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Book 2 in the Seen in Silverbridge series

YOU SHOULD HAVE SAID - excerpt

Chapter One
Unknown

She wasn’t even supposed to be here.

All her friends had told her to stay away from him, and her family as well. Oh God, if her Dad found out she was with him right now….

No, there was no use thinking about that. She was catastrophizing. She had to think about what to do.

“We have to call the cops,” she said.

The boy she was with—the boy she shouldn’t have been with—dragged a hand over his face.

“We just have to. Right? It’s our only option. We have to call the cops.”

He looked at her. His eyes were small—too small. His eyebrows were growing closer together, and moving in a scary diagonal shape…. No, he looked normal. It was the drugs, that’s all. But he did look disappointed in her. Mind-boggled that she could be so stupid.

“We can get rid of the drugs. We can toss them in the river,” she said.

She had an answer for everything. It was all gonna be okay. Why was her heartbeat so damn loud? She could hear it throbbing in her ears.

“Babe. Chill,” the boy said.

She was speaking too fast. “I’m chill, I’m chill. I need to just … I need to think for a second.”

She paced down the road, barely feeling the downpour. Rainwater had puddled in the undulations in the old road, and was drenching her sneakers. Her toes felt like they were made of jam.

“Babe—you’re all wet.”

Her hair was soaked, dripping down her shirt. In seconds her hoodie would be sodden, and maybe she’d catch a cold. Then she could stay in bed all day, not have to talk to the cops, not have to relive what she’d just seen, not have to say how she’d seen it. She walked further along the bridge, her eyes fixed on the gigantic dark mass of water ahead of her that had just taken a life. Or two lives. Or three…. Damn, her memory had already grown hazy.

She held a hand up to the road. Balled it into a fist. It looked huge.

“Come back to the van,” the boy said. “Let’s turn the gas cooker on. It’ll warm the place up.”

She rotated her fist, miming the car losing control. The whine of the motor as it had sped across the bridge. The thick grating sound of the tyres as the car had swerved to avoid the man standing on the bend.

The shockingly loud crunch of metal on metal as the bonnet had hit the barrier. A groan, a spluttering, and finally a ka-splash—heavy and final.

The splash echoed over and over in her mind. It was a bad time to be high.

“They might still be alive,” the boy said.

She couldn’t help a scoff escaping her lips.

“True,” the boy conceded. “But you know, stranger things….”

The man—where had the man gone? The man with the bag. The briefcase. The satchel, or whatever it was. He had been standing there in a trench coat. Or was it an anorak? She cast her mind back but the image kept changing, morphing like churning butter.

Where had he gone? Had the car clipped him? Was he dead too?

She ran to the barrier and grasped the bent cables. They thrust out into the rain like a broken giant’s bones.

“Babe! What are you—?”

She held up a hand to silence him.

Below her the river lay placid, the dark grey surface dimpled with the pounding rain. Down on the banks under the gnarled willows she saw movement.

“There!” she yelled.

Clapping footsteps as the boy ran over.

“Hey!” She waved her arms above her head. It was a person! Somebody had survived! “Up here! Are you okay?”

The figure stumbled up the muddy bank, doubled over and gripped its knees. Long hair—it was a woman. And she was alive!

“Holy shit,” the boy said.

“We have to call an ambulance!”

“No, we gotta jet, babe—”

“What—?”

The boy spun her to face him. The world kept moving for an extra second after she stopped.

“We have a van full of molly, coke and K. If we call an ambo, the cops are bound to come with the paramedics, and then we’re done. Like, done. I know you wanna help but we just can’t.”

“But—”

“We just can’t, babe.”

She glanced back through the gaping hole in the bridge’s barrier. The figure was stumbling up the bank toward an open paddock.

“See? She’s fine. She survived.”

She couldn’t just leave. “There were two people in the car. I saw them. And the man … there was a man on the bridge. He waved them down. You saw it, didn’t you?”

“Shit—lights.”

Headlights lit up the side of the hill ahead, the glow diffused by the curtains of rain.

