by Tim Weaver
His headtorch blinked like a heartbeat, dimming every time it registered the impact of a step. He stared at his cellphone, the brightness of his eyes illuminated by the screen, his olive skin softly lit in pale blue. In the week since he’d attacked her, he’d let his stubble grow thicker, maybe to cover the cuts and bruises – but she would have recognized him anywhere.
He followed the trail along the bottom of the gully, not looking up, his fingers moving across the screen. He had no idea Rebekah was watching, just twenty-five feet away, still breathing, still alive. He thought her body was further into the forest, decomposing, being picked apart by animals. Yet she was scared. She was so scared it was like a tremor in her bones.
He stopped directly down the slope from her.
His gaze was still fixed on the cellphone, but now it was vibrating in his hand, a muffled hum that carried across the stillness of the forest. Please don’t answer it here. Please go. Please just leave.
He lifted the phone to his ear. ‘Yeah?’ he said, looking around him, turning towards her. ‘No, I didn’t hear it ring. This place is a total dead zone.’
‘Did you just fire your gun?’
For a moment, Rebekah could hear the caller perfectly.
‘Yeah, there’s skunks out here.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘I don’t want to go home with rabies.’
‘We’re not even supposed to be here, you stupid asshole!’
‘Calm down, it’s the off season,’ Green Eyes said, then moved slightly – and, as he did, any response from the caller became muted by his body. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I told you, she’s not here.’ A short pause. ‘It wasn’t this part of the forest. It was somewhere else.’
The man turned in Rebekah’s direction again.
Either side of the tree she was using to hide herself, the ground burst into life, the foliage, leaves and branches lighting up. She flinched and closed her eyes, listening for him, her mind creating images of him tearing up the slope towards her, a gun out in front of him.
‘I don’t know where she is,’ he said.
She let out a breath.
‘I can’t tell at night.’ She saw him change direction again, could feel the wind pick up, carrying the conversation towards her. ‘This place is like a maze. What do you want me to say?’
‘I don’t want you to say anything,’ the caller fired back, as clear as if he were standing in front of them both. ‘All I want is for you to remember where you last saw her.’ The man with the green eyes turned again, taking in his surroundings. ‘Her body was supposed to be rotting in a fucking hole.’
He started to move again, heading in the opposite direction to the way he’d come in. Soon, the other side of the conversation became impossible to pick up. All Rebekah could hear was the man with the green eyes, his faint Latino accent, the aggression in his voice, the threat.
‘Even if I can’t find her, by the time anyone comes back here – if anyone ever comes out this far – her bones will be scattered all over the forest by the animals.’ He stopped, peering intently into the undergrowth. He’d seen something – or thought he had. The caller must have picked up on the silence. ‘It’s nothing.’ Unhurriedly, carefully, he started walking again. ‘If you want me to tell you where her body is, we’re gonna have to come back in the day.’
He stopped again, half turned, his gaze back on the same spot he’d been staring into a moment before. Rebekah followed his eyeline: there must have been an animal there. ‘No, I’m not saying we wasted our time,’ he continued, still focused on the same spot, his voice dropping in volume as he searched the trees. ‘But this forest is bigger than I remember and at the moment it’s pitch black. If we come back during the day, it’ll be easier to find her.’ He began walking again. ‘I disagree. It’ll be fine. No one’s going to be here until April.’
He was maybe a hundred feet from her now. Soon, he would be too far away for Rebekah to pick up anything – so, in response, she moved forward, automatically, trying to adjust her position to hear him more clearly.
As her foot lifted up and came down again she saw the crooked angle of a branch beneath it.
By then it was too late to pull back.
In the silence of the forest, the branch cracked.
Before
For a month Rebekah felt numb. In the evenings, after the girls had gone to bed and she was alone in the house, she would try to watch TV, or pick up a book, or distract herself with the laptop. She’d do anything to stop her mind slowly decamping to the one place she never wanted to go back to.
A stranger’s bedroom.
