by Tim Weaver
‘Did you speak to Louise again that night?’
‘No.’
‘Just a text?’
‘Yes,’ Murphy said. ‘After the doctor said Noe was going to be okay, I went outside and sent Louise a message to tell her I was sorry for running out on her like that. When I didn’t hear back from her …’ He faded out, his face carrying the rest of that sentence: I guess we know why. ‘I tried texting her again the next day, and again didn’t hear back, then called her and left a voicemail. When I still didn’t hear from her, I just … I figured …’ A shrug of the shoulders.
‘You figured she didn’t want to see you again?’
‘Yes,’ Murphy responded, his eyes back on his lap, the camera recording the top of his head. He laced his fingers together. ‘I just assumed that, when I dropped her at the hotel and left her like I did, I’d really upset her.’
‘Okay,’ Travis said, and paused, watching Murphy. Murphy didn’t move, just stared into space. It was a look Travis had seen a million times in interview rooms: he was remembering something. Travis just had to work out whether it was something he’d already admitted to – or something he’d held back. ‘You got anything else you want to tell me about, Johnny?’
Murphy looked up, his expression harder to pick now, and shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said softly.
But was there something?
‘You sure?’
‘Yes,’ Murphy said.
Travis eyed him for a moment longer, then broke into a smile. ‘Well, okay,’ he said, ‘then I think we’re done here.’ But he didn’t get up from his seat, just remained still for a moment, pretending to make some notes. It was an old-school tactic: prolonging the silence, making it uncomfortable so a suspect would start speaking just to fill the quiet, and – flustered, made to feel awkward – say something they hadn’t planned to. Travis was absolutely convinced that Murphy – introverted and modest as he appeared to be – would be someone who hated the unease of a situation like that.
But he was wrong.
Murphy just sat there quietly, saying nothing and staring at Travis, until eventually Travis had no choice but to call time on the interview.
Before
‘What the hell’s going on?’ Rebekah said, her voice betraying her.
But the man pretending to be Karl Stelzik didn’t respond: he stepped off the platform of mud and roots, and onto the slope of the gully, never taking his eyes off Rebekah. It was the first time she’d appreciated how green they were, and how incongruous they seemed in his face: like bright gems buried deep in the dirt.
He kept coming, step by careful step, until he reached the trail. As soon as he did, his gaze switched to the dead body Rebekah had discovered in the tree roots.
Skin crawling, heart racing, she looked at the man’s wrist, at the blood that had soaked through from the bite marks, and put it together: Roxie had attacked the fake Stelzik at the dig site because he’d killed the real one – and the real one was her owner. The only thing that didn’t make sense was why, when Rebekah and Johnny had first arrived, they’d found the man out cold, because it hadn’t been an act.
She didn’t need to be a doctor to know that.
‘Look, I’m not sure what you think we’ve done,’ Johnny started saying, sidestepping closer to Rebekah instinctively, ‘but we’re just tourists. We don’t know anything about …’ He stopped, glancing at Karl Stelzik’s dead body, and Rebekah thought she could see the rest of the sentence, unspoken, in his face: about this, about violence, about murder. This is so far from our world, it’s a different universe. Until now, Johnny had been surprisingly still, outwardly calm, but now he began blinking nervously.
‘This is a mistake,’ Rebekah said to the man, a hand up.
‘You’re damn right it’s a mistake,’ he replied.
He was from New York. He’d suppressed his accent when they’d first met: Rebekah had even thought she’d heard a hint of eastern European in line with Stelzik’s name. But if she had, it had been a performance, part of the lie.
The man came a step closer.
They were maybe ten feet apart now. Rebekah had never been so close to a gun before. Her brothers had occasionally gone to ranges growing up, learning how to use weaponry. Their dad had thought it was a useful thing to know in America, and holstering a gun was as natural a part of his daily routine as buttoning up the blue uniform and pinning the badge to his chest.
