by Leah Stewart
Even in a strange place with spotty cell service, Josie has confidence that she’ll find her destination. She always knows which way is north. Here there is only one main road, which follows the coastline through the settled parts of the island. Eighty percent of the island is wilderness, accessible only by foot, boat, or helicopter, so the road goes only three-quarters of the way around the island. Where the last piece of the circle would be is rain forest instead—rain forest, a large canyon, and mountains that start where the beaches end and press insistently into the center of the island, with fingers of the mountains reaching out even farther. On a map, civilization appears to cling to the island’s edge between the encroachments of mountains and sea. It seems to Josie, driving from airport to resort through heavy traffic and little towns dense with ramshackle houses, that the mountains maintain a magisterial remove.
As she nears the resort, billboards vanish, along with roadside food stands; undrivable vans; abandoned construction with tipped-over porta potties; storefronts that combine locksmith, printing, and legal services; small wooden rectangular buildings in need of paint; and other markers of people who don’t have money. This resort is for the people who do. Everything that interrupts the beauty of the landscape is gone, as if someone has swept the porch. On either side of the road are eucalyptus trees that reach for one another, forming a canopy, so for a mile or so, Josie feels as if she were in a tunnel, though a tunnel that’s spangled with light. Josie doesn’t know this, having read no guidebooks, but hundreds of these trees were planted more than a hundred years ago on the orders of a man who’d grown rich off the island’s resources. Part of what was once his land now belongs to the resort. He was, by all accounts, a terrible man. The tree tunnel is beautiful.
The resort advertises itself as luxurious, relaxing, and secluded, all of which is accurate. It encompasses nearly two hundred acres on a small, irregularly shaped peninsula, with seven private beaches, diving, snorkeling, and sailing, multiple restaurants, tennis courts, massage cabanas, a bar offering frozen mango cocktails, a boutique selling overpriced colorful scarves. Fluffy little donkeys roam the grounds. There are no televisions or telephones in the rooms. Josie would have stayed at a moderately priced chain hotel, but there doesn’t seem to be one on this island. So here she is on a quest in this place designed for the perfect vacation, feeling a momentary confusion of purpose. She stands on her balcony gazing at the blue, blue ocean as a big white boat passes by. A breeze rustles the fronds of the palm trees. In the distance, she can see the hazy gray-blue outline of the next island. Her bedspread has a pattern of sea grasses on a sand-colored background. The same fabric is on the throw pillows on the armchair and the couch. The floor is tile—the color of a darker speckled sand—and it’s cool under her bare feet. She’s just out of the shower, wrapped in a thick white robe, droplets of water forming at the ends of her hair and descending over the edge of the balcony, back to the sea. What if she just stayed here for the week she booked and then flew home? No confessions, no confrontations, no rejections. No risk. But that is not the choice the hero makes.
In the hall, she passes a maid with her cart, and it seems to her that the maid looks at her strangely, turns to watch as she passes. She doesn’t look back to confirm the other woman’s gaze. She expected to go unrecognized here, but then again, these days it’s impossible to know what people have and haven’t seen. Bronwyn even followed her onto the plane.
Back through the tree tunnel and Josie rejoins the main road, heading still farther away from the airport, up and around to the island’s north shore. This area is less densely populated. There are no billboards, fewer turnoffs, more places to pull over and photograph the view. Josie departs the main road for one that abruptly diminishes in size, so two cars passing each other would have to drive partly on the shoulder. The houses are neat, if slightly shabby. On her right, there is a small stone church with a peaked roof ending in a modest wooden cross over an arched door and a rose window. Its quaint loveliness is striking after the chaotic modernity of the towns near the airport and the well-brushed sheen of the resort. On her left, there is an upscale market, comprised partly of the well-kept buildings of a former plantation. Josie glimpses a sparkling fountain of mosaic tile, above it a bright parrot on a perch.