The boy grabbed her hand and pulled her back along the bridge, her jammy toes squishing in her shoes. They hopped the fence and scrambled over the wire netting that held protective landslide-preventing rocks. They were back in the van.

The boy fired the ignition before she could gather her thoughts. Everything had moved too quickly—why was she so wet? That’s right, it was raining. Shouldn’t she be cold? As soon as she thought about it she felt it, and her body prickled with sweat in a desultory attempt to warm her.

“We should call someone,” she said weakly, knowing he wasn’t listening. “We should tell someone what we saw. Shouldn’t we? Maybe we shouldn’t. Should we?”

The boy pulled the van onto the country road, leaving the headlights off. She peered out the back window and saw that a vehicle had pulled over. Good, that was good. Somebody was helping.

As they drove back to the city, they passed two ambulances, two police cars and a highway patrol car. Their lights and sirens were whirring, screaming, and urgent as they vanished in the opposite direction.

The girl turned in her seat and watched them speed through the rain as the van crossed back into Silverbridge.

Chapter Two
Luce

“Welcome back!”

The four members of Seen in Silverbridge were gathered inside their new premises. Huds admired the open-space bullpen, the empty walls and bright overhead lighting.

Luce cupped a hand around her ear and leaned forwards theatrically in typical children’s entertainer style.

“Let’s try that again. Welcome back!”

“What’s the appropriate response to ‘Welcome back’?” Rodney asked. “You let us know, and we’ll shout it back to you, if that’ll satisfy you.”

“Oh, Roddles,” Luce said, shaking her head in faux exasperation. “Us and our office banter, ay? What do you think of the place, guys?”

For a second, nobody spoke. Then Faven cleared her throat.

“It’s very nice.”

“Very nice.” Luce put her hands on her hips and looked to the heavens. “Very nice? Look at all this space! And we’re in the heart of the city!”

“It’s fantastic. I meant to say fantastic.” Faven said, looking to Rodney and Huds for support.

“I think what Faven’s trying to say is that we’re a bit shell-shocked,” Huds said. “We didn’t even know you were looking for a space.”

“No, I really did mean it’s fantastic. I love it. It’s my new favourite place,” Faven insisted.

“Climb out of my cooch, Faven. Nobody likes a suck-up.”

The four team members—Huds couldn’t yet bring himself to mentally refer to them as journalists—hovered awkwardly in the middle of the office. On one side, a floor-to-ceiling window presented the crumbling red-brick wall of the neighbouring building. A wavy brown line stretched across the perimeter of the walls where the Gib board had been water-damaged in some long-ago flooding incident. Just how the water had risen that high on the second story of the building was anybody’s guess, but still, it was an office! Huds couldn’t really believe it. Only two months ago they’d been university students writing for other university students, and now … they had an official premises.

“Champagne!” Luce shouted and ran to a closed office. It was the only room with a door, and Huds expected Luce would claim it as her private workspace.

“Who wants the honours?” Luce asked, returning with a bottle of cheap champagne.

Rodney stepped forward, brushing some white plaster dust from the elbow of his suit jacket.

“Top shelf?” he asked, deadpan.

Luce blushed. “We’re on a budget.”

“Why is it warm?”

“Actually, a study in Reims Champagne-Ardenne found that the fizz keeps its bubbles for longer if it’s served at room temperature. Too cold and you’ll numb the taste buds.” Luce pulled open the kitchenette drawers at random, searching through the debris left by the previous owners. “That, and we don’t have a refrigerator yet. Or champagne flutes for that matter. A team that drinks from the bottle together, stays together!”

Huds found a dusty coffee mug with the words ‘Golf Chumpion!’ printed on the side—a typo too strange to be deliberate—and wiped it clean with his t-shirt.

“Oh, it’s okay. I don’t want any,” Faven said.

“Are you pregnant?” Luce asked.

“What? No! It’s just … it’s nine in the morning, on a Monday.”

Rodney popped the cork and it pinged off the ceiling, sending a fresh shower of plaster dust across the carpet.

