by Tim Weaver
‘Frank?’
‘Sorry. It’s nothing. Simply that this friend of mine, she’d trusted me with something unrelated to this, vouched for me in front of the brass back in New York, done a favour for me in getting hold of that video from Montauk, so I didn’t want to drag her into this.’ He stopped again, something remaining in his expression that Rebekah couldn’t interpret. Was it to do with his friend at the NYPD? ‘So, I’ve been sitting on my hands, waiting for this ferry, hoping for answers, for eight days. And do you know the first thing I saw when I drove out to Montauk harbour and pulled into the lot?’
Rebekah shook her head.
‘Lima. I was sitting there in that parking lot, waiting for the ferry, and I saw these guys pull up in a pickup, towing a trailer. And one of them gets out to take a leak and, when he turns around, I see his face, and it’s the same guy I saw in the security-camera video, the guy driving Stelzik’s car …’
‘So you followed them?’
‘Best I could, without being seen. If one of them made that anonymous call to me about Johnny, then I figured there was a good chance they knew what I looked like. I’d been in newspapers, all the way back to my first spell with the department, and it was likely they would have done their homework. I knew I was okay in terms of my car, because it was a rental, but I couldn’t risk them getting too close and seeing me. That was why I was last onto the ferry, and it was why I stayed in my car the whole time – I didn’t go up at all during the crossing. And then, when we got to the island, they headed east, down to the dig site there. I’d planned to go to the harbourmaster first, to see if he recognized you, but that was before Lima turned up in Montauk. I had to switch plans. So I waited for them at the top of Simmons Gully, hid out behind this old building, and when they reappeared ninety minutes later, they had your Cherokee on the trailer. I felt sick seeing it, because I knew what it meant for you, and for Johnny. There was only one reason they’d be getting rid of evidence like that. They were arguing too. I saw it, even from where I was. Of course I know now that by then they were starting to doubt you were even dead.’
That was why Lima had come to the shack.
It was why he’d shown Caleb her photograph.
‘Hain wanted to get some gas, so he dropped Lima on Main Street, then turned around and went back. That was why Lima was alone. I couldn’t keep tailing Hain – the roads were so empty and it was so easy to spot me – and there was nowhere else in Helena to just sit in the car and watch what they were doing without them seeing me. I had no idea you were in that shack, or I’d have come.’
‘I know you would,’ Rebekah said.
He shook his head, as if the decision was still raw. ‘There was no way they could leave the island until the ferry left, so I knew I had time on my side. And before I came to the island, I spoke to this colleague of Karl Stelzik’s at the Museum of Natural History, a guy called Gideon Burrows, who’d eventually reported him missing, and Burrows said Stelzik was staying in a hostel on the north coast. So I thought I’d head out there, see what I could find. To me, it was likely Stelzik was buried here, but even though I knew that, even though I’d seen your Cherokee on that trailer – a very obvious sign that you and your brother were dead too – I still had nothing on Louise.’
‘Did you find anything at the hostel?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t even get that far. I was on the Loop, north of the sawmill, when I heard this deafening crash. That was when I pulled a U-turn.’
The crash had been Hain and Lima hitting the tree.
‘Here,’ Travis said. He was holding his cell out to her, a hint of a smile on his face. He knew where her head was at: now he was trying to haul her out of the hole she was in. ‘That friend at the NYPD I was talking about, I texted her after you tried to call your girls earlier and asked her to find some numbers for me.’
He stared at the phone for a second, as if some unspoken message were passing between him and the handset, then handed it over.
Rebekah took the cell from him. Onscreen was a text from a woman Travis had logged as ‘Amy’. Her text had two cellphone numbers in it.
One for Gareth. One for Noella.
‘I bet there are some little girls who really need to hear from their mom.’
Her fingers trembling, Rebekah pressed her thumb against the number for Gareth.
