Rewind

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  Richard’s face hardened.

  She took a couple of steps back.

  He didn’t move to follow, but he held up a hand in a frozen wave and said, slowly and deliberately, ‘I’ll be sure and get that microwave fixed for you.’

  He locked eyes with her as he said this, turning whatever unease she’d been feeling up to eleven.

  Natalie moved abruptly and started walking, not knowing exactly where she was going, only that it was away from him. Where was this fabled hotel supposed to be? She felt for the key of the cottage in her pocket, manoeuvring her hand until the plastic tag was in her palm and the sharp end of the key was poking up between her fingers.

  Just in case.

  She could feel Richard’s gaze boring holes into her back.

  But … Could she really? Or was she just overreacting? Imagining things, again? She pictured herself recounting what had just happened to someone who wasn’t there. Well, he came up to me and said it was a gorgeous morning and then offered me a lift back to the cottages because the road is a bit dangerous for walkers and, oh, he said he’d make sure to get the broken thing in my cottage fixed because that’s his job.

  She could see Mike in her mind’s eye, hands on his hips, looking at the ceiling, lips pressed together. Trying to think of a way to say that she was losing her grip on reality without actually saying that. A new way.

  ‘Fucking bitch,’ Richard spat from behind her.

  Nope, right the first time.

  Natalie picked up her pace.

  The Front Strand was just one long beach disappearing around a bend into the Far Strand at the west end and, from what she could see, ending in a bank of sand dunes up ahead of her, to the east. The footpath she was on ran parallel to the water. There was a large car park with two or three cars, all empty; a neglected children’s playground and some low-slung buildings off in the distance that might be a shop and a pub or café or something, but were all shuttered up. That was it. Everything else was fields and road or things that looked to be very far away. Shanamore itself was forty-five minutes’ walk – at least – back the way she’d come, and she was getting further and further away from it with every step.

  But she wasn’t going back to where he was. Not a chance.

  She saw it then. A bus stop.

  It was on the other side of the playground, by the main road: a lonely red pole with a dinner-plate-sized Bus Éireann logo tacked on top. The bus that had brought her here yesterday had driven past here on the way to Shanamore. Logic dictated that it would do the same today. But how often?

  Natalie was steps from the stop when she heard an approaching car slow behind her. For a second she worried it was Richard but when she turned she saw, sitting somewhat incongruously in the driver’s seat of a monstrous Jeep, a woman who looked like she might have her photo under ‘Kindly Grandmother’ in the dictionary. The passenger-side window was sliding down with an electronic buzz and the woman was leaning over.

  ‘You need a lift, love?’ she called. ‘That bus won’t be here for hours. I’m going as far as the village if that’s any good to you?’

  It was better than good. Natalie skipped the obligatory round of polite refusals, eagerly pulled open the door and got in the car, awash with relief.

  Kindly Grandmother was Nettie, who lived in nearby Ballycotton. She and her husband were retired but ran a B&B from their house during the summer months. They talked about the weather and the lack of public transport in rural areas and how good the cake was in the café in The Kiln.

  It was after nine now; The Kiln would be open. Natalie asked if Nettie wouldn’t mind dropping her off there.

  ‘Not at all, love. Sure it’s on the way.’

  The Kiln’s car park was nearly full and a couple were walking up the steps into the shop. It felt like Grafton Street compared to the beach. But when Natalie entered The Kiln – its interior seemed to have both the ceiling height and the respectful hush of a church or a cathedral – she found that the place was practically deserted. There was just the couple she’d followed up the steps, a bored cashier rearranging leaflets at the register and, down the far end, a waitress in an empty café area.

  She wondered who owned all the cars outside.

  Then Natalie saw the very last thing she was expecting to see here, in The Kiln, in Shanamore.

  A picture of her own face smiling up at her.

  Audrey arrived at Mike and Natalie’s home just as someone else was leaving it: a blonde woman, wearing a long, beige trench coat cinched tightly at the waist and a pair of those thick-framed designer glasses that manage to look both ridiculous and incredibly chic all at once. She turned and walked off in the opposite direction, towards the beach. Audrey wondered if maybe the woman was one of Natalie’s friends. She made a mental note to check Natalie’s Instagram connections for women who looked like that later.

  Sydney Parade Avenue seemed relatively quiet for a residential street so close to the city centre and abutted by two busy roads. There was a steady flow of traffic but no horns or sirens, and no pedestrians once the blonde woman had disappeared around a bend in the road. The Kerr–O’Connor home was an elegant redbrick Edwardian semi-D with a stained-glass window in its front door and what looked like new sash windows in a tasteful sage green. A loose gravel drive pushed the house back from the road and immaculately manicured hedging served as a buffer from it. It was picture-perfect except for the fact that all the blinds were drawn and one of the two vehicles parked outside was a Garda car.

