Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone

CHAPTER 30

Erin’s whisper of my name floated down from above. The storm had reignited, and the tiny capsule of my chalet groaned as the weather squeezed it on all sides: it felt like we were in a submarine. I was on the couch, having given Erin the loft, and finally out of the bathrobe, into a pair of boxer shorts and a t-shirt from a band I didn’t listen to anymore. Erin’s request to stay with me had been borne out of loneliness and fear, not flirtation, and so there was never any expectation that I would head up the ladder with her. There are no sex scenes in this book.

‘I’m awake,’ I said.

There was a rustle from the loft as she, assumedly, rolled over. Her voice seemed minutely closer when she next spoke. ‘So, what do you think?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said honestly. ‘I can’t get this Black Tongue thing out of my head. This torture, it’s so distinctive. It would do well in a mystery novel.’

‘Almost breaches Rule 4,’ she said, absent-mindedly. ‘Requires scientific explanation. Not sure if a snow tunnel counts as a secret passage though.’

I’d been writing my how-to guides for a long time, so Erin knew Ronald Knox’s rules just as well as I did. I wondered if she was spouting them off now in an attempt to make us feel like a team. It seemed strangely possessive from a woman who’d lied so boldly in order to avoid having children with me. And who’d nicked my loft.

‘That’s exactly the problem,’ I said. ‘Those murders are headline grabbing. They’re perfect for the front page – they’ll be a streaming documentary in a few months. They’re statements. Which means they’re easy to copy.’

‘You’re saying maybe someone just wants us to think the Black Tongue is up here?’

‘What’s more believable, that an infamous serial killer followed us up here, or that someone’s trying to make it look like they did?’

‘Sofia’s been trying pretty hard to convince people with all her explanations,’ Erin observed. ‘It’s almost like she’s trying to scare us.’

‘She is a doctor. She treated one of the victims. It’s not as if she’s said anything that isn’t in the news.’

‘Sounds like you’re defending her.’

‘Gotta trust someone.’ I decided that was a bit cruel and changed the topic. ‘Tell me something: how did Michael convince you to go graverobbing with him?’

That caught her off guard. ‘Well, I didn’t know it was graverobbing at first. He kind of sprung that on me.’

‘How did you get involved in the first place?’ The double meaning of the word involved ballooned and filled the room.

‘Michael and Lucy were having their financial problems. You and I – we’d been struggling since . . . Well, they say a problem shared is a problem halved. It was comfort, Ern. Just comfort.’ I hadn’t meant it that way, but I couldn’t bring myself to stop her talking. ‘It’s like snow on this mountain, is the only way I can put it. Lots of little flakes, and then you’re knee-deep in it. Or ash on a lung, I guess. Is that too dark? Things seem to only move little by little, but then you look back and they’ve moved a lot. It was only when you and I had started sleeping in different rooms, but Lucy didn’t know.’

The revelation that they’d been together longer than I’d thought, before Michael had shown up in my driveway, should have crushed me. I’d had so many parts of me crushed that day, however, that it kind of bounced off.

Something Michael had said that night returned, though. Lucy will know. Because a trial for murder, in which every movement is picked over, would almost certainly uncover his affair. Lucy couldn’t have known, or she wouldn’t have reacted the way she had to the news of them spending one night together. Imagine if she did know the whole story? Lucy will know. Michael had said it even though he and Erin were already seeing each other. I wonder if Erin knew he was still clinging to his marriage at that point, that he’d only made up his mind much later. It was telling that Lucy was much more devastated over Michael’s death than Erin was. I wondered if she knew more about it than I thought.

I put a pin in it. ‘I meant involved with this.’

‘Michael and I, not that it matters, but we never meant to—’

‘I don’t need to hear that bit. Tell me what Michael told you. And, more importantly, why you believed him.’

‘I didn’t the first time. I took some convincing. But, well, then I found the bag of money that you were hiding. Michael told me to look for it. I didn’t expect there to be anything, but I just couldn’t figure out what he had to gain by lying, so I had a poke around. You didn’t hide it very well, Ern.’ She said it like it was my fault. Like she’d tell me, back when we were happy, that she’d eaten chocolate she didn’t want purely because I’d left it within her eyeline. ‘And then I started to think about which other parts of his story made sense. And maybe I wanted it to be true. I was reeling from how we ended, and this was – well, it was insane, but it was redemptive. I bought into it because I thought we could make it up to you. I made Michael promise you’d be in. It was supposed to be our money, Ern – the three of us.’

