The Shattering

by Karen Healey

Genres: Young Adult

Synopsis

Praised as “a breath of fresh air” (Booklist), Karen Healey’s debut novel Guardian of the Dead received a starred review from School Library Journal and was a finalist for the William C. Morris Award. Healey’s second novel The Shattering stars Keri, a 17-year-old trying to come to terms with her brother Jake’s death. Although
authorities believe Jake committed suicide, Keri cannot accept that her brother would take his own life. And
when she’s approached by her classmate Janna, whose brother also committed
suicide years earlier, the two team up in search of answers. Soon the girls come to a grim realization—that their brothers weren’t the first in town to die under mysterious circumstances.

Release date: September 5, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 320

Sample

THE FIRST TIME I BROKE MY ARM, I WAS READY for it.

I was seven years old, and Janna van der Zaag and I were playing in her backyard. Janna’s backyard was a fantastic place for kids—a big dollhouse and a lot of bush out back for playing hide-and-seek in and a brand-new zip line her dad had made, sloping from a tall platform built into the sturdiest tree down to a brace attached to the next sturdiest.

Janna had been using the zip line for days, and she flew down with style, blond hair like a banner, the T-bar gripped tightly in her hands. I climbed the ladder and clung there as she ran the T-bar back up to me on its long rope. The zip line hadn’t seemed so high up from the ground.

What if I fell off and broke my arm? I thought. And I mean I really thought. I pictured it in my mind, working out the way it could happen and what I should do if it did. I decided that a bone would go crunch or crack, and I would sit up and cradle my arm and yell, “Janna, get your mum!” and then go to the doctor in the family’s big blue van that fit all the van der Zaag kids for Sunday Mass.

Then I opened my eyes, grabbed the T-bar, and took off flying all the way down the wire, screaming laughter at the rush of flight. My landing was perfect, and I ran the T-bar back up to Janna for her turn, heart jumping with joy and terror.

My body was so free.

On the fourth time down the line, my palms were too sweaty. They slipped, I fell, my left arm went crack, and I yelled, “Janna, get your mum!” before her big blue eyes could even fill with tears.

Everyone praised me for being so brave, but I had still been scared. I had only known what to do if the worst happened.

After that, it just seemed a good idea to be prepared. I hung a go-bag on my door in case of a fire or an earthquake and put a mini first-aid kit in my backpack, and I rehearsed possible disasters in my head, over and over, until I was sure I knew how to react.

I knew it sounded a little bit crazy, and I stopped telling anyone about it when Hemi Koroheke called me creepy and, with smug emphasis, neurotic, which was our Year Eight Word of the Day.

But I did it anyway. I had plans for what eulogy to give if both my parents were hit by a car, how to escape or attract help if I were kidnapped, and how to survive if I were lost in the bush. It wasn’t as if I thought all these things were likely to happen. But I knew they could, and if they did, I wanted to be ready.

In the end, it didn’t do me any good. Because I didn’t have a plan for what to do if my older brother put Dad’s shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger with his toes.

My mistake.

I found Jake—I mean, I found the body—but I don’t remember that. A couple of weeks later I couldn’t find my favorite pair of jeans, and Mum said she threw them out because of the blood, and I suddenly remembered the feeling of something heavy in my lap. I might have imagined it—I don’t know. But I think it was real, that memory of wet weight across my thighs.

That’s it, though.

Jake killed himself and he didn’t leave a note, and I lost bits of my memory and my favorite pair of jeans. I’ll never get a pair like those again—they don’t make that style anymore. They were scuffed in all the right places and cut to fit my short legs and big bum, and they were comfortable and a choice faded dark blue that looked good with everything.

That’s not a metaphor. I loved those jeans.

I loved my brother more. Jake was my favorite person—my best friend, my first supporter, the last one to get angry with me when I said something that was just too sarcastic. At nineteen, he was two years older than me, but we weren’t one of those sibling pairs who hated each other as kids and then hit adolescence and got along. We’d always been that close. My first word was Chay.

There had been no warning. He didn’t give away his possessions or say things like “It’ll all be over soon.” His girlfriend, Sandra-Claire, swore up and down that he didn’t act depressed or fight with her, and even though she is a heinous bleached and bony bitch who told me that if I kept cutting my hair short everyone would think I was a lesbian (and she didn’t say lesbian), I believed that Jake hadn’t done any of that stuff, because I knew he would have told me first.

I knew what to do if someone you love showed signs of suicide, because we’d studied it in Health. It’s a myth that people who talk about it aren’t going to do it; 74 percent of suicides give a warning sign of some kind, and if Jake had ever mentioned it, I would have had a plan. A plan for what to say, how to tell Mum and Dad, what to do if he did it and failed, what to do if he did it and succeeded, what to do if he did it and succeeded and I found the body. But he didn’t and I didn’t, and it happened anyway. It made no sense at all.

