Distress Signals

by Catherine Ryan Howard

‘How?’

  ‘I know a guy. He let me take a look.’

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘To make sure.’

  ‘What made you unsure?’

  ‘You,’ Ethan said. ‘When you called me.’

  ‘The first time I called you, you thought I was her.’

  ‘I just saw an Irish number and I thought she was calling to apologise or whatever, but couldn’t do it. So when she hung up – or when I thought it was her who’d hung up – I’ll called back, and got you, and you were screaming about the police and her family and all sorts of shit. It got me worried, so I went to check if she had got off the ship. The system said she had. So I figured, okay, I’m okay here, but obviously after she got off she didn’t go home like she’d said she was going to, and she’s probably off somewhere trying to clear her head. But you’re mad as hell, and if you have my phone number, what else do you have? You probably know all about me and, well, if I were you, I would’ve come straight here to find me and, probably, beat the crap out of me. Which is exactly what you did. Well, the first part anyway. And look, I appreciate—’

  ‘I came here to find Sarah, you fucking piece of shit.’

  Ethan shrugged. ‘Doesn’t sound to me like she wants to be found, man. Sorry.’

  ‘What time was it when you went back to the cabin?’

  ‘I don’t know. Ten or eleven?’

  ‘So it was dark?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You didn’t notice anything unusual in there?’

  ‘Other than the fact the note had gone, no.’

  ‘Did you find Sarah’s phone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s a passenger missing from the ship right now, isn’t there?’

  Ethan was momentarily thrown by the change in subject, but then he said that yes, there was.

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Who is it?’ I asked. ‘Do you know their name?’

  ‘All I know is it’s some American girl. On a PR trip, so everyone’s freaking the fuck out.’ So it was Megan then. ‘Especially because of . . .’ Ethan trailed off. ‘Well, let’s just say everyone’s freaking out.’

  ‘Because of what? What were you going to say?’

  ‘Just that, ah, there was a murder here on one of the early cruises. Don’t repeat this, okay? In the crew quarters. A real bloody one, apparently. Total horror show. One of the tabloids got wind of it, but they didn’t have any pictures or names so it didn’t spread. Blue Wave are still holding their breath on it though. If this girl is actually missing . . . Well, they’ll turn on the fans in the shit factory, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘What do you know about that murder?’

  Ethan shrugged. ‘What I just said, that’s all I got.’

  A murder in the crew quarters. I wondered if that could be Sanne. But didn’t Peter say that Blue Wave maintained she’d fallen overboard? Had she really been murdered, and they were just covering that up?

  ‘What about the girl this morning?’ I asked. ‘How did anyone know that she was missing?’

  ‘I heard someone reported it.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe a crew member? Why are you so interested in her?’

  I tried to focus. To think.

  ‘Did your cabin have a balcony?’ I asked. ‘The one you stayed in with Sarah. Or were supposed to.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Did you go out there when you came back to look for her?’

  ‘No, but I could see out through the doors. It was dark. If Sarah was out there, she would’ve turned on the outside light.’

  ‘But it was dark out there?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  So someone could’ve been out on the balcony, hiding.

  Like the man who’d just killed Sarah by pushing her off of it.

  No.

  It could have been Sarah, hiding from Ethan because she didn’t want to talk to him. She waits for him to leave, thinks better of leaving the note, grabs it on her way out, decides she can’t come home after what she’s done and sends the note to me instead.

  Maybe she was alive.

  But then where was she?

  ‘Will you be here?’ I said to Ethan.

  ‘I’ll be around,’ he said. ‘Listen, man, I am sorry. For all this.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I turned to leave. ‘So am I.’

  I had one foot out the door when I thought of it.

  I turned back around.

  ‘Wait a second,’ I said. ‘You met Sarah in an office?’ Ethan nodded. ‘Which office?’

  ‘Her office. Anna Buckley.’

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘Er, same thing everyone else was. Looking for a job.’

  ‘But why did you . . .’ It dawned on me then. ‘Ethan, when did you start work on the Celebrate?’

  ‘The day before yesterday, technically. This is my first cruise as crew.’

  ‘What were you doing before this?’

  ‘Right before this? I was managing a restaurant in a Dublin hotel. But I was looking to get moving again, and I heard Blue Wave were recruiting through Anna Buckley. That’s why I went down there in the first place.’

  ‘So you weren’t here last August? On the Celebrate?’

  ‘No, man.’ Ethan shook his head. ‘Why is everyone suddenly asking me that?’

  I felt my pulse quicken.

  ‘Who else asked you that?’

  ‘Well, okay,’ he said. ‘Not everyone. But there was this guy in one of the restaurants the first night. A British guy. I thought he was maybe, you know, checking me out or something at first because he kept staring at me, but it turns out he just thought he knew me from the last time he was aboard. Last August. But I told him the same thing I told—’

  I was already out the door.

  Romain

  Hersonissos, Crete, 2012

  For Romain, it was love at first sight.

  She was walking in the door of Mikey’s Place, searching for a face she knew, her soft pale skin standing out in the darkness, her long golden hair loose around her shoulders. She looked nothing like any other woman in the crowd that night, or any other night for that matter.