It’s family money.

There it was again. Except this time, I finally understood it.

‘You’re not talking about the bag. You thought you were digging up . . .’ All this for a treasure map? ‘Wait, what exactly did you think you were digging up?’

‘Before he got out, he had me tell everyone the wrong date of his release. And he asked me to hire a truck because he said we had to pick something up, and that we had to do it at night. He said he knew where he was going and he just needed one day after he was out to finish everything off. So, I go along with it, and then we’re in a graveyard, and I tell him I don’t want to do anything like this, and he tells me it’s just dirt and wood and that he needs my help. So we use the straps and the pulleys and the truck’s engine to pull this coffin out of the ground. Michael opens it, takes one glance and says that we have to bring it up here with us. So we put it in the truck, and came up here. I think he was quite pleased with himself. I don’t think he thought he was going to die. Your dad did robberies, so I put two and two together and assumed the coffin was just there to house something more valuable. I don’t know – diamonds? Obviously I didn’t think we were digging up a corpse, in case that wasn’t clear. I would have run a mile.’

‘You told me before that Michael wouldn’t tell you what Alan was selling. If you’d gone to the effort of digging up a coffin, why didn’t you ask what was in it?’

‘I did. He said it was safer if I didn’t know.’

‘You haven’t asked me either.’

‘It seems that everyone who knows what’s really in there is winding up dead, or close to,’ she reasoned, with a pointed look at my hand. ‘I figure he was onto something.’

‘And maybe that’s part of it too. Say that Green Boots is a nobody. He was killed to make it obvious that the Black Tongue, or whoever is pretending to be the Black Tongue, is here. Or, he was killed because he got in the way. What if Michael was the real target all along?’

‘It means anyone who knows what’s in that coffin is in danger,’ she said.

This was the same idea Marcelo had alluded to. Marcelo hadn’t known there was a coffin in the truck, and Erin didn’t know what was in the coffin. By their logic, I, knowing the most, would be next on the Black Tongue’s list.

‘If that’s the case, you need to tell me something else. We’re past lying to each other. We were married for four years, and you still flinched at the thought of kissing in public. But you and Michael . . . It doesn’t make sense.’ I paused, hoping she’d figure it out without me saying it, which would mean admitting to how closely I’d observed them.

‘I’m not sure where you’re going with this. Is now really the time to explore our intimacy issues?’

‘On the front steps, before Crawford took him away, what did you take from Michael’s back pocket?’

Erin’s embrace of Michael in front of everyone had stood out to me as odd at first, but I’d put it down to my jealousy and her crowing. I’d seen it play out again, Erin’s hand in the back pocket of Michael’s jeans, on Juliette’s weather-cam footage and it had struck me, once again, as incongruous. Michael, in the Drying Room, had tried to show me something before giving me the keys to the truck, but he hadn’t been able to find it. But my envy had masked the reason it had stuck out to me. I knew my wife. She didn’t display affection like that.

Above me, Erin made some rustling noises, then something light landed on the cushion next to my head. I fumbled in the dark until my fingers closed around a small plastic object. It was similar in shape to a bottle cap, though slightly larger and deeper. More like a shot glass. I held it above me; there was just enough moonlight coming from behind the clouds that it gradually took shape. One surface gave a wink. Reflective. Clear plastic, maybe even glass.

‘You’re a clever one, you are,’ she said.

I had a memory of a shot glass rolling off the dash as Michael backed out of my driveway. I’d been a bit distracted by what was in the back seat at the time, but now I realised this was the same object. And it wasn’t a shot glass, but a jeweller’s eye-piece. The type where the open end of the cone was placed over your eye, and at the top was a magnifying lens to look through. (My editor has left a helpful note that it is called a loupe, so I’ll pretend to be educated and use the proper word from now on.)

It had obviously been innocuous enough that it hadn’t been confiscated as evidence, but important enough to Michael that he’d fossicked around to get it from under the seat before he’d been arrested and kept it as part of his small envelope of possessions handed back to him on his release from prison.

‘Why did you take this?’ I asked.