“Suit yourself, Osmun.” Luce grabbed the bottle from Rodney and necked it, the fizz erupting out the side of her mouth. She grimaced, coughed, and rearranged her features into a satisfied smile. She raised the bottle in Huds’s direction. “To our university graduate; we’re so proud. Now, how was everyone’s break?”

The bottle of champagne acted like a talking stick; as it was passed around, the team took turns debriefing each other on their summer holidays.

Rodney had spent the New Year break at his apartment, sorting through divorce papers and barely seeing his teenage daughter Ruby. Faven, still at university, had attended summer classes to catch up on what she’d missed the year before thanks to Seen in Silverbridge. After the team’s joint efforts in solving the mystery of Gustaf Neilsen’s death had led them to being incarcerated for three nights, Faven’s studies had suffered. Huds lied—while feeling terrible about it—and said he’d spent the majority of his summer with his family. Luce, unsurprisingly, had enjoyed a picture perfect summer: she and her soccer star boyfriend Jordan Lazenby had spent almost a full month in Fiji, sunbathing and snorkelling and drinking. She even had the tan lines to prove it, which she showed them.

“I feel like I deserved it after failing to secure my university degree,” she explained. “But even though I’m tens of thousands of dollars in debt to the government with a hefty student loan, and I don’t even have a degree to show for it, I believe I have something much more valuable: this magazine and its beautiful team of people.”

Faven sighed. “Okay, give me the champagne.”

“Yay!” Luce shoved the bottle into Faven’s hands. “Now, shall we commence our first official meeting?”

“Do we have an agenda?” Huds asked. “I checked Seen’s analytics, and our online readership has dipped a lot since the December issue.”

“Starting the year off by missing our first issue was an interesting tactic,” Rodney said drily. “You gathered so much attention after breaking the Ripe For Picking story last year that you should have capitalised on it and released a gigantic January issue.”

Luce nodded thoughtfully. “We shat the bed, is what you’re saying.”

“In so many words,” Rodney confirmed. “You could’ve come out of the gate with new branding, showing that Seen in Silverbridge isn’t just an amateur magazine for university students.”

“We could have come out of the gate. We’re a team now, remember?”

Rodney grimaced. Luce’s smile shone even brighter.

“Then there’s no time to waste. Our February issue will be a bonanza! We can welcome back the old readers, and introduce the evolved Seen in Silverbridge to new ones. Remember, we’re now the team who solved a murder case! We’re also considered quite bad-ass after having been thrown in jail. There are rumours circling that you even shanked someone, Faven.”

“What?” Faven asked, stricken. “Really?”

“Let’s brainstorm ideas for this year,” Huds said. “Do we have a whiteboard?”

Luce gestured to the empty office space. “We’ve got nada.”

“Let’s brainstorm a list of office supplies,” suggested Rodney.

“You can’t believe you’re here, can you?” Faven asked him. “Rodney Holliday, working at a gossip magazine.”

“But I’m a Peabody winner!” Luce whined, as if imitating him.

“First of all, I’ve never said that,” Rodney began. “Second, I’m very happy to be here.”

“Refrigerator, whiteboard … what else?”

Faven took notes on her phone as the group threw out suggestions. They were interrupted by the blaring of a siren horn, which turned into the pounding bass of electronic music. Huds felt the floorboards vibrating with each beat.

“That’ll be the Zumba class,” Luce explained. “One of the advantages of occupying the second floor of a cheap building…”

“How often does this happen?” Rodney raised his voice over the noise of muffled shouting as the instructor cheered people on.

“Get those knees higher, Janine! Uno, dos, tres—sí, sí, sí!”

“Not that often!” Luce yelled back. “Only at six, seven-thirty, nine-thirty, and eleven.”

“Every day?”

Luce nodded. “Yes, plus afternoon classes on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.”

The team stood and listened as the bass line rumbled through the building.

“Petra, use your towel, your sweat is landing on Drew and Frannie!”

“We’ll get used to it,” Luce promised them.

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