As it started ringing, she checked the time: it was just before 4 p.m., so probably too early for Gareth to be home. The girls would still be at daycare and he’d be somewhere else. If the girls even did the same hours, or went to the same daycare. If Gareth had even moved back into the brownstone in the first place. Maybe he’d decided to start again somewhere different. What if he really had moved to another city? What if he’d moved in with the woman he’d been sleeping with? What if the girls now saw her as their mother, as the permanent fixture in their lives, as the only th–
‘Hello?’
A voice at the end of the line.
66
For a moment, everything stopped.
‘Hello?’ the voice said again.
‘Gareth?’
A long, agonizing pause.
‘Bek? Bek, is that you?’
‘Yes,’ Rebekah said, elated, unsure, confused about how she felt. The call had rung for so long she’d become certain he would never answer.
Now he had, she didn’t know what to say.
‘Bek? Are you there?’
‘Yes. Yes, I’m here.’
‘Where the hell have you been?’ His voice wavered, an oscillating lurch between anger and relief. ‘We thought you were dead. You haven’t called, y–’
‘Someone tried to kill me.’
That brought him to an instant halt. ‘What?’
‘Someone tried to kill me,’ she repeated, but the words were getting lost now, disappearing as she struggled to hold back the tears. ‘Johnny and me, we came out to an island, and someone tried to kill us, and I don’t know what happened to John, and I got left behind in this place. I couldn’t get home to …’
She faded out, wiping her eyes.
‘Bek?’
‘I’ve been here alone for five months.’
‘On an island?’
‘Yes, off the coast of Montauk.’
‘Shit, Bek. Are you okay?’ He seemed to realize what a stupid question it was immediately after asking it. ‘I mean, are you hurt? Shall I call the –’
‘I’m okay. The cops are here.’
She glanced at Travis. They’d driven about a mile back down the coast in the direction of Helena, where a jetty crawled out into the ocean. It was the closest point to the lighthouse that the police boats could get to without running aground. Travis had left Rebekah in his rental and walked down to meet the cops.
‘Shit,’ Gareth said again. ‘Bek, I’m so … I can’t believe this …’
‘I know,’ she said.
‘Shall I drive out to you or something?’
‘No, it’s fine. I’ll be home soon.’ She sniffed. I’ll be home soon. Even now, it was hard to believe that was true, harder to let herself believe it. ‘I didn’t know if you’d be at work or not,’ she said, and the ordinary nature of the sentence, its absolute banality and how much she’d longed to be able to ask something as simplistic and mundane, brought more tears to her eyes.
‘Bek?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘It’s okay. I got a new job and do afternoons from home now – you know, since you left, uh, since you disapp–’ He stopped himself. He didn’t know how to describe what she’d told him. ‘Since last year. Since last November. The girls go to daycare in the mornings, and I pick them up and bring them back here, and they constantly interrupt me while I’m on conference calls.’ There was humour in his tone, a profound sense of love for their daughters. ‘It’s actually worked out pretty well,’ he added, but then paused, as if he understood how insensitive that might have sounded.
Rebekah thought of the email Gareth h
ad sent Stelzik, of his place on the suspect list, of the questions she wanted answers to – but then it all faded into the background. ‘Can I speak to the girls?’
‘Yeah,’ Gareth said. ‘Yeah, of course.’
‘Are they there?’
‘Yeah, they’re here.’
But now there was hesitation in Gareth’s voice.
‘Yeah,’ he said again. ‘Yeah, just give me a second.’
She heard him put the phone down and shout, ‘Kyra! Kyra, come here, sweetheart!’ And then she heard the faint creak of footsteps, of old floorboards moaning, of Gareth ascending the stairs, and after that there was a hush.
And, in the hush, she knew something for sure.
He’s told them I’m dead.
That was why he’d left the cellphone behind instead of taking it upstairs with him. It was where the hesitation in his voice had come from, the thing that had distracted him. Eventually, maybe two or three months in, with no sign of her or Johnny, no indication of where they’d gone and why they hadn’t come home, he’d realized he had to tell Kyra – because Chloe was still too young – the truth, or some version of it. He had to tell her why her mom wasn’t living with them, why she wasn’t at the breakfast table first thing in the morning – and why she wasn’t there to tuck them in last thing at night.
