The Steeping Room Mysteries

I dreamed about the box.

It sank through green water in my sleep, tumbling end over end, slow as a leaf falling in still air. I reached for it and my hands passed through the surface like it was glass, solid and cold, and I woke up with my fingers gripping the edge of the mattress so hard my knuckles ached.

Professor Whiskers was sitting on my chest. His weight was substantial and his breath was terrible and I had never been more grateful for another living creature in my life.

"Okay," I told him. "Okay. We're getting up."

It was five fifteen. The sky outside my bedroom window was the colour of a bruise, not quite dark, not quite anything else. I went through the motions: kettle, teapot, three spoons of Morning Courage. Blue cup with the cracked handle. Four minutes steep. First sip. Breathe.

But the ritual felt thin this morning, like a coat you keep wearing even after the lining's gone. The lavender couldn't touch what was coiling in my chest. I had watched Diana Morrison throw something into Pearl Bay harbour twelve hours ago, and I had done nothing about it.

What would I have done? Shouted from the cliff? Sprinted down the steps and confronted her on the jetty? And said what? Excuse me, Diana, I was spying on you from sixty metres away and I'd like to know what was in that box.

I could call Detective Okafor. I should call Detective Okafor.

I picked up my phone, put it down, picked it up again. The Detective had told me, in terms that left no room for interpretation, to stay out of this. Walking my cat and happening to witness something from a public footpath wasn't the same as involvement. Was it?

Professor Whiskers meowed. It was not a suggestion. It was a command.

"Fine. Walk first. Crisis of conscience after."

The harbour was empty at five forty-five. Fog sat on the water like a held breath, thick enough that the far headland had disappeared entirely. The boats at their moorings were just shapes, grey on grey. I could hear water lapping against the seawall, the creak of rope against timber, and somewhere out in the fog, the mournful complaint of a channel marker buoy.

Professor Whiskers walked with his tail high and his ears swivelling. He liked the fog. It made the world smaller, more manageable, reduced to the immediate circle of what we could see and smell and hear. I understood the appeal.

We walked past the memorial anchor, past the boat ramp, past the spot where Helen had grabbed me yesterday. My feet wanted to keep going. My brain wanted to turn around. My feet won.

I stopped at the jetty.

The tide was low again, not as low as Monday morning, but low enough that the pylons wore skirts of barnacles and weed above the waterline. The jetty itself was weathered grey timber, solid enough despite its age. I walked to the end, where Diana had stood last night.

The water below was murky with fog and tannin. Whatever she'd dropped was gone, swallowed by the harbour floor. I wasn't about to go diving for it. I was fifty-eight years old with a dodgy left knee and a strong preference for remaining dry.

But I looked. And as I looked, I noticed something on the jetty itself, right at the edge where the last plank met open air. A scratch in the wood. Fresh, pale against the grey, shaped like a curved line. It could have been anything. A dragged anchor. A dropped tool. A box scraping the edge as it went over.

I took a photo with my phone. Probably meaningless. David used to say I could find a conspiracy in a car park. I'd say that depended on the car park.

"You're out early."

I nearly went off the jetty. Professor Whiskers hissed.

Nina Chen stood at the landward end, coffee cup in hand, microphone bag over one shoulder. She was small and precise, with short black hair and glasses that made her look like a particularly stylish librarian. She ran Pearl Bay Community Radio from a converted garden shed behind the library. I listened to her morning show most days. She played good music and had a voice like warm honey over gravel.

"You scared me half to death," I said.

"Sorry. Occupational hazard. I'm always lurking where news might happen." She walked toward me. "And the harbour feels like where news is happening this week."

"I was walking my cat."

Nina looked at Professor Whiskers, who was grooming his paw with elaborate unconcern. "On the jetty. At five forty-five in the morning. In fog."

"He likes fog."

"Margot." Nina's voice dropped. She glanced over her shoulder, though there was no one to hear us. "I heard you found the body. I also heard Helen Whitford came to see you yesterday. And I've been doing this job long enough to know when someone is standing at the end of a jetty looking for something."

I considered lying. It lasted about two seconds. Nina Chen had a quality that made dishonesty feel exhausting.

"I saw something last night," I said. "From the Cliff Walk. Someone throwing something into the water from this spot."

"Someone."

"I'd rather not say who until I know what I saw."

