by Tim Weaver
He shrugged.
‘Maybe Louise wants to get back in touch with you.’
He still didn’t look at her.
‘I doubt it,’ he said quietly.
It only occurred to Rebekah much later on that, in the rush of the morning, she’d never told Noella exactly where she and Johnny were heading. On the phone, when she’d arranged it with Noe, Rebekah had told her that Johnny and she were going out for the day, then had quickly moved on to what time she’d drop the girls off, because that had seemed more important. They hadn’t had time to get into anything else on the call because Noe had had to hurry out to a work function. Rebekah hadn’t been in touch with Gareth about the trip either, other than to explain that she and Johnny were going out for the day and that Noe would drop the kids off in the evening. And that morning with Noella, at four thirty, it had been so fatiguing and the girls so upset that, again, she’d never had the chance to talk about their plans.
‘We’re going out to Long Island first,’ Rebekah had told Noe, as she’d removed the girls from their car seats. Chloe had been bawling her eyes out and Kyra kept asking the same question over and over again: Where are you going, Mommy? Where are you going, Mommy? Where are you going– ‘I’m going out with Uncle Johnny, Ky. Please.’
She handed Chloe to Noella, then hurried around to the other side of the car, checking her cell for the time, flustered, worried about missing the ferry.
‘Once we get to Long Island,’ she said, as she popped Kyra’s seatbelt, ‘we’re going to get –’
‘Bek.’
‘We’re going to get the –’
‘Bek,’ Noe said, reaching across the back seat, putting her hand on Rebekah’s arm. ‘Calm down. Just call me later, okay?’
Rebekah had nodded then, smiled at her friend, and looked at Kyra, her daughter’s eyes welling with tears. ‘I’m sorry, my angel,’ she said to her daughter, then leaned in and kissed her. ‘Mummy loves you so much.’
In the minutes after that, as she got back behind the wheel of the Jeep, she waved to the girls from the other side of the windshield.
They were both crying again.
‘I’ll try to call you from Montauk,’ Rebekah said, through her open window, but all Noella did was wave at her.
Over the engine noise, she hadn’t heard her.
And then, as she reversed out of the driveway, as she got her last glimpse of the girls, Rebekah remembered the worst bit: Kyra.
It wasn’t her tears.
It was the way she reached out – as if Rebekah were about to topple into some deep, dark hole.
27
Rebekah woke suddenly, the image of Kyra – arms out to her on the morning she’d left Noella’s house – burned onto the back of her eyes.
She rolled onto her side. Everything hurt, but not from working so hard: from doing so little. Her weeks of inactivity were petrifying her, seizing her limbs. She flipped back the blankets and watched the leak in the ceiling for a while, dripping into a bucket she’d set under it.
The image of Kyra flashed in her head again.
Would that be the last time she saw her daughter? The vague hint of her face on the other side of a car window? Why the hell hadn’t she told Noella exactly where they were going? Why hadn’t Noe listened when Rebekah said they were going to Montauk? Maybe because she did listen, but pretended not to hear. Maybe because she’s not the woman you think.
No. Rebekah squeezed her eyes shut. No.
She forced through an image of the Noella that, in her heart, she knew was real. Her best friend. Her sister. After that, she thought about what Noe definitely did hear that morning, and about what she and Gareth would actually be able to tell the police. The only thing Rebekah was certain that Noella had heard was ‘Long Island’ – so that was what she would tell the cops, and that was where the cops would start.
Rebekah’s heart sank.
Long Island was a search area of more than fourteen hundred square miles. That made it three times bigger than New York City. Not only that, but the disappearances would have been reported to the NYPD but worked by police departments in Nassau and Suffolk counties, which relied on the sort of co-operation Rebekah had seldom seen as a doctor. She’d rarely heard about it from her father either, and as she thought of him, his voice formed like an echo: Cops are the most selfless and selfish people I know. The case you’re working, it’s everything to you. Anyone else’s, it’s irrelevant. And even if there was some level of co-operation between cops, what were they going to do? They could try following street cameras. Maybe, in Johnny’s house, they might find research for the book he was planning, or the name of the curator from the Museum of Natural History he was due to meet. Maybe, after that, they might realize that Long Island wasn’t the ultimate stop-off for them.
But it felt like a long shot.
If the police knew where Rebekah and Johnny had ended up, why hadn’t they come yet? And, anyway, was a beat cop really going to piece together the journey of a car from Brooklyn using traffic cameras? Were they going to keep following it along 128 uninterrupted miles of freeway? Was it more likely they would gain access to Johnny’s house and turn the place upside down – or that the missing persons report would get written and filed, then put in a cabinet along with thousands of others? In the world of missing people – from what Rebekah had seen as a doctor – two adults, with no red flags in terms of their mental health or criminal record, would be left to drift if there were no fast leads.
It was just the cellphones that bothered her.
Johnny and Rebekah had had phones on that first day, and before they were taken, they’d made calls on them, or had tried to. Those calls would have pinged the tower on the island. So, had the cops not checked the cellphone records? Surely even beat cops would have done that much. The second they did, they’d have seen the cellphone activity and they’d have had a last location for Rebekah and Johnny.