So he’d told them she was dead.
Because that was what it had looked like.
‘Hello?’
Her voice came out of nowhere.
‘Ky?’
No response.
‘Ky, is that you, baby?’
It was deathly quiet at the other end.
‘Kyra? Kyra?’
Why wasn’t she answering?
She’s not answering because she doesn’t know who I am.
I’m a stranger.
She doesn’t remember my voice.
‘Ky, it’s okay, it’s me. It’s Mummy.’
An even longer, more terrible silence.
‘Ky,’ Rebekah sobbed, ‘you remember Mummy, right?’
Again, there was no sound from the other side, not even the crackle of her daughter’s breath on the line, and this time Rebekah completely fell apart. She leaned forward, against the dash, and everything hit her at once: tears as fierce as every storm that had ripped across the island; abandonment as brutal as every day she’d been alone; pain as real as every cut she’d made in her skin, every bruise, every sprain. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Travis staring at her from the jetty. But there was nothing he could do.
There was nothing anyone could do.
‘Did God send you back?’
Everything stopped for a second time.
‘Ky?’
Rebekah wiped at her eyes, her nose.
‘Did God send you back?’ Kyra repeated, her voice small, reticent, her words edged with an uncharacteristic shyness. But it was her. It was the voice Rebekah had longed to hear every day for 152 days.
‘Yes, baby,’ Rebekah said. ‘God sent me back.’
‘Because Daddy said you were in Heaven.’
She swallowed. ‘I know he did.’
‘Are you still in Heaven?’
She wiped her eyes. ‘No, honey,’ Rebekah said gently. ‘No, I’m not in Heaven any more. I’m on my way back. I’m almost home.’
67
Investigators cleared a space inside the general store and set up a table, some chairs and an interview kit. The roof was still leaking, the bucket Rebekah had left there to catch the water overflowing. Islanders had told the cops that the owner of the store didn’t usually arrive back until May, but Rebekah overheard the cops talking to him on the phone at one point, explaining what they were doing. Later on, an early-season fisherman came in and made running repairs to the ceiling. The whole time, he kept eyeing Rebekah.
She watched through the door, a blanket around her shoulders, some water on the table in front of her, as – out on the street – Frank Travis talked to one of the detectives from Suffolk County PD. It had been four hours since he’d found her outside the sawmill, three since she’d got off the phone to Kyra and Gareth, and two since the cops had decided to move her down to Helena to be interviewed. Travis had told her forensic teams were still up by the lighthouse, working on the pickup in the molten orange glow of sunset; search teams were busy too, scouring the island for signs of Hain.
So far they’d found nothing.
The detective Travis was talking to was called Bowners, and was a slim, attractive woman in her late forties. Beside her, Travis couldn’t have looked more different. He was over ten years older for a start, his body starting to go to seed, his hair just about more black than grey, his beard dark, except for the places in which it was thickest – at the chin, along his jaw – where it had tinted silver. Halfway through talking to Bowners, he’d got out a notebook and put on a pair of reading glasses, but the weird thing was, none of it made him seem old. There was an energy to him, a vitality. She’d often seen the same thing with doctors after they’d called it a day: they ended up missing the job, even the worst of it, and whenever they returned – to advise, to give lectures – it was like something lit up in them. They cast off retirement like they’d prised open the teeth of a trap.
Travis and Bowners broke off the conversation and disappeared from view. A couple of minutes later, Travis returned.
There was someone with him.
‘Roxie!’
As soon as the dog heard Rebekah’s voice, she was straining against her leash. Travis smiled, struggling to cope with how hard Roxie was fighting to get free, and Rebekah jumped up from the table. Roxie leaped at her, so excited she barely knew which part of Rebekah to start with. In return, Rebekah simply squeezed, closing her eyes, savouring it.