It was a lot easier to think about how irrational Jake’s killing himself was than to think about how my insides had been ripped out.

Because Jake’s death was a suicide, we nearly didn’t get to hold a proper tangi, in case all the celebration and ceremony for the dead encouraged other kids to copy him. But I think Nanny Hinekura put her foot down, and all the family on Dad’s side turned up at the marae farther down the coast. It was three days of people crowding around us and talking about Jake. All the stories: how he’d bagged his first deer; how he’d gotten his first swimming medal by crashing into the end of the pool; how one Christmas he’d played PlayStation for twenty-one hours against any cousin who’d take him on, and he’d fallen asleep in front of the TV, thumbs still twitching. I liked the stories a lot better than the formal speeches, which were mostly in Mori. I’m all for valuing our cultural heritage and that, and I’d taken Mori for two years to make Nanny Hinekura happy, but it turned out I was just no good at languages.

Jake was much better. He would have translated for me.

The mourners cried and laughed and talked—so much noise, everyone saying “Jake, Jake, Jake,” echoing the way my heart beat out his name. When everyone slept, on the mattresses spread out under the high carved rafters of the wharenui roof, I could feel the thick emotion leeching out of them, sticking to my skin like steam. I was surrounded by love, but it felt like I was smothered by it. I’d been at tangi before and watched grieving families take comfort. But I couldn’t. Not with Jake in the closed coffin beside us instead of sitting with me, adding his own stories to this mix.

I gripped Mum’s hand, very pale in mine, and didn’t let go.

Once we went back to Summerton, I didn’t go to school for the last bit of the year—there was no point with the Christmas holidays coming so soon, and I got compassionate consideration on all my final assessments anyway. Mum cleaned the house as if she would die if she didn’t, and Dad had to go back to work. I walked a lot, trying to avoid people who would say useless, comforting things, like “Well, I’m sure he’s in a better place.”

I couldn’t believe any of that crap. The room he’d died in had been blessed and a farewell karakia chanted, but Jake wasn’t going to take the long trip to Cape Reinga to find the home of Dad’s ancestors. He wasn’t in heaven with some white-bearded God. He wasn’t hanging around, keeping an eye on me. And he sure couldn’t do all three, which was what Nanny Hinekura seemed to believe. Those were just stories, things people made up to make the world nicer. How did they know? Where was the proof?

No, Jake was dead. He wasn’t in a better place. Everything left of him was in the ground, where it would rot.

Two weeks after the burial, I was in Summerton’s only department store, trying to find a replacement pair of jeans. Janna van der Zaag walked up to me and said, “If you want to find out who murdered your brother, follow me.”

So I did.



Janna was cute and short when she was seven. Now she was tall and skinny and gorgeous in a perky blond-and-milky-complexion way, which was probably one of the reasons why she put on eye makeup like she was painting the house and dyed her hair every two weeks (right now it was shiny purple-black) and wore black velvet blazers and plaid skirts.

The other reason was that she was in a band.

She looked right at home in the alley between Lauer’s Department Store and Mimi’s Muffins, leaning up against the redbrick wall behind the trash-filled Dumpster, wanting to talk to me about murder.

“Hi, Stardust,” I said. “I thought you only came out at night, with the other vampires.” Ever since primary school, everyone had called Janna Stardust: van der Zaag → Zigzag → Ziggy Stardust → Stardust. So it’s not actually a cool nickname, but she acts like it is.

Normally this is the sort of thing that gets me a reputation for being a bitch, but Janna didn’t seem to care that I’d just called her a bloodsucking creature of the night. She probably thought it was a compliment.

“Do you believe me?” she said. “About the murder?”

I looked at my fingernails, all bitten down to raw nubs. “Not yet. But it makes sense.”

She nodded. “No note, right? No warning?”

My interest sharpened. “Right.”

“I knew it. Exactly the same thing happened to Schuyler.”

I very nearly said, “Who’s Schuyler?” but then my brain got in the way. Schuyler was Janna’s older brother. He’d killed himself ten years ago by hanging himself in the garage. It happened about three weeks after I broke my arm on the zip line.

“Someone murdered your brother?” I said instead, and Janna nodded again, tugging at her collar with black-painted fingernails. Hers weren’t bitten at all.

“And yours.”

I leaned my head to one side. “Huh.”

“You’re weirdly calm about this,” she said.

