicholas found it an attractive gesture. He was sure men shopped here just to look at her.
“Anyway,” she said. “Since I can’t trip you, can I help you?”
He thought about it. “I don’t think so. No.”
“Okay,” she said, frowning. A small, sweet line appeared between her eyes.
“There’s a mark on your door,” he said.
“Oh?”
He nodded at it.
She stepped out from behind the counter. She was slim and nearly his height. Her dress was of an old cut, but snugly fitted. Simple, but flattering to her figure. She kept herself a few steps distant from him as she went to the door. He told her to open it, and pointed to the rune.
She frowned again as she peered at it. “You know, I’ve never noticed that. Did you put it there?” She leveled both eyes at him with startling frankness.
He blinked, off guard. “No. There used to be a seamstress here, when I was a kid. She was a bit creepy.”
“I’ve been here a year,” the young woman said. “Before me was a pool supply guy. The place reeked of chlorine.” She shrugged again, and cocked her head as if to ask where this was going.
Nicholas realized it was going nowhere. “I have a cold,” he said suddenly, and instantly wondered where the words had come from.
She looked at him for a moment. The blunt gaze was strangely erotic—as if she were imagining him undressing, and finding the thought pleasing. Then she nodded to herself and ducked from sight. He could hear the sounds of tins opening and the crunching of slender fingers in dried leaves. She returned with a paper bag, which she sealed with a sticker from beside the till. “Sage, ginger, echinacea, garlic. Make a tea with it.”
Nicholas took the bag doubtfully. “How will it taste?”
She smiled. “Dreadful. Eight dollars fifty.” As she handed him change for his ten, she asked, “Are you a local?”
Nicholas looked at her. This close, he could smell her hair. It smelled like vanilla, clean and good. He thought for a moment. “Yes. Home again.”
She nodded approvingly. “Next time, I’ll try something much more treacherous than beads.”
“I look forward to it,” he said. “Sorry about the mark thing. I just thought … You know.”
“Strange marks,” she said.
It was Nicholas’s turn to shrug.
“Do you think it could be Chinese?” she asked. “They used to have market gardens somewhere around here, I heard. It could be for luck.”
“Could be. I’m Nicholas.” He extended his hand.
She looked at it, and took it, and shook it firmly.
“Rowena.” She smiled. “We’re well met.”
“We are,” he agreed.
He found himself thinking about Rowena’s smile on his way home, and so guiltily buried the memory of it.
He was emptying the letterbox when a man stepped through him. Nicholas jumped, his heart suddenly kicked into a sprint.
Gavin Boye kept walking up to the front porch of the house, silently carrying his gun in a black, glossy garbage bag. He stopped, then knocked silently on the door. No one answered.
Nicholas felt a greasy knot in the pit of his stomach. This was too much like the dead boy with his screwdriver outside his flat in Ealing. And that memory led back to Cate’s death.
I can’t face this every day.
He dropped the mail back in the letterbox and stepped out onto the footpath, closing the gate behind him.
It was just after lunch when the balding, constantly smiling real estate agent handed Nicholas keys to a furnished flat on Bymar Street. Nicholas had signed the lease, paid two months’ rent in advance, and been allowed to use the agency’s telephone to connect power and gas. He considered continuing up the road to the shopping mall and replacing his cell phone, but the prospect of queues and forms and sales patter about plans and discounts was too exhausting. Another day.
He carried the keys and his bag of herbal tea up the concrete stairs to the first-floor flat, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. The furniture was cheap and badly worn. The fridge had an asthmatic rattle. The carpet smelled faintly of cannabis and wet dog. The white curtains of the front room hung as listless as dressed game fowl. He pulled one aside, repulsed by the greasy feel of the fabric, and looked down the street.
At the end of Bymar Street was Carmichael Road, and beyond it, the heavy darkness of the woods.
In the sagging kitchen, Nicholas found a ceramic kettle with a wire element, and boiled water. He wondered how the woods could still be there, how they survived the housing boom of the fifties, the licentious building rackets of the seventies, the fiscal orgy of the ’03 spike.
It wasn’t a loved park. No one went in there. In fact, people hurried past them. People knew, without even entering, that they weren’t friendly woods.
Leave here, he thought. Buy a ticket south. Get a job in a design firm in a nice new building and live in a new apartment where there are no ghosts. You can live with that. This place hasn’t changed.
He went to the window and stared down the road, but the woods were a sea of shadow. Down there, in the green, secret velvet, the Thomas boy was being dragged between dark trees, his face a mask of terror, his last hours or minutes playing over and over, again and again. And down there—somewhere—was Tris, caught in his own endlessly repeating cycle, tormented and helpless, forever just minutes away from his own awful, lonely death.
You can bring no solace to the dead, he told himself. Why not let the departed stay departed?
Because they didn’t stay departed. They just stayed. Cate in London, falling and dying and falling and dying. The Thomas boy here. And Gavin. And Tris. The dead were everywhere. And if he didn’t try to find out why, didn’t do something, he’d go mad. He’d put a gun to his head like Gav, or smash his car like his father, or Christ knew what else. Only then, he feared, he’d become one of them. Caught in his own death loop, forever lifting steel to his mouth or watching a power pole race toward his windscreen.
He was going insane.
And he was sure of one other thing: he couldn’t leave town. Tristram’s body had been found kilometers away, but Suzette had seen his ghost on the gravel path on Carmichael Road. The Thomas child’s body had been found three suburbs away, but Nicholas had seen his ghost dragged by invisible hands into the woods. The boys’ bodies may have been found elsewhere, and their supposed killers had confessed to murdering them a long way from Tallong, but their ghosts didn’t lie. The boys were murdered in the woods.
And he and Suzette were the only ones who knew that.
As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t leave.
Trapped.
His cheeks were wet. He wiped them distractedly. The kettle was boiling noisily. He made the herbal tea. It was surprisingly pleasant. He drank it all, folded himself onto the thin fabric of the sofa, and fell into a dark and hollow sleep.