Nina sipped her coffee. "Fair. But can I tell you something?"

"Go ahead."

"I've been covering local news in this town for four years. Council meetings, fundraisers, the occasional break-in at the surf club. Nothing like this. And since Monday morning, three people have called my station to tell me things about James Whitford. Things they've apparently been sitting on for months."

"What kind of things?"

"The kind of things people only share when they're scared, or when they think staying quiet is more dangerous than talking." She paused. "One of them was about a councillor. I'm still verifying."

My stomach turned over. "Which councillor?"

"I can't say yet. Journalistic ethics and all that. But Margot, this town is a pressure cooker with the lid rattling. James Whitford's death didn't create the pressure. It just turned up the heat."

Professor Whiskers wound himself around Nina's ankles. This was unprecedented. The Professor did not fraternise.

"He likes you," I said.

"Animals and small children. My two demographics." Nina scratched behind his ears. "Listen, I have an idea. It's probably terrible. But I want to float it."

"Float away."

"I've been wanting to start a true crime segment on the station. Local stories, historical cases, that sort of thing. Pearl Bay's got a surprisingly dark past for a town this pretty. Shipwrecks, disappearances, a smuggling ring in the 1920s."

"That's interesting, but what does it have to do with—"

"I need a co-host. Someone with an analytical mind who can look at evidence and ask the right questions. Someone the town is starting to trust because she makes excellent tea and doesn't gossip."

"Nina."

"I'm not asking you to solve James Whitford's murder on air. I'm asking you to sit in front of a microphone and talk about how evidence works. How observations lead to hypotheses. How you separate what you know from what you assume." She tilted her head. "Think about it. That's all I'm asking."

I thought about it on the walk home. I thought about it while I showered and dressed and opened the shop. I thought about it while I brewed sixteen pots of tea and sliced three loaves of lemon drizzle cake and smiled at forty-odd customers who all wanted to talk about the same thing.

Detective Okafor's follow-up interview happened at nine sharp in the Pearl Bay police station, which was a fibro building the colour of old teeth, wedged between the surf club and a vacant lot. The interview room smelled like instant coffee and regret.

Okafor sat across from me with a notepad and a face that gave away nothing. She was tall, angular, with close-cropped hair and hands that moved with an economy that suggested she didn't waste anything, not words, not motion, not time.

"Walk me through Monday morning again," she said. "From the moment you left your house."

I walked her through it. The same details, the same order. She wrote in a small, tight hand without looking up.

"The knots," she said when I finished. "You mentioned to the attending constable that the knots looked unusual."

"They did."

"Can you be more specific?"

I closed my eyes. The image was there, clear as a photograph. "They were precise. Symmetrical. Two half-hitches into a square lashing, if I'm remembering correctly. That's not a fishing knot. It's not a knot anyone would tie in a hurry or in the dark."

"How do you know about knots?"

"I was a chemistry teacher for thirty years. I ran a school camp program every year. You pick things up."

Okafor looked at me. Really looked at me, for the first time since I'd sat down. I could see her reassessing, adjusting her mental file from "civilian witness, minimal value" to something else.

"Ms Baptiste, I'm going to be direct with you. This case is complicated. James Whitford had business dealings that extend well beyond Pearl Bay, and there are a lot of people in this town who seem very eager to point fingers at each other."

"That doesn't surprise me."

"No, I imagine it doesn't." She set her pen down. "I've spoken to Rick Sullivan. He says the crab pots were secured with standard fisherman's knots when he last checked them on Saturday. Someone re-tied them."

"Someone who wanted to make sure the body stayed tangled."

"That's one interpretation."

"What's another?"

Okafor almost smiled. Almost. "That's police business, Ms Baptiste."

"Of course."

She walked me to the door. I was halfway out when she said, "Those knots. The square lashing. Where would someone learn that?"

"Military. Maritime training. Rock climbing." I paused in the doorway. "Scouts."

Okafor's pen tapped twice against her notepad. "Thank you, Ms Baptiste. That's all for now."

I walked back to the shop through streets that felt different now, charged with something invisible. The morning sun was warm on my face and the footpath smelled like hot concrete and frangipani from the tree outside the library, but underneath the ordinary beauty of a coastal Wednesday, something had shifted. Okafor had asked me about the knots. Not dismissed me, not patronised me. Asked. Which meant she didn't know. Which meant the case was more open than anyone in Pearl Bay was comfortable admitting.