Yet they still hadn’t come.
Her thoughts were shattered by the squawk of a fish crow. She watched it pass the windows – a black blur – her heart thumping in her chest. It had been two and a half weeks since Hain and Lima had come to the island, and she was still jumpy. But it couldn’t go on.
Something had to change.
She had to try to move forward.
She needed to wash her clothes, and it would be too cumbersome and awkward in the bucket that was catching the leak. She needed to go down to the sea and get them clean. She needed more food as well. She was down to five days’ worth of cans – a week, if she was conservative – and she’d cleaned out the first hostel. She could try to find a fishing rod, but that really was a last resort. It could take her days – weeks – before she was proficient enough to catch the amount of fish she’d need to feed herself, even longer before she got to know the best spots for bagging the most fish. Before it came to that, she was going to try to raid the second hostel for more cans, and cover the rest of the island too: she still hadn’t searched whole swathes of the north coast, the west coast – where the lighthouse was – and big areas of the centre. Deep down, she didn’t expect to find much in any of them: even on the old map, created at a time when the island was still doing well, there appeared relatively few places of interest in those parts. But she had to try.
Hiding was no longer an option.
She had to fight.
28
She scaled the gates that segregated the harbour area from Main Street. They were chained and padlocked from the harbour side so, even armed with the jack, there was no way she could break them open without climbing the fence.
It was relatively straightforward to get over and onto the other side, the chain links in the gates providing ideal footholds. Once she had her feet back on solid ground, she worked at the padlock with the jack. It was the third time she’d tried to break one like this, and each time she was getting a little more efficient. Within a couple of minutes, it pinged open.
Aside from a small, em
pty parking lot and the pockmarked concrete of the quayside, there was nothing except the wooden harbourmaster’s shack. She wanted to take a look, but first she wandered down to the slipway, to the water sloshing against its slant, and started to remove her dirty clothes.
It was absolutely bitter, but she took everything off.
When she got down to her underwear, she paused automatically, hands ready to unclip her bra, and turned back in the direction she’d come. It felt so bizarre stripping down like this, in a place that would have been so public in the summer. As her eyes went to the boarded-up buildings on Main Street, the wind stirred the trees. It swivelled an old weathervane on one of the roofs. Nothing else moved.
No one’s watching.
She thought of Hain and Lima, then looked across the water to the smudged line of the mainland on the horizon. The wind came again, even colder than before, and she started to shiver. Slipping off her underwear, she climbed into the clothes she’d found at the gas station. They were old, musty, and smelt of mildew. The wool of the sweater was abrasive against her breasts, even with a T-shirt on, but she put up with it, climbing into the pair of oil-stained pants.
She slipped her sneakers back on, without her socks, washing some of the mud off the sides and toes, and then she went through each piece of clothing, dipping it into the water, soaking it, scrubbing it with half a bar of soap she’d found in the hostel, then squeezing it out. By the time she’d finished, her hands were blocks of ice. Scooping up her wet clothes, she made a beeline for the store, before remembering the harbourmaster’s shack.
It had been locked with a key, not a padlock.
That made access trickier.
If it was even worth trying to access it. There were metal signs fixed to the exterior – IN CASE OF EMERGENCY CALL 911 and FIRST AID – which gave her a temporary burst of hope, but when she got up onto a cinder block beneath the only window, she couldn’t see much worth making the effort for.
It was cramped inside, shelves everywhere, jars full of nails and screws, tools, boat parts. She could see a first-aid kit fixed to the wall but otherwise there was nothing. Before Hain and Lima, before she found out their plans to come back, she’d have prayed for a radio that she could understand how to use, unlike the one she’d found at the gas station. But now she felt weirdly conflicted: what if she did find one, and she successfully sent out an SOS message, and the two of them were listening in? She knew it wasn’t feasible for someone to man a radio channel every hour of every day for the next four months, but that didn’t stop panic gripping her. Because it wasn’t irrational to believe that they might be listening to the audio traffic for this part of the coast. It wasn’t irrational to believe that, at some point, they might hear her if she managed to establish contact with someone.
She rocked from one foot to the other, looking again for evidence of something to communicate with. In her turmoil at using a radio, she’d thought about alternative ways to make contact with the outside world, like gathering wood, heading up to Nuyáhshá, and starting a fire there. If she lit it after sunset, and kept it going all night, there had to be a pretty good chance that someone somewhere on the mainland would spot it.
But what if Hain and Lima had people in Montauk?
What if that was where the islanders retreated to in the winter, dotted along the coastline in their houses, always within sight of this place?
She thought it highly unlikely that Hain and Lima would have told anyone exactly what they’d done out here – they’d be admitting to murder – but it wasn’t implausible that they might have slipped someone some cash and asked to be kept informed of boats heading in the direction of Crow Island, or people turning up and showing an interest in it. The two men would be thinking about cops, maybe coastguards, but a fire would probably be an even bigger question mark. Why would a fire suddenly start on the island’s highest point in winter?
