“Mrs. Cresswell-Smith, did you kill your husband?”
“Did you do it? Did you kill Martin?”
A searing flash of memory blinds me and I almost stumble. Blood. Martin’s. The fishing knife . . . the fury in Martin’s eyes. The bitter bile of betrayal in my throat.
“How long had you been planning his murder?”
Anger expands like a hot balloon inside me. My pulse races. My raw hatred for Martin pushes against my carefully constructed emotional walls. I fist my hands tightly at my sides and clench my teeth as I ascend the stairs flanked by my legal team in their flowing black robes.
“Innocent until proven guilty!” yells a large woman.
“Bitch! Black widow bitch!”
Rage explodes and shatters my facade into a million shimmering shards and I’m filled with a vileness of fury that makes me want to inflict bodily harm. I swing around, opening my mouth around a ferocious retort.
A camera clicks in my face.
Fuck.
My lawyer grabs my arm. “Do not engage,” he hisses in my ear. “Do not look at the cameras. Do not smile. Do not say anything.”
But it’s done. The cameraman who yelled the disgusting insult has baited me. He captured my tight, twisted face, the ferocity in my eyes.
I’m shaking with adrenaline now. Sweat prickles across my lip. Moisture dampens my armpits.
“Justice for Martin! Justice for the Cresswell-Smith family!”
And suddenly I see them near the doors. Martin’s parents. His sister stands on one side of the couple, his brother on the other. Shock stalls me as I meet his brother’s gaze. The genetic echo is startling. It’s as though Martin is standing right there, looking down at me from the courthouse doors, judging me, admonishing me from beyond the grave. Martin would look exactly like his brother in a few more years if . . . he were alive. The idea carves a hollow into my stomach.
How does this even happen to someone?
When did it begin?
Did it start with our move to Jarrawarra Bay, when the spotted gums burst into blossom and the flying foxes came?
No, it started well before that . . .
Watch the shells closely, Ellie, I say in my head, channeling my father’s voice, clarifying my focus. Because life is a shell game, and in a shell game only the tosser wins. Never the mark. You’re either the tosser or the loser.
I plan on being the tosser in this confidence trick. Slowly I glance up at the imposing building that houses the wheels of justice. I imagine the faces of the jury across from me.
You’re all going to let me walk out of here. Because I’m going to sell you my story.
Just watch me.
THEN
LOZZA
Over one year ago, November 18. Agnes Basin, New South Wales.
The Jarrawarra Bay police boat carved a smooth V into the dark water of the Agnes River. Senior Constable Laurel “Lozza” Bianchi stood on the starboard side of the boat with Constable Gregg Abbott. She watched the deepening shadows among the mangrove trees tangled along the north bank. There were four on board. Constable Mac McGonigle was skippering them under direction from Barney Jackson, the old crabber who’d found the body and made the triple-zero call.
The late afternoon pressed down heavy with humidity. The air tasted fetid on Lozza’s lips. Everything lay eerily silent, apart from the growl of their engines and the occasional soft thuck against the hull as they hit and sliced through one of the big jellyfish that floated with the tidal currents toward the sea. The jellyfish were the size of volleyballs and trailed frilled tentacles barbed with venomous stingers.
Smaller saltwater channels fed off the tidal river, twisting like a labyrinth into the heart of the mangrove flats. Lozza knew the silty channel bottoms teemed with mud crabs whose shells could grow as broad as a man’s head. Both omnivorous and cannibalistic, the muddies were aggressive scavengers with claws powerful enough to crush shells. And snap fingers. Whatever awaited them deep in the dank shadows of the estuary would not have been left untouched by those muddies.
They passed a listing old jetty. Rotting pilings stuck out of the water. Shags perched atop the pilings, hanging their black wings out to their sides to dry as they watched the police launch pass.
Thunder rumbled in the distance.
Gregg glanced up. “Think the storm will blow in?” he asked.
Lozza followed his gaze. Two fish eagles wheeled high above towering eucalypts, the raptors silhouetted against streaks of clouds turning violent vermillion and orange as the sun slid toward the horizon.
“Hell knows,” she said quietly. “But it’ll be dark soon. It would help to get a look at that floater while there’s still some light.”
“Bloody foxes will fly as soon as that sun slides behind those trees,” Gregg said. “At least they aren’t as bad here as south of Jarra.”
As if summoned by her partner’s mention, a colony of giant fruit bats exploded out of the eucalypt canopy and swarmed in a shrieking cacophony into the sky. Almost simultaneously, cockatoos and lorikeets began to screech. The earth seemed to exhale and shift, and a slight breeze stirred. The mood on the river changed.
“I hate them,” Gregg muttered as he squinted up at the swarming creatures. “They fight the whole night in the spotted gum outside my bedroom window. Like bloody witches bickering in a coven. And they stink.”
Everyone was on edge over the giant flying foxes that had mysteriously migrated en masse to the region recently. They’d begun arriving in swarms when one of the gum varieties had suddenly blossomed, and then more and more of the megabats had come flying along the highway like a portent of doom, gradually increasing in numbers until nearly every building, rock, tree, and vehicle in the town just south of Jarrawarra was covered with them.
“Like a Hitchcock movie,” she said.
Somewhere, a kookaburra laughed.
The boat rocked as Mac guided their craft into the choppier water of Agnes Basin. The water body was vast—almost forty square kilometers—and full of the giant jellyfish. Like bubble tea.
“You go about another half kilometer up the east side of the basin, over there,” Barney said as he pointed the way for their skipper, his voice hoarse and quavery. “And then you turn into a deep, narrow channel. That’s where it is.” Barney’s complexion was bloodless beneath a map of red veins. Sweat sheened the old man’s face, and he swiped his sleeve across his brow. Lozza noticed the man’s hands trembled. Maybe Barney needed a drink. Or maybe he was rattled. Maybe both.
Barney had gone to check on his “noncompliant” crab traps. Instead, he’d discovered the body of a blond male tangled underwater in one of his lines.
“There—that’s the channel entrance.” Barney gestured toward a dark gap amid the mangrove trees. “You go in there.”
Mac slowed the launch, steering them carefully into the channel. Water slapped and chuckled against the prow. Heat grew wetter. Branches clawed at them from the sides, and twigs scraped softly against the hull. Mac slowed the engine further. It grew darker as they went in deeper. Hotter. Clouds of mosquitoes buzzed over the water, and tiny bugs got trapped in the orange frizz of hair that had sprung out around Lozza’s face in spite of her best efforts to marshal it all back into a tidy bun.
Mac switched on the spotlights, and eerie shapes and shadows jumped at them. A sense of a presence oozed out of the swamp, like something hidden, waiting, biding its time to clutch at them. The air smelled foul.