Marta calls a meeting, adults only, and they have it all squeezed into Ma’s shack coz Marta has Gerra recovering in hers. Even though it’s adults only, me and Jag sit outside with our backs to the wall under the window. Ma says it’s clear the siblings met with ‘foul play’ and whoever did the ‘foul play’ was hoping the siblings’ boat would be taken out to sea, them not knowing it might wash back in a freak storm. Them not knowing a sibling was still alive. So now the ‘foul play’ evidence was sitting here on our shore, we’re in trouble. Coz if the people from the Valley of the Sun come looking, it’s gonna look bad, and if the people that did the ‘foul play’ find out about Gerra still being alive, they might have ‘unfinished business’.
I’ve no clue why adults speak to adults and still speak in code words like ‘foul play’ and ‘unfinished business’. I dunno what’s wrong with speaking plain and saying what’s on your mind.
Jag’s da says he could run the siblings’ boat up a secret creek and hide it good in the bushes. Marta says that can’t be done soon enough, and maybe Gerra will be well and leave on it one day soon, and tell the people from the Valley of the Sun how good we were to her, then all our problems will be over. In the meantime, if they come looking for the siblings, it’d be easy to find out that this was the last place they worked on account of the transmitting device on our hill. We’d be ‘prime suspects’ in ‘foul play’ with Gerra, not able to say for sure it wasn’t us that killed her sister, her only having seen us giving her a funeral and not remembering anything of the event.
‘And the way people gossip in these islands,’ Marta says. ‘Who’s to say no one saw Licorice Stix towing home the Valley of the Sun boat or saw it tied to our jetty during the storm, even though it’s been tarped-over since then. By now it could be back to everyone that we found the boat at least. We have to keep a lid on the fact that Gerra survived.’
‘It was dark and grey,’ Dizzy says. ‘We could say it was jus’ a fishing boat that someone came and claimed a couple of days later, someone from the Whaleback Ranges. It got swept inland. People from our islands don’t know many from the Whalebacks.’
‘Good,’ Marta says. ‘That’s our story. A fishing boat from the Whalebacks. You hear that good and proper, Neoma and Jaguar?’
We pop our heads up into the window and say, ‘Yes sir, Aunty Marta!’
‘And if people from the Valley of the Sun come looking?’ Ma asks.
‘We’ll have to hope Gerra remembers who did do this to her, or trusts us enough that she’d never suspect us of hurting her family,’ Marta says, and sighs.
An idea starts then, a little bud of an idea that flowers in my head the more I think about it. Part One, disconnect that box so it don’t kick out light or a signal or look like the siblings stopped here at all. I’m the only one who can do it, coz I know it don’t kill you, it jus’ burns you. Part Two, stick to Gerra like a tick, make sure she understands we’re good people who don’t do bad things. That way she’ll tell her people we couldn’t have been the ones who killed her sister.
