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“Geez Leilah! Why didn’t you say something?” Vaughan’s hiss sent the gelding’s head darting upwards in fear, its eyes rolling as grass tumbled comically from whiskery lips.
Leilah blew out a harried breath. “I went for a walk along the boundary and when I looked down into the water, this body stared up at me.” The shudder seemed to begin in the soles of her feet and rock through her slender frame. She gripped her fingers around the wooden slat and swung her legs for balance. “I needed to get Hector, but he’d kill me for wandering around the property at night. So I let Red out of his enclosure.”
Vaughan’s eyes widened. “You did that on purpose?”
Leilah raised a hand in protest. “I thought he’d just run to the bottom and then come back when Hector appeared. I didn’t expect him to go after your mares.”
“He’s a stallion, Lei! Why do you think your dad built up the fence around him? Did you expect him to stand at the fence with a bunch of daisies and ask nicely for a shag?”
Leilah looked away, a faint blush rising up her neck and flooding her cheeks with colour. “I’m sorry.”
“Who’s shagging? I’m up for some of that.” Dante’s cheerful voice made them both jump and he caught Leilah as she pitched backwards off the top rail. “So much eagerness, Miss Dereham. Falling into my arms.” The dark-haired boy laughed as he hauled her backwards over the gate like a sack and stood her upright. His fingers lingered on her waist as Leilah regained her equilibrium. Vaughan’s descent sounded more elegant and Leilah cringed, pulling herself free before he saw the tiny act of intimacy. She put a respectful distance between Dante’s raging hormones and her budding womanliness. Complicated didn’t cut it as a description anymore. Drawing in a breath, she straightened her tartan school skirt.
“They arrested Horse for growing weed.” Vaughan covered the facts in six flat words, managing to insert disdain and injustice into the single sentence.
Dante nodded. “I heard. How can we fix it?”
Vaughan raised his hands in front of his body, an accusatory gaze straying to Leilah. “That’s not the worst of it.”
Leilah swallowed as Dante raised an eyebrow in expectation. “And?”
“I saw Malcolm,” she said, her voice faltering. The sky seemed to spin around her head. Dante’s hand shot out to steady her, his long fingers clasping her forearm. Leilah saw the flash of interest in Vaughan’s dark eyes. “I saw him dead in the gully.” Her throat grew tight and swallowing felt painful. Saying it out loud made it worse than she imagined. Dante glanced up towards the bush line in the distance and he tugged her down to kneel in the bare earth. Grazed to soil height, it raised questions about Horse’s finances again. He hadn’t bought Hector’s excess hay all year, the annual argument still pending. Leilah glanced at the gelding munching his roots in peace. They’d be through the small paddock in less than a day. Then what?
“Leilah!” Dante crouched next to her, his fingers digging into her shoulders. “Leilah, what did you see?”
She closed her eyes and blew out her cheeks, willing herself not to see the image which strayed into her dreams and drove her to wake sweating and guilty. “I didn’t kill him.” Shuddering, she shook her head hard enough to dislodge her brain.
“We didn’t think that!” Dante sounded appalled and a hysterical bubble began in Leilah’s chest, threatening to pop and take her heart out with it. He didn’t ask for details and a surge of gratitude accompanied the comfort of his gentle stroking on her spine. Vaughan offered his hand and helped her rise. Pinioned between the two young men, Leilah acknowledged a sense of safety inside their canopy of concern. They towered over her and she found herself wondering when they gained such height. And why she hadn’t noticed being left behind.
“I saw him in the gully at the bottom,” Leilah whispered. She turned to point and Vaughan snatched her fingers to prevent the action.
“Cops everywhere,” he hissed. “Don’t give them reason to start poking around elsewhere.”
Leilah nodded, tuning into the sound of the gelding making short work of the grass at his feet. The fillies bunched in a far corner, nervous and jumpy as they snatched at stalks and moved on. Their skittishness communicated the urge to run away and Leilah struggled to keep her feet still as the images of Malcolm’s corpse surfaced again. “I didn’t know it was him. I thought maybe I imagined it and panicked.” She huffed out a ragged breath. “We all came out to chase Red and I felt sure someone else would see him floating there and do something.”
“But we didn’t.” Vaughan made a clicking noise with his lips. “And you found out it was Malcolm the next day?”