Screw it, just radio again, because you’re running out of options unless you want to be here until April. But then she felt that same sense of hesitation, the fear so paralysing it was like she was drowning in it. She wanted to live. She wanted to get back to her girls and, at the moment, she had one big advantage: Hain and Lima thought she was dead.
Radios and fires were out.
She had to find another way off.
Before
The island edged closer. Rebekah dug into her pocket and got out her cellphone. No bars. Johnny had assured her that she’d be able to pick up a signal once they’d docked. She’d call Noella then to see how the girls were because she hadn’t had a chance at Montauk harbour: they’d been late getting to the ferry, thanks to traffic on the Expressway, and the boat had left about a minute after they’d boarded – and about a minute after that, her signal had vanished.
For a while, it had felt liberating to be doing something other than changing nappies and making meals. But, soon, she was feeling confused, worried about being so far away from them, and as she glimpsed a peeling sign reading HELENA on the jetty up ahead, she started to wonder if she’d done the right thing in offering to drive Johnny all the way out here. What if the girls were still crying and Noella couldn’t settle them?
But a moment later her signal returned and the handset buzzed in her palm. It was a text from Noe. There was a picture attached of her and the girls at Coney Island, the Wonder Wheel visible over their shoulders.
Cold at the beach! But not too cold for early morning ice creams. Yummy! Everything good. Have a nice day and say hello to J. AND RELAX. Noe x
Through the windows, as the boat slowed, she could see a man standing on the jetty, some vehicles in a parking lot beyond, and another man moving around in Helena’s narrow main street. With one last look at the picture of Noella, Kyra and Chloe, Rebekah pocketed her phone.
‘Okay, big brother,’ she said. ‘Let’s find your curator.’
She felt better, more positive: after Johnny had done the interview, they could sit on a beach, or – if she was feeling brave – paddle in the cold ocean water; they could get ice creams from a store and breathe in the smell of the sea. They could do anything they wanted for a few hours, be spontaneous, break loose. And, in that moment, Rebekah vowed to soak up every minute of her adventure out of the city – and out of her routine – alongside the brother she loved.
Johnny told her the curator had rented a room in a hostel full of fishermen on the north side of the island but worked in the forest, where he was researching the Niantic tribes that had once called Crow Island home.
‘Do you even know what this guy looks like?’ she asked, as they headed out of Helena.
‘No, but he said to call him when we’re near.’
She nodded, gazing at the scenery through the windshield.
‘When did you last come here?’
‘Years ago,’ Johnny replied, ‘way back in my Columbus days.’
He meant Christopher Columbus: in their early twenties, Johnny, Mike and a few guys from the neighbourhood had started exploring abandoned buildings. Most of them had done it for a dare, but Johnny’s interests were more substantial: he was a fan of history, always looking for inspiration, and found a strange sense of place in the silent, empty corridors of old structures. Eventually it must have led him to the buildings left behind after Gloria had torn through.
‘It could be really nice here,’ Rebekah said.
Johnny didn’t reply.
‘I mean, I bet it was nice before the hurricane.’
Johnny was going over his notes – questions he’d prepared for the curator, things he needed to tick off, a succinct synopsis of what his book was about. Rebekah didn’t take offence at his lack of response. She could see he was starting to get anxious now, his expression marked with worry. He looked old for a moment, his red hair flecked with grey, the lines around his eyes dense, as if a sculptor had carved them with a hammer and chisel.
‘He’s not going to think you’re a fraud,’ she said.
Johnny looked up. ‘What
?’
‘I know that’s what you’re thinking. If he cared about whether you were published, he wouldn’t have agreed to meet you, would he?’ When, again, he didn’t answer, she glanced at him. ‘Would he?’
‘I just don’t want him to think he’s wasted his time.’
Rebekah frowned. ‘Do you think he’s letting you drive all the way out here so he can tell you you’ll never be as good as Ken Follett?’
Johnny smiled. ‘I just want this to work.’
‘It will.’
The curator’s name was Karl Stelzik. Johnny tried calling him as they followed the main route around the island, a circular road called the Loop, but the calls kept going to voicemail. He left one message, then another, but the further away from Helena they got, the worse the cell service became.
Ten minutes later, they found the hostel Stelzik was staying in, a boxy utilitarian building covered with a gossamer sheet of sea salt.
There were no lights on inside.
‘I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come,’ Johnny muttered, as he left the car and trudged down to the front door. He tried pulling it open. When it didn’t move, he buzzed the intercom and waited for a response.
Rebekah switched on the radio while she waited. She twisted the dial, cycling through the stations, but there was no reception. Switching it off again, she returned to the picture of Noella, Kyra and Chloe at Coney Island, to three smiles, to the ice cream on Kyra’s cheeks.
Unexpectedly, she felt another flutter of panic. Her eyes moved over Kyra’s face, the glimpses of Gareth in it, the curls in her hair, and then to Chloe, her features scrunched up as she lay in the stroller, swamped in a snowsuit.
Before she knew it, she was outside the Jeep, the cellphone raised in her hands, doing circles of the car, trying to find a better signal. The instant one flickered into existence, she dialled Noella’s number.