by Con Riley
Marc interrupted, speaking English this time, his hand over the phone receiver as he spoke directly to Rob. “You were right. They were university students. Someone’s putting me through to the right department.”
“What university? What department?” Jude shook Rob’s hand off his arm as he tried to restrain him again from pulling out the pins that had been added, ones that confused an already muddied picture of where the One for Luck may have gone down.
“Leave them,” Rob repeated, then said, “This really might all come to nothing,” his brow so deeply furrowed that Jude took notice.
“Tell me.” Jude lifted an arm for Lou to scoot under his shoulder. “Tell us,” he almost shouted.
“Okay, okay,” Rob said, placating just as Marc spoke again on the phone. Rob reduced his tone to a whisper. “It was their T-shirts. The ones in the photo of—” he winced “—the wreckage.” He held Lou’s free hand very gently, cradling it really. “I couldn’t sleep, so I googled the logo, and then I wondered why students from a French university would have been the ones to find it.” He glanced at the noticeboard where a list of business ideas was pinned. He pointed to an idea written below spas and guided tours, that said geography field trips. “That’s when I figured out they must be on a field trip like the ones I thought might attract schools to Porthperrin. Losing a beach is a big deal, so I wondered what they had gone to research.”
He paused, Marc covered the phone with his hand again to say, “They were measuring the height of floodwaters inland on some islands, gathering measurements to make some kind of model.” He listened for a third time before adding some quick thanks in French and reading out the Anchor’s email address. “Okay. They’re going to email it to us.”
“Email us what?” Jude asked, wondering if he was actually still upstairs in bed, dreaming.
Marc said, “They’ll send the coordinates and the date as soon as they can.”
“Date?”
“Yes.” Marc nodded, not a trace of anything but compassion in his expression. “They found the wreckage far enough inland to pinpoint exactly when it washed up.”
The exact date?
That was one of the missing links Trevor said was needed.
Jude found himself braced then by his sister, sounding so much stronger than she looked as she asked, “What are these new red pushpins for?” only for Rob to seem nervous, his high colour paling.
“Rob,” Jude said, his whole world stuttering to a stop for the second time in twenty-four hours. “What have you done?”
“I….” Rob wet his lips as if they were as dry, his voice an arid croak too. “I used the postcards to plot where they actually went instead of the route they’d first planned.” His hand shook as he touched the last pin in an entirely different patch of the ocean than Jude had searched. “This island is where they sent the last card to Trevor.”
Marc made a small sound from his place at the desk. “The email. It’s here.”
“Jude,” Rob rushed. “It might come to nothing. I didn’t want to—”
“Get my hopes up?”
Rob’s brow creased again as he nodded. His gaze skittered between the map and Louise before settling on part of the ocean Jude hadn’t sailed anywhere close to aboard the Aphrodite. “They sent the last postcard to Trevor on the 16th from here.” He then pointed to another pushpin, not all that distant. “This is where the wreckage washed up.”
Marc translated the email. “It says the storm surge waters only rose high enough to wash them that far inland on the 18th.”
Jude held onto his sister winded by hope he could barely breathe through, knees weak as what Marc and Rob had discovered sunk in.
“A two-day window,” Lou said, just as breathless. “That’s what Trevor needed to pinpoint their location.”
After months of searching alone, hope now steered them all together in a brand new direction.
33
Carrying on like normal was impossible while buzzing with new purpose, the urge to drop everything so close to the surface of Jude’s skin that he could almost see it. He was thankful all over again for Rob’s forward-thinking at lunchtime, the restaurant filled with paying clients instead of village locals, all with big-city expectations. “Thanks,” he murmured as he put Rob’s prep to good use, hands moving independently of his mind, which had a different focus.
“No problem,” Rob said, finishing each plate with a five-star flourish, concentrating so hard that he didn’t notice Jude’s staring.
