Chapter 38
Now
quinn
‘Where the fuck are we going?’ Phil says.
‘No idea,’ Quinn says. ‘She wouldn’t tell me.’
Phil downshifts, noisily grinding gears. He’d picked Quinn up from the marina in the only car the local hire company had left: a rusting Subaru almost as old as Quinn. It still has a cassette player and actual window handles.
‘So we just keep following her till she drives off the edge of a cliff?’ he says.
Quinn braces herself against the dash as they rocket around a curve. ‘Stop bitching and keep up.’
For a kid with the ink still wet on her licence, Rose Gray drives like a demon; roaring up the dirt mountain road in her mother’s borrowed Audi, clearly not giving a shit if she bottoms out or breaks an axle.
Phil’s driven through enemy gunfire in Ukraine and Afghanistan, but Rose makes him look like a timid old maid.
‘What exactly did she tell you?’ Phil asks.
‘She said she’d explain when we got there.’
‘This fucking place.’
‘She was hanging around the boatyard like she was waiting for me to turn up,’ Quinn says. ‘It was a little weird.’
‘Not if she wanted to talk to you without being seen,’ Phil says shrewdly. ‘It’s a fair bet you’d turn up there sooner or later. D’you think she’s the real deal?’
Quinn knows seventeen-year-old girls have a flair for drama; they can turn the loss of an acrylic nail into a Shakespearean tragedy. But Rose Gray isn’t your typical attention-seeking teenager.
Quinn has read and reread the transcript of the girl’s testimony at the civil court case the Walkers brought against MacGill’s Marina and Amy Gray for taking the Lady out too soon after the storm.
She saw what the jury in the case missed: Rose’s testimony was revealing because of what she didn’t say, not because of what she did.
‘She’s the real deal,’ Quinn says.
The girl’s clearly fucked up, of course, and with good reason.
Quinn’s thirty years older and a great deal tougher than Rose, but she nearly drowned at the bottom of a bottle of bourbon in the wake of the bomb blast in Syria.
Rose has lost her brother and cousin, and spent the last year inhabiting a town in mourning.
Quinn can’t imagine how the girl has held it together as well as she has, but sooner or later, all that bottled-up trauma is bound to explode.
Quinn doesn’t want to take advantage of a damaged teenager. But the truth needs to come out. She wants justice for those dead kids.
Legal or otherwise.
‘Shit,’ Phil says, as Rose’s car abruptly plunges off the road onto a dirt track.
‘Don’t stop,’ Quinn says. ‘Follow her.’
The track is little more than a wide bike trail. After less than fifty metres, it peters out altogether and Rose pulls over to park.
‘What now?’ Phil asks.
‘Fuck. We walk.’
Phil grabs his camera from the boot of the car, and they set off after Rose.
The girl hikes with the same speed and fury as she drives.
Quinn trips over stones and tree roots as she struggles to keep up, cursing colourfully in several different languages.
It’s still light: sunset isn’t for another hour and a half.
But up here on the mountain, beneath the thick autumn canopy of maple and birch trees, it’s hard for Quinn to read the terrain with her limited vision.
She has to stop several times as the path grows steeper, struggling over steep pitches of rock and boulders.
Phil knows better than to stop and offer to help.
Finally, the hardwood trees give way to dense pines. Quinn can see purpling sky ahead of them instead of the rising mountain, and she realises they’re nearing the top of the ridge.
Her quads are burning.
Goddamn Vermonters.
Phil has stopped to wait for her in a small hollow up ahead. Quinn pulls her packet of Gauloises from her back pocket and lights a cigarette, taking a deep, restorative inhale.
‘Where’s Rose?’ she asks, when she can breathe again.
He points to a narrow deer trail branching off the main path. ‘About a hundred metres that way.’
‘Are we there?’
‘So it would seem.’
‘Christ Almighty.’ She stubs out her cigarette in the small silver box she carries for the purpose, and pockets the butt. ‘This better be worth it.’
They follow the trail into the woods, and find Rose waiting for them in the centre of a clearing.
‘I think we’re here,’ she says, glancing around.
‘Wait,’ Quinn says. ‘You don’t know where we’re going either?’
‘I haven’t been up here before,’ Rose says. ‘But Nicky told me he could see Raylan’s cabin. He was going to a party at his place and said he could see the lights.’
‘Down there,’ Phil says, pointing.
Quinn glances back down the mountain. She can just make out the silhouette of a darkened cabin in the gathering gloom.
‘His parents haven’t been back there since the accident,’ Rose says.
‘When was this party?’ Quinn asks.
‘About a week before prom,’ Rose says. ‘Raylan was always having parties when his parents were away. They’d all smoke a lot of weed, drink beer, that kind of thing. It was pretty lame, really. Finn always went, but it wasn’t usually Nicky’s scene.’
‘What about you?’
‘Not my thing either. And only seniors were invited anyway.’
‘Why did Nicky go that night?’ Quinn says.
‘He was super stressed about graduation, college, all that. I think he just wanted to get stoned. He cycled there.’ She turns and points up the mountain. ‘There’s a short cut from Aunt Amy’s old place over the ridge.’
‘So you weren’t actually at the party yourself?’
She shakes her head. ‘Nicky told me what happened the next day.’
‘At the party?’ Quinn asks.
Rose wraps her arms around herself as if she’s cold.
‘No. Nicky never got there,’ she says.
Quinn waits. Twenty years as a journalist have taught her when to ask questions and when to let silence do the heavy lifting.
‘He fell off his bike,’ Rose says finally. ‘Hit a tree root, or something. I think he might have given himself concussion. The bike was totalled, anyway. He said he kind of just sat on the ground for, like, five minutes, trying to get his head together.’
Quinn’s pulse quickens. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Phil drift away from them and heft his camera onto his shoulder.
‘Nicky saw something, didn’t he?’ she says.
‘He never told anyone,’ Rose says. ‘Just me.’
‘What did he see, Rose?’
She hesitates.
‘A body,’ she says. ‘He saw someone dragging a body.’
‘A body? He’s sure that’s what it was?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he see who was dragging it?’
Rose shakes her head.
‘What about the body? Did he see who it was?’
‘He didn’t get that close. He was too scared.’
‘When you say a body—’
‘They were dead. Whoever it was. Nicky said he could just tell.’
Quinn has been around the dead enough to know what Nicky meant. There’s a stillness, an absence, when life leaves the body. You know instantly. Death is unmistakable.
‘Hey,’ Phil calls out. ‘Quinn. Over here.’
He’s staring at something on the ground. He pushes at it with his foot as she and Rose join him. ‘Looks like an ID.’
Rose bends to pick it up, but Quinn puts out a detaining hand. ‘Don’t touch it.’
They step back as Phil zooms in on the plastic card. It’s half buried beneath dead pine needles, caught in a tangle of tree roots. The lanyard is dark with mould, but the plastic ID is still easily readable.
Quinn feels a sudden rush of vindication.
It belongs to Luke Connelly.
She turns to Rose. ‘Why didn’t Nicky go to the police?’
‘He kept saying they wouldn’t believe him.
I tried to get him to tell his mom, but he wouldn’t.
Aunt Amy was really worried about him. She told Mom she thought something was going on with him the week before prom.
I said I’d tell Aunt Amy what’d happened if he wouldn’t, but he freaked.
That’s why we argued that night on the boat.
’ She looks right at Quinn. ‘I think he didn’t go to the police because he did know who was dragging the body,’ she says.
‘I think it was someone he was trying to protect.’