They stayed like that for a long time.
A while later, Bowners came in.
‘Hey, Rebekah,’ she said, sitting down next to Travis. ‘We met earlier. I know you want to get home. Five months alone in this place …’ She let the rest of the sentence hang. ‘Problem is, we’re a hundred miles from the mainland, on an island with one cell-phone tower, no internet, and no police station. By the time we’ve got back to Montauk, we would have lost time and, potentially, recall. I want to get this first interview down before we leave. Is that okay?’
‘I guess,’ Rebekah said.
‘I’d like to film it too, so I’m just going to grab a camera,’ Bowners said, and went outside again, in the direction of the harbour, where Rebekah knew a police truck was parked. As she thought of the harbour, she thought of Caleb again and asked Travis how he was doing.
‘It’s too early to say, but they think he’ll be okay.’
She nodded, eyes returning to the window, the two of them quiet now. She had something else to ask – she just wasn’t sure if she wanted the answer.
‘Have they found Johnny yet?’
Travis pushed his lips together. ‘Not yet. I’m sorry, Rebekah.’
But that wasn’t all.
‘Frank?’
His gaze was on an item that Bowners had brought in with her and left between the two of them. Rebekah couldn’t make out what it was. When Travis looked up again, he seemed distressed.
‘They found this,’ he said, and placed the item on the table between them. It was a clear plastic bag marked EVIDENCE. Inside was a wallet.
Rebekah felt winded.
‘This was Johnny’s, I think?’
She nodded. ‘Where did you find it?’
‘At the lighthouse.’
‘The lighthouse? Why would it be there?’
‘We don’t know yet,’ Travis said.
‘But his body’s not there?’
Body.
Even now, she could hardly bear to describe Johnny in that way. She tried to think of how she might have missed him at the lighthouse, and the answer came soon enough: because she hadn’t been looking for him there.
‘No,’ Travis said quietly. ‘We haven’t found him yet. Sorry, kidd
o.’
After that, they were silent for a while.
‘You know,’ Travis said eventually, ‘I didn’t tell you this earlier, but when I was eight, my parents brought me here.’ He was looking at Main Street, caught in a memory. ‘I mean, I’m an old man, so you can imagine how long ago that was.’ He grimaced playfully. ‘Back in the sixties, Crow Island was the place to come. And I remember, one summer break, my old man surprised me and my mom. He drove us all the way to Montauk in his shitty AMC, rust all along the panels, the suspension like a tank’s, and he told us we were getting the ferry out here. We were speechless. Crow Island was where rich people came. Don’t get me wrong, we stayed in the cheapest, crappiest hotel on the island, because that was all my dad could afford, but my mom and me? We didn’t give a damn. We were lucky if we got a vacation at all, so a vacation to Crow Island?’
‘We were like that.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Did I tell you my dad was a cop?’
‘No, but I knew he was. When I talked to Johnny last year, he said your dad worked out of the 68th Precinct.’
A brief pause at the mention of Johnny.
‘Anyway,’ Rebekah said, ‘a beat cop’s salary, three kids, you can do the maths. I lived in England until I was eighteen and, when I came back for the summer holidays, we used to go to the same place in Jersey, at Union Beach. The J, it was called. It was the only vacation Dad could afford, but we loved it.’
Travis nodded. ‘Your dad passed a couple of years back, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And your other brother?’
‘Mike?’ Rebekah forced a smile. ‘Yeah, he’s dead too.’
And then the full, unadorned picture was laid bare in front of them. Rebekah’s dad was dead. Mike was dead. And now Johnny was too.
She was all that was left of the Murphys.
‘You wanna hear something weird?’ Travis asked. He looked older all of a sudden, greyer, more beaten. ‘When I pulled into Montauk this morning, I had this crazy, completely inappropriate sense of nostalgia about returning to the island. Despite everything, the dread in the pit of my stomach, my head was full of images of my mom and me building sandcastles on the beach.’