Bay of Fires

by Poppy Gee

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Sarah Avery's reckless behavior has cost her a job, her boyfriend, and the independence she desperately craves. Reluctantly home for the holidays in the Bay of Fires, a tiny seaside town on the Tasmanian coast, she hopes for a calm, quiet visit, with time to reflect on all that's gone wrong. Those hopes are crushed when, early one morning, she discovers the body of a young female backpacker washed up on the shore.

A year earlier, another woman went missing and hasn't been seen since. Now everyone wonders: is there a killer in the brush? Or were these women victims of Tasmania itself? The island is place of savage beauty: pristine sand beneath orange-lichen covered granite boulders; heaving shadowy kelp fields; sweeping cold currents; crackling bush beyond the seashore. It's also a landscape as flawed, vulnerable and vengeful as any human. Once its fragile peace is shattered, the locals' anxiety fuels a string of speculations about happened to the women - and who might be the next victim.

When journalist Hall Flynn arrives to investigate, haunted by recent failures and yearning for a fresh start, he's determined to do whatever it takes to break the story, and Sarah is his best source of local information. But Sarah - like everyone else in this close-knit town - has secrets she's desperate to keep hidden. And one of those secrets leads straight to a killer's door.

Haunting, evocative, as wildly atmospheric as the remote island where it takes place, BAY OF FIRES is a startling and wholly original debut.

Release date: March 12, 2013

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 384

Sample

Chapter 1

Six beer caps filled the pocket of Sarah Avery’s cutoff jeans. She checked her watch; Christmas lunch was over, but the afternoon was hours from ending. Lame jokes printed on slips of paper found inside Christmas crackers and long-winded stories that she had heard before became louder. It was time to get out of here. Sarah crumpled the paper crown she was wearing into a tight ball and flicked it under the table. She muttered something about checking fishing conditions. No one noticed her grab the bottle of Bundaberg rum, her gift to herself, from the top of the gas fridge. No one tried to follow as she left the family holiday shack, and that satisfied her. The thought of being alone on the rocks with her father or his mate Don was excruciating. From the outdoor cold box she took a six-pack of beer and a liter of Coke and shoved them into her Esky fishing cooler.


She did not relax until she was steering the car, in a pleasant alcohol-infused idle, along the gravel road. At the wharf she parked behind the boatshed. Low greasy cloud sweated over the ocean horizon. Close to the shore the sea was choppy. She could leave the car here and walk back to the shack if she wanted to. On the backseat was the wicker picnic basket her sister had given her for Christmas. What a stupid gift, she had thought, as she thanked Erica that morning. Now she realized it was handy. She took one of the cups and poured herself a rum and Coke.

Runabout dinghies, partly filled with rainwater and seaweed, bobbed tightly on their cable wire restraint. Some had not been taken out to sea in years. They remained here, tied so severely they were barely able to float. Perhaps she should come down with a box of salt and pour it into the point where the cable was drilled into the rock. Better off being a shipwreck than like this.

Halfway through her drink, a muscular guy wearing his cap back-to-front emerged out of the scraggly casuarina trees. He trod carelessly on the native pigface, a purple-flowered succulent vine that protected the dune from the wind. She watched him skim stones across the little harbor and smoke a cigarette. He tossed the butt into the sea. Sam Shelley—all grown up. The last time she had seen him, maybe seven years ago, he had played Chinese checkers against her and Erica. He had cried when he lost. To cheer him up, Sarah had taken him fishing at the jetty and helped him reel in a beautiful leatherjacket.

He said he remembered her and sat in the passenger seat, fiddling with the stereo, adjusting the mirror, storing his cigarettes in the rental car’s empty glove box. Several soft hairs that his razor had missed grew from his cheek.

Sarah didn’t offer him the first beer; he asked. That point would seem important to her when she recalled the evening later.

 

On Boxing Day the beach shacks huddled under one endless cloud of cold moisture. Sarah sat alone, watching the heaving sea through the window. It was perfect weather for reading, and there was a fly-fishing article in an old Reader’s Digest Sarah wanted to have a look at. Unfortunately, Sarah’s parents invited their best friends, Pamela and Don, over for a game of Celebrity Head. They had played some kind of game every afternoon in the week since Sarah had arrived, while summer rain blew sideways from a chilled gray sky. Her sister, Erica, said Sarah had brought the rain with her. Indifferently she agreed and took another large mouthful of beer. Noisy rain popping into bowls and saucepans strategically arranged under the leaking roof forced everyone to raise their voices as they drank Ninth Island champagne from glasses marked with individual charms. For the fun of it Erica had attached a charm to Sarah’s stubby. It was a single stiletto.


