The Hideaway

by Sheila O'Flanagan

  But of course it did.

  Luis didn’t stay long. He told me he’d drop by the next day if I liked, but I said that I was absolutely fine and there was no need. I said that I planned to be out all day.

  ‘Where?’ he asked.

  My mind went blank as he waited for my reply.

  ‘Valencia,’ I said eventually.

  ‘Valencia?’

  ‘Yes.’ I was speaking with more confidence now. ‘Ana Perez invited me there, and I want to see the City of Arts and Sciences.’

  Even as I spoke I realised that this was actually an excellent plan. Visiting a place dedicated to science and not airy-fairy thoughts would be good for me. Going there would be going to a place that would anchor me in my beliefs.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘So I’ll be fine,’ I repeated.

  ‘Call me if you need anything,’ said Luis. ‘I would be happy to help you, Juno.’

  ‘I can manage,’ I said. ‘No need for you to worry about me.’

  ‘What are you going to do for the rest of today?’

  I hadn’t thought much about it and blurted out that I’d be spending time in the garden. I’d finished painting, I said. Now it was time to turn my attention to outside the house. Plants needed to be cut back. Weeds needed to be killed. He didn’t look convinced but he nodded and said goodbye.

  When he was gone, I switched on the phone again. And my heart tumbled.

  Because there’d been another call from Brad’s number.

  But still no message.

  Chapter 24

  I couldn’t make myself call back. I wasn’t prepared to talk to whoever was on the other end. I needed to keep busy. To do other things. I’d told Luis I was going to work on the garden, so that’s what I would do.

  My decision made, I switched off the phone again and went to investigate the shed for garden products.

  There was a large shears but no weedkiller, so I got into the car and drove to Beniflor to buy some. But no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, my mind was firmly on the phone in my bag. Part of me wanted to leave it switched off, but I knew I couldn’t do that forever. Yet I’d no idea how I’d feel – or what I’d do – if it rang again and I actually saw Brad’s name on the screen.

  Once I’d bought everything I needed, I put the weedkiller and plant food in the car and walked slowly to the plaza, where I sat at my usual table in the Café Flor.

  Rosa, back to her cheerful self, took my order and then asked if I’d thought any more about Magda’s predictions.

  ‘Not really.’ I didn’t want to muddy the waters by talking about phone calls from a dead man. Back from the dead with a message is a long way to come, I thought suddenly, even though I knew I was being silly.

  ‘I have a date tonight,’ she told me, and I realised that she was more bubbly than usual. ‘With an old friend.’

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘His name is Tom Deasy,’ she replied. ‘His parents own the Irish pub in Beniflor Costa. I’ve known him for years, we went to school together.’

  ‘And he just suddenly asked you out?’

  ‘I bumped into him at the hotel last night.’ Rosa and her parents lived in a small cottage in the grounds of La Higuera. ‘He was having dinner with his family. And he went for a walk in the grounds at the same time as me. We got talking. And he asked me out. So Magda was right, you see. A new romance with someone I already know.’

  ‘Well, maybe,’ I said. ‘It’s just a date.’

  ‘It’s my first date since Pep Navarro,’ she told me. ‘I hear he’s gone to Mallorca.’

  The town grapevine worked quickly.

  I nodded.

  ‘Missing him?’

  This time I shook my head.

  ‘Really?’ asked Rosa. ‘Not even a little bit?’

  I was too preoccupied to miss Pep. But I couldn’t tell her that. So in the end I said that I was keeping myself busy at the house and hadn’t had time to miss him. She gave me an unbelieving look, then went off to serve some other customers. I finished my coffee and left the money on the table.

  When I got back to the Villa Naranja, I switched the phone on once more. There were two messages from Pep, but nothing from Brad’s number.

  I released the breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding, and went for a swim.