This man, who now dotted sauce and spooned delicate foam onto Carl’s catch as if nothing else in the world mattered had propped open a window of hope that Jude had only dreamed of. He’d looked at that picture of wreckage and seen more than Jude or Lou had, then he’d found the one person who could translate French when they needed.
Would Marc have spared Jude the time if Rob hadn’t nurtured the spark between him and Lou?
Maybe not, he had to admit; Jude hadn’t earned it.
Making up with Marc wouldn’t have even been on his agenda before Rob had stuck his nose in. Now, only a few months later, Marc set aside his own work to wait tables for them. Jude backed into the kitchen with empty dishes, and made sure to tell him he was thankful.
“It’s nothing,” Marc said, distracted, checking the ticket for his next table.
“I mean, thanks for everything, Marc. For helping today. For phoning that university for us. For translating. For….” Behind Jude, a timer pinged, Rob already there to turn bass fillets just when their skin reached crisped perfection.
“It’s no problem,” Marc said again, but his smile was so much warmer. He balanced full plates on his forearms like Jude’s mum had taught him back when Jude had done so much to avoid him, and his wink caught Jude off-guard. “Besides, serving meals makes a change from painting your sister with her kit off.”
Rob’s hoot of laughter wasn’t even annoying. “You asked for that,” he said as the door closed behind Marc. He pulled a ticket towards him, reading with the kind of wholehearted concentration his dad would be amazed at, then he noticed Jude’s expression. “What?”
Jude said what had lurked on the tip of his tongue all morning, chilling him to the core, Rob the one person he could be honest with without hurting. “You know they probably are dea—.”
Rob set down his spoon before Jude could finish and pulled him into an embrace, his cheek hot from the stove, his kiss just as warming. “The jury’s still out on that, isn’t it? Hmm?” He let go and pulled the next ticket from its clip as though it was business as normal, not potentially so close to the end of a months’ long nightmare. “Let’s stick to the plan. Trevor is coming this afternoon with his laptop, and we’re going to listen to his advice, and then make a decision. It doesn’t matter that the timing is shit for you leaving again if that seems like a viable option.” He wasn’t wrong—they truly were booked solid. “And it doesn’t matter if we can’t get anyone official to agree to resume the search. You were always going to look for them at the end of the summer, anyway, weren’t you?” His gaze was frank, accepting, softening as Jude nodded. “Just like I was going to go back to London once I’d proven my point. Plans can change, Jude.”
“But—”
“No buts. We’ll make it work if that’s what needs to happen,” he said, decided as if Jude leaving right at the start of the vital summer season could ever be that easy.
“But the bills….” Lou’s spreadsheets still had so many more red entries than black ones. “The flights alone would cost so much more, last minute. I don’t have anywhere near enough.”
Rob silenced him again with a quick kiss. “I said we’ll make it work if there’s even the slightest chance.” He held up the ticket and squinted. “But until we know, you’re going to get two more bass on, so we can finish this service. Yes, chef?” Rob’s gaze turned steely, another flash of his father, so like him at that moment that Jude couldn’t help agreeing.
“Yes, chef!” he answere
d, and got back to finishing his first, and maybe last, lunch service of the summer.
Trevor arrived with more than his laptop and charts. He brought a lasting hug for Jude, and warm cheek kisses for Louise that she returned as he passed her a photo album. “Thought you might like to see some of my photos from when I worked with Simon,” he offered.
Lou hugged the album to her chest. “Thank you.” Then her face crumpled as she had an emotional moment Jude could relate to, so similar to one he’d had during the lunch service. “I-I know there’s not much chance,” she got out, stuttering. “Of finding them alive, I mean. And I’m sorry to put you to work like this when you’re retired, but we need to know for certain that we’ve done everything that we can.”
“I’m only semi-retired, sweetheart, and it’s the least I can do,” Trevor answered as if any of this rested on his shoulders somehow. “Give me a moment to get set up, and we’ll run some numbers.”