‘Use your brain, Ern. I thought we’d dug up something valuable. I don’t know, diamonds? Gold bricks? What do you steal and hide in a coffin? Why else would he have this, if not to check something like that? Alan was a second-hand jeweller, wasn’t he? I thought it was pretty obvious what they were talking about. And I took it because, well’—she cleared her throat, embarrassed—‘because Michael wasn’t telling me anything about the coffin, and maybe I wanted to see for myself. Just in case this weekend went a different way than I thought it was going to go. With Lucy.’

‘You felt you couldn’t fully trust him? Once a cheater always a cheater?’ I only needled on this point for my personal validation, knowing full well how petty it was. Katherine’s pills must have loosened me up. I never would have said that sober.

‘Maybe that was part of it,’ she admitted in that low, shameful voice people use when they admit to things. ‘It took him so long to tell Lucy about us, and he knew I couldn’t tell you before he agreed to tell her. I begged him to pay her debts, so we could have a clean break. When he finally sent her papers, I think it was only because he was still so mad at you. That was the first time I thought maybe he just wanted something of yours. This weekend brought it all up again. I felt on show.’

‘So you took this from him, knowing he couldn’t cut you out of whatever was in the coffin if he couldn’t check the value until he got off the mountain.’

‘It sounds a bit paranoid, when you put it like that,’ she said. ‘But then he gave you the keys, not me. And I knew if you didn’t go alone into the truck, Crawford and Sofia would see it too, and then everyone would know. I knew, at least, that you wanted to keep the bag of money secret, so I thought you might keep this secret too, whatever it was. That’s why I insisted you looked alone.’ I heard her suck her teeth. It was something she did when she was worried and couldn’t sleep. I used to stroke her shoulder, to let her know I was there and everything was okay. I was surprised to see my arm make the same movement towards the empty space beside me on the couch. A muscle memory. ‘Obviously I was wrong about what was in the coffin’—she paused expectantly, but I didn’t take the bait—‘so I have a new theory. I think he wanted to check your money.’

I thought about that for a second. It made sense. I didn’t know a lot about counterfeit bank notes but I assumed there was some microscopic signifier somewhere, a serial number or something. I have since looked this up and I was, indeed, correct.

‘This isn’t particularly fancy or valuable,’ I said as I rolled it between my fingertips. I could see it better now my eyes had adjusted. ‘It looks the same as the ones in my Year 12 science labs. You could get one of these anywhere. But you’re right about Alan’s job. This was probably his, and Michael took it off him.’

‘So maybe Alan brought this to check Michael’s money and it wasn’t up to scratch? And that’s why they fought?’

‘I’ve been wondering how Michael got his hands on $267,000 without Lucy finding out about it,’ I confessed. ‘It’s a lot of money. Even Marcelo didn’t know about it. Or you, for that matter, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Michael asked you to find it just to see if it was still there.’

‘But if he already knew the money was fake, why would he need to check it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What if it’s the other way around?’ she suggested. ‘Alan brought the money and Michael wasn’t happy.’

I let the idea seed. Michael had been clear that he was buying something from Alan. Was that the truth? What would Michael possibly have to sell? ‘If the money’s useless, useless enough to kill over anyway, why keep it?’

‘You’ve spent some,’ she offered. It wasn’t a question.

‘A little. I had no problems.’

‘Just because it’s fake doesn’t mean it’s worthless. Or maybe it’s marked – you know, how the police mark bills and all that?’

‘Maybe.’ I was missing something, but I wasn’t sure what it was. My intuition told me that one of Erin’s theories, something she’d said, was nudging close to the truth. But I didn’t know enough to unlock it. Michael had told me the problem was that he didn’t have enough, so I thought it was unlikely the money was fake.

We ran out of theories and dipped back into silence. The submarine of our chalet felt like it sank another hundred metres, groaning. It seemed for a time that Erin might have fallen asleep. Then the pale orb of her face appeared above me, leaning over the loft.

‘Is it worth me saying I’m sorry?’ she asked.

‘For which part?’

‘All of it, I suppose.’

There is some metaphor to be found in her voice, wafting down to me, while I lay on my back and spoke to the stars, but I don’t know what it is.

‘Okay.’

‘Just okay?’

‘Hmmm.’ I did my best impression of a sleepy, noncommittal mumble, but I’m sure she could hear my heart beating. It seemed to be vibrating my whole pillow.

