Read an extract from My Family and Other Suspects by Kate Emery.
CHAPTER ONE
They look at him like they want to kill him.
This seems a little harsh, given the guy is already lying on a hospital gurney being fed into an ambulance, IV trailing from one arm. Nick doesn’t look like the kind of guy who intentionally screws up anyone’s holiday. If the Wikipedia entry for surfie had a baby with a member of BTS, that would be Nick: all dark hair, slow smiles and cheekbones. Sure, he’s kind of old, but he doesn’t yet resemble an op-shop handbag the way my second-best friend Libby’s once-hot older brother does. You can tell just by looking at him that he doesn’t wear a watch.
‘Sorry,’ Nick says, his perpetual grin finally fading into something closer to sheepishness. ‘I really thought I could catch it.’
Nick’s girlfriend, Aunty Vinka, who is definitely not delusional enough to believe she could catch a brown snake using only a pair of kitchen tongs, smiles up at the nearest paramedic. Aunty Vinka smiles up at everyone: she’s five foot nothing and says my dad sucked up the entire height allocation in their family. ‘Can I ride with you guys to the hospital?’
The paramedic grunts, which I guess Aunty Vinka can decode, because she climbs in, inadvertently (at least I hope so) flashing the family as she picks up the hem of her skirt, the silver trinkets on her anklet jangling together like we’re all about to enter a flashback in a bad TV show.
‘I’ll call you when we get there!’ she says, and the ambulance doors close before anyone can remind her that she can call all she wants, but we won’t be picking up: there’s no phone reception here at the farm. There’s no internet, either, in case you’re wondering how personally stoked I am to be here.
‘I guess it’s not his fault,’ Bec – Aunty Bec, I should call her now, for reasons I’ll get to in a sec – says to Dad, as the ambulance tyres spray gravel towards us.
This is overly generous because it really, truly is Nick’s fault. Not the murder, which hasn’t happened yet, but getting bitten by the snake. Turns out snake handling isn’t actually ‘just a matter of confidence’.
‘Of course it’s his bloody fault.’ Dad always says what I’m thinking and can’t say. (Mum thinks he says what nobody should say, which might be why they’re divorced.)
‘He was trying to help.’
‘Help who – the snake? Mission accomplished.’
‘D’you reckon he was trying to impress us?’ Aunty Bec says.
‘What? Why?’
‘Meeting the family, you know. He was probably nervous and wanted to make a good impression.’
‘I told him to put down the tongs,’ Dad says.
Personally, I’m not sure Nick heard Dad over Shippy whooping with encouragement and Aunty Vinka shouting at him not to hurt the snake.
‘Let’s go inside,’ Bec – Aunty Bec – says, sounding tired.
It’s Aunty Bec, not Aunty Vinka, who you’d expect to have the hot, younger boyfriend. Aunty Vinka is probably quite pretty, but most of the time she looks like she’s recently escaped from a hippie commune (and not the kind with running water and yoga classes, but more of a make-your-own-compost deal). Aunty Bec is Veronica from Riverdale grown up: all swishy bob and no visible pores. That’s what makes it all the weirder that she’s voluntarily tied herself to Shippy.
‘I thought he had it,’ Shippy says, scratching at his floppy blond curls like someone whispered the word nits in his ear. ‘Just before it bit him.’
‘Another entrant for the Darwin Awards.’ Dad puts his arm around me as we all head back into the farmhouse we were supposed to be leaving. ‘Do you think Vinka finds all of these guys outside the lobotomy clinic, or is it just a coincidence?’
‘Nick’s a sweet guy, Andy, don’t be a shit,’ Bec – Aunty Bec! Aunty Bec! – says. Then, remembering my presence, she adds: ‘Sorry, Ruth.’ She looks around for her son, Dylan, but he’s probably in his room. Dylan’s usually in his room.
We troop inside the farmhouse. It used to be a holiday home, before Grandad and his second wife, GG, moved in permanently. It’s still got that holiday-home feel: mismatched furniture, hand-me-down appliances and the smallest TV you’ve ever seen in your life. Even when the whole place is clean, which it is right now because we’re supposed to be driving back to Perth, it still looks grubby: there are stains on the wall that won’t come off and the couches are more patch than original material. I found mouse poo under my bed last night (or at least, I really hope that’s what it was, because the alternative is a rogue possum).
I want to ask Dad if people still die from snake bites (middle-class people with holiday houses, not hikers lost in the bush with only a warm can of Coke), but is it too soon?