  The listing for the house was still online. Audrey had checked. It didn’t reveal how much the house had actually sold for, but the asking price had been just a few euro shy of seven figures. Crazy money for the square footage, but par for the course in this, Ireland’s most expensive postcode.

  As Audrey walked up the drive, each step made a conspicuously loud crunching sound on the loose gravel underfoot. The rattan welcome mat said Our neighbours have better stuff.

  She rang the doorbell and stepped back to wait.

  An electronic ding from her coat pocket signalled the arrival of a new email. A message from Joel. This time he was no words and all punctuation.

  ???

  Audrey was hurriedly typing Got something, more soon when the front door opened and she and Mike Kerr were face-to-face.

  He looked a bit dishevelled, like he’d just woken up from a nap, but otherwise he was the man in Natalie O’Connor’s wedding photos. Tall and broad-shouldered and attractive, but in a generic, forgettable kind of way. If she’d seen him committing a crime, she mused now, she’d find him hard to describe to police. He was in need of a shave and either didn’t know or didn’t care that he’d dripped coffee or some other brown liquid down the front of his shirt.

  He blinked at her in confusion.

  ‘Audrey,’ she said, sticking out a hand. ‘Coughlan. From The Paper? We spoke on the phone.’

  ‘Right, right,’ Mike said. ‘Yes. Sorry. Come in, come in.’

  Inside the house was quiet and cold. What little light was coming through the blinds was weak and thin. Shadows fell everywhere. The difference between what Audrey had seen of this house online and what she was looking at now was the difference between the dress on the model on the dodgy website and the dress that arrived, creased and wrinkly and shapeless, in the post a month later postmarked China. Natalie O’Connor had clearly applied a few filters in her time.

  Mike led her down the hall, towards the rear of the house. As they passed the open door of what looked like the living room, Audrey caught a glimpse of the occupants: one man and one woman, both in Garda uniforms. She was standing in front of the fireplace, he was sitting on the couch. Both of them looked up as they passed. It was somewhat disconcerting to encounter uniformed Gardaí in someone’s home and Audrey was reminded that she was totally winging it here and potentially way out of her depth.

  Her palms began to sweat.

  Mike took her into the kitchen, an enormous, clinically white
space, clearly a new extension to the original house. The blinds were up on these windows and there was an enormous skylight above the dining table, so it wasn’t quite as gloomy as the front of the house. But Audrey could detect a faint rotting-food smell; somewhere there was a rubbish bin that needed emptying or a fridge in need of a clear-out. There were soiled dishes in the sink and a pizza box on the counter, stained with splotches of grease.

  Mike indicated that she should take a seat at the dining table.

  Audrey obeyed and then set about getting what she needed out of her bag. Her notebook. A pen. Her phone so she could record the conversation. She did this slowly, to give herself a chance to gather her thoughts. She’d start by asking the questions she’d come up with on the way here, the ones she’d hastily scribbled down in the bus shelter around the corner. But she should also remember to study him, to try to gauge his emotional state, to see what she could glean from his demeanour. And not to upset him. Unless … Would it be better if he did get upset? Would that make a better story?

  Audrey began to wish that she’d talked to Joel before she’d left the office, got his advice.

  Mike sat down across from her.

  Too late now.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘thanks so much for agreeing to talk to me.’ She smiled, then realised this wasn’t a smiling situation. And she should probably say … ‘I’m so sorry about Natalie.’ But that made it sound like she was offering her condolences. Shit. ‘I mean, I was sorry to hear that she’d …’ What? What was the end of that sentence? Natalie could be luxuriating in a five-star spa resort on the lakes of Killarney for all anyone knew. ‘I know this must be a very stressful time for you.’ Okay, good. ‘And a very frustrating one.’ Better. ‘But because we’re an online news site, I think we’re best placed to reach Natalie’s followers. Much more so than the traditional media outlets. So we can get the details out there, amplify the Garda appeal. We can help. We will help. With your help.’ Oh, that was good. Where had she pulled that from? She should write that one down.

  ‘Yeah,’ Mike said. He had folded his arms. ‘Let’s just get this over with.’

  For a second Audrey was wounded that she’d failed to endear herself to her subject, but this wasn’t a social call. She set her phone recording and pushed it across the table, closer to him. She flipped to the page in her notebook with her questions. Most of them were barely legible.

