Read an extract from A Beautiful Family by Jennifer Trevelyan

Allen & Unwin
May 19
9 min read

Updated: May 30

An eventful summer forever changes the lives of a family in a page turning coming of age mystery.

A Beautiful Family by Jennifer Trevelyan

As the summer holiday stretches ahead, with her older sister more interested in boys, her mother disappearing on long walks and her father, beer in hand, watching the cricket, the youngest in the family often finds herself alone.

At the beach, she meets Kahu, a boy who tells her a tragic story about a little girl who disappeared a couple of years ago, presumed drowned. Suddenly, the summer has purpose—they will find the missing girl and become local heroes.

Between dips in the ocean, afternoon barbecues and lazy sunbaking, their detective work brings to the surface shocking discoveries and dark secrets, even about her own beautiful family . . .

'I absolutely loved this page-turning family mystery and didn't want it to end. The author so effortlessly transported me to another place and time, and every character leapt off the page. An extraordinary, exquisitely written debut.'

Liane Moriarty, author of Here One Moment

'An absolutely riveting read. I loved it.' Hannah Kent, author of Devotion

Start reading A Beautiful Family below ...

Chapter Three

My favourite game in the water was to pretend I was a dolphin.

Diving under the waves and popping up again. Diving under and popping up. Dive-pop, dive-pop. I could do this for hours. I tried to dive low and pop high— I wanted my chin to

graze the sea floor, and my hips to clear the water. Sometimes I kept my eyes shut for long periods, becoming completely disorientated. I’d open them to find myself facing the horizon, when I thought I’d be facing the shore, or I’d find myself miles down the beach, staring at the wrong trees, the wrong houses, the wrong-coloured towels lying in the sand.

On the third day, when I’d been at the beach for maybe half an hour, I popped up with my eyes shut and heard a voice close to my ear saying,

‘Hey.’

It was too late to halt my next dive— I was under the water before I’d had time to react. I popped up again, eyes open. It was the boy with the greenstone carving around his neck. The chubby one from across the lagoon. He was startlingly close, bobbing aimlessly in the water. I looked past him, toward the beige sand. My mother, my so-called chaperone— a pale speck at the corner of my eye— was gone.

‘Hey.’

Slightly louder this time, slightly more insistent. I dived, but this time I didn’t pop back up. I let myself drift a few metres, and then I surfaced lazily on my back. He was still there.

‘What.’

‘You’re from the lagoon.’

I dived for a third time, and this time, I stayed under as long as my lungs would allow. I wondered if he was impressed by my lung capacity. I wondered if he would tell his family

he’d met a girl who was part dolphin.

‘I saw you,’ he said, when finally I popped back up.

‘I know.’

‘Is it your boat?’

I shook my head.

‘Your dad’s?’

I shook my head again. ‘The place we’re staying.’

He nodded, and began to drift away. I dived, thinking, will he be gone when I come up? He was, and I found to my surprise that I was disappointed. He had turned toward the beach and was meandering away— part doggy-paddle, part breaststroke. He was a clumsy swimmer, nothing at all like a dolphin. Thinking fast, I said, ‘I like your necklace.’

I wasn’t used to paying compliments to boys.

‘It’s not a necklace,’ he said, touching it. ‘It’s a pounamu. A fish hook.’

I reddened, thinking I’d offended him. Taking a deep breath, I prepared to dive again.

‘Have you seen the memorial?’

I frowned.

‘The wooden cross? With the flowers?’ He pointed up the beach.

‘Of course,’ I lied. ‘I’ve seen it.’

‘Wanna look at it with me?’

I did, very much. With my mother walking me to and from the beach, and my sister only interested in sunbathing, I hadn’t had much of a chance to explore. I had only the vaguest idea what a memorial was. Something to do with birth, or marriage, or death. Something churchy. We weren’t churchy people. I dived again, but I didn’t stay under very long this time, and while I was under, I moved toward him.

Pop.

‘Well, do you?’

I shrugged. ‘I guess.’

‘Good. Stop diving then. Just follow me.’

‘Her name was Charlotte,’ he said. ‘She was nine.’

I thought then how small and babyish ‘nine’ sounded, now that I was ten, going on eleven. We were standing in front of a small wooden cross that poked out of the dunes not far from the path through the pines. From a distance I’d thought the cross was a thing a child had made— I thought a child had found an oddly shaped piece of driftwood and stuck it in the ground and thrown handfuls of grass and seaweed at it. Closer up, I saw that it had been made with love and care. You could tell that if you yanked hard on that cross it wouldn’t budge, and that if a strong man like my father finally did manage to get it out of the ground, you would find as much of it buried underground as there was visible above, and you would find its buried end sharpened to a point like a garden stake.

Above ground, the cross had rounded edges and a smooth, waxed finish, bleached white in places by the sun. The stuff that I thought was grass and seaweed was actually a collection of wild flowers, faded and beginning to wilt. These flowers had been carefully threaded through a piece of wire that looped around the centre of the cross.

'She’s buried here?'

‘No, course not. It’s a memorial.’

I nodded as if I knew what that meant.

‘How old are you?’

I thought about lying— I would be eleven in a matter of months.

But in the end I admitted I was ten.

‘I’m twelve,’ he said. ‘My birthday was in October.’