  I’d been expecting the phone to ring when I was in the pool, because that’s how life usually works out, but it didn’t. Nor did it ring while I sat in the shade and finished the book set in Andalucia. Feeling slightly demented, I checked my social media accounts – although, as Brad hadn’t used social media, I’ve no idea why. In any event, they only contained the usual notifications about new postings by people I didn’t really know that well. There was nothing from Saoirse or Cleo, either as a message to me or an update on their own statuses.

  I might as well not have existed.

  It was much later that night when I looked at my recent calls list again. It still contained all of Brad’s to me and mine to him. We rarely phoned each other, preferring to text – although, given that he’d been having an affair with me, the texts were damning evidence against him. I felt a shiver as I thought again of whoever had his phone reading them. Could it have been one of the rescue workers who discovered it beneath the rubble? Or on Brad’s body? Had they returned it to someone in his family? Or had it been found by someone who had no idea who owned it and had kept it for themselves?

  No matter who had it, I still wondered how they’d unlocked it without erasing all his data. Unless, of course, it was a family member who already knew his PIN number. But Brad had been extremely protective of it. I certainly didn’t know what it was. We’d talked once about the ridiculous quantity of passwords you had to have in modern life, and he’d said that he had one code that he used for his most important devices. When I’d asked what it was, he’d winked and told me it was a memorable number to him.

  ‘You’re always advised against using memorable numbers,’ I warned him. ‘Because somebody else might guess it.’

  ‘Nobody would guess mine,’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Positive.’

  Despite Brad’s certainty, I supposed someone might have unlocked his phone thanks to a monumentally lucky guess. Nevertheless, the most likely situation was that the new owner of the phone already knew it. Yet surely the only person who might have had any idea what it was was Alessandra.

  Would Brad have deleted our explicit messages? Certainly, if she knew his PIN number, he would. Yet I remembered him scrolling through them with me, smiling at me, remembering receiving them. They were still on the phone. I knew they were. He hadn’t deleted them, because he was confident that no one else would read them. But someone had. I shuddered to think of it being Alessandra. I couldn’t imagine what she would feel. But, I reminded myself, she wouldn’t be feeling anything, because she couldn’t be the person reading them. After all, Alessandra, like Brad, was dead.

  It was four in the morning. The house was still, and when I got up and opened the shutters, the full moon cast a silver light on the garden towards the jacaranda tree. In my mind I could see Pilar’s great-grandfather being hauled from the house and hanged in that exact spot. I shivered, even though the warm air was like a blanket in the room.

  Four in the morning in Spain was three in the morning in Dublin. It was a bad time to call anyone. But I didn’t care. I dialled Brad’s number.

  The message was in Spanish. But I could guess what the automated voice was telling me. The number I’d dialled wasn’t in service. Somehow, between the first time the call had been made to me and now, the phone had stopped working. So maybe whoever had cracked the PIN had wiped the data after all. Or maybe . . . maybe Brad’s spirit had moved on and he wasn’t able to access his phone any more.

  I needed to stop thinking about spirits. There were none. Not of Brad. Not of Alessandra. Not of Pilar’s great-grandparents. Not of anyone. The question of the phone was entirely pr
actical. And, in a practical way, I would eventually work out who had it and how they’d accessed it. Not that it mattered to me at all.

  I didn’t go back to sleep. Instead, I made myself coffee (guaranteed to keep me awake, anyhow) and drank it at the stone table in the garden to the sound of the gentle rustle of the orange trees and the continued chirruping of the crickets.

  Then I got into the car. I drove to Beniflor Costa, where the sky was beginning to brighten and the sea lapped gently on to the shore. It was just after six thirty when the sun rose over the Mediterranean, drenching the landscape in a vibrant rose-gold light. A flock of the flamingos who fed in the nearby salt lakes wheeled overhead in a flash of shocking pink. A solitary white cloud drifted across the horizon.