  She closed the notebook again. Took a deep breath.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘Mike. Right. Let’s start at the beginning. When did you first realise that Natalie was missing?’

  ‘I don’t know that she is missing.’ When he saw the confusion on Audrey’s face, Mike added, ‘Just because I don’t know where she is doesn’t mean she’s missing. Does it?’

  Audrey thought that since he was her husband and he hadn’t seen or heard from his wife in a week and there was a Garda appeal out for information on her whereabouts, that’s exactly what it meant.

  ‘Okay … Well, then, when did you last see her? Let’s start there.’

  ‘Monday morning.’

  ‘Here in the house?’

  ‘Here in this kitchen.’

  ‘How did she seem?’

  Mike’s eyes narrowed. ‘I thought this was about asking the public for help.’

  ‘It is, but—’

  ‘Then why do you need to know how she seemed?’ He rolled his eyes. Combined with the folded arms, messed-up hair and stained T-shirt, the gesture gave him the distinctive air of Sullen Teenager. ‘You don’t.’

  Audrey hadn’t expected Mike to be this prickly but then maybe he was right to be. ThePaper.ie could help disseminate the appeal for information on Natalie’s whereabouts, yes, but only if it came wrapped up in something that appealed to their core readership. A story that was, on some level, an attempt to tear Natalie down.

  Maybe Mike knew this.

  Maybe this was just him trying to protect his wife.

  ‘Had you any contact with her after that?’ Audrey asked. Yes/no questions were probably a safer bet at this juncture. ‘After you saw her on Monday morning, I mean.’

  Mike shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘She didn’t leave a note?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you try to contact her?’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  ‘By phone?’

  ‘Repeatedly. There was no answer. Then it started going straight to voicemail. I sent her messages too, but there was no response.’

  ‘Did any of those messages have read receipts?’

  ‘She never read them,’ Mike said. ‘By the morning after, they weren’t even getting delivered. She must have turned her phone off.’

  ‘Do you’ve any idea where she might have gone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Has she done anything like this before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why did you wait a week to report it to the Gardaí?’

  ‘Because this isn’t—’ Mike stopped, exhaled. She sensed he was either nearing the end of his patience or regretting inviting her here, or both. ‘This isn’t that, okay?’

  ‘Not what?’

  ‘You know …’ He waved a hand, as if the thing they were talking about was tangible and sitting on the table between them. ‘Something bad.’

  Audrey waited.

  ‘Look,’ Mike continued, ‘she cancelled things, okay? She had an event on Thursday – last Thursday – and first thing Monday, that morning, she cancelled it. She called the organisers on the phone and sent an email apologising. And then there was that post, with the suitcase …’ He shrugged. ‘She just needed some time off, that’s all.’

  ‘But why not tell you that?’ Audrey said. ‘Do you think?’

  Mike looked away. ‘I don’t know.’

  Because maybe she needed time off from you, too, Audrey thought.

  She said, ‘So, you last see her on Monday morning and you called the Gardaí on …?’

  ‘Natalie’s parents called them on Friday,’ Mike said. ‘I was going to give it until today, but they didn’t want to wait.’

  ‘Why did you want to?’

  ‘Because I didn’t want this,’ Mike said, pointing at Audrey. ‘Or them.’ Pointing towards the living room. The two uniformed Gardaí in there.

  ‘But surely you want to know where she is, that she’s safe.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ Mike said, loud enough for it to qualify as shouting. ‘That’s why I’m doing this, why I’m talking to you.’ He shook his head. ‘For all the bloody good it’s doing.’

  Audrey let a beat pass.

  ‘When you saw her,’ she said then, ‘do you know if it was before or after she put that post with the suitcase up on Instagram? The one with the note about her taking a break? Because I read some of the comments on it and, God, they were awful.’

  ‘Never read the comments.’

  ‘Is that what Natalie says?’

  ‘It’s what I say to her. All the time.’

  ‘Does she listen to you? Maybe she read the ones on that post and got upset, and that had something to do with why she left.’

  Mike shook his head. ‘It wasn’t that.’ Before Audrey could ask the obvious question, he’d pushed on. ‘Look, Nat values her privacy, okay? I know that seems like a weird thing for someone in her position to claim, but she does. Everything that goes up online is carefully chosen. That pink suitcase? That’s not even hers. Not the one she uses, anyway. She points out the things to people that she wants them to see and she keeps everything else for herself. For us. We live a private life, ironically. And I want her to come home, to come back, but I don’t believe that I have to go against her wishes in order to do that, okay? We’re appealing for information here, not sharing it. We should be able to