31

Nina was smoking again when she answered the door. Her mother was there as well, on top of the staircase, a distant, fearful spectre. The rain had started on their way down there, and Nina took them outside again, to the covered part of the deck, so they could watch the storm on the horizon.

‘I spend all my time out here,’ she said. ‘Just watching the sea. I quit my job. And I’m not going back to that house.’

She seemed defiant in her loss. Alice said, ‘You’ve been through a lot.’

Nina seemed paler, thinner, even though it had only been three days since they had last seen her. She was twirling a cigarette around her fingers like it was the one thing she could do in her life.

‘Have you found out anything?’ she asked.

The rain was loud on the sea, the wind making everything intense. ‘Nothing concrete,’ Teddy said. ‘We’re following some more leads today, down at the peninsula, which is why we thought we’d come by.’

‘Where are you going?’

Alice didn’t trust that Nina would make good decisions if she knew the truth. ‘I don’t want to say much, in case it’s nothing. We’re pulling at all the loose ends, hoping there’s a knot somewhere to unravel.’ It was a clunky metaphor, and she felt it.

Nina nodded, disappointed.

‘You don’t know anything,’ she said.

‘Do you have anything to share?’ Teddy asked.

‘I know someone shot my brother. Who the fuck even has a gun in this country?’

There were some three and a half million guns in Australia, but you rarely saw them, unless you were Teddy and Alice. Teddy couldn’t say anything, because the answer to ‘who the fuck even has a gun in this country’ is that she had, until a month ago.

‘We’ll find him,’ she said.

Alice had sensed something in Teddy the whole drive, a shift in her demeanour. She was angry, and confused. There were questions about Art that needed an answer now, when he wasn’t supposed to be in the equation at all. Their purpose had been to avenge him, and now murky waters surrounded this man, their friend.

Teddy opened a picture of Cole on her phone. It was the one from the real Hank, the one where Cole was finally smiling. ‘Do you recognise this man?’

Nina took the phone in her hand and huffed. ‘No. Should I? Is he one of Art’s friends? Or one of yours?’

There was nothing in Nina’s face to show she knew him, not a tic, not a blink.

‘Just a lead,’ Teddy said, and put her phone away, relieved, a little, that he hadn’t been on her radar.

‘You haven’t called any of his friends,’ Nina said. ‘I know, because I’ve asked them.’

‘We’re not allowed to,’ Teddy said, though she worried she sounded like a petulant child. ‘Someone else is working those angles. We’re doing what we can.’

Nina rolled the cigarette under her palm on the table and her nostrils flared.

Alice asked, ‘What was Art like the week before he died?’

‘Normal,’ Nina said. ‘We didn’t talk much. He was busy, I was busy.’

‘You didn’t hang out?’ Teddy asked, disappointed.

Nina paused. ‘Went for a drive down to Geelong for a day about a week before,’ she said. ‘That was all right.’

‘What did you do?’ Alice asked.

‘Just a drive. You know how it is. It’s nice down there.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Teddy said, leaning in.

‘What do you mean?’ Nina stopped rolling, and lit the cigarette with the butt of one she had nearly finished.

‘I just want to know,’ Teddy said. She looked desperate. ‘Was it nice? Did you laugh?’

Nina stared at her.

‘It’s like this,’ Teddy went on. ‘My father died a year ago, right? You didn’t meet him, but my friends did, a lot.’

‘A lot,’ Alice echoed.

‘He died of cancer, and it was extremely shit. He was fine, completely fine, then he started whining about a pain in his back, and he never told his normal doctor, because he had years of problems with doctors as a kid. It got so bad that his boss – Choker – got his personal GP to surprise him during a meeting, and the guy told him he needed scans. Choker said he wouldn’t give him any more jobs until he did them, so my dad relented. But Choker never did hire him again anyway, because my father died five weeks later.’

Nina got a new cigarette out, and balanced it upright on the table. She didn’t look at Teddy, or Alice.

‘The last time we hung out before he got sick,’ Teddy said, ‘we went out for lunch, at this nice place, right next to a lake. He was at me to quit working for Choker and go to university, which he said a lot, but he was mostly playing. He asked after Alice. I showed him some pictures of Cherry.’

