Chapter 11
Shippy’s back, but he’s not alone. I guess I gave that away already. The guy climbing out of the car is tall, skinny, and maybe around the same age as Shippy. I don’t know, once grown-ups hit thirty, they all start to look the same to me until they make it to fifty.
“Hi, I’m Rob.”
Social conditioning coaxes a hi or hey back from each of us, all too polite to say what we’re really thinking, which is some combination of (a) Who are you? (b) Why are you here? (c) Where has Shippy been this whole time? and (d) Do you know you’ve got a bit of something green in your teeth?
Aunty Bec is first with the hugs, arms snaking around Shippy despite several pretty suspect stains on his T-shirt. She’s last with the hugs too, because nobody else goes in for one.
“Where have you been?”
“This is Rob,” Shippy says unnecessarily. Then, when nobody says anything, he adds: “What are you all doing out here?”
Dad does an actual facepalm, something I thought was reserved for emojis.
“Why don’t we all go in for some tea,” Aunty Bec says in a voice that would make me want to change my name and move to Bali if I was Shippy.
“Lovely place,” Rob says politely as we’re herded into the living room.
“Do you all live here? How many acres is this? Do you run cattle?” Nobody answers this slightly frenetic and frankly pretty weird jumble of questions.
Rob and Shippy take a seat on the most comfortable couch, flanked by Aunty Bec, who keeps looking at Shippy like she thinks he might disappear again and she’s not sure whether to hope for it.
It’s a nice novelty to witness Dad’s anger without being the target of it.
I’m not a teenager who gets into serious trouble—I’ve never had detention and I’d have to have sex before teen pregnancy became an issue—but I’m still pretty much constantly getting told off for some minor infraction, from failing to stack my bowl correctly in the dishwasher (I know what you’re thinking and the answer is I have no idea) to reading too late in bed.
(Aren’t parents supposed to be catatonic with joy if their kid puts down their phone long enough to read an actual book?) Dylan perches on the arm of my chair and tilts in.
“Who’s Rob?” he whispers, as though I’ve been privy to a briefing session he blinked and missed.
“I don’t know him,” I whisper, but too loudly, because the room goes silent just as I say it. Nobody says anything, but Dad covers a laugh with his hand, Rob’s ears go sunset pink, and I die of embarrassment (so you should know that the rest of this is being narrated by my ghost).
“So,” Aunty Bec says, coaxing a sentence from that one word. “What the hell?”
“I know,” Shippy says, grinning like he doesn’t realize everyone in this room was within touching distance of ratting him out to the cops as a possible murderer half an hour ago. “Crazy day, right?”
“Where. Have. You. Been.” Aunty Bec articulates each word like a series of slaps, and only now does Shippy realize how seriously the vibe is off.
“I went out for a surf,” he says.
“A surf?”
“The swell was unreal.”
“But—” Aunty Bec hesitates, like she’s trying to find the biggest but in what he just said. She makes a call: “Your surfboard’s in Perth.”
“First day of the trip I got talking to Rob in town when you were in the bakery. He said he could hook me up with a board if I needed it, but I didn’t think we’d be here long enough.
” Shippy grins. “Only remembered this morning and thought I’d try my luck.
” Everyone looks at Rob, who seems to be a step ahead of Shippy and ducks his head apologetically. “I thought I’d be back hours ago.”
“You didn’t wake me up to tell me?”
“I texted.”
“No, you didn’t.” Aunty Bec takes a deep breath. “I didn’t have any messages on my phone, and I went out to the bloody paddock—and got bitten by a bull ant, by the way—to check.”
“I did.”
“Show me your phone.”
Aunty Vinka comes in with a tray full of mugs and everyone takes one, even though the tea is gray and smells like a full dishwasher before a cycle.
“The message didn’t send,” Aunty Bec says, shaking her head at Shippy’s phone. “Did you try to send it when you were still here?”
“Yeah.”
“The here where there’s no phone reception?”
“Oh.” Shippy gets it. The scary thing is, he’s a civil engineer: People rely on this guy to keep bridges from falling down.
“Why were you gone all day?”
Shippy’s face relaxes, as if he thinks the hard bit is over. He has no idea. “The surf was unbelievable, so I did wind up staying awhile. Rob was getting out at the same time, so we went for a coffee and grilled cheese that, seriously, took like twenty minutes.”
“Great coffee, though,” Rob chimes in, doing his bit for the Dunsborough Tourism Board, I guess.
There are still some unanswered questions—Why is Rob here?
What happened to the rest of the lost time?