Jude watched Trevor boot up his laptop and then start to type. “Weather statistics,” he muttered before clicking over to a new tab. “Wind speed and direction, and measured rainfall.” Again and again, he opened new tabs to draw from, pausing often, thoughtful. “This is so much easier now the parameters can be defined, but multiple sources would increase the accuracy,” he mused, his brow furrowed. His fingers flew over the keyboard as he scanned statistics and added more data to a spreadsheet that gradually filled, apart from one blank section.
Ever nosy, Rob asked, “What goes here?”
“That’s where I’ll add any hazards like rocks or particularly shallow waters when we have a better idea of where we’re looking. I can do pretty much everything online initially, like this, but I don’t trust the outcome until I can chart it myself, by hand.” Trevor glanced up. “These are the charts I’ll need.” He jotted the details on a Post-it. “Did you say Simon kept some here?”
“Yes.” Rob took the list and got up. “I’ll go and look.”
Jude stood as well. “I’ll come too.” They’d boxed up so many from his dad’s study, it might take an age to locate them.
“No need.” Rob was gone before Jude could argue, and then back what only seemed like minutes later.
Trevor took a quick look before grinning. “Excellent. They’re exactly what I needed. Now, I’ll need a bit more room for this part. Where can I spread them out?”
“How about in the bar? It’s empty now,” Louise said.
Jude went ahead and cleared tables of their menus and bar mats, and then unrolled several old charts. His “thanks” was gruff as Rob also passed over empty pint glasses to hold down their edges. Out of the hundreds that his dad had kept in his office, Rob had brought exactly the right ones. “How did you know where to find these?”
“That was easy,” Rob said, lightly. “Lord knows I’ve been staring at them ever since I got here.” He smoothed a hand over a patch that was sun-faded. “They were the ones pinned up in the boatshed. Your dad must have liked looking at them when he was building the One for Luck out there. I brought them over yesterday to add more of a nautical feel to the snug bar.”
The right charts had been in the boatshed for Jude’s entire childhood.
His parents’ last location there this whole time.
“Shush,” Rob said as if Jude had spoken aloud, his lips a soft graze against Jude’s temple. “Hush. This place is chock-full of maps. There was no way you could have guessed which ones mattered. We needed Trevor for that, and who was it who dug deep enough to discover his name in the first place?”
The man himself stood in the doorway holding his laptop. Trevor said, “Oh, now this is very lovely,” like he was seeing the bar for the first time. The view over the harbour was idyllic, masts of sailboats bobbing, seagulls bright-white against the same indigo sky that Ian had captured in his review photos. The windows framed a picture-postcard scene that Jude had taken for granted until he’d exiled himself in London. God, then how he’d missed it.
“You’ve never been here before?” Lou asked.
“No, but boy, did I ever hear all about it.” Trevor chuckled while surveying the unrolled charts. “When did they buy it?” A frown marred his features as Jude answered. Trevor bent over one of the charts for a prolonged minute, silent, only eventually asking, “It was that long after they married?” The sigh he let out was just as extended before he looked at Louise. “There are some photos of the wedding in there. Near the end,” he added, not needing to explain to Jude why that was where the photos finished.
“Really?” She flipped the first few pages, stopping every so often to ask a question. “Where was this photo taken?”
“That one?” Trevor pointed with the same parallel ruler Jude had grown up watching his dad use to plot courses around the Cornish coastline. “It was taken somewhere around here,” he tapped the western corner of the chart.
“And this one?” Jude peered over her shoulder at the photo of the same golden Buddha that he’d wondered about so often.
This time, Trevor tapped farther east on the chart. “That was here.” He touched where a pushpin once had left a small hole before he finally settled in front of another chart that showed a vast expanse of water. “This part might take a while, and still involves more guesswork than I’d like,” he admitted. “The issue is that to chart accurately, you want two clear points, a start and an end. But we’re still not entirely sure of the first point and there’s still a two-day margin of error for the second.” He bit the end of his pencil as Louise asked a final question.