‘So,’ says Aunty Bec, perching on the armrest of one of the couches, right over its biggest patch, ‘I guess we’re not going home today after all.’
Dad looks surprised.
‘You guys can still go back to Perth. Ruth and I will stick around to see if Nick’s okay, and maybe stick a pillow over his face if he’s not, teach him a lesson.’
Aunty Bec shakes her head. ‘Shippy and I drove down with Nick and Vinka, remember – my car’s at the mechanics. Do you think they’ll let him out of the hospital today? I’ve got a meeting tomorrow.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Great,’ Shippy says, flopping into the nearest armchair so violently that it rocks backwards and almost tips over. ‘All chill and no Netflix.’ I’m not sure he knows what that phrase means. Also: gross.
Aunty Bec’s reading the spines in the bookshelf. ‘Serves me right for forgetting my Kindle. These books haven’t changed in twenty years: it’s all Sherlock Holmes, Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie.’
She’s right but I don’t care. I love murder mysteries, the higher the body count the better. You wouldn’t think you could read a mystery more than once, but maybe my brain is defective, because I often forget who strangled so-and-so in the library or poisoned blah-de-blah in the conservatory. (I’m still not sure what a conservatory is but they’re constantly popping up.)
I love real-life mysteries too, and I’m pretty good at solving them. Sure, as a fourteen-year-old who’s never lived anywhere but Perth the only mysteries I get to solve are The Mystery of the Weird Smell in My Bedroom (a mouldy banana at the bottom of my bag) or The Mystery of the White Dots on My Black Skirt (a tissue in the wash), but it counts. I’m sorry to brag but, you see, it’s going to be relevant soon.
‘There’s still the TV,’ Shippy, who I am definitely not calling Uncle Shippy no matter what (he’s not Dylan’s dad so he’s barely family anyway), says. ‘Right?’
‘You could always catch the bus back,’ Dad says hopefully.
‘I get carsick on buses and it’s, like, four hours.’ Shippy brightens a bit. ‘Maybe I could check out the surf. Are there any old boards lying around here? Mine didn’t fit in the car.’
Dad shakes his head and doesn’t point out that neither his dead dad hobby farmer nor his elderly stepmother are likely to be big surfers, which is uncharacteristically restrained.
Nobody has asked me how I’m feeling about any of this, which sucks because I’d love to complain. It’s not that I hate my family; they’re fun and Dylan is . . . I’ll get to him. The problem is that I’m supposed to be going to the movies with my best friends, Ali and Libby, tomorrow night and if they go without me, they’ll probably bond over their mutual love of Timothée Chalamet and then the next time we have to pair up in PE, they’ll choose each other and I’ll be stuck with Viv, who will definitely want to do my personal astrology chart again.
The kitchen door bangs open and closed and in walks Dylan. He’s missed the whole thing, which is classic Dylan, really. At the sight of us all he stops and slides his over-the-ear earphones down to his neck. Something that might be Finnish death metal blares out.
A word about Dylan, on whom Ali and I developed crushes the summer he learned how to do something with his hair. That little crush got pretty awkward around six months ago when I learned we’re not just family friends who grew up together but related because his mum, Aunty Bec, is the half-sister of my dad and Aunty Vinka.
It’s a whole thing, but the short version is that Grandad had a super-sneaky affair with some woman he worked with, who put the kid up for adoption. Aunty Bec’s mum, who was best friends with Grandma, thought it was a great idea to secretly adopt the kid and not tell anyone about it. Bec only found out after her mum died and she went through her stuff.
The word you’re looking for is: yikes.
Dylan looks at me and raises his eyebrows. He can’t raise just one, like me, and I know it kills him. I shrug, not sure how to communicate the whole Snake! thing with just my face. Now that we’re, what, half-cousins, I haven’t even noticed this trip that he’s lost his curls (bad) and skinny jeans (good).
‘What’s going on?’
‘We’re staying another night,’ Aunty Bec says.
‘Why?’
‘Ask Nick.’
That’s when Dad sits up with an expression like he’s just been told the toilet’s overflowing with shit and all the plumbers in the world are booked until Christmas. ‘Crap.’
‘What?’ I ask.
‘Someone’s got to tell Gertie.’
Anyway, that’s how the whole murder mystery thing starts.
My Family and Other Suspects
by Kate Emery
Holly Jackson meets Agatha Christie in this cosy modern-day YA murder mystery where your closest family are your prime suspects.
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