She took the girls to Prospect Park, letting them kick around in the leaves as they started to fall, and met friends she worked with at the hospital who also had kids. She and Gareth even took the girls, as a four, to a movie – although it proved a disaster, because Chloe cried through most of it, and Rebekah and Gareth both ended up losing their temper, shouting at the girls, then turning on each other. Keeping busy worked, though: she didn’t think about her mistake as often and, once she and Gareth had re-established the equanimity they’d entered since the split, her life drifted back to normal.
In the last week of October, as fall started to grip and the nights closed in, Rebekah invited Noella for dinner, and – as they were sitting at the table in the kitchen, drinking wine while chops sizzled under the grill – Rebekah almost confessed. She knew Noe wouldn’t judge her, that she would almost certainly say it was good for Rebekah, important to go out and have fun, to spend time doing the things that a single adult should be doing. She’d say, ‘Your daughters are the most important, most joyful thing you’ve done in your life, Bek, but when it comes to changing diapers and mopping up puke, everyone has their limits.’ But something about that night, the anonymity of drunken sex, just made Rebekah flush with shame.
‘Are you all right, hon?’
She looked up. ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’
‘You sure?’
Noe was eyeing her closely.
‘Yeah, absolutely,’ Rebekah said, and got up to check on the chops. When she’d finished, she glanced at Noe again. She was still looking at her as if she’d sensed something was up. Rebekah shrugged. ‘I guess I’ve been thinking a lot about Dad lately. I mean, it’ll be two years soon.’ She paused, barely able to meet Noe’s gaze, because it had been a lie, and a heartless one: she missed her dad so much, but she hadn’t been thinking about the anniversary of his death. ‘I can’t believe it’s gone so quickly.’
‘I know, hon,’ Noella said. ‘Anniversaries can be hard. People think the worst bit is when someone dies – but it’s not. I remember, after my mom passed, I cried my eyes out every time her birthday came round. I cried on Thanksgiving most years too, just cos I missed her mashed potatoes.’
Rebekah smiled, and then her gaze went to the doorway: Kyra had wandered in, her pink giraffe in her hands.
‘Ky, you’re supposed to be asleep.’
‘I’m not tired, Mommy.’
‘Come on, it’s bedtime.’
But Kyra went to Noe and slid her arms around her, hanging on for dear life, because even at two and a half, she knew how to play the delay game. ‘Hello, Aunty Noe,’ she said innocently, and Rebekah and Noella stifled grins.
‘Hey, honey.’
She squeezed Noe and Noe squeezed back.
‘Your mommy’s right, Ky. You don’t want to be tired in the morning, do you?’ Kyra buried her head even further into Noe’s belly.
‘Come on, missy, it’s bed,’ Rebekah said, and held out a hand.
Reluctantly, Kyra took it.
She left Noe to watch the chops and carried Kyra upstairs. A night light was scattering shadow animals across the ceiling. In the crib on the other side of the room, Chloe was sound asleep. Rebekah tucked Kyra in and, when she asked Rebekah to stay, she lay next to her daughter and began stroking her hair. It didn’t take long for Kyra to go quiet, her breathing changing, but Rebekah stayed there for a while, enjoying
being so close to her girls. She heard Noe in the kitchen, finishing off a dinner she was supposed to have been a guest at, but Rebekah knew she wouldn’t mind.
Eventually, Rebekah slid off the mattress, kissed Kyra, pulled the door to and padded downstairs. As she did, she stopped at a photograph, mounted on the wall halfway down. It was of her, Johnny, Mike and their father, taken at the diner on Macdonald Avenue where they all used to meet, two weeks before Mike died. Looking at their faces, she felt another stab of guilt about the lie she’d told Noella earlier. When was the last time she actually had spent a moment remembering her dad? Maybe a week ago. Maybe two. But when was the last time she’d thought about Mike? A month ago? Two? Longer than that?
I need to forget about strangers, she thought, her gaze moving from her dad to Mike, and finally coming to rest on Johnny. It’s time to concentrate on the ones I love.