“I’ll cry later,” I told her. She rolled her eyes, so she might have thought I was being sarcastic, but I was telling the truth. I felt like a girl-shaped open sore, walking through a world made up of salt and lemon juice. But there was a limit to how much anyone could cry in public, and I’d reached that limit at the tangi, tears rolling down my face while the aunties clustered around me.

I refocused. “If you think they were murdered, shouldn’t you go to the police?”

She laughed. “In this town? I don’t know who the murderer is, but he’d know I’d been talking in about ten minutes. Twenty, tops.” She made a gesture at her throat. “And then I might ‘suicide.’ ”

She had a point, even if she was being typically melodramatic about it. It didn’t take long for gossip to get around Summerton.

“I want you to meet someone,” she said.

“Who?”

“This guy I know. He gets here from Auckland tomorrow.”

I choked on a laugh. “Wait, he’s a tourist?”

“Sione’s a good guy!” she said, really defensively, as if being a tourist and being a good guy were normally mutually exclusive. As far as I could tell, they were. Summerton is a tourist town. People got worried a while ago when an earthquake destroyed the famous limestone Steps to Heaven, which stood just off the coast, but the tourists keep coming every summer, and the money keeps rolling in. In fact, there are more tourists now than ever before. Other towns on the coast have lost young people to the cities and old people to retirement. Thanks to the tourists, Summerton’s still going strong.

But no one actually likes the tourists, though people like Janna are happy to party with them. In my experience, most of the tourists are rich snobs, and the ones our age are only interested in surfing, snogging people of the opposite gender (mostly other tourists), and leaving puddles of vomit drying on the streets for me to dodge when I did my paper route.

“He lost someone, too,” Janna said.

“Has he looked under the couch?” I asked.

Janna gave me a look that said I wasn’t following the script and then proved she had a sense of humor by giggling. But she looked guilty afterward. “Are you doing okay?” she asked, and her voice was soft and kind.

Up until then, I had been just about enjoying the conversation. Sure, Jake had been a big part of it, like every other conversation I’d had for the past few weeks. But Janna hadn’t bothered to keep her voice low and her gestures gentle, or even, right up to that point, ask me how I was.

“How do you think I feel?” I said.

“How I felt,” she said. “How Sione feels.”

I rocked back on my heels and considered it.

“We’ll meet tomorrow at the Kahawai to show you something,” she said. “Eight PM. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Well,” she said, and made a sort of uncertain gesture. “And… I can’t believe I didn’t start by telling you that I’m really sorry. Because I am.”

“It’s okay. We’re not exactly friends.”

“Well, we used to be. And Jake was always nice to me.”

Jake was always nice to everyone. I took a deep, deep breath against the hurt and the tears. “See you tomorrow.”

Other people might have tried to hug me, but Janna just nodded and walked away, the thick soles of her red platform shoes making no sound on the asphalt. I sniffled for a while, then took more deep breaths of leftover-food stink. How could anyone wear black velvet in this weather? She must have been sweating like a pig under all that makeup.

I wondered if she was pulling some kind of joke. I didn’t really know much about her now, and people change a lot from when they were seven. We didn’t play pretend anymore; I played rugby, and she played bass. Not that you couldn’t do both, but we didn’t. We were in the same English class (I was okay; she sucked), and we knew each other enough to say “Hi” and “Good game” and “Good gig.”

That was about it.

But I was pretty sure she wouldn’t do this to me, not after Schuyler. Her intense face had said she believed every word coming out of her mouth. So she was delusional or had been fooled by this Sione guy—or she was right. Jake had been murdered.

I scrubbed my eyes with my T-shirt hem. I didn’t have what I’d come for, but I didn’t want to go back to Lauer’s and buy inferior jeans from Candace Green or let anyone in Summerton see me and think, That poor Keri, she’s been crying again.

I had to get through the holidays. The holidays and then one more year of school and the holidays again. Then I could get out of here. Go to uni in Dunedin, or head to London for a working holiday, or anything to get away from Summerton and the room I couldn’t go into and the memory of Jake laughing all over town and heavy and wet in my lap.



I rode home with the sun on my back, warm through my T-shirt. It rains a lot on the West Coast—outsiders joke that it should be called the Wet Coast—but Summerton has the kind of summers you read about in books. Long, warm, dry days, perfect for swimming or lazing around with a book or doing a bit of a hike in the green and shady bush. But maybe not so good for biking along Iron Road, up the hill, past the fancy hotels and time-share apartments, to the places where real people actually lived. There was sweat pooling unpleasantly at the base of my spine.

I coasted down the concrete driveway, leaned the bike against the garage, and slammed my way into the kitchen. I needed a shower, a cold drink, and some quiet to think about what Janna had said.