  Another magical sunrise. Another day when the earth kept turning. I knew that, globally, our current life expectancy is around seventy-one years. That’s 25,915 days. 25,915 sunrises. Some of which might be as spectacularly beautiful as this morning’s. Some of which would be hidden behind dark clouds and rain. No matter what was going on in the lives of the people below, the sun rose every single day. Brad had been nearly thirty-five when he died. So he was missing out on at least 13,000 sunrises and sunsets. I felt sad at the thought. But the sadness didn’t grip me in the way it had before. It didn’t nearly knock me over. It was a quiet sadness for someone who would never again experience the serenity of daybreak, or the rustle of a gentle breeze through the trees, or the awesomeness of a night sky. But I would. And that made me the lucky one.

  I sat on the beach and watched as the sun continued its ascent and the town began to shake itself awake. As the last traces of pink and gold were replaced by another azure-blue sky, I got up and dusted the sand from my clothes. Then I drove back to the Villa Naranja.

  The house, with its freshly painted shutters and newly tidied garden, looked serene in the morning sun, its turbulent past only vaguely remembered. The people who’d lived here had moved on too. Just as I had when I realised I would’ve left Brad McIntyre because he was married. My problem then had been that I hadn’t got over my sense of loss. That was why the phantom phone call had been such a shock. But now, as I let myself into the house, I realised I’d got over that too. I remembered that life is about finding and losing and finding and losing, over and over again. I’d lost Sean and found Brad. I’d lost Brad and found Pep. And if – when – I lost Pep too, there would be someone else. Maybe not right away. And maybe not forever. But there’d be someone, someday. He’d be someone kind and gentle I’d meet when I was least expecting it, and he’d matter to me more than any other man I’d ever known.

  I had to believe he was out there somewhere. And I had to believe I’d find him. But when? And where? And how?

  Chapter 25

  Because I’d told Luis I was going to Valencia, I decided that was exactly what I’d do. The coastal city was about an hour and a half away, and I reckoned it would be good for me to get in the car and drive. I’d always intended to go to its famous City of Arts and Sciences while I was in Spain. Constructed on the dry bed of the diverted river Túria, the complex contains a concert hall, a science exhibition centre and an enormous aquarium. The three main buildings, all glass and metal and surrounded by water, look like something from a sci-fi movie. In all honesty, their stark modernity is far more appealing to me than cute towns like Beniflor.

  I reserved a ticket for the Prince Felipe Science Museum online, then set Jane, the satnav, to bring me to a nearby shopping centre with parking. I was fully confident in her ability to find it. What I was less confident in, I realised, was my own ability to arrive unscathed – whatever my driving skills on the motorway, the city traffic was unbelievably scary, and there were a few times when I was blasted out of my lane by an impatient Valenciano with no time for tourists in hire cars clogging up the streets. But eventually, nearly two hours after I set off, I parked the car in the El Saler Centre and made my way to the museum.

  There were queues at the entrance but they weren’t as long as the one I’d encountered at Alicante airport on the night I’d arrived, and I got to the desk without too much of a delay. After I’d collected my ticket, I asked the girl who’d served me if Ana Perez was around.

  ‘Ana?’ She looked at me curiously. ‘You know her?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘My name is Juno Ryan.’

  She hesitated for a moment then made a phone call, stumbling a little over my name. She looked rather surprised as she hung up and told me that Ana would be down to see me shortly.

  I stood to one side and waited for Pilar’s mother to arrive. The reception area was a cool haven after the scorching sun outside, but I was hot and thirsty after the short walk from the commercial centre, and I bought myself a bottle of juice from a machine while I waited.

  ‘Juno!’

  I hadn’t seen her arrive but she looked at me with an expression of surprise and pleasure. ‘How are you? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming sooner?’

  ‘Because I only decided on the spur of the moment,’ I admitted. ‘I thought it would be a fun thing to do.’

  ‘You are all right?’ Her eyes scanned my face. ‘There is no problem at the house?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘It just seemed a good idea to come here today. I didn’t want to go home without having seen it.’

  ‘Of course you shouldn’t go without seeing it,’ she agreed. ‘And it will be my pleasure to show you around.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t have to do that!’ I exclaimed. ‘I just couldn’t come without saying hello, that’s all.’