  Romain was mesmerised. He’d never experienced anything like it before. An overwhelming warmth in his chest. A desire to touch her, yes, but more than that too. He wanted to look after her. To be with her. To make her happy. He felt her presence in the room like a touch, and for the entire night kept track of where she was without conscious effort.

  When she came to get a drink at the bar and smiled at him, he was relieved to be called away by another customer and let Freddy, the new bartender, serve her instead.

  Romain didn’t know what to do and that made him nervous.

  It wasn’t like he was a novice. There had been other girls. Lots of other girls. He was a strong, healthy, handsome twenty-something working as a bartender in one of the most popular bars on the island of Crete. That meant that every evening from April to September he could take his pick. A different one each night, if he liked, although, after the initial novelty of that, Romain had quickly learned that there were advantages to being more discerning.

  But a relationship? He’d never managed to talk himself into one of those, and no one else had tried to talk him into it either. It was such an odd idea – having someone who stayed with you all the time, someone who looked after you and who constantly told you that they cared for you – that it didn’t seem to Romain like it could ever be real.

  Until that night. Until this girl.

  Walking out with Freddy after closing, he saw her outside, smoking a cigarette and chatting to another girl.

  Freddy nodded towards her.

  ‘There’s the one who was hanging around
at the bar all night. Here.’ He punched Romain lightly on the arm. ‘Watch this.’

  Freddy walked up to the girl and her friend with a confidence that puzzled Romain, because Freddy was short, red-haired and unattractive. He also had a whole arm covered in ugly tattoos, most of which he’d done himself or started himself that later had to be corrected. Lack of artistic merit aside, they were all embarrassing choices too: religious shapes, his mother’s face – Romain couldn’t even begin to fathom that one – and a song lyric from one of last summer’s big hits that made little sense when you were drunk enough to dance to it and no sense at all at all other times.

  And yet here was Freddy, striding up to two girls, one beautiful, one ordinarily attractive, with the confidence of a much more attractive man.

  People puzzled Romain, even now.

  ‘Do I know you?’ Freddy said. It wasn’t clear at first which girl he was addressing, but then he pointed to her, to Romain’s girl. ‘You look really familiar . . .’

  The girl and her friend exchanged a glance.

  ‘Do I?’ she said to Freddy. ‘Imagine that.’

  Romain got the sense that she was just playing along, being polite. Hope rose in his chest.

  ‘We don’t know each other?’ Freddy said.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then where do I know you from?’ Freddy made a big show of thinking about this. ‘Oh, wait I know: from my dreams!’

  ‘Really?’ the girl said. ‘That’s what you’re going with?’

  Freddy nodded. ‘Yep.’

  ‘Well, in that case . . . I’ll meet you there later.’

  The girls laughed, but it took Freddy a second.

  ‘Oh, I get it,’ he said. He sounded cheerful. ‘Good one.’

  The girl’s eyes flicked to Romain.

  ‘Does your friend have any better lines?’

  ‘Ah, him?’ Freddy gestured for Romain to join him. ‘Lines? Sweetheart, he wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. Luckily the fucker doesn’t need any lines. Have you seen his face? Ask him yourself though, just to be sure.’ Freddy took a step to the right, making room for Romain to stand beside him, and addressed the second girl. ‘You know, you look kind of familiar to me too . . .’

  ‘Hi,’ the first girl said to Romain. ‘I’m Sanne.’

  ‘Hi, Sanne,’ Romain said. ‘I’m Luke.’

  ——

  Sanne had come to Crete with friends on a short break from her job in Utrecht, where she was packing bags in a supermarket to save money to go travelling around the world for a year. But only a week after returning to the Netherlands she was back in Crete again, standing in the doorway of Mikey’s Place, looking around.

  This time, it was for Romain.

  This time, she was here to stay.

  She moved into his room for the remainder of the summer season. In September, they found a place of their own, an old holiday apartment that overlooked the sea if you leaned against the balcony railing and turned your head the right way.

  Romain had lost the concept of a home to his childhood; his concern was only a bed to lie in for the night. Now, he watched as Sanne piled colourful cushions on their bed, hung framed pictures of them on the walls and lit candles at night to make the place ‘cosy’. She even decorated at Christmas, dragging a potted palm in from the balcony and twisting multi-coloured fairy-lights around its trunk. She baked him a cake on his birthday, wrote that she loved him in his card.

  She made a home for them, and whenever Romain woke up to her or came home to her or fell asleep beside her, she felt like a home to him.

  Sanne got a job in a restaurant in town and Romain was promoted to management at Mikey’s. They stayed in bed well into the day, touching skin and stroking hair and kissing lips. They shared dinner at home, then went off to work for the night, before meeting up again in the early hours to party with their friends or to take a bottle of wine to the beach. They rarely argued, almost always laughed. Sanne told Romain that he made her feel safe.

  Of course, she called him Luke when she did that.