But Rebekah had been in England until she was eighteen, a country where people were shot and killed sixty times a year, not sixty times a day, and she’d had no interest in learning once she arrived in New York. Guns scared her. They scared her even more now than when she was younger because she’d seen the effects of them in the OR: the way they shattered bone and punctured tissue, the way they lacerated, ruptured, destroyed.
‘We won’t say anything to anyone.’ The frenzy in Johnny’s voice returned her to the forest. ‘Whatever it is you think we’ve done here, we haven’t. I swear. So if you just let us go, we’ll walk away from this –’ he glanced briefly at Stelzik, at the grotesque angles of his body ‘– and we won’t say anything.’
The man just looked at them.
‘Please,’ Johnny muttered. ‘This is crazy.’
‘You must have made a mistake,’ Rebekah said, trying to back Johnny up, her words coming out as quickly as his. ‘You must have us mixed up with someone else. We’re nobodies. We don’t have any idea what’s going on.’
This time, the man gave a hint of a smile, as if entertained by what he was seeing. ‘You look – what’s the word? Befuddled.’ He said befuddled in an English accent, in an obvious approximation of how Rebekah spoke.
‘This is insane,’ she replied. ‘I don’t even know you.’
‘You don’t need to know me, sweetheart.’
The man looked between them both.
‘I messed up.’ He gestured with the gun in the vague direction of the dig site. ‘I’ve been trying to find that friggin’ dog since I offed Stelzik and, this morning, I see it in the trees, and I go after it, and I slip like some old man.’
He looked at them both again, a Can you believe that? expression on his face, as if he was talking about some minor mishap. The fear ripped through Rebekah, her entire body trembling. He didn’t care what he was saying to them, didn’t care what he admitted to, and the casual way in which he talked about killing, about hunting, told her why: they were going to die out here.
‘I hit my head on this old piece of rock Stelzik was digging up, and – boom – blackout.’ He rubbed his skull, fingers at the point of impact. ‘Anyway, it could have been a problem, because it could have meant I didn’t get to do what I came all the way out to this dumb fucking rock to do. I mean, look at this shithole.’ He waved the gun at the trees. ‘What sort of backward-ass place doesn’t even have the internet or working phone lines? I’m surprised they’ve got a cell tower. Hell, I’m surprised they’ve even got running water. But whatever. When I woke up, and there you both were, you know what I felt?’ He shook his head. ‘Just relief. Pure relief. You never realized I was after you because you’d come to me. I didn’t have to go chasing round trying to find you. I didn’t have to spend one second longer in this cesspit than I needed to.’
Rebekah dragged her eyes back to the body of Stelzik.
‘I don’t understand.’ Her voice was breaking up, the words getting lost in her throat. ‘What have we done? What did Stelzik do?’
‘Stelzik? He’s just a loose end.’
His expression changed instantly. It was like a light going out. Rebekah noticed again how green the man’s eyes were, but the rest of his face was as opaque as night. Rebekah looked at Johnny, saw that he was on the verge of tears, and immediately started to sob too. ‘Please,’ she begged, ‘I don’t know what you thin–’
‘Shut up,’ the man hissed. He jabbed the gun towards the tree roots. ‘Climb up there, both of you. Let’s get this over with.’
38
Over the next few days, Rebekah dressed and treated Roxie’s injury, washed her, made her a bed, walked her, and took her out for drives in the Jeep. She carefully rationed what food was left, dividing it into two piles, but by the fourth day after they’d found each other – Rebekah’s Day 45 – they were down to just two cans of soup. Rebekah knew she had to find a way to get into the hostel that Stelzik had stayed in, otherwise they would both starve – but as they were out walking a trail, inaccessible by car, her plans changed.
She suddenly lost Roxie.
She disappeared so quickly into the bush that she was gone before Rebekah had even realized. ‘What are you doing?’ she shouted after the dog.
But no sound came back, no barking.