She turns onto a road that climbs to higher ground. Gated driveways appear in breaks in the trees and hibiscus hedges. Whatever wonders they protect are hidden from view, but occasionally more modest houses sit exposed and ungated by the road. Once she sees a trailer, alone in the center of a huge swath of cleared land, radiating abandonment.
A long gravel driveway takes her up higher still to the cottage where Charlie is supposed to be. It’s isolated on six acres, a little yellow cottage with large windows and a small patio nestled among fruit trees and tropical flowers. Josie stops at the top of the drive. Hers is the only car here. She assumes Charlie rented one and that therefore he must be gone somewhere. She gets out anyway to make sure, to have a look around. To wait? One of the compact reddish chickens that roam free on the island crosses her path, a quartet of chicks scurrying after her. Josie sees a rooster, too, and a peacock and three peahens, one of whom has her own large chick. The peacock is in full display, his magnificent feathers fanned out while he turns in a slow circle, furiously shaking the more ordinary brown feathers at his rear. These enticements seem to interest the peahens not at all. They move around him in a way that suggests they’re carefully avoiding eye contact. At the sight of his vigorous, determined silliness, Josie laughs for the first time in what feels like days or weeks, and she moves up to the house with a lightened spirit. If Charlie’s not here, he will be later.
Cupping her hands around her face to look through the big front window, Josie sees a big bed under a filmy canopy, a table holding an unopened champagne bottle and two unused flutes, two wicker chairs with floral cushions, a small kitchen against one wall. It looks like a honeymoon cottage, and she feels a pang of sadness at the thought of Charlie’s being there alone. For Josie, solitude is not inherently a negative, but it is for Charlie. Charlie doesn’t like to be alone. How has he felt sleeping on that huge bed under that romantic canopy? The shower is an outdoor one, under the roofline of the house within a wooden enclosure. Through the heart-shaped window carved in the wood, the showerer would be able to see mountains, bushes bursting with flowers of an insistent red, a faint blue line of ocean. Has Charlie been forlorn, standing under the water, looking at a heart-shaped view?
Maybe not. Maybe he hasn’t been alone.
But there are no signs of any other inhabitant, no hairbrushes or women’s razors or bikini tops hung from doorknobs to dry. Just Charlie’s pile of paperbacks, Charlie’s Reds baseball cap, Charlie’s bottle of bourbon. Charlie’s things. But not Charlie. It’s painful how much she wants to see him, as if he were a star and she an ardent fan, as if her longing were locked in desperate battle with the deep and certain knowledge that he’ll never ever be hers.
She waits an hour until the light starts to fade and the sky takes on colors. She’s tired—her body tells her it’s bedtime—and she doesn’t know the road well enough to want to drive it in the dark. Before she goes, though, she walks the property, which includes an orchard of guava, lychee, papaya, and mango trees laid out in long neat lines. Who picks this fruit? A fair amount of it has fallen untouched to ripen and ferment on the ground, giving the orchard a fragrance of drunkenness. She peels and eats some lychees. She walks a little while accompanied by a chicken, who keeps pace with her in companionable fashion until it abruptly veers off, pursuing its chicken ends. She’s getting hungry—she’s no longer fighting her hunger, seven pounds be damned. She thinks of attempting a mango, but she’s never been good at telling when they’re ripe, and she doesn’t have a knife to slice one open, and she doesn’t want to greet Charlie with strands of mango stuck in her teeth. She eats some more lychees, dropping the peels as she walks as if leaving a trail.
She eats dinner at one of the resort’s open-air restaurants and then goes back to her room to slip into her deep, dream-filled pregnancy sleep. Charlie will call, or he won’t, and either way she’ll go out again tomorrow to find him.
Two.