Leilah nodded and blinked back the ready tears. She’d cried in front of Tane at primary school, but never these boys. Their towering masculinity offered salvation, alongside the jarring reality of their status as children. They could drive killer machines and make babies, but voting remained elusive because nobody wanted to listen to their opinion on anything. “So, he died up here somewhere. And if the cops find that out, we’re screwed.” Leilah looked up in time to catch the wary expression pass from Vaughan to Dante. They weren’t screwed, but Horse would be. Wiping her nose on her bare wrist, Leilah drew back her shoulders and swallowed.
“Anyone fancy a walk?” Dante asked.
They followed the line of the gully uphill into the foothills of Mount Pirongia. It took them out of view of Horse’s house and the nosey police officers. Led by the ragged crack carved into the earth, they retraced the water to the source of the spring which forged its way through rock and volcanic ash. It widened in points, the banks becoming hard going. Leilah tripped over supplejack vine and bush lawyer snatched hold of her clothing and snagged her skin until it bled. Rock rose around the gully until it became inaccessible, a steady downward trickle metres below their feet. Vaughan led most of the way, the relaxed slope of his shoulders demonstrating a lack of concern as he bush-bashed his way through. Horse’s land and therefore Vaughan’s back yard. Familiar. Easy.
Leilah gasped as a branch thwacked back and slapped her across the neck. She placed a hand over the raised welt, horrified when she withdrew fingers speckled with blood.
“Lei’s hurt!” Dante whipped around and his dark brows creased in instant guilt. “Sorry, I tried to hold it back, but it slipped.”
Vaughan’s gaze moved from Leilah’s face to Dante’s and back again, assessing. Always assessing. “It’s just a scratch,” he announced. “Why don’t you walk between us?”
Leilah shook her head and slumped onto a nearby punga tree. Fallen and forgotten, the trunk felt spongy and unreliable. Tiredness sent lead into her veins and her body sagged. Her inadequate Roman school sandals made her feet slip and bush debris collected beneath the straps. She reached down to pull out an errant twig and sighed. “This is pointless. What are we hoping to find?”
Vaughan tested the trunk and eased onto it, keeping a decent amount of weight balanced in his knees in case the thing should give. “I don’t know. A clue. The murder site?” He asked it as a rhetorical question and nobody rushed to provide an answer, absorbing the futility of their climb. The bush overshadowed them, blocking out the late sunshine and threatening darkness with the summit still hours away and off track. “She’s right. We’ve got nothing with us. It’s stupid to go higher.”
Dante nodded and squatted on the leaf strewn ground. He pulled the fronds from a silver fern with a curious look of contemplation gracing his handsome features. When he glanced up, the speckled light caught his face and Leilah saw the beginnings of a blue bruise snaking around the eye socket. His father’s boyfriend had a reputation for being handy with his fists. A flicker of compassion jetted through Leilah’s soul and she gave him a wan smile. Dante caught it and looked away, not wanting her pity. Leilah understood, his predicament resonating with her own. The town labelled her motherless and criticised Hector’s haphazard child rearing. But Dante bore a worse tag, more unfortunate than Vaughan’s as the local foster kid who nobody wanted. The handsome, dark-haired boy of good Italian stock went home to the only local homosexual and a lodger who paid no rent and ill-treated his father without mercy. Lodger. A smokescreen which only set local tongues flapping and imaginations verging on the perverse and downright perverted.
Dante rubbed at his eye and winced, thought better of it and stood. “I don’t think we need to go higher,” he stated, turning and peering down into the gully ten metres below his feet. He pointed into the gentle flow. “The stream goes underground here and the opening is tiny.” He pulled a face which mingled curiosity with horror. “They haven’t searched any further than the edge of town. I’ve been watching them. They’ve assumed his injuries happened at the waterfall before Horse’s place and that’s where they pitched their white tent and took all their samples.” He tapped a beat on his thigh and only he could hear the accompanying instruments as he pondered. “Only we know he died here and the coroner might work it out eventually from plants and stuff caught in his clothes. But we can work backwards.” Squatting down, Dante leaned over the edge of the gully and Vaughan rose to stand next to him.
“You’re right,” he concluded. “The water was high later on because of the rain, but Leilah saw him before that. Which means he wasn’t forced through any tight spaces.” He turned towards her, guilt already etched into his face. “Sorry, Lei, but did his face look creamed?”
A mouthful of vomit burst into her mouth and Leilah spat it out onto the ground behind the punga. When more threatened, she leaned forward and saw the leafy ground surge at her feet as though snakes disturbed the undergrowth. She forced her mind back to the pale skin of the ears, the face looking down in the dark water and the dark jacket caught on a bough. Shaking her head, she shuddered. “I couldn’t see. He faced downward. I just remembered seeing his jacket caught on a floating branch. Denim. Darker from the water.”
“Ripped?” Dante cocked his head and Vaughan nudged him in the ribs with his elbow as Leilah retched again.
“No,” she spluttered. “I don’t know.”
Dante steepled his hands with a sigh of satisfaction, his agile, analytical mind on overdrive. “Good. So, he didn’t die up here. He wasn’t dumped here either. His jacket would be torn or lost after washing down.” He tapped his lip and turned on the spot. “The water doesn’t flow real fast either. He was in school that day because he fought with Tane, but what time did you see him, Lei?”
She shook her head. She’d sneaked out of the house after Hector watched the ten o’clock news and went to bed. The night disappeared from beneath her grasp whenever she met her lover on the riverbank, whisked away in furtive touches and the kind of kissing which hurt her soul. He’d tried something new, experimentation coming with increased confidence. Leilah blushed at the memories of her muted cries of pleasure, muffled by his palm across her mouth.
“Leilah?” Dante’s eyes narrowed and she shrugged in answer, not able to trust herself to speak.
“Midnight. Just after.” Vaughan rescued her, his expression earnest. “Horse heard a noise and got up. I’d just finished my maths homework, so I went out with him to look.”
“What was the noise?” Dante demanded and Vaughan’s lips creased into a smile.
“Hector Dereham’s three-hundred-dollar-a-cover-stallion screwing the hell out of our mares for free.”
Dante snorted. A townie and educated about farming from second hand conversations, he only registered the verb and his eyes glittered with interest. “That’s why you talked about screwing?” He nodded, the puzzle pieces falling into place. “Right. Bumper year for Horse then.” His brow knitted and he cocked his head. “Why did Horse never do that accidentally on purpose?” he mused. “Instead of paying the three hundy?”
Vaughan and Leilah watched his city brain tick and gaped at each other. They replied at the same time. “It’s stealing!”
His answering laugh seemed to shock them, an offended collective. “You know that makes your dad a pimp, right?”
Leilah swallowed, not wanting to admit she didn’t really understand what a pimp was. Or did. She shrugged and tried to change the subject away from Dante’s predictable foray into the Kamasutra. He’d claimed to have seen a copy when he sneaked into the adult corner of the town library. His graphic descriptions had shocked her initially, descending into a rabid desire to try everything in the erotic picture he’d painted. Diverted, Dante chewed on his thumbnail and stared at the water.
“Let’s go down stream,” Vaughan suggested. Leilah nodded, glad to leave behind the wet patch of vomit and escape the eerie silence of the bush. They retraced their steps, falling over the same supplejack vines and snagging themselves on the same outstretched branches of bush-lawyer. The gully grew shallower, carrying its trickling tide into the foothills and bouncing over rocks and outcrops with abandon. Vaughan halted and dropped with such suddenness, Leilah ran straight into him. She stopped herself pitching clean over his shoulders and landing in the bubbling water, aware of her hair snagging on an overhanging branch. She screamed as the hair detached from her scalp, leaving a raw, burning patch at the side of her head.
“Sorry, sorry!” Vaughan rose and tried to help her, making it worse as the remaining strand tangled worse around the spiked twig. She swatted his hands away in temper, but stilled as Dante’s skilled fingers picked the mess undone with meticulous care.
“There,” he said, patting the knots down with a look of confusion. Leilah dragged her hair tie free and ran her hands through the length of curls, dismayed when more floated to the ground. Blood stained her forefinger as she poked at the sore place. “Oh. It’s bleeding.” Dante winced and stated the obvious.
Leilah inspected the tiny speckle and her eyes narrowed. She jabbed a bloodied finger at Vaughan. “The tee shirt in the laundry was yours,” she stated, cocking her head. “And the blood was mine.”