Mum was waiting for me, still in her clean white blouse and black trousers, but her sleek, blond hair was falling out of its French knot, and her eyes had that red pinched look.

“Where have you been?” she snapped.

“I went to buy jeans.”

“You didn’t tell me you were going out!”

“You were at work.”

“You could have dropped in. You have to tell me when you go places, Keri!”

“No, I don’t,” I said, and she reached across the kitchen island and slapped me. I stared at her for a moment, then slapped her back.

“Oh, God,” she said, and spun away to lean over the counter.

“I won’t do it, Mum,” I said. “Not ever.” Damn Jake anyway, I thought, and then felt guilty for the rage. My hand was stinging, and pain and anger and guilt went around and around in my brain. Grief was so exhausting.

“I know.” She gulped and wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry. I had a tough day at work, and then you weren’t here and I worried. I shouldn’t have slapped you.”

“I’m sorry, too,” I said. I was wondering about evidence. Maybe there’d been something peculiar about Jake’s body—a dropped cigarette butt or something, anything to point to a murder and not a suicide, something to prove that Janna wasn’t being weird and crazy. The police had investigated, of course, with officers coming across from district headquarters in Nelson to assist the locals and everything, but they’d mostly seemed concerned with making sure that Dad had his firearms license and had followed the safety rules.

Which he had. The shotgun and the two rifles were always unloaded and locked up when they weren’t in use, and the ammunition was stored separately. But Jake had his own license, and he knew where the keys were.

The cops had seemed satisfied with that, though there had to be an inquest anyway after the holidays.

Mum might have seen something more. I found the body, but she found me holding it, and there were no gaps in her memory.

But I wasn’t going to ask her now, when she was slapping me and home early from her first day back at work.

“I saw Janna van der Zaag today,” I said instead.

Mum was pouring herself a glass of water. “How’s she?” she said, and then turned, face crinkling. “Didn’t her brother—”

“Yes,” I said. “She said she knows how I feel.”

Like no one else did. No one in Summerton had died so young or so violently for years and years. No one else knew what to say.

“You two used to be such good friends.”

“I’m meeting her for dinner tomorrow. To meet a friend of hers. If that’s okay?”

“Of course, Keri,” she said. “Here, let me—where are you going?” I let her reach for her handbag on the table, even though I had my own money from the paper route and I knew Mum and Dad were running short. The funeral and burial had been expensive. The family had given us koha to help, of course, crisp notes in clean envelopes, but the costs added up.

But this was Mum’s way of apologizing for hitting me. So I stood there and waited for the cash.

“Janna said the Kahawai.”

Mum hesitated and then pulled out a purple note instead of a green. I blinked at the fifty-dollar note but tucked it into my pocket.

“Try the snapper,” she suggested, as friendly and detached as if I were one of the hotel guests. Then her face stopped being Ms. Lillian Pedersen-Doherty, concierge extraordinaire, and went back to being Mum. “No drinking, home by ten thirty.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, hoping to make her smile.

She was looking at my empty hands. “Didn’t you find any?”

“Huh?”

“Jeans.”

“Oh. No. Nothing that really fit the same.”

She nodded again, rubbing her eyes. I had a sudden vision of what she would look like when she was old. “I’m going to lie down. Can you scrub some potatoes?”

“Sure,” I said.

I could scrub spuds and tell her where I was going when I left the house and take her apology money, and none of it would do anything to really help. Mum needed Jake back; she needed him to have never done it. I couldn’t do anything about that.

Unless he hadn’t.

Right then, in the kitchen, I decided that Janna had to be right. Jake had been murdered.

I felt the world click into place again. I had a plan for what to do if a member of my family was murdered.

It went (1) find the killer, (2) make sure he was guilty, (3) destroy him.

Completely.



SIONE INCHED CLOSER TO THE BUS WINDOW and wished, for about the 912th time, that he’d had the guts to say no to Janna.

“So you’re traveling alone?” the elderly white woman sitting next to him persisted. “It’s a real family vacation spot, I thought.”

Sione nodded. She’d been talking since the bus left Nelson, and he had managed not to say much, which was almost as good as not having to speak at all. She probably thought she was being nice, but conversation with strangers was hard and small talk was torture.

“You kids are all so independent these days,” she said. “I’m always surprised by what your parents let you do.”

Me, too, he thought, but managed to come up with, “I’m meeting friends.”

“Ahhhh. A group of you, is it? Are you going early or late?”

“Friends who live in Summerton.” Well, Janna was his friend, sort of. This Keri girl was an unknown quantity. If Janna was wrong, and Keri thought they were nut. . .