No one noticed Sarah’s sadness; they barely noticed as she stood up to light the gas lanterns. She had told them that boredom had been her reason for quitting her job at Eumundi Barramundi Farm. Man troubles, too, she had added, when Erica pressed her. They all assumed Sarah had been rejected. Fair enough, Sarah didn’t blame them; it was a safe assumption about a plain woman like her. It was easier for them to digest than the truth. Sick, perverted, mental; those were the names Jake had shouted across the wet asphalt that night. Her family didn’t need to know that. One by one she held a matchstick beside the soft wicks, filling the shack with milky light. Conversation drifted around her like a familiar, itching blanket.

Sarah had a sour feeling of déjà vu; they were talking about the same things they had talked about for as long as she could remember. Jane Taylor, the angry woman who ran the guesthouse, had let her dogs run unleashed on the beach and one of them had chased a child. That was irresponsible, Sarah’s mother, Felicity, said; Pamela agreed wholeheartedly.

Deep in the national park on the east coast of Tasmania, the Bay of Fires was a holiday community. People drove for hours from Launceston or Devonport every summer to open up their shacks or rent one of the humble fishermen’s cottages or pitch a tent in the camping ground beside the lagoon. Two people lived here year-round, Jane Taylor and Roger Coker, who kept to himself in his green cottage. There were no more than a dozen shacks, no room for more than a dozen tents at the campsite. Even now at Christmas, the busiest time of the year, the beach remained quiet enough to suit Sarah. Everyone said the Bay was crowded, but it was nothing compared to a tourist-packed Queensland beach in January.

Beer bubbled up the back of Sarah’s throat and into her nose. She swallowed and concentrated on the conversation. Simone Shelley had bought a new wave ski and had offered John and Don a lesson. Felicity, or Flip as everyone called her, and Pamela decided that was half funny, half pathetic. Simone was flirtatious, but that didn’t bother Flip and Pamela, so they said; it was more that she wasn’t warm, she wasn’t comfortable around women. Pamela ran the corner store and was pleased to share local news. She said the campers were drinking a lot more than in previous years; she could tell by how much ice they bought from her. She could tell other things, too, such as why certain people couldn’t lose weight, judging by what they bought from her store. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that an apple or a banana in Pamela and Don’s store cost three times the price of a bag of potato chips. The campers presumably brought their own fruit and vegetables from Launceston.

The only customers who could afford Pamela’s fruit were the relatively well-off people who owned holiday shacks—professional people, doctors, teachers, business owners. Flip and Pamela were pharmacists. Flip owned a pharmacy in town, but Pamela had never used her degree. Instead, Pamela and her husband, Don, had worked in real estate and done so well they were semi-retired now. They ran the local shop in summer and then closed it and retreated to Queensland for the winter. Pamela and Flip had been best friends since studying pharmacy together. Sarah assumed they had been equally annoying back then: Pamela had been crowned Miss Pharmacy, Flip first runner-up. It was a story they still liked to tell—and with no embarrassment.

“Sarah’s turn.” Erica wrote on a piece of paper and passed it to Sarah. Sarah licked the back of the paper and stuck it to her forehead.

“Am I a woman?”

“Yes.” A circle of grinning faces surrounded her.

“Am I married?”

“No.”

“Am I alive?”

“No.”

Sarah couldn’t think of another question. She didn’t care. The celebrity head was probably some pop star she had never heard of.

“Give me a clue.”

“You’re an elderly virgin.” Erica’s laugh was a hoot.

“Who is it?”

“It’s not you!”

“Erica. Let her work it out.”

Sarah ripped the paper off her forehead. Everyone groaned. She was Queen Elizabeth the First.

“Good one.” She tipped her head back and poured the warm flat froth at the bottom of her stubby down her throat.

Outside, pink light was visible through cracks in the darkening sky. Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Although it was raining now, tomorrow would be clear. She would still leave. The week had dragged on long enough. The weather didn’t bother her. In fact she preferred it; bad weather brought schools of salmon close to the beach and kept the tea tree–stained lagoon pleasantly childless. It was the Bay of Fires that she remembered from her childhood, when all the shacks were tiny Fibro fishing cottages and there was never a queue at the boat ramp.