‘You don’t want to know why?’

‘Are you talking because you have something to say, or because you can’t sleep?’ I didn’t mean it to sound snappy – there’s a certain margin where cruelty bonds with affection in a marriage – but now that we weren’t together, even gentle ribbing came across as barbed.

‘Can it be both?’ The appeal in her voice was clear.

‘Sure.’ I softened. ‘But if I lose a footrace to a serial killer tomorrow because I’ve under-slept, I’m blaming you.’

Her teeth flashed white in the dark. A grin. ‘There he is.’

‘You don’t have to apologise to me, Erin. I shouldn’t have put that pressure on you. I thought you were happy, I thought we’d made the decision to have kids together, but I mustn’t have seen how much I was pushing you into it. I was mad for a long time, but what right do I have over your choices? You shouldn’t have lied, and I wish it was anyone but Michael – I’ll never be past that – but I’ve asked enough of you. I don’t need an apology.’

This was only half true. The real truth was that I didn’t want to have to lie there and listen to her spout excuses. I’d heard them before – in therapy, at home, whispered and yelled, texted and emailed, tear-splattered and hate-fuelled. I thought I’d heard every excuse in every form.

Then she surprised me by saying, ‘I killed my mother.’

CHAPTER 31

The words were like a bomb in the small room. I didn’t know what to say to her confession. I knew her dad had raised her – it was one of the reasons we’d understood each other when we started dating – but Erin had told me her mother’s death had been from an illness when she was young.

‘She died giving birth to me.’ Her voice was barely above a whisper. ‘You’re about to tell me it’s not my fault, but it doesn’t matter. It’s what my father told me, and I believed it. Still do. I killed her. I know, it happens. I know it’s not my fault. That’s why I started telling people it was cancer, because people just say, “Oh, I’m so sorry,” instead of all that other stuff. But my father told me every day growing up, right up until he died, that it was my fault. I always knew he would have traded me for her.’

I’d known her father was abusive, but I’d never known it had been so targeted, filled with such blame and hatred. ‘That’s a horrible thing to say to a child,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘Please believe me when I say that I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just, well . . . After we talked about trying for a baby . . .’ She caught herself in a sob and took a second to compose herself. ‘You were so excited, Ern. I couldn’t believe how happy it made you, just talking about it. You were in love with the idea before we even started trying. I wanted to be what you wanted me to be. And you were so happy when I agreed. But then . . . I’m not saying it was your fault – I’m trying to explain. I was scared. I just needed a bit more time.

‘I was only supposed to keep taking the pill for a few weeks,’ she continued, ‘until I got used to the idea of getting pregnant. And, God, I loved those first few weeks. It was the happiest we’d ever been, I think. You had a light in your eyes that I couldn’t bring myself to snuff. But then a few weeks turned into a few months, which turned into a year, and suddenly you wanted to figure out what was going on and we’re driving to clinics and doctors, and you have that little plastic cup and I realised I’d trapped myself into never telling you, so I just had to go along with it, knowing that the only solution was to stop taking the pills and reveal a miracle pregnancy before someone else told you first. And I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was like feeding fivers into a pokie machine. I kept putting off the clinic. I kept thinking that I just needed to get rid of one more letter, I just needed to shrug off one more phone call, and then I’d be ready. Every prescription was my last, and then I’d find myself in the chemist waiting for another one.’

I was crying too now. ‘I wanted just you – just you as you were. I didn’t want a vessel. I was only excited because I thought we were doing it together. I would have listened.’

‘But if I’d have told you, you would have pushed. You wouldn’t have known what you were pushing against, and you would have done it in your funny charming way, and maybe you’d have dropped it for a year or two, but you would have pushed. I couldn’t tell you about Mum. I haven’t told anyone since I was a teenager, when I realised it was easier to tell people she was sick. I couldn’t face the judgement. I thought, with enough time, I could give you what you wanted. I really tried.

‘I’m not asking for pity. I’m trying to tell you why I was scared. Scared of being physically hurt, yes – of dying, like her. But mostly I was scared that if something did happen to me, you’d look at the child, the baby you’d wanted so badly, with the same eyes my father used on me.’

‘I wanted a family so badly—’

‘Oh, Ernie. I know.’