  ‘I cannot be with you the whole time,’ she said. ‘It can take a few hours to look at everything in the museum, but perhaps you would like to start with the science of the human body? And after that the electrical exhibition?’

  She knew exactly the things that appealed to me most, I thought, as we began the tour. My own mother would have been bored after five minutes, but Ana Perez laughed and joked with me as I measured my body strength and tried to beat various agility tests designed to demonstrate the complexity of the human body.

  When we got to the electrical exhibition she left me to my own devices. She had a meeting, she explained, but she could see me again in about an hour. She suggested a small café just outside the entrance to the museum as a meeting point, and when I nodded, she hurried away.

  I stood in front of an experiment showing how alternating and direct currents work, and I thought of how powerful and frightening electricity must have seemed to people who were experiencing it for the first time. It would be almost supernatural. And, as I thought about my phone, still switched off in my bag, I reminded myself once again that there was nothing supernatural in our world, that there were simply phenomena we hadn’t yet managed to explain.

  The fact that I’d been up literally since the crack of dawn was beginning to tell, and by the time I met Ana again I was feeling tired. When she produced tickets for all of the different exhibitions, I felt myself tense up. I’d never manage to see them all in a day and get home. I’d fall asleep at the wheel of the car.

  ‘You can stay with Alonso and me,’ she said. ‘Our apartment isn’t very far.’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly,’ I told her. ‘You’ve been kind enough already – and besides, I didn’t bring anything for an overnight stay.’

  ‘Do not worry about that,’ said Ana. ‘I have a robe you can borrow. Besides, you’ve been more than kind to me. What about all the work to the house? It’s amazing.’

  I’d sent her photos of the painted rooms and she’d sent back ecstatic replies. Perhaps a little too ecstatic. She was just being very nice about it. But sitting in front of her now, I realised that she meant it, that she liked the facelift I’d given to the house.

  ‘I couldn’t have done it myself,’ she admitted. ‘It would have felt disrespectful to my mother.’

  ‘Ana!’ I stared at her, aghast. ‘I thought you were OK with me doing it. You said it was all right to go ahead. I wouldn�
�t have—’

  ‘No, no,’ she interrupted me. ‘It had to be done. It was simply that I didn’t have the heart to do it. I’m happy to let the house go, but I couldn’t make the changes it needed. I realise that sounds silly.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said.

  And I did.

  I spent the rest of the day at the City of Arts and Sciences (although I fell asleep during the show at the Planetarium) and then retrieved my car and drove Ana home. Her husband hadn’t yet arrived but she phoned him and told him to meet us at a nearby tapas bar, which he did. Alonso was a genial man in his fifties who, like Ana, spoke impeccable English. While we picked at Serrano ham and prawns in garlic, he used the bar’s Wi-Fi to FaceTime Pilar. I grinned and gave her the thumbs-up, telling her that I was loving her country and her city, and she said that she hoped to be home for a visit in September when the weather was cooler.

  Then she and her parents spoke in Spanish while I sipped my glass of cold white wine and thought about my own mum – and realised, with a sense of guilt, that I hadn’t spoken to her in a while. So I took my phone from my bag and switched it on.

  One missed call. Unknown Caller. One message.

  The noise of the bar and the chatter of Ana and her husband with Pilar receded into the distance. One missed call. One message. From an unknown caller. It could be from anyone, of course, but as I stared at the screen I knew it wasn’t just anyone. I was certain it was the person who had Brad’s phone. I wanted to listen to the message straight away but I couldn’t, not here and now, surrounded by people. I stared at the notification and, even though I could feel the rapid beat of my heart, I very deliberately dismissed it.

  Instead, I made my own video call to Mum. She was delighted to see me – and also to see Ana and Alonso, and know that there were people looking after me.

  ‘I don’t need looking after,’ I told her. ‘I can take care of myself. But,’ I added before she could speak, ‘it’s lovely to have people I can count on here.’

  ‘Be well, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘Your aura is still a bit shot. But at least you’ve got some colour in your cheeks.’