Erica cupped her hand around another slip of paper as she wrote.

“One for you, Pam.”

Pamela stuck it on her forehead.

“Am I a woman?”

Flip and Erica shouted yes.

“Am I a bitch?”

“Yes!”

“Am I Simone Shelley?”

Raucous laughter drowned the rain. It woke Henry, who poked his head up and barked. Sarah couldn’t feign a laugh. It had been a mistake coming here. After living and working for seventeen months in the cheerful nosiness of Eumundi, Tasmania’s isolation had appealed. Ninety kilometers down a gravel road to coastal wilderness. No electricity, no telephones, no television. Bay of Fires: summer population, seventy; winter population, two. But the isolation was not as reassuring as she had imagined. A week, a month here, nothing to talk about but Simone Shelley’s alleged flirtations, untrained dogs, and fat people. Before long they would want more details about Sarah. It was the intimate details of other people’s lives that nourished them. So far, Sarah had listed bare facts: she had quit her job and broken up with Jake.

She didn’t know that she could keep her secret hidden. Kindness would be enough to shatter her fragile shell. The problems that had forced her self-imposed exile from her life up north would provide her mother and Pamela hours of intense discussion. Worse would be their disgust if they found out that she had messed around with Sam Shelley, Simone’s seventeen-year-old son. If she was honest, she hadn’t given his age a thought. And on Christmas Day, no less. It was so bad it was almost funny. But she had not drunk enough to laugh.

Sarah looked around the room at her family and their friends. If they turned on her, she could handle herself in an argument. But to be the focus of their concern would be unbearable. Sarah twisted the top off another bottle of beer.

  

Sarah went to bed too early and woke in the dark, with nothing to do but wait for day, prey to a contorted parade of raw memories. She tried to control her thoughts by focusing on work. On the barramundi farm there was order, systems, programs that required finite concentration. Before she quit she had been improving staff training. She’d taught them to diagnose diseases that the caged fish suffered. Each ailment had specific symptoms: gill disease, skin lesions, sores, viruses similar to those humans could contract. Lying in bed, Sarah visualized each symptom. Some were psychological, and she concentrated on recalling each troubling behavior, such as fish swimming unusually, or sitting at the bottom of the tank, or floating on the top, gasping for air.

Some of the blokes on her staff never got it. Glorified tank cleaners. Not that she’d ever say that to their faces; she had encouraged them to take pride in their work. But still, how many times did she need to remind them to be alert to the reactions of the fish every time they brought in new water or new breeding stock? Old anger temporarily contained her shame. She focused on her breathing, counting each breath, releasing it slowly. Maybe she was the problem. She had high expectations of people and got frustrated when her expectations weren’t met. But so what? If they didn’t like it, she could handle that. She only wanted them to reach their potential. Some of them had never had a chance; one older bloke had spent so much time moving in and out of prison, he had never had a proper job until Sarah made him full-time. No doubt some of the Eumundi Barramundi staff were glad she had quit. She could see them standing around the Pineapple Hotel pool table, laughing about her over Friday afternoon beers.

People were more of a challenge in land fish farming, as opposed to ocean fish farming. Storms and sudden shifts in currents, hot autumns and freezing springs, pollution; there were many unpredictable elements in ocean fish farming. The thing is, you expected these to occur. On a land farm, you were supposed to have total control of the environment.

Quiet and dark, that was how barramundi liked it. It was her job to make the environment as friendly as possible for the fish. Healthy fish lived a peaceful life, rippled currents on the surface of the tank their trademark. She imagined herself submerged near the bottom, slippery skins slicking past her, flipping somersaults in the cool darkness. On the tank floor, the sun would belong to another world. Oxygenized water bubbled upward to the top. She closed her eyes and allowed herself to be absorbed into the undulating swirl of four tonnes of barramundi. The distraction worked for a while until the madness crept in, her thoughts more frightening than any bad dream.

As soon as light appeared at the sliver where the mold-stained Ken Done curtains did not join up, she slid out of bed and hung a towel around her neck. She closed the shack door on Mum’s and Dad’s and Erica’s sleep noises, escaping before the cups of tea and conversations that would follow her from the solitude of the couch to the wooden chair under the old beach umbrella on the front veranda.