24
The instant the branch cracked, the man turned.
His eyes pinged to a spot about three feet from where she was.
Shit. Oh, shit.
Instinctively she went for cover, to the tree she’d been using before, her back to it, her hands flat to the trunk, her heart in her throat.
Suddenly her lungs were like lead.
She could hardly breathe.
She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to hear him, but he was on the trail, not in the undergrowth like her, and the trail was mostly grass and hard mud.
He wouldn’t make any sound.
Run.
You need to run.
She looked up the slope, in the direction she’d descended. Out that way was the beach. From there, she had a quarter-mile sprint back to the car. Could she make it without being caught? What would happen even if she did? They’d know she was alive. They’d know she was –
Crack.
Her body locked.
The noise had come from the other side of the tree, from the bottom of the gully. It was him. He was looking up in her direction.
Barely ten feet from her.
‘What is it?’
He was so close, Rebekah could hear the caller again.
‘Have you found something?’
Torchlight washed across the ground immediately to Rebekah’s right. She didn’t move. She watched out of the corner of her eye as the light began to sweep from her right, across the back of the tree she was hiding behind, to her left. As it did, she saw that a tree on that side of her had split, and part of it had toppled. The man’s headtorch lingered on it, as if he was trying to figure out whether the tree had made the noise – or something else.
‘Are you there?’
‘Yeah,’ Green Eyes said softly.
‘What’s going on?’
His silence felt like it went on for hours, pictures forming in Rebekah’s head again: him creeping up the slope, her not even being aware of him, a hand coming out of the darkness and grabbing her by the throat.
‘Nothing.’
His voice was still the same distance away.
She let out another breath.
‘We’re not coming back here in the daytime.’
‘Why not?’
‘Didn’t you listen to anything I said on the way down here? This whole area is patrolled by feds. It’s a major coke route.’
‘So?’
‘So if they catch us here, it means questions.’
‘We can just lie.’
‘No, we can’t just lie. We don’t even have a permit to dock here – day or night. At least at night we got the dark. In the day, we got nothing. We can’t lie our way out of being spotted and not having a permit. And, anyway, lies mean more questions. More questions mean more cops. I already got rid of one problem for that asshole. I don’t need this thing escalating into another. Shit, why didn’t you just bury her like I told you to?’
‘It was complicated. Things went wrong. I ran out of time.’ The man sounded feeble, even to Rebekah’s ears, and must have realized it because then he came back stronger: ‘You don’t know. You weren’t there.’
‘No, I know I wasn’t. That’s the problem.’
‘Her and her brother …’
Rebekah stiffened at the mention of Johnny, anger swamping her fear. What did you do to my brother?
Did you kill him?
‘Things just went wrong,’ the man said finally. ‘That’s all.’
‘No shit.’
‘I’ll make this right,’ he said, and hung up.
Rebekah stayed exactly where she was, looking up the slope. But then she heard him, further out along the trail, clearing his throat as he walked. Eventually, she found the courage to lean out and take a look: he was so far away from her now that the darkness was swallowing him whole.
She replayed what she’d just heard.
Why didn’t you just bury her like I told you to?
Maybe he would have done if she hadn’t been at the bottom of a gully, even steeper and more inaccessible than this one. Maybe he would have done if he hadn’t been working against the clock and had Johnny to deal with.
She tried not to linger on the idea of her brother being dead. The truth had fluttered in and out of her thinking ever since she’d been left behind and had started to coalesce after she’d spent so much time searching, fruitlessly, in the forest for him. But, perhaps, there was still hope. Did the fact that she couldn’t find him mean he might still be alive? Could he, too, have escaped after they’d become separated? She’d found no body and no grave among the trees, and the man had said on the phone that things had gone wrong. Maybe Johnny really did make it out.
