“You raped her!”
“Let’s not bring up the past. Shinju tried that, and look what happened to her.”
“You killed Shinju, didn’t you?” I said, scraping up every smidgen of courage to keep the terror from my voice. “I have a right to know why.”
“Shinju was blackmailing me. Needed big bikkies for her habit. But I couldn’t keep up the payments. She threatened to ruin me. A rape charge by BSSP’s favorite model? I’d lose everything — my pension, my reputation...”
“Your freedom. You belong in jail.”
“You don’t understand. My wife’s cancer bills wiped out our savings. I sold the house, but it wasn’t enough.”
My mind battled to make sense of things. “That poor diver, Simms, offered Crowe the stray, didn’t he? Whose idea was it, yours or Crowe’s, to get rid of him?”
The whites of the captain’s eyes glistened in the sunlight. “We both fancied the idea of a two-way split instead of a three. Later I brought Shinju to the island and showed her the pearl. She fell in love with it. Agreed to be the hand model for the pearls we stole. But later that day the pearl was missing from Crowe’s office.”
“You found her here at Sunset Point.”
“High on cocaine. She opened her fist and flashed the pearl at me. I demanded it back. She just laughed. Said she’d left a note at your bungalow about the rape so there was nothing I could do. The next moment I thought I saw her throw the pearl over the cliff.” He snorted under his breath. “But she tricked me. She must have thrown a shell.
“I lost control. That pearl was worth a mint. I wrestled her to the ground. Pressed her head into the sand. I had to kill her, don’t you see? But I didn’t figure it out until I read the newspaper. She’d put the pearl in her mouth and choked on it!”
He took a step closer. I shuffled back, teetering on the edge of the rock. The waves crashed on the ancient formations below, sending a fine mist high into the air and onto my bare legs. I bent slightly and pulled my knife from its sheath.
“Now, Kashiko, don’t be difficult.”
I waved my weapon back and forth, hoping he wouldn’t come any nearer. Instead Captain Lafroy lunged at me. I yanked the knife arm high, above his head. He grabbed my other arm, but I twisted, coming around the back of him, slicing off his ear. Howling, he stumbled backward off the edge of the rock. But he still had me in his grasp. In the next moment we were both falling through the air.
In his panic, Lafroy released me. I grabbled for the rock face sliding past me. My thigh bounced off a protruding rock and momentarily slowed my fall. My hands, scraped and bleeding, found purchase and my body slammed into the cliff. Every nerve in my body lit up in pain. A second later I heard the captain’s body hit the limestone below with a gruesome crack.
I refused to look down, but the view above did little to console me. I was a full body length down from the ledge. There were no roots or niches to help me climb back up, and my arms were on fire. Down, down, down, sang Johnny Cash. Down to the blue below, swarmed by box jellyfish. My body mottled with stings. My death a diver’s nightmare.
I noticed a narrow fissure in the rock face above me. My knife angled out from it. I reached for it, shoving the blade deeper into the slit, the metal grinding against the rock. My broken ribs screamed in protest. Placing both hands on the handle, I pulled myself two feet higher.
A shadow fell over me. Tom Jr.’s face twisted as he stared beyond me to where his father’s body surely tossed in the surf, surrounded by jellyfish. The anguish I saw stopped my heart.
His eyes shifted to me, then he fell to his knees and gripped my wrists. “Let go of the knife, Kashiko.”
“No!” I screamed.
He grasped my wrists harder. “Trust me.”
I hated to place my faith in Tom, but my grip was weakening. I took a deep breath and released the knife. He dragged me up and over the ledge, my ribs wailing.
Tom rocked me in his arms. “Oh, God, oh, God. I’m so sorry, Kashiko.” He said it over and over. I wished he’d shut up. I couldn’t handle the pain in his voice. But he kept rambling. “I knew Shinju was getting money under the table from somebody in Broome. It had to be Crowe, all Crowe, I told myself. But Da acted strange when I asked him about it. Nervous, suspicious. Still, I had no idea about... about what he’d done to Shinju.”
“You stopped calling me after my face was cut.” It was all I could think to say.
“I was fifteen. I was an ass. I’m sorry.”
He started to cry, but I wondered if sorry would ever be enough. For any of us.
“Miss Nakagawa?”
I awoke from my drug-induced nap. The two detectives were sipping coffee at the foot of my hospital bed. But my lids were heavy and shut without any help from me. When I inhaled, a jolt of pain reminded me I had three broken ribs.
“Miss?” Suit Number One repeated.
I kept my eyes shut. But I talked. About Shinju, Crowe, and the captain. About the pearl. The unfortunate diver, Simms. But I didn’t tell them everything — that the night I slept with Tom, the captain raped my sister. That she cut my face to save me from the same fate. The suits didn’t need to know. At least not right now.
My parents drove me home and Mum offered to stay. I think she was a little surprised when I told her she could. She helped me get into an old nightgown and we sat on the small patio behind the bungalow. A full moon glowed overhead.
A few blocks away, the Staircase to the Moon shimmered on the mudflats. When we were little, Shinju and I imagined skipping up those steps to escape the rows at home. Sadly, she found heaven dust a better way to escape her nightmares.
Mum’s lids drooped and she slumped sideways in her patio chair, palms lying limply on her lap. Her shoulders seemed narrower than I remembered. When had her skin become so thin across her cheeks?
Slipping one hand into my nightgown pocket, I drew out Shinju’s necklace. Each pearl looked unearthly, as if an angel’s halo had been captured in a glass ball. I grasped Mum’s fingers and gently wrapped Shinju’s pearls around our clasped hands. I’ve never believed in anything as ethereal as a soul. But if there are such things, I hoped my sister’s was now free, skipping those amber stairs to the moon.
Lee Martin
A man looking for trouble
From Glimmer Train Stories
My uncle was a man named Bill Jordan, and in 1972, when I was sixteen, he came home from Vietnam, rented a small box house on the corner of South and Christy, and went to work on a section gang with the B & O Railroad. If not for my mother and her romance with our neighbor, Harold Timms, perhaps my uncle would have lived a quiet and unremarkable life, but of course that’s something we’ll never know.
“He’ll do all right,” my father said one night at supper. He looked out the window and nodded his head. It was the first warm day of spring, and the window was open. I smelled the damp ground, heard the robins singing. “I’m glad he’s back,” my father said, and I believe now, for just an instant, my mother and I let ourselves get caught up in his optimism, a gift we desperately needed, although we were the sort of family that never would have admitted as much.
“How’s your pork chop?” my mother asked.
“Bill’s going to be aces,” my father said.