‘—maybe I forgot I already had one.’ I sighed. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m apologising to you, you prick.’ She gave a choked laugh. ‘I’m sorry I lied to you. I didn’t want to be the one who couldn’t give you what you wanted.’

‘I would have loved you just the same.’ I still did, but I didn’t say that. It was too painful, even with the oxycodone, to confess. Maybe I should have said something. Maybe that’s part of the reason I’m writing this all down. A book is a physical object, remember. It is written to be read.

After a pause, her voice floated down again. ‘Do you want to come up the ladder?’

I knew she was only hunting intimacy as a reaction to Michael’s death. I knew it would be false and hollow, and would only make everything hurt afresh tomorrow. I knew all of this, but still I lay there, unsure how to answer her.

‘More than anything,’ I said at last. ‘But I don’t think I will.’

CHAPTER 32

I dreamt of my wedding day, though it was more of a memory than a dream. Michael was leaning on the lectern like it was the only thing keeping him upright, slurring his words as he tried to get his third rule of best man speeches out, the guests laughing along with his struggles. Even Audrey was smiling. He took a swig of his beer and held a finger up – wait a sec, I’ve got this – hiccupped, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and tried once again to get his tongue to form the words ‘happy wife, happy life’. The room roared with laughter, and he grinned, believing he was earning those laughs through talent and not buffoonery. He hiccupped again. But this one sounded different, a little more like a . . . Another hiccup, but this was definitely more of a gag, and then he was clutching at his throat, eyes bulging, as his hiccups turned into a full-blown choking. And the room kept on laughing, riotous, as black, bubbling tar seeped from his lips.

The morning was grey-skied, dim, the storm back with renewed fury. The snow had dumped so heavily that the door needed a shoulder charge to carve an opening. Outside, we were wet-shinned and shivering within thirty seconds. Flakes of swirling ice bit my skin like sand-flies. The cars remaining wore white toupees, and drifts sloped against the walls of the guesthouse like suspended waves.

Erin and I had dressed and left the chalet without talking much; the space between us had the awkward air of long-time friends who’d slept together. After last night’s confessions and her invitation, we weren’t sure what to say. I’d slept in the oven mitt, and now it was half bio-material. I couldn’t take it off if I wanted to. I’d had to force it, seams straining, through my thermals. Seeing my one-handed struggle, Erin had helped me pull a beanie down over my ears. Yesterday I’d seemed to find myself in the cold more often than my crackling-fireplace wardrobe allowed for, so I was determined to be prepared. I chewed a single glove down my good wrist until it slid over my fingers. As we left, I grabbed an iron, fossicked from one of the chalet’s back cupboards. Erin had raised an eyebrow when I’d picked it up, but I saw her question rise in her chest and give up halfway, no doubt deciding she didn’t care to know.

I had the loupe in my pocket. I’d woken before Erin and had examined it in the morning light. It had 50x written on the side, which I assumed was the magnification. I’d fetched a fifty-dollar note from the stash and held it aloft, looking through the eyepiece for anything interesting.

There was one thing I knew about Australian fifty-dollar bills, and that was thanks to an old party trick that comes in handy for writers. In 2018, the yellow fifty-dollar banknote was redesigned to include a miniature reprinting of Edith Cowan’s inaugural speech to parliament underneath her portrait. Unfortunately, it featured a misspelling of the word ‘responsibility’, which had gone unnoticed for six months, after millions of bills were already in circulation. It was an easy dinner party anecdote: I’d ask around for fifties and, upon spotting one of the misspelled ones, launch into the story, climaxing with the glass-chinking exclamation that ‘It’s proof they don’t pay us writers enough – we would have found the error much faster if we’d seen a few more of these!’ Cue raucous laughter. But that was the extent of my knowledge of currency. Examining the bill, I could see it did have the typo in it, which suggested the money was more likely real than fake in any case.

There was indeed a serial number, as I’d guessed, as well as intersecting dashes of colour and a small hologram on the bottom left. But all of those features, including the typo, were visible to the naked eye. The loupe wasn’t necessary. The 50x magnification was strong enough to show me the very seam of the plastic, the bleed of the different colours of ink. The loupe was to see something else. I gave up. Looking was pointless if I didn’t know what I was looking for.