Rebekah sprinted after Roxie but, before long, she’d wandered onto another trail, snaking into a clearing. The wind moved, the trees making a gentle whisper, and when it died away again, she heard something.
A series of muted slaps.
It was early morning and the light was subdued, so she returned to the Jeep, grabbed a flashlight and headed back the way she’d seen Roxie go. She soon arrived in the clearing again: the grass had been compressed by the cold, creating a kind of corkscrew pattern, and off to her right an outcrop of rock sat against the trees, like a series of granite towers. In its middle was a cave with a thin, vertical mouth.
Rebekah shone the flashlight in the direction of the entrance and moved in closer, trying to angle it so she could see inside.
‘Roxie?’ she said, uncertainly.
The light quivered against the rock, expanding the closer she got, but the interior remained dark.
‘Hello?’ she said, her voice sounding loud in her ears. ‘Rox? Are you in there?’
Nothing.
‘Rox? Is that y–’
It swooped out of the dark, striking her in the chest like a bunched fist. Stumbling back, losing her footing, Rebekah hit the ground hard, the frozen forest grass like concrete against the base of her spine. Before she had a chance to understand what had happened, something else swept out of the cave, then more, one after the next, shadows against the mellow light.
Bats.
They kept coming, individually at first, and then in groups. They circled the clearing, the noise of the island replaced by the whumph of wings – and then, like the swirl of a cape, they all plunged back into the cave again.
Rebekah stared into its mouth.
‘Rox?’ she said again. ‘Roxie?’
A thought hit her, cold as a hand on her throat: what if Roxie had gone in there, disturbed the bats and one had bitten her? Instinctively, Rebekah started shaking her head, hating the idea of it.
Not rabies.
Please not rabies.
But then, from her left, Roxie reappeared.
She wandered into the clearing, looking between Rebekah and the cave, as if she didn’t know what all the fuss was about, or why Rebekah was on her backside in the middle of a patch of frozen grass. Rebekah clambered to her feet as Roxie pushed her head against her leg, and started laughing when she saw what the dog had returned with. ‘You’re a genius, girl, you know that?’
Roxie had a dead rabbit in her mouth.
Rebekah had been so preoccupied with what Roxie had found – a fresh source of food – that she hadn’t noticed how the sky was changing. By the time they reached the Cherokee, the heavens had opened.
She sat in the car, wipers going, and considered going on to the hostel – that had been the original plan after the walk – but decided against it. When the storms came to the island, they came hard: this one felt like it was going to be more rain than wind, but if the wind got up, that was when things were dangerous. She’d lost count of the times – in the six weeks she’d been on Crow Island – when huge objects had been tossed around, like toys. One night, as she’d watched a storm unfold from the window of the store, a wooden picnic table had been lifted off a bank and launched at one of the buildings.
Once Roxie was beside her, Rebekah pulled out onto the Loop and headed in the direction of Helena instead.
‘I wouldn’t normally condone killing a rabbit, Rox,’ Rebekah said, rain pummelling the windshield, ‘but desperate times call for desperate measures.’ She rubbed Roxie’s belly but kept her eyes on the road: every second they were out, it got a little worse. Eventually, the wipers couldn’t go fast enough.
Unable to see properly, Rebekah slowed right down and glanced out at the ocean, hoping to find some relief out there, some light in the sky. But the Atlantic was a swirling wall of mist, except for one black dot, like a pinprick in the fog.
She slowed some more, looking closer at the dot.
It was getting bigger.
39
It was raining so hard that, for a second, she lost sight of the dot. But then it broke from a thick curtain of rain, bigger than before.
It’s a helicopter.
She shoved open the door of the Cherokee, telling Roxie to stay put. The dog seemed confused, moved from the passenger seat to the driver’s side, but did as she was asked. Rebekah slammed the door, making sure Roxie couldn’t run off, then raced around to the trunk. Inside were the old flares she’d found in the house on the north coast. She’d never fired one, but there was no time for a dry run.