Dad had mowed the track to the beach. It was reassuringly wide, but Sarah set each foot down with a deliberate thump and hummed to warn the poisonous black snakes that thrived in the area that she was coming. It was a childhood habit and she was barely conscious of it. Dad had done a good job of mowing the track, especially for someone who was not used to doing it. Sarah’s parents had a gardener who came weekly. When Sarah had lived at her parents’ home in Launceston, it seemed her dad had never had time to do anything more than tend his herb and flower gardens, his time stretched between his job as a lecturer in history at the university and his research on Tasmanian tin mining in the nineteenth century. Her father still made Sarah lists of handyman-type jobs to do whenever she came home.

Erica had mentioned that she had the same gardener tending the lawn at her place, which was a smaller version of the family’s red brick and red tile roof Federation-style home. Erica worked as a flight attendant, her boyfriend, Steve, as a pilot, and they said they didn’t have time to do it themselves. Sarah wondered what other aspects of their parents’ lives Erica and Steve would eventually emulate. She could see Erica educating her children at one of Launceston’s private schools and spending the next decade watching rowing regattas, netball matches, and ballet recitals in lieu of a social life, as their parents had done. It was not the life Sarah desired and had been one of the reasons why she had moved away from Launceston as soon as she finished university.

At the bottom of the track she kicked off her sneakers and leapt across the smooth granite rocks and onto the chilled sand. The storm had cleared and the beach was empty, a slender pale arm curling between spiky yellow sea grass and the ocean under a scrubbed-clean blue sky. Curly brown seaweed and twists of orange string, driftwood and fishing line, broken shells, globs of smashed jellyfish, and bits of plastic littered the beach beneath the shacks. The sea was too rough for swimming. The usually clear green water churned sand. Clumps of dirty yellow froth like beer scum stained the beach. If Erica were here, she would crinkle her nose and say it smelled like raw sewage, but Sarah liked the salty, fishy smell that remained after the storms, that pungent aroma of decomposing seaweed. It was good for fishing.

Twenty minutes’ walk down the beach, the dune flattened around a purple lagoon. Sarah tossed her towel on the sand and waded into the swimming hole without fuss. Smashed sticks, gum leaves, and other debris flushed from the gullies floated on the surface. She scooped water over the goose bumps on her thighs, wetting her sagging nylon one-piece, splashing her shoulders and face, smoothing her unbrushed hair back into its ponytail. The sun rose slowly in Tasmania and a chill breeze rippled the water. A school of tiny silver baitfish darted toward her, then away. She took a breath and dived. Underneath, she opened her eyes. The water was so cold it felt like her eyeballs had frozen.

The storm had created a new deep pool at one end of the lagoon, conveniently near a good jumping rock. She swam toward it. The distant sound of breaking waves was accompanied by the high screech of seagulls and the gentle lap as Sarah sidestroked through the water. For a moment she forgot everything. The lagoon was wrapped in quietness now, though before long it would be as noisy as a public swimming pool. Sarah had mentioned this to Erica last night and her sister had agreed, cheerfully, as though this was a good thing about the lagoon. Sarah couldn’t stand it. The men in new Christmas board shorts following kids flapping on blow-up fluorescent-colored toys; mums yelling instructions; old women keeping their hair dry breaststroking up and down; and that awful blind friendliness of people who think they know you and want to ask stupid questions when all you want to do is press your shivering body flat against a hot rock and close your eyes.

When she got out she was cold. Wrapping the towel around her shoulders she walked along the beach, away from the shacks. The sand was warm under her icy feet. A man was coming toward her. As she got closer she realized it was Roger Coker. He swung his fishing bucket with his good hand, his rod wedged tightly under the other arm. She couldn’t remember the last time she had spoken to him; it had been years since she had spent more than a weekend here. Roger was an awkward man, and she had always made a point of being friendly to him, conscious that it took him a certain amount of effort to initiate a conversation. Sarah curled her lips into a parched smile.

“There is a girl. Down half a mile. Dead.” He blinked and looked out to sea.

“What are you talking about?” Sarah resisted the urge to take a step backward; Roger was standing too close to her.

“Smells bad, worse than rotten squid.”

“A dead person?”

“Murdered.” His breath smelled like sour milk.

“On the beach?”

“Stabbed.”