As we passed the cars, I patted Erin gently on the elbow to get her attention. In the howling storm there wasn’t much point talking, so I simply raised the iron and nodded towards Marcelo’s Mercedes. We slushed over to it. I thrust the iron, the heaviest removeable object I could find in the chalet, at the glass, which cracked but didn’t shatter, bending around a crater in the middle instead. The tinted window was marked with long, white streaks.

The idea had festered since yesterday, when I’d seen the glass around Katherine’s car, but I’d been a touch too busy being half-dead to try. I’d figured, seeing as Katherine’s Volvo had suffered similarly in the storm, that another broken window wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. But I hadn’t accounted for the alarm, which started shrieking into the wind as soon as I hit the window. The storm was loud, but I wasn’t sure if it was loud enough to cover the wail, and the wind’s direction was working against me, ferrying the sound towards the guesthouse. The hazard lights were blinking like a beacon too. Erin was keeping watch in case someone decided to investigate, but it was completely futile; her visibility was only a few metres. I had to hurry.

I hit the window again and it bent further, air now breaching as it flexed like an eggshell, but still the glass held. I only had to hit it once more before my whole hand exploded through it. I used the oven mitt (coming in handy now) to push the remnants of glass through the frame and leaned through. Erin was bouncing slightly, agitated and ready to leave, but I knew what I wanted. I yanked at it, ripping a cascade of cords from their sockets, and had just stood back up and turned to yell to Erin that we could go when a fist slammed into the side of my jaw.

Morning powder is quite good at catching a fall, but I didn’t make it to the ground. Erin caught me under both arms like a boxing coach.

‘Jesus, Ernest.’ Marcelo was shaking out his hand, surprised to see me.

I gingerly stood back up, probing the side of my jaw. He’d hit me with his right hand, so I was thankful his reconstructed shoulder had weakened his punch, because that was the wrist he wore his Rolex on. It should have felt like being socked by a dumbbell. I was surprised I still had teeth.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Marcelo said. ‘I was checking Lucy’s car and I heard the alarm. With everything that’s going on, I thought someone was . . . Hang on . . . What were you doing here?’

He looked at his car, clearly thinking about the broken window. I realised I’d dropped the iron just below the door. It was half dusted in snow by now, but still visible. I used my foot to nudge it under the car. Marcelo stepped closer to the window. If he peered in, he’d see the cables strewn across his dash and know that something was wrong.

‘I saw the window was broken from the storm.’ I said it too loudly, but it worked, making him turn back to me. ‘Those nice leather seats and all. Thought it would be a shame if those were ruined. I was hoping to find something to cover them with inside.’

‘Good man,’ he said, slinging an arm around me and steering me away from the car. ‘Forget the leather, let’s get you inside. Hang on . . .’ He paused, dropping a knee into the snow. My stomach, which had already had far too many opportunities to gravitate already, found another one. Marcelo groaned in standing, hand outstretched, holding something for me to see. But it wasn’t the iron. ‘You dropped your phone.’ He handed me the device.

Look, this is a borderline breach of Rule 6 – a fortunate accident – but every detective needs a bit of luck. Narrative suspense is built by stacking the odds against the gumshoe, but every now and then, just like in real life, the dominos topple in their favour. And, honestly, I don’t know why Marcelo didn’t see it. Maybe he was distracted, calculating how much his window would cost to replace, or maybe the cold had fogged his vision. Maybe his hand hurt from socking me in the jaw. It was a similar device to a phone, of course – small, rectangular and electronic, with an LCD screen – but he really should have noticed. But I wasn’t about to question it. I figured, after yesterday, I was owed some good fortune.

So I snatched the portable GPS device, freshly wrenched from its windscreen mount, and burrowed it into my pocket before he got a better look.

There was an abomination of a vehicle parked outside the front of the guesthouse. A bright yellow windowed cube sitting hip-high atop garish mechanical treads, it looked like the offspring of a military tank and a school bus. Steam was hissing out from underneath it, the engine on and hot.