Is it possible Shippy has some kind of hidden depths that enable Aunty Bec to put up with…
the rest of it?—but Rob reminding us all of his existence seems to prompt Aunty Bec into some knee-jerk civility.
“Do you live in Dunsborough, Rob?”
“Just in town for a surf,” Rob says. “It was my birthday last week, so, you know, bit of a present to myself.”
“He’s been sleeping in a friend’s van,” Shippy adds, “so I told him he was welcome to crash here for a day or two.”
Everyone cares way too much about what this complete stranger thinks of us to react openly to this, but Dad reaches out a hand to crush Aunty Vinka’s shoulder and Dylan bumps his knee against me. (I can’t look at him.)
“If it’s okay,” Rob chimes in, possibly correctly interpreting the silence.
“It’s fine,” Shippy says.
“You’d be very welcome,” Aunty Vinka says. “We are hoping to head back to Perth in the next day or so, though.”
“That’s seriously so kind,” Rob says with an easy smile. “Is it just you guys in the house? I think you said the other day it was your…stepmother’s house, Shippy?”
Dad is having none of this cozy Welcome to the Family business. “I still don’t understand why you were gone all day.”
“That’s the wild part,” Shippy says, clearly loading an anecdote.
“We had our coffee and food and, okay, we might have had a brownie too.” He glances at Aunty Bec.
“But when we got back in the car, the tire was flat, totally blown. Must have picked up a nail on the drive from the beach, because there was a big one just sticking right out of it.”
“And it took you all day to change the tire because…?” Aunty Bec presses.
“No spare.” Shippy looks at Dad. “What’s the deal with that?”
“Andy, you don’t have a spare?” Aunty Vinka says, distracted.
“My missing spare tire is not the villain here,” Dad says. “Roadside assistance exists, people.”
“What did you do?” Aunty Bec’s voice sounds a little gentler, and maybe she’s not going to straight-up murder Shippy in front of us, which is a shame, if only because it really would help clarify the question of whether anyone in the house is capable of it.
“By the time we figured all this out, the coffee shop had closed—it’s run by one of the local guys, and we told him the surf was great, so he shut up to hit the beach. Total own goal.”
“Our bad,” Rob agrees cheerfully.
“I figured we’d hitch a ride into town to see if we could find a garage or something. I tried to call, but, you know.”
“No reception,” half the room choruses.
“Exactly. After about twenty minutes of guys just cruising past me in their SUVs, this one guy stops and offers to help. Turns out the bloke is a mechanic—can you believe it? He insists on taking us back to the garage and sorting us a spare tire. Then, of course, Yusef—that’s the guy, great bloke—suggests we go for a beer, and we can’t exactly say no after he’s helped us out.
We might have had a few too many because Yusef got a bit messy and I wasn’t sure he should drive, so we had a meal to sober up and a few coffees and then he drove us back to the car and we were on our way. ”
Shippy shrugs.
“You do realize we almost called the cops?” Dad says.
“What for?”
“For you.”
“Andy, I never knew you cared.”
“You disappeared the day after Gertie was murdered, Shippy. That’s the sort of thing that the police usually like to know.”
“Did you say murdered?” Rob asks, looking startled, but he’s top of nobody’s priority list right now, so I’m not sure anyone else hears him.
“You thought I—” Shippy doesn’t finish the question.
“Nobody thought that, honey,” Aunty Bec says quickly, and do you think she knows she’s lying?
“You can’t seriously—”
“Sorry, who’s been murdered?” Rob asks again, sounding genuinely alarmed but not yet loud enough to break through the others’ bickering.
“We did kind of think you’d done a runner, mate,” Dad says, and it’s possible he believes he’s helping. “But it was a working theory. We weren’t quite ready to knot the noose.”
“Bloody hell,” Shippy says.
Aunty Vinka stands up. “Sorry to interrupt this…whatever it is, but I’m going to head to the hospital. There’s a chance Nick could be released tonight, and if not, I said I’d take him a change of clothes.” (I’ll tell you right now: Nick’s not coming home tonight.)
“I should probably think about doing something about dinner,” Aunty Bec says with the intonation of someone who’s just announced an impending pap smear. She doesn’t move.
“Let us handle dinner tonight,” Shippy says, pausing for a round of applause that never arrives.
“Rob, you were talking about that laksa you learned to make in Vietnam—you must be a decent cook?” It feels a little optimistic to imagine GG might have the ingredients for a laksa kicking around, but I’ll let Shippy handle that one.
“How about it? We can whip up something, I’m sure? ”
“Uh, sure.” Rob stands up. “And maybe you can fill me in on what’s been going on here? Sounds like you’ve had a big week.”