His long white finger pointed to the unprotected end of the beach. With the rough swell that lingered after the storm, the only other person who might walk that far would be a shell collector. But there was no one else wandering along the tideline picking up polished creamy cowrie shells, Chinaman’s fingernails, or the flat shells with a hole perfect for threading fishing line through. Apart from Roger, Sarah was alone on the beach.

“The Shelleys’ is the closest phone,” Sarah said.

“No. No. I’ll use the phone box at the shop.” Roger’s gumboots dragged through the sand toward the shacks.

Sarah watched him for a moment, then followed his boot prints back along the shoreline. In the morning sun her shadow was long, a thin black ribbon that moved one step ahead of her toward the dead woman.

The smell hit her first; rotting flesh, as foul as road kill festering in the sun. Her stomach heaved but she didn’t slow her pace. From a distance the body looked like a seal, curled and dark on the sand, the outgoing tide lapping her legs. Up close the blackened and bloated body was swollen around bikini bottoms. Her top half was naked.

A crab crawled out of the raw tissue. The stench was unbearable, but Sarah couldn’t turn away. Covering her nose and mouth, she walked around the body. Roger’s footprints formed a circle in the sand; none came close.

Sarah wasn’t squeamish. Crouching down, she rolled the dead woman over. Her head was floppy like one of the dead fairy penguins tossed onto the beach by winter seas. Her empty eye sockets stared at the new sky. Sarah registered the polka-dot pattern of the bikini bottoms and reeled backward, her hands clawing at the sand as she scrambled away. Adrenaline shot through her system, at once sickening and strangely pleasing. She had not expected to recognize the corpse.

She sprinted toward the shacks, ignoring the splintering sensations in her ankle tendons as she pounded across the hard sand.

Chapter 2

Ocean swell muffled the police car’s engine. The windows rattled and the chimney pipe swayed and tapped against the tin roof as two policemen came up the ramp. Erica tied a sarong around her waist. Sarah sat on the banana lounge and inspected her hands. Every nail had broken unevenly. Two nails were split up the center, ruined from repairing filter systems and replacing gutters. What could she tell the cops? She had been anticipating their arrival, had silently rehearsed what she would say; now they were here, her thoughts were beyond her control.


They took her statement while she sat there in her Speedos and a T-shirt that said The Liver Is Evil and Must Be Punished.


“I saw her in the guesthouse. I might have said hi.” Sarah didn’t elaborate on the conversation she had had with the Swiss woman. “I took Jane Taylor, the guesthouse owner, some mullet a few days ago. Can’t remember when exactly.”

She wasn’t lying. What passed between her and the pretty backpacker was nothing. It wouldn’t interest the police. Thinking about it made Sarah’s stomach churn sluggishly. The younger, gravel-voiced policeman demanded to know why she had tampered with the crime scene.

“The danger is you destroyed evidence.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.” Sarah tried to read his face but it was inscrutable, his pen poised over his pad as though he expected some kind of confession. “She’s been soaking in the ocean for God knows how long. You won’t get the killer’s DNA.”

The older policeman stood with the sun behind him so that a shadow fell across her body. He had his hands deep in his pockets and his hips thrust forward. She wasn’t intimidated. Sarah had been the only woman on the barramundi farm. She had been in charge of eleven men; hard-living, hardworking blokes who didn’t hold back. She had been one of two women in her year studying aquaculture. At Hash House Harriers running club she was the only woman. She could hold her own from the ponds to the pub and anywhere else it counted.

“I am sorry I touched her.”

“It’s all right.”

Sarah reached for a glass of water beside the banana lounge. She rolled the water around inside her mouth. It was warm and had a faint taste from the tank. They were correct; she shouldn’t have touched the body.

“I felt sorry for her.”

If she started describing the twisted bikini, the legs splayed revealing unkempt pubic hair, the crawling lice, or the sand caked in her fingernails, there was a chance she would cry. If she started crying, there was a chance she would not be able to stop.

“What do you think happened to her?” Sarah asked.

“Too early to say. The forensics personnel will take the body to Hobart, and the postmortem will take place in a week or so. We’ll get the toxicology reports first. The cause of death always takes longer. Of course, we can’t release the findings until the family is located,” the older cop said. “If she is a Swiss national, as the guesthouse owner suggests, that could take time.”

The younger cop added, “But young women don’t get killed for no reason.”

“She was raped?” Erica said. “Oh my God.”