Alice leaned over and put her hand on Teddy’s.

‘We had this really good lunch,’ Teddy said. ‘I had this salad with puffed wild rice and cranberries and all kinds of things. Dad had salmon. He always had fish, and he’d pretend he was a sailor when he ate them.’

‘It was really more of a pirate impression,’ Alice said. ‘Cherry would lose her mind about it. She thought he was a real pirate.’

Teddy smiled. ‘We went for a walk around the lake afterwards. The weather was really nice, and we did the whole loop. The sun came out, and we saw a turtle in the water. It rolled off the log it was on when my dad called out hello. Then I hugged him goodbye, and I didn’t hear from him again until he was already in hospital.’ She stood up and leaned against the balcony, looking out at the water. ‘That’s what I’m asking. Whether this last trip together was a nice one. Did you go to the beach? Did you eat ice cream in the sand?’

Nina licked her lips.

‘Or not,’ Teddy said, leaning back in her chair.

Nina picked up her cigarette and put it in her mouth unlit, next to her lit one. She said around them both, ‘I don’t know. We weren’t going anywhere. We were just driving. You know, to hang out. I don’t remember what we did, and I wasn’t thinking about it afterwards. It’s not an anything memory. We were just driving.’

‘Fair enough,’ Alice said, watching her. ‘Was the weather good?’

‘Sure. Yes. Sunny,’ Nina said, then slapped her hands on the table and said, ‘You know, this doesn’t really help me.’

‘We’re sorry,’ Alice said, but she wasn’t, really. She thought that Nina was hurrying this, that something was off with her, beyond the obvious.

‘Can you tell us about anybody who might not like him? Any reason someone might want to hurt him?’

Nina barked out a laugh, then stopped. ‘No. You asked me last time. There’s nobody I can think of. I don’t know.’ She looked up. ‘Are you going to figure it out sitting here and asking me the same questions over and over?’

Alice and Teddy took the hint and stood up. Nina walked them downstairs.

At the front door, she said, ‘You’re so like him. Obsessing over restaurants. Thinking about them on the last day you spent with your dad.’

‘The last good day,’ Teddy clarified. ‘There were a lot of days after that. Well, not enough.’

‘We hope you remember your last good day together too,’ Alice said, using her soft, gentle voice.

‘So do I,’ Nina said.

In the car, heading towards Sadie’s funeral parlour, Teddy said, ‘Something was up with that last day of theirs together, wasn’t it?’

‘It sure was.’ Alice looked up at the cloudy sky. ‘First – it wasn’t her, was it? Who shot you?’

Teddy considered. ‘No,’ she said. ‘She’s the wrong shape. She wasn’t the one who you stabbed in the hand, was she?’

Alice barked out a laugh, then paused. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m – I think she’s not tall enough.’

‘Think?’

Alice waited until they were stopped at a traffic light, and closed her eyes, imagining herself back in Tomb Creek, the sound of her knife through skin. ‘I’m sure it was a man who screamed,’ she said, opening her eyes. ‘I’m sure they were bigger.’ She nodded. ‘It wasn’t her.’

‘All right. So did they go visit an enemy of Art’s? Did he buy drugs? Sell them?’

‘How do we get her to tell us?’

Teddy was quiet. ‘We can’t beat it out of his own damn sister, can we.’

‘Not unless we want him to haunt us.’

Teddy did want that, a little. ‘Do we know about anything we can hold over her? Even if it makes me feel dirty to think about it?’

‘We can ask Rusty.’

Teddy called him. Alice drove and looked for the sea next to her between houses as much as she could, watching for the dark grey water to soothe her.

Alice knew about Teddy and Art’s brief time as lovers, and that Teddy did not love him in that way afterwards. Still, she worried that Teddy missed him with an extra, intimate layer that Alice didn’t have. She wanted this done for her friend. So much that even though she kept telling herself she wouldn’t put Teddy in danger, here they were anyway, on the coast road down to Sadie and her long-faced daughters, only a handful of days after she’d said it wasn’t safe. Three against two. The odds, she thought, were still in their favour.