A small group huddled by it: Sofia, Andy, Crawford, Juliette and a man I didn’t know, whom I allowed to momentarily lift my hopes – perhaps he was a detective. But, as I joined the group, I saw he was zipped into a sleek plastic raincoat with SuperShred Resort embroidered on the breast. Everything he wore had a logo on it – from his blue and gold holographic Oakleys, to his Skullcandy bandana tied over his chin (skull and crossbones over his mouth), to his puffy plastic pants with Quiksilver emblazoned all the way down one leg. He looked like a well-stickered beer fridge. I pegged him as a snowboarder: the only part of his face showing, his nose, looked often broken. As I got closer, I saw the SuperShred insignia was similarly printed on the flank of the bus-tank. He must have been from over the ridge, the resort in the adjoining valley.

I nudged my way between Andy and Sofia. Sofia was shivering intensely, winter pale. I could tell she wasn’t focusing on what was going on, rather counting down the seconds until she could go back inside. I expected at least one raised eyebrow at Erin and I arriving together, Erin in the same clothes as yesterday, but nobody seemed to have the energy for schoolyard gossip. Everyone was too focused on Marcelo, returning with us, to pay us any mind.

‘Are we leaving?’ I asked. The vehicle could only be designed to travel through thick snow, and it wasn’t here for joyrides.

‘Well?’ Juliette spoke over the top of me, to Marcelo.

‘Chalet’s empty. Her car’s still there.’

‘Shit.’

‘I can take you up the ridge.’ The Walking Billboard’s voice was no exception to his outfit, his accent sponsored by Monster Energy Drink. If he hadn’t been talking about a missing woman, I’m sure he would have used ‘dog’ and ‘bro’ as punctuation. There was a slight Canadian lilt, which I took to mean he was one of the snow-chasers who spent six months in the Northern Hemisphere and six months in the south. ‘But we’re not going to find someone in this unless we run over them.’

‘What’s happening?’ I tried again.

‘Lucy’s gone.’ Marcelo finally addressed me, albeit with the distracted air of someone who’s just been asked ‘What did I miss?’ during a film. ‘No one’s seen her since last night.’

It made sense. Marcelo had sprung me looting his car because he was already there, checking to see if Lucy had driven out overnight. I assumed that’s why Katherine and Audrey weren’t with the group: they’d split off to search the house.

The Walking Billboard swivelled his head across our group. ‘Excuse me for asking, but what the fuck happened to you lot? Jules, I should take you all back to Jindabyne right now.’

‘This is Gavin.’ Juliette put a hand on his arm. They seemed to know each other well; I assumed there were quickly forged friendships between seasonal workers. Not well enough for her to tell him about Michael’s murder, though, or he wouldn’t have been asking. ‘The weather’s getting worse, and the Oversnow’—she patted the side of the bus-tank, which gave a hollow thunk—‘is our only option down the mountain. Gavin’s offered to take us.’

‘But we have to go now,’ Gavin added, looking nervously at the sky.

‘Without Lucy?’ Erin asked.

‘This is our window.’ He shrugged. ‘You’ve got all the cops. I’m on my own. Which means I’ve got my own staff to worry about.’

‘We’ve got one cop,’ Marcelo corrected. ‘And barely that. Listen, it’s all of us or none of us. We’re family.’

It struck me as a strange thing for him to say, Lucy being his ex-stepdaughter-in-law, but I knew that the Garcias’ policy on hyphens was different to my own. Besides, if clashing with the law was a Cunningham trait, Lucy had copped that speeding fine on the way up, so I guess she was one of us after all.

‘I appreciate you coming over,’ Juliette said. ‘But we can’t leave her. Take us on one loop. I’ll owe you.’

‘Shots?’

‘Shots. Just like Whistler.’

The memory of an assumedly wild night perked him up so much his sunnies changed colour. ‘Right, who’s coming with me then?’

‘I’ll come.’ I suspected Andy volunteered because the unwashed pheromones of a gap-year were mingling with his middle-aged regrets, and he associated movement with usefulness, or perhaps he just wanted a ride in the big clanky thing.

I felt Erin bump me. One of us should go. ‘Me too,’ I said.

Gavin seemed to notice me for the first time and held out a North Face glove in greeting. I raised my oven mitt, apologetically declining.

‘Nice glove, dude,’ he said.

Crawford moved to follow the volunteers, but Juliette stepped in front of him. ‘You should stay here and keep control of things. Erin, Marcelo – help Katherine and Audrey search the rest of this place. Sofia’—she looked her up and down—‘to be honest, you look like you need a lie-down.’ Sofia nodded gratefully. ‘Gav, I’ll come too and look at those papers. I know.’ She must have seen his eyes light up. ‘Don’t push it. Just a look. Ernest and Andrew, hop in.’