“That’s a guess until the autopsy is completed,” the older policeman cut in. He stepped forward, and Sarah was out of the shadow of his body. Sun pierced her eyes and forced her to squint. “If you remember anything…”

“This is like in the movies,” Erica said. “If we remember anything, we’ll come down to the station.”

“Yes, Erica. It’s just like in the movies, except it’s not, and someone did actually die,” Sarah said.

Embarrassment flushed Erica’s face. She blushed easily. Cried easily, too. Everything came easily to Erica. The only thing Erica struggled with was failure. Sarah had often tried to assuage her younger sister’s disappointment. The desire to protect Erica remained in Sarah, but right now it was dormant, too deep to be tapped.

Ashamed and unable to apologize for her meanness, Sarah turned away.

Not long after the police left, the shack became crowded. Elbows resting on the veranda railing, Sarah watched through the binoculars as the police removed the body. She ignored the chatter and the feeling that she was just another nosy resident. The forensics people worked slowly. One person was taking photographs. Another, crouched beside the body, was writing in a notepad. More men, in plainclothes, watched. There were no women documenting the crime scene.

Behind Sarah, her mother and Erica bustled about with the teapot and leftover Christmas cake and shortbread biscuits, as though this was a high school parents and friends fundraising morning tea and not the aftermath of a murder. Slurping tea from chipped cups, the visitors swapped bits of information with barely contained excitement.

It seemed the Swiss woman had been walking to the rock pool in the middle of the day, a few days before Christmas, when she was killed. No one even knew she was missing until Roger found the body. If he hadn’t found her, there was a chance she could have washed away on the next high tide. Someone said that she had sunbathed topless every afternoon at Honeymoon Bay and laughter simmered through the crowd. They became silent when someone else added that the woman’s parents would probably fly out from Switzerland to take her body home. Sarah was the only person who had spoken to the woman, a fact she didn’t volunteer.

Anja Traugott was alone in the Bay of Fires Guesthouse when Sarah strode in, looking for Jane. Anja had tried to speak to her. She was not Sarah’s kind of woman. Her accent, dumb and sexy at the same time, was irritating.

Sarah had been back in Tasmania for less than a day. Everything felt irrelevant except her own reeling sadness. Sarah told herself her unfriendliness had nothing to do with the woman’s pale, pinup girl prettiness, or the fact that her clothing, tiny cutoff shorts with breasts almost falling out of her red and white bikini, was better suited to the Gold Coast than a Tasmanian national park. She wasn’t jealous, she was just preoccupied.

But as Anja had traced her finger along Jane Taylor’s wall map of the local coast, shades of blue pillowing out from the long curving beach to the continental shelf, Sarah had stood mutely, the plastic bag of mullet she was bringing Jane hanging limply by her side.

“The rock pool is a two-hour walk from here,” Sarah had said before leaving the woman staring at the map.

Sarah had been to the rock pool that morning, and the water, usually so clear you could see the delicate seaweed fronds growing on the bottom fifteen feet down, was blurred with fish guts and scales. Gulls scratched over bloodstained rocks where someone had cleaned fish. But Sarah had not mentioned this.

Sarah gripped the binoculars with damp fingers. Her hands were sweating. There were other walks she could have suggested; traversing the nearby apple and turnip farm to see the wild northern beach or hiking along the sandy Old Road past the local rubbish dump, known as the tip, and up to the burnt bridge where wildflowers were in season, tiny pink and lemon petals among parched banksia and wattle. Any of those would have made a nice walk for a tourist.

Through the binoculars Sarah watched as two people in white jumpsuits lifted the body into a bag, and then onto a stretcher, and carried it to a white van parked behind the grassy dune.

“It’s quite disgusting that you touched that dead woman,” Erica said with a grin. “Mum’s worried they’ll make you a suspect.”

“Mum’s got no idea.”

“Yeah.” Erica took the binoculars. “Oh. She’s gone.”

There was disappointment in her voice as she turned and announced the news to the people gathered on the veranda.

 

A solitary bodysurfer hurtled down the face of a seven-foot wave in the post-storm swell beneath the shack. The wave crashed, and he disappeared into the beating foam. Sarah counted silently. It was a good thirty seconds before he emerged from the white water. It would be like being inside a washing machine in there. He stood up, twisted around, and dived under an incoming wave, just before it exploded with a force Sarah could hear from the veranda. His forceful strokes were those of someone who had done years of swimming training in the pool.

She had not seen him since. . .