The kidnappers are at a loss. Ben—Charlie—won’t eat, won’t rise from his hammock. Once, Denise flips him out of the hammock, and he just lies there on the ground until Adan helps him back in. Only Adan can get him to drink water. It is as if he has decided to die. When they speak to him, he looks at them with faraway eyes and doesn’t answer. He will no longer respond to Ben. When they call him Charlie, that is the only time he speaks. He says, “That is not me.”
Thomas is sullen. He thinks often of running away. He misses his neighborhood soccer game. He misses his girlfriend. Adan is sorrowful. He thinks he’s a player in a tragedy, helpless to resist fate. He goes around with tears in his eyes. Denise is angry, but her anger no longer motivates her. She has passed into a permanent state of fury that she experiences as numbness. She leaves the care of Charlie entirely to Adan, spends all day pacing the edge of the ocean watching for Mystery. Mystery—whose job it was to find an e-mail address and write a ransom demand and send it. Has she done it? Has anything happened out there in the world?
There is no way to know.
Three.
A knock at the door intrudes on Josie’s sleep. She didn’t expect to sleep this long or this late. She’d expected—she’d hoped—to be woken by a call from Charlie. So she didn’t set an alarm, forgot to hang the do-not-disturb sign. Even at the sudden sharp knock she doesn’t quite wake. Her dream clings to her. She thinks she is awake, that she is in Charlie’s bedroom rearranging the items on his dresser while Charlie explains that he wants her to pose for nude photos with him, and she objects, and he is inexplicably holding a clipboard. The dream thins so she can almost see real life through it, so she hears the door open and the maid’s footsteps and knows they don’t make sense with the clipboard and the nude photos, but she is still lying in bed, working out the truth, when the maid walks into her room.
The maid does not realize right away that someone is in the bed. Josie shoved all but one of the ten thousand pillows to one side, so the mound of them blocks the maid’s view. Not until she lifts one of those pillows, intending to unmake and remake, does she see her. At that moment, Josie thinks, Wait, that’s not right, and opens her eyes. She and Josie make eye contact, and both of them utter a sound between a gasp and a scream.
It’s easy for Josie—as she and the maid stammer incoherent apologies, the maid first in her own language, then English—to attribute all the fluster and awkwardness to the unexpected encounter of maid and half-dressed hotel guest, blowsy with sleep. But the moment goes on for too long. Why isn’t the maid beating a hasty retreat? Why is she still standing there, compressing that pillow against her chest, murmuring, “I am so sorry”? Is she a fan? But she shows none of the eager, animal impulse to get closer.
“Don’t worry,” Josie says. “I should have put the sign on the door.”
The maid nods, but still she doesn’t go.
“It’s okay,” Josie says. She’s sitting up in the bed, her oversize T-shirt adjusted so the neck no longer slips off one shoulder. Now she reaches under the covers to pull the hem over her hips, in case it takes sliding out of bed to encourage this woman to leave. She debates what’s worse on the scale of vulnerability: being in the bed while the woman towers over her or rising half-clothed to tower over the woman. Well, it’s all in how she plays it.
She throws the covers back, swings her feet decisively to the ground with no abashed effort at concealment. She stands looking at the maid with her hands on her hips. Her chin is tucked so that her lifted eyebrows point at the door.
But the maid—who is, of course, Mystery—hesitates another moment. Her eyes go to Josie’s stomach, which is—in the sunlight from the window, through the thin white fabric of the T-shirt—visibly rounded. The T-shirt is airbrushed in blue swooping letters, I ♥ OUTLAWS, above a black cowboy hat. The heart is, like all hearts, red. Charlie brought the shirt back from a trip as a joke. “Outlaw,” the maid says. She says it like two words. Then she drags her gaze back up to Josie’s face. Why does she look so stricken? “I am sorry,” she says again, and then at last, at last, she goes.
Josie hangs the do-not-disturb sign and engages the bar lock and, with that, believes she has dismissed the encounter. But something about it nags at her, and she catches herself in a reverie, replaying the scene under the rapidly cooling shower. She has one of those feelings we call hunches or intuition—a certainty that comes after we process so much information so quickly that we don’t notice we’re doing it. Josie is an empath by nature and by training.