Reality dragged her back. If he was still alive, why couldn’t she find him? The forest was dense, and maybe a couple of miles across at its widest point, but the rest of the island was a narrow, empty husk: fifteen square miles of broken buildings. There were no hiding places. And if he’d made it off, if that was why she couldn’t find him here, why hadn’t he raised the alarm?
She shut her eyes.
Forget it and concentrate.
She tried to imagine who the second man – the caller – was. He’d said cops patrolled this area, and maybe they did, but until tonight Rebekah hadn’t seen or heard a boat in a week, so if there were patrols out on the water, they were far away. That scared her, too, because it really did mean a rescue wasn’t coming. Although there was one tiny crumb of comfort: the men were worried about being spotted on the island, even in the middle of the night. And if they were worried, it meant they wouldn’t want to stay here long.
Lies mean more questions, the caller had said. More questions mean more cops. I already got rid of one problem for that asshole. I don’t need this thing escalating into another.
She looked down into the gully again. What was the problem they’d got rid of? And who was the ‘asshole’?
Rebekah still had no idea why someone wanted her dead, but she understood why they would have chosen this place. The man with the green eyes had called the forest a maze, and he was right: it was compact, crowded, easy to get lost in and incredibly hard to navigate once you were off the trails. He’d been right about something else too: if she’d been killed, if her body really was out here, by the time anyone found it – if they ever found it – she’d probably be bones. It would be a minimum of five months before any corpse was found, most likely more when you factored in how few people were on the island, even in season. That meant insects and animals would have finished their desecration long before anyone discovered her.
Except none of that mattered because she wasn’t dead.
They just thought she was.
And, tonight, that gave her an advantage.
Before
The morning after she’d had Noella over for dinner, Johnny came to the house early, unexpectedly, cheeks flushed, holding a small parcel. Rebekah let him in, and whatever stress her brother had been feeling, he forgot about the second he saw Kyra. She ran towards him, arms out, and he scooped her up and whirled her around, singing ‘American Pie’,
as he always did when they met, except he altered the lyrics from Bye Bye to Ky Ky. He hoisted her into the crook of his arm, Kyra playing with his red hair, and turned his attention to Chloe. He had a different song for her, this one made up because he always said he couldn’t think of a famous song with lyrics that rhymed with Chloe. Chloe wasn’t bothered, though: as he told her she was doughy, and showy, and loved to play in the snowy, she giggled. Rebekah set Kyra up with a xylophone in the living room, put Chloe in her bouncer, then took Johnny into the kitchen.
‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ he said, and handed her the parcel.
Rebekah looked at it. ‘Is it my birthday?’
‘I just saw it and thought of you.’
She untied the ribbon and lifted the top off the box. Inside was a tiny snowglobe: a runner was under the glass, partway across a miniature park.
‘What’s this?’ she said, lifting it out.
‘You used to have that snowglobe when we were kids, back in England, but it smashed. I think Mike knocked it off your desk when he was messing around. Anyway, there’s a German woman who lives in my building who makes them – and I saw this and thought of you. That’s supposed to be Central Park, by the way.’ Johnny shrugged, as if the gesture were nothing, but Rebekah was already blinking back tears. She’d never forgotten the snowglobe she’d had as a kid. It had a woman with red hair in it, Big Ben behind her. Sometimes she’d asked God to make her small enough to go inside the globe, as the snow fell, to ask the red-headed woman why she’d left.
‘It’s beautiful, Johnny.’
‘I know it’s cheesy.’
Rebekah put the snowglobe down and threw her arms around her brother. ‘It’s amazing,’ she said, and heard the surprise in her voice, but she shouldn’t have been surprised at this small act of kindness. This was what Johnny was like. This was what he’d always been like.
‘My car wouldn’t start this morning,’ he said, after they were done. His cheeks were no longer flushed, and seeing the girls – and Rebekah’s reaction to the snowglobe – seemed to have curbed any frustration that might have been lingering. That was another thing she’d always loved about her brother: he rarely held on to things. Maybe it was the writer in him, the dreamer, the romantic, always convinced that whatever came next would be better.