I wished I’d lied. I was very cold without my towel. I dug my toes into the sand and clenched my fists to bring feeling back to my fingers. I had a million questions, but to ask them all would have given the boy from the lagoon all the power.

He was already a whole two years older than me— if I revealed how little I knew about the cross and what it signified, he would become the one who knew stuff, and I would become

the one who didn’t. I was already that person at home— always needing jokes explained to me, never allowed to know the full story. To hide my ignorance I turned away and forced a yawn, as if memorials— even ones to nine-year-old girls— bored me.

‘Your lips are blue,’ he said.

‘I should probably get my towel.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Over there.’ I pointed to where Vanessa was lying on her stomach in the beige sand.

‘Okay, let’s go get it.’

We clambered down from the dunes and ran across the sand to my sister. It wasn’t a race. I thought it was a race, and ran fast, the way I always ran when racing boys— with all of my heart. I sprang off the balls of my feet and pumped my arms, but when I got to where my towel was, I looked behind me and saw that he was well behind, and that the effort of running was all over his face— he wasn’t trying to hide it. When he caught up to me, he didn’t say, ‘You got a head start,’ or ‘I let you win,’ he just doubled over and panted for a while.

Vanessa raised her head one inch off her towel and opened one eye. ‘Who’s this?’

I didn’t know his name and I didn’t want him to meet my sister, who liked to torture my friends, or, according to her mood, charm them, and torture me instead. I grabbed my towel and pulled it roughly around me. ‘Someone I met,’ I said, by way of an answer. ‘Where’s Mum?’

She propped herself up on her elbows. ‘Dunno. Gone for a walk, I guess.’

‘I thought she was supposed to be chaperoning us.’

‘Chaperoning you. I’m fifteen, I don’t need a crappy chaperone. So, does this someone have a name?’

I glanced quickly at him, hoping to warn him. My sister was looking him up and down, deciding whether to torture him, or charm him. I felt we had woken a sleeping lioness, and in doing so, had turned ourselves into fat, juicy prey. But the boy from the lagoon stepped forward and said: ‘My name’s Kahu, and your back is really sunburnt.’

‘It is?’ She twisted around to look at her own back. ‘Shit, it is too— I fell asleep.’ I realised that by turning his attention to Vanessa’s favourite thing in the world— her own body— Kahu

had disarmed her. ‘So,’ she said, twisting back to face us, ‘what are you two doing?’

We looked at each other and shrugged.

‘We thought we might hang out for a bit,’ I said.

Vanessa gave me a look. It was a dead kind of look, empty behind the eyes. I knew it well— it was the look of a cat about to pounce. I had made a mistake. By thinking that my sister was in a good mood, and that Kahu had won her over, I’d walked straight into one of her traps— I’d admitted that I wanted to ‘hang out’ with a boy, and I’d used the word ‘we’, as if he and I were something more than just two dumb kids who had nothing better to do. The last time I’d seen my sister with that dead look in her eyes she’d asked me, in front of our older boy cousins, if I knew what a vagina was. I lied— I said that I did know what it was.

She asked me to point to one. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Point to a vagina.’ I remember the way they burst into fits of giggles— even my older cousins, who were young men of sixteen and eighteen, not usually given to giggling. I was caught in a lie, but it was something more than that— something else about vagina that was ugly and sinister, and I didn’t know; I hadn’t the faintest clue. I remember looking around and, in desperation, pointing toward the window— I thought whatever it was, it was bound to be out there somewhere (to me it sounded like the kind of flower my mother planted in shady spots under trees). I remember that the moment only passed when an adult entered the room to tell us that dessert was ready. I remember eating the dessert, but being unable to taste it, and after that, I felt differently about my boy-cousins.

My sister had turned them against me, and the worst part was that I didn’t even know how she’d done it— I didn’t know what vagina was.

Now she was looking up from her towel with the smallest smile on her lips, deciding whether to skewer me in front of my new friend. I braced myself for what was about to come, but then she yawned, closed her eyes, and put her head back down on her towel.

‘Well? Are you two going to piss off or what?’

We ran— back the way we’d come, toward the dunes. I got the feeling Kahu knew, without me having to tell him, how close we’d come to disaster. This time I slowed down— I didn’t

try to race. We got to the dunes and sat down. The sand there was cool and welcoming. I was so relieved that Vanessa had decided not to skewer me, I allowed myself a question.

‘So, where is she buried? This Charlotte-person.’

‘She’s not.’

‘She’s not buried anywhere?’

‘She was never found. My uncle said it happens a lot with drownings. He said she ran off to the beach— this was a couple of summers ago. She didn’t have permission from her mum, and the waves were really high that day. That’s why you always have to get permission, even if you know how to swim.’ Kahu picked up a stick and dug it into a clump of damp sand, snapping it in half. I did the same— the sticks that lay in those dunes snapped easily, and made a pleasing sound when they did. We sat cross-legged in the sand at the edge of the dunes, snapping sticks, until we couldn’t find any more that were long enough to snap. Then he stood, brushed the sand off his bottom, put his hands on his hips, and said,

‘Wanna help me find the body?’

Extracted from A Beautiful Family by Jennifer Trevelyan,

available 3 June wherever books are sold.

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