“Where did you go next?”
“Next?”
“After this photo in your album. Look.” She crossed the room to snatch one of the framed photos that once hung in their dad’s study and now mingled with Marc’s seascapes for sale. “See? Dad had a similar photo of you and him as well.” She held the framed photo next to the one in the album. It showed both men grinning and a touch sunburned, arms slung across each other’s shoulders. “See how both photos have the same Buddha as the one on the last postcard Dad sent you. Where did you go after that? What was your next port when you sailed that last time together?”
Trevor set down his pencil and flipped a couple of the album pages. “Here,” he said. Then he looked up and made a request that Jude hurried to follow. “Could you get the postcards for me?” Once he had them spread out in date order, he nodded. “There are a few deviations from that voyage, but if he did follow the same route—” he checked the date on the postcard “—then they actually could have made it this far, the day before the storm surge from the typhoon hit. And this would have been where he was next headed.” The spot Trevor pointed to diverged from their father’s original planned route by enough degrees to make a difference. “Okay. Let’s see what happens when we use this as our start point.” He measured carefully then made an indent on the chart. “Now,” he murmured, “I’ll line up on a meridian, north to south.” His measurements were slow and oh-so-careful. Jude found he was holding his breath as Trevor murmured, “Then I’ll walk the ruler up. Don’t let it slip,” he warned, talking to himself and muttering more numbers under his breath before switching to another chart that covered a quadrant of the ocean in much more detail.
“That means he’s getting closer, right?” Rob’s fingers threaded with Jude’s.
“Yeah,” Jude said as Trevor checked against the graphs on his laptop, and then replotted.
“Thanks for working so hard on this,” Louise said once Trevor finally stood back.
“If doing this means I get a chance to apologise firsthand to your mother, that at least would be a great outcome.”
He busied himself with more measurements while Jude reeled, Louise putting into words what he couldn’t. “No, Trevor. I know Dad must have felt awful about lying about you, even though you wanted him to, but what happened to you in the first place was terrible. It shouldn’t have happened. None of it. I’m so sorry about the way you were treated.” She looked Jude’s way for a long second b
efore saying, “No one should have to hide something so important.”
Trevor’s smile was small but honest. “I take a lot of comfort from knowing that they must have been ecstatic when they eventually got to have both of you kids as well as this place. I wish…” His voice shook. “I wish they hadn’t struggled, but they probably appreciated everything a great deal more for having waited. I know that I did.” He blinked fast a few times. “Now, let me run these numbers again. It’s going to take me a while. I’m sorry, but I want to get this right if I can.”
Somehow, the time passed, Rob steering them all to seats by the window, Jude oblivious to the scenery outside as his whole worldview was shaken. Rob watched him closely, placing one hand over Jude’s and his other over Louise’s. “I don’t know why I ever thought you were quiet,” he admitted. “Your face is so expressive it does all your talking for you.” He pulled a silly face at Louise and added, “Ugly as sin, of course, but still expressive.”
“You love his ugly mug,” Louise said, her smile smug as Rob nodded. “I knew it—” She broke off when Trevor stood straight.
“Okay. This is the best I can do.”
There might have only been a few feet between them but it seemed like nautical miles to Jude, wading instead of easily walking through hope and dread that felt hip-high. Trevor pointed to a much smaller quadrant than Jude had expected, this final chart denoting rocky outcrops, spits of land, and a spatter of small islands he hadn’t come anywhere close to searching.
Jude made his way to the office much, much faster than he’d crossed those few feet in the bar. He ran, catching his hip on the door to the hallway, clipping his shoulder on the office doorframe until he got to the phone, which rang and rang against his ear until his old skipper answered. “Of course,” Tom said without hesitation as soon as Jude blurted his request. “Of course I will. I told you I’d change course for you anytime, didn’t I, Jude? I’ll do it right now, and I’ll spread the word.”