That woman knows something about Charlie.
She dresses hastily, hoping to catch her. Only a few minutes go by, not more than ten, but when Josie stands at her doorway looking one way down the hall and then the other, she sees no cart. She’s visited by an oddly fond memory of Cyrus the bodyguard. All clear, Cyrus, though she would prefer it otherwise. Strange that the maid is not cleaning the next room without an occupant—Josie sees three doors without signs dangling from the knobs.
She vanished, through a portal, in a puff of smoke, by teleport. She ran away.
In the hallways, on the grounds, even as she eats a late breakfast in the restaurant, Josie looks for her. What is it you think she knows? she asks herself. What could that woman possibly know? She challenges her own conviction but can’t diminish it. She is sure, and that sureness creates a thrumming, insistent dread. She finds another maid, exiting a room, and describes to her the woman she saw. “That is Mystery,” the maid says.
“She doesn’t sound familiar?”
The maid looks puzzled, so Josie rephrases.
“You don’t know her?”
“Yes, I know her. Mystery.”
“She’s a mystery?”
The maid frowns. “Yes. Her name. Mystery.”
Josie would laugh if it wasn’t for the dread. “Have you seen her today?”
No, the other woman has not seen her.
“Who might have seen her? Who can I ask about her?”
Now the other woman looks worried. “You need something for your room? You don’t like the cleaning?”
“No, no, no, it’s not that. She hasn’t done anything wrong. I just wanted to talk to her about something.”
The worry shifts toward puzzlement. “You want to talk to her?”
There’s a why in that question. Yes, Josie, why? Why do you want to talk to the housekeeper? To seek advice about the island? There’s a concierge for that. You need to think of a reason. “Okay, never mind, it’s okay, thank you,” Josie says.
“You need something?” the woman asks.
“No, I . . . sure, yes, sure. Could I have . . . an extra towel?”
The maid’s face brightens. This is a request that makes sense to her. She gives Josie the towel and Josie thanks her again and they go their separate ways.
By the time Josie approaches the front desk, she has her reason, which should have come to her more readily, as it’s the key that opens most doors, at least outside of LA. “Excuse me,” she says to the man at the desk. “I have kind of a strange question.” She smiles at him in conspiratorial sheepishness.
He smiles back, like a person unfazed by strang
e questions.
“I’m looking for one of the housekeeping staff. Mystery. I don’t know her last name.”
“Yes, Mystery.” The clerk looks at her in expectation of more.
“She came into my room while I was there earlier today—”
“Oh!” The clerk’s face changes.
“No, no, no,” Josie says. “No, no, it’s no problem. I’m not here to complain. I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to talk to someone. Let me back up. I’m an actress.”
“Oh?” His eyebrows go up.
Yes, Josie thinks. All right. “I have a part in a movie where I play a housekeeper in a place like this.”
The clerk permits himself a small smile. Hollywood, he thinks.
Josie barrels past the smile. “Anyway, she said that she could talk to me about what it’s like, maybe I could follow her through her day. It would help so much with preparation. She just wanted to check with her boss. But I didn’t find out how I could get in touch with her. Could you find her for me?”
He picks up a receiver but pauses before he pushes a button. “What happens in this movie?”
“Oh, it’s a romantic comedy. I fall in love with a guest in the hotel.”
“Ah. And who will play the guest?”
Josie names a famous American actor, and the man looks suitably impressed. “I will call down, Miss . . .”
“Lamar. Josie Lamar.”
“Ah.” He files the name away. As soon as she leaves, Josie knows he will look her up, and then if she seems sufficiently recognizable, he’ll tell everyone he knows she was there. He dials the numbers, speaks to someone on the other end of the phone. He puts his hand on the mouthpiece and says to Josie, “They will go look for you.”