Read Starlight Peninsula for Free Online Page B

it was the wrong place. She turned inland, and kept walking.
    To Maungawhau, Mt Eden, the highest cone, its green terraces rising steeply above the city. She turned onto a path that led between wooden fences and through suburban gardens, onto the hillside and up to the summit, where the coaches parked, and the tourists milled around, photographing the rock-strewn volcanic crater and the slopeswhere Maori once built their pa and fought off marauding tribes, the view of suburbs stretching all the way south to the airport and north to the city. Haze of sun over the Sky Tower, shining dust.
    She crossed the summit to the west, climbed a stile and walked down the hillside track. She had only been back twice since the morning Arthur died, both times to take away clothes she’d left there. The detective with the odd-coloured eyes had been with her. When the policewoman briefly left the room to talk on her cell phone Eloise, suddenly angry at being watched, and at being told she could take nothing of Arthur’s, pulled a file of his papers from under the desk and concealed it in the sports bag containing the clothes she’d collected. She’d taken it home and hidden it.
    Now the track led through the long grass under a stand of trees and came out above the concrete deck where she and Arthur used to sit on summer mornings, listening to the sounds of the city below.
    From here she had a view of the roof and the deck, the back door and the kitchen window. A wisteria vine grew up a trellis, and there was an orange beach towel hanging on a wooden chair. She left the path, treading carefully on the uneven ground, avoiding holes and stones hidden by the long grass. She recalled summer mornings waking with Arthur to the sounds of cicadas and birds, the scent of hot grass and pine through the open window. Arthur’s jokes and crazes, his obsessions. He would get up in the night and make notes. He said, ‘I’ll change my name to Abelard,’ and explained when she didn’t get it.
    She stood on the hillside remembering, the patch of sun on the deck, light catching a metal water bowl left there for the cat, stillness, and she saw a man cross the deck and behind him Arthur getting up from the wooden chair, talking to the man who was just inside the kitchen now, Arthur pulling a leaf from the wisteria vine as he talked, rolling it between his fingers. Arthur’s eyes, his face, his thin body and long legs. Turning to follow the man, he kicked the metal bowlof water, she caught the flash and shimmer of light. The door closing.
    Eloise sat down in the long grass and watched the cloud shadows crossing the suburb. The cicadas sang so loud they had no meaning, no essence, only sound. The green mountain, once a plate of fire spilling lava, site of ancient wars, the clouds above it filtering sunlight, sending down the beams that Maori call the ropes of Maui. She lay in the grass and dreamed.
    Killing time.
     
    She was halfway along Karangahape Road when she remembered sitting in a room at the police station with the woman detective. Her name was Marie Da Silva. She had blonde hair, long at the back and sticking up like gold wire on top of her head. She had a male partner who seldom talked, only watched — she remembered his steady stare. Detective Da Silva showed her a note written by Arthur. In his scrawling handwriting in black felt pen, there were names divided by a forward slash.
    ‘This mean anything to you?’ Da Silva asked. ‘Do you know these names?’
    Eloise, who had been silent, began to talk. Words spilled out of her. Arthur always had a lot of projects on the go. He wrote copious notes. He was working on a play. He was part of a team of writers on a TV comedy show. He was finishing a screenplay about a National Party prime minister. He wanted to plan his first novel. Arthur was a barrel of energy, he was curious about everything. He wanted to experience as much as possible, to come up against things, institutions, people. He was