Grabbing one, she raced further along the Loop, towards a more open section of the highway. The whole time the rain was relentless, pounding off the asphalt, the storm drains choking on dead leaves. As she got into position, already drenched, she focused on the flare she was holding: both ends were capped, one white, one red, but only the red one came loose. She wriggled it free and tried to work out the rest: an igniter was built into the flare, an abrasive patch that felt like sandpaper, and a similar one was embedded in the outside of the cap.
The helicopter was still way out over the sea – forty miles, maybe more – and she didn’t want to fire the flare too soon, so she began to wave her hands above her head, jumping up and down on the spot.
‘Hey!’ she screamed into the rain, even though she knew her voice would never be heard. ‘Hey! Look over here!’
The chopper kept coming.
She waited.
Waited.
But then, suddenly, it began to bank.
‘No!’ she shouted. ‘No, wait!’
It was still at least thirty miles from the shoreline but now she couldn’t afford to hold on: she began to jab the red cap hard against the igniter button.
It wouldn’t light.
‘Shit.’
She tried again. Still nothing.
‘Come on, come on.’
Again, again, again.
‘Come on!’
Finally, with a fizz, the flare bloomed.
She shot her arms up, above her head, and moved them back and forth, the red tail of the flare forming momentary lines in the air. For a second, she lost the chopper – but then she found it against the granite sky.
As she did, she felt herself wither.
It had already turned so far around that she could no longer see the front, even its windows. Its entire shell was just a narrow blur against the whirl of the storm.
‘Hey!’ she shouted, the flare still fizzing. ‘Wait! Wait!’ She screamed the words so hard she almost choked, waving the flare more furiously than ever, her shoulders scorched with the effort.
But the helicopter was just a dot again.
‘Please come back,’ she muttered, finally dropping her arms, the flare slipping from her fingers to the ground. ‘I’m still alive.’
Before
‘Move.’ The man with the green eyes gestured with the gun. ‘Move,’ he repeated, when Rebekah and Johnny didn’t respond – and, slowly, with their feet barely able to cross the ten feet between where they were and the place in which the man was going to kill them, they started to inch forward. Johnny went first, still in front of Rebekah, still trying to protect her.
‘This is a mistake,’ Rebekah said again. �
�We don’t even know you.’
‘Shut up and get over there,’ the man said, using the gun as a pointer. They’d reached the base of the gully, where the slope slanted upward. From where they were, Stelzik’s body was almost level with Rebekah’s eyeline.
‘Is this about money?’ Johnny asked, trying to make his voice steady. ‘Because if it’s about money, we can organize something. When we get back–’
‘She ain’t going back, John.’
The entire forest seemed to lurch, but when Rebekah looked at Johnny, he was frowning, his expression odd. It was like he was confused.
‘Johnny? What’s going on?’
‘I don’t know, Bek,’ he said quietly.
Rebekah looked between her brother and the man with the gun. Had Johnny just lied to her? ‘What’s going on?’ she repeated. ‘Johnny, what’s –’
‘I don’t know what’s going on!’ he said, with a surge of frustration.
Rebekah tried to reach for her brother’s hand, but she couldn’t grab his fingers. He’d taken a step away from her now and was looking at the man again.
‘Please,’ he was saying, ‘please. Let my sister go. She’s a mom. She has two little girls. This isn’t right.’
‘Shut up,’ the man said again, checking his gun.
‘Please,’ Rebekah begged.
‘Don’t plead, honey. It ain’t becoming.’
‘But why? Who are we to you?’
And then his eyes snapped back to her. ‘You’re no one to me. That’s the whole point. Now climb up to those roots there and let’s get it over with.’
They dragged their legs up, their bones heavy. Both of them were crying now. It hurt Rebekah more than anything she could ever remember to see her brother so vulnerable. Halfway up the side of the gully, she reached out to him for a second time and this time she was able to grasp his hand.