  Romain, meanwhile, felt like he’d lived his life thus far in a dark, constricting box. He had no idea being alive could feel like this. Is this how other people felt all the time; warm and safe and wanted and worthy? He wondered if that’s why he’d been so different . . . before. If everyone had darkness inside them, but this warm love kept theirs from ever coming out.

  The darkness. Sometimes he wondered if it was still there. It was all so long ago now. Mikki. The day at the pond. Sometimes he thought about finding an address for Dr Tanner, sending a message to him to let him know that he’d been right. The treatment had worked. Jean had just fallen off that gate.

  But Tanner probably didn’t want to hear from Romain, not after what had happened. And anyway, Romain couldn’t risk making contact.

  He was thinking a lot more about Tanner these days. Being around Sanne, Romain’s words and actions all felt like they came from a deeper place. Before, if he laughed, it was because he’d identified a moment in which he was supposed to. Someone had paused at the end of the joke, or other people were already laughing. His personality had always been a string of learned behaviours, each one discovered, studied and acquired quite consciously, many of them during Tanner’s treatment, a stable of reactions he could collect and display whenever it was necessary.

  But with Sanne, it was different.

  He didn’t have to think about what to say or what to do and, whenever he did say or do something, it didn’t come from just beneath the surface. It came from deep inside him.

  He was becoming real.

  He was really being good.

  Romantic love was an entirely new experience for Romain, both feeling it and receiving it. So he didn’t know there was a danger in throwing himself into it, in opening his heart wide, in thinking that his life with Sanne was his life for ever now.

  He couldn’t have known, and it couldn’t last.

  Certainly not after she told him she was pregnant.

  ——

  Romain said nothing at first. He was too stunned to.

  ‘I know we didn’t plan this,’ Sanne said, ‘but it’s happened. And it’s not like we’re teenagers, Luke. I’m twenty-three. I can have a baby if I want, who’s to say that I can’t? And wouldn’t it be nice? A little person that we made together? We’d be a family.’

  Family.

  The word stung Romain’s heart.

  ‘I know,’ Sanne went on. ‘Money. Yes, we probably can’t afford to raise a child right now, but we have eight months to go, and I’ve been talking to Paul at the restaurant and he said that there’ll be a bookkeeping job coming up in—’

  ‘Sanne,’ Romain said. ‘You can’t do it.’

  ‘I can learn how to do accounts, Luke. It’s not rocket science.’

  ‘No. I mean . . . You can’t have it.’

  Sanne’s face fell. ‘What?’

  ‘You have to get rid of it.’

  ‘What are you—

  ‘You just can’t have it, okay?’

  They were sitting side by side on their sofa. She put a hand on his cheek.

  ‘Luke, I know this is scary but just—’

  ‘Listen to me, Sanne. You’re getting an abortion.’

  She pulled away from him. Her eyes filled with tears.

  ‘I love you, Sanne,’ Romain said. ‘You know I do. But you can’t . . . You can’t have a baby with me.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Because there’ll be darkness inside it. Because eventually that darkness will get out. Because when it does, you’ll make it feel like Mama made me feel.

  ‘I can’t tell you why, Sanne. But there was something . . . There was something wrong with my father and the same thing was wrong with me. Before. If you have that baby—’

/>   ‘But you’re fine now, Luke. You’re perfect. Are you saying you had a disability or something? A disease? Were you sick?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Because if I do, you won’t love me any more.’

  ‘Oh, Luke. Don’t be ridiculous.’ She moved back to him, let him take her in his arms. She kissed his cheek, whispered in his ear. ‘I love you and there is nothing you could tell me that would change that.’

  This was a line Romain had heard uttered numerous times, on TV and in movies. Or some version of it. It made him ball his fists, it was so stupid. Anyone who would say such a thing had to be wilfully ignorant of the things that could happen in this world, how things could go horribly, irreparably, frighteningly wrong.

  Sanne needed to know how wrong she was.

  ‘Romain Dupont,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That’s me. That’s my real name.’

  ‘Your . . . Your real name?’ A nervous laugh. ‘Luke, what are you—’

  ‘My name’s not Luke. It’s Romain.’

  ‘No.’ Sanne started shaking her head. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Romain Dupont.’ He spelled it out for her. ‘Look it up online. See if you still love me then.’

  But Sanne didn’t move. She just sat there, staring at him.

  Finally he got up and got the laptop himself, powered it up, typed his name into Google and pointed to a screen filled with results.

  ‘Here,’ he said, handing the machine to her. ‘Tell me if you want any of the French ones explained.’

  He knew the stories Sanne was now looking at, because he’d done this same thing himself many times.

  Child Killer: ‘No Remorse’ For 14-year-old Victim . . . ‘Devil Spawn of Deavieux’ Strikes Again . . . World’s First ‘Cured’ Violent Psychopath Murders Own Brother 24 Hours After Release . . . Interpol Launch Search for Romain Dupont . . . Disgraced Psychiatrist Loses Licence.

  Mixed in among them would be Romain’s listing on a ‘Kids Who Kill’ website, a link to a so-called true crime book someone had written about the case and links to YouTube clips of the round of interviews Mama had done right after Jean’s death.