The Girl in the Mirror(42)

The words won’t come. And Adam doesn’t stop talking all the way to the marina, where Bathsheba is waiting for us. He tells me how he nearly died when Bathsheba was overdue, how he panicked when he saw me on deck, struggling to handle the yacht on my own. How his heart overflowed when he found me safe and held me in his arms again. “I’m going to get you through this, Summer, like you got me through losing Helen.”

Everything he says is I love you, I love you, I love you.

We park at Eden Island Marina and walk past a line of open-air restaurants, their neon signs glowing in the dusk. French, Turkish, Brazilian, Chinese. Spicy aromas waft through the evening air.

“Where do you want to eat?” asks Adam.

I can’t think about food. I need to be alone on the boat. I need to get rid of the disc. But I can’t tell Adam to go and dine without me. This is our big reunion.

Apart from when he needs the bathroom, Adam has no reason to leave me alone all evening. And I can’t get the disc while he’s in the bathroom. My injured hand is clumsy. There won’t be time, and he might hear something. On a boat you can feel the motion when someone moves a suitcase around.

Now we see the supermarket, the stalls outside stacked with papayas and limes. “Oh, fresh food,” I say. “Can’t we eat on board? I want to be alone with you.”

“I’ll cook you dinner, beautiful,” Adam says. “Let’s grab some steak and veggies, maybe some apple juice?”

Steak sounds great. No need to keep up the vegetarianism, obviously. “Would you mind doing the shopping?” I ask. “I’ll meet you on the boat.”

“I think we should stick together,” says Adam. “You might find it hard being back there on your own.”

“No, no, I’ll be fine,” I say. “If anything, I’m landsick. I need the boat’s motion.”

Such an un-Summer-ish thing to say, but it works.

“Okay,” says Adam.

“See you soon, babe,” I say casually.

I force myself to walk slowly until he is out of sight. Then I scurry along the floating dock toward Bathsheba. Her mast is dead ahead, but I’ve come down the wrong walkway. Damn! I’m close, but I can’t leap over three meters of water, so I have to double back almost all the way to the supermarket to get to the right pontoon.

I finally reach the yacht and rush to the stateroom, where I drag Iris’s suitcase out of a locker and unzip it with fluttery hands. I slide my hand inside the lining, feeling for the disc. Nothing. Is it gone? Could the police have searched the boat and found it already? Just as I’m about to give up, my fingers close around the cold, thin plastic. I yank it out with a suppressed cry of joy and shove the suitcase back in the locker.

Night is falling as I climb up to the cockpit. This must be the right thing to do. I’ve sorted things with the police, or Adam did, who cares, so it’s time for the disc to go for a swim. It’s annoying that it’s going to be in the shallow marina instead of the bottomless ocean, but seabed is seabed. No one goes digging around down there.

The marina is quiet, but it’s still light, and there are lots of other boats around. Anyone could be inside another boat, looking out. Dropping things overboard in a marina is taboo, so it’s the sort of thing that another sailor would notice and remember. Someone might mention it in front of Adam.

I’ll wait. Men are never quick in the supermarket. Any minute now, the hasty tropical night will cloak me in privacy. I’ll let it get a little darker.



The sky is charcoal, and the disc has a dull sheen as it drops into the wet black void between Bathsheba’s hull and the floating pontoon. It slips into nothingness.

Footsteps. I look up. Adam is striding along the pontoon toward me.

Did he see me? His face is screwed into a ball of fury, or perhaps fear—I can’t read his expressions yet. He’s holding his phone.

“Bad news,” he says. “That was Barbé.”

He climbs on board and flicks on the flashlight on his phone. Bending low, he shines it around the sides of the cockpit. Under the cockpit seat, half covered by the cushions, is a series of red splashes. Blood.

That wound I cut into my leg, that ritual for Summer. I was standing right here. I can’t believe I sailed all the way across the ocean and didn’t take a moment to clean up the blood.

Adam shines the light in my face, and my lower lip trembles. “That’s blood, isn’t it?” he asks.

“Did he see it?” I ask. “Why did he phone you about it?”

“Who, Barbé? No, he doesn’t know about it. At least I think he doesn’t,” Adam says. “I saw it when he was questioning you, but none of the policemen seemed to notice it. Thank God they didn’t sit down. They would have been staring right at it. Then, what with having to tell your mum the news and deal with Tarq, I forgot about it. Obviously it’s from the wound on your hand or maybe fish blood or something—did you catch a fish? But we don’t want them getting any ideas. I’ve been thinking, Summer, don’t tell the police anything about Iris, the weird shit, I mean—the dressing alike, the copycat haircuts. I don’t mean to scare you, but the police here are not like in Australia.”

He brushes his hand over my face, pushing back the hair from my eyes. I can’t understand what he means by “weird shit.” I got a haircut similar to Summer’s back in New Zealand, and okay, it wasn’t the first time I had given a hairdresser a photo of Summer to copy, but only for the sake of convenience. As for the clothes, I did occasionally take advantage of Summer’s habit of posting photos of her new outfits online complete with price tags, but only in order to pick up bargains. I never intended to copy her.