I stopped at the bakery for supplies. Len Proctor, who'd been baking bread in Pearl Bay since before I was born, wrapped up a sourdough loaf and two almond croissants without making eye contact.

"Terrible business," he said to the counter.

"It is."

"James Whitford used to come in here every Saturday. Large white, two bacon and egg rolls. Never said please." Len finally looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed. "Doesn't mean he deserved what happened."

"No. It doesn't."

"People are saying things, Margot. Ugly things. This town's got secrets the way every town does, and a murder has a way of shaking them loose." He handed me the bag. "Be careful who you listen to. Not everyone who wants to tell you things has your best interests at heart."

I took the bag. His hands, flour-dusted and steady, had a small bandage wrapped around the left index finger. A baker's wound. Nothing sinister. But I noticed it, and the fact that I noticed it told me something uncomfortable about where my head was at.

I was looking at everyone's hands now. Everyone's knots. Everyone's small injuries and odd behaviours. A filter had settled over my vision, and I couldn't figure out how to lift it.

The afternoon brought rain. It came in hard from the south, driving against the windows of The Steeping Room in sheets, turning the street outside into a wash of grey and silver. I lit the lamps and put on Coltrane and the shop became a warm island in the storm.

Tom Kowalski arrived at three with rain in his hair and a question on his face.

"Quiet afternoon," he said, looking at the empty tables.

"Rain keeps people home."

"It drove me out." He sat at the counter. "Harbour Fog, please. Strong."

I made his tea with extra lapsang, the way he liked it, and the smoke-and-vanilla scent curled between us. He wrapped both hands around the cup.

"Rick Sullivan came into the pub last night," Tom said. "Eleven o'clock. Three sheets to the wind already. Started telling anyone who'd listen that the police were trying to fit him up."

"Fit him up how?"

"The crab pots. They're his pots. His lines. His mooring. He reckons Okafor thinks he did it."

"Does she?"

"I don't know what she thinks. But Rick said something interesting before his mate drove him home." Tom lowered his voice. "He said someone asked to borrow his boat two weeks ago. Wanted to go out at night, something about checking on a property from the water. Rick said no."

"Who asked?"

"Rick wouldn't say. Got cagey. Changed the subject. But he was looking at the back wall of the pub when he said it, and you know what's on the back wall of the pub?"

I didn't.

"Community noticeboard. Council meeting schedule, footy fixtures, and a very large poster for the Pearl Bay Scout Jamboree, courtesy of Councillor Frank Gibson."

I stared at Tom. He stared back. The rain hammered the windows.

"That could mean anything," I said.

"It could."

"Or nothing."

"It could mean that too." He sipped his tea. "But it doesn't, does it?"

Professor Whiskers jumped onto the counter and pushed his head against Tom's forearm. Tom scratched the cat's chin without looking, his eyes still on me.

"Nina Chen wants me to do a podcast with her," I said. I hadn't planned to tell him. It fell out.

"About the murder?"

"About true crime. Evidence. Local history. Not specifically about James."

"But eventually about James."

"I don't know. Maybe."

Tom was quiet for a while. The rain eased from fury to persistence.

"David would have loved this," he said. I must have looked startled because he added, "You talk about him sometimes. The way he read true crime, the way you'd argue about cases over dinner. He'd have been all over this."

My throat tightened. "He would have been better at it than me."

"I doubt that." Tom finished his tea and set the cup down carefully. "Do the podcast, Margot. This town needs someone asking questions that aren't just gossip."

He left. I stood behind the counter in the lamp-lit quiet and listened to the rain and the distant brass of Coltrane and the rumble of Professor Whiskers purring on the counter.

My phone buzzed. A text from Nina.

Had a thought. The historical society archives include records of every community organisation in Pearl Bay going back fifty years. Scout troop membership rolls, volunteer lists, committee minutes. Helen Whitford is the archivist. Want to take a look?

I typed back: Tomorrow. After the shop closes.

Then another text arrived. Unknown number. No greeting, no signature. Just six words.

Stop asking questions about James Whitford.

The phone sat in my hand, suddenly heavy, the screen glowing in the dim room. Professor Whiskers stopped purring. Outside, the rain had ceased. The silence it left behind was the loudest thing I had ever heard.