I was impressed that she knew all of our names, and told her as much. She shrugged and said that if the rollcall kept getting shorter, she’d have no trouble at all. That got a grin out of me, dark as it was. I realised I was glad she was coming with us.

Gavin walked around to the rear of the beastly machine and pulled open the door. We clambered up a three-rung ladder while he made his way to the driver’s seat. It was barely a vehicle; instead of seats in the back it had long steel benches down either side. It was as cold as a fridge inside a freezer, the temperature wrapping me up in a rib-cracking squeeze. Everything smelled of fuel. The floor rumbled with the engine’s throaty growl as Gavin manoeuvred a gearstick the size of a tree branch.

We started at a slow crawl between the buildings, but then Gavin roared the throttle up the hill and started bouncing the three of us around. I held on to a steel bar above one of the windows and tried to peer out the frosted glass. Gavin was right – we would hit Lucy before we saw her. Given the giant tank wheels, I doubted we’d even feel it. The snow had dumped too heavily to leave tracks.

While we drove, I took Marcelo’s GPS from my pocket. It was solar powered, but still had some battery left, so it turned on easily in my hand. I searched the menu for recent trips. A rudimentary map loaded. Sky Lodge wasn’t even marked; it was just a small arrow icon in the middle of a blank area. I zoomed out until I could see the nearest road. The green line started near the Beer! sign that felt a thousand kilometres and years away, and then continued down towards Jindabyne, and then – I scratched my jaw in confusion – back up the hill on the other side of the valley. The trip was a perfect U-shape, estimated at fifty minutes one way. I knew from Juliette’s snow cam that he’d been gone six hours. Which begged the question: what had he been doing at SuperShred Resort for the other four?

‘This is pointless,’ Andy yelled after fifteen minutes. We were probably halfway up the slope. I could see a small halo of light, which I knew was the floodlight at the top of the chairlift, but nothing else. There weren’t even trees or rocks this far up. No one replied, so he tapped Juliette on the shoulder and repeated himself. ‘I said, “This is pointless.” The snow’s so heavy there’s no trace of her. She’d have to be mad to go out in this.’

‘We have to try,’ Juliette yelled back. It was like talking in the cargo hold of an airplane. ‘The chairlift looks closer from the bottom of the valley than it is, the mountain less steep too. Maybe when she couldn’t move her car, she thought she’d walk up there. She wouldn’t have known she was in trouble until she was halfway up.’

‘Or she’s gone to the road and is trying to hitch,’ I added.

‘Exactly.’

‘But why would she have gone . . .’ A particularly rough bounce dislodged Andy’s words, and he fumbled them back: ‘. . . gone into the storm at all?’

‘Maybe she was scared,’ I suggested.

Andy nodded. ‘She looked pretty unsettled when Sofia showed her that photo.’

I’d thought she had just felt confronted by death, but Andy was right. She had been upset, leaving the room straight after. What if it had been a threat from Sofia? In front of all of us, that would have been a confident move, but I already knew confidence was not something the Black Tongue lacked. But what would the threat have been? Was it I know about you or I’m coming for you?

Andy was thinking the same thing. ‘Even if something scared her, why come out here?’

‘She thought she could make it.’ There was a dark edge to Juliette’s voice; it was obvious she didn’t believe her own words. But then why were we out here?

‘In this weather?’ Andy shook his head. ‘That would be suicide!’

At that, Juliette’s eyes met mine for the slightest flicker and then shot to the floor. I realised what she was thinking, why she thought Lucy might have taken herself out into a lethal storm. I thought about the way Lucy had canvassed the guilt in the bar, before she’d been shown the photo of Green Boots and left in a hurry. Maybe Sofia had scared her. After all, the only thing linking the deaths so far was the method, and Erin had rightly pointed out that the Black Tongue’s MO was easily researched. I knew for a fact that Lucy had googled it; she was the one who told me about the first victims. And she had more grievances against Michael than many of us. Maybe seeing him arrive with Erin was the final straw.

I looked back at Juliette, her eyes fixed grimly out the frosted window.

We weren’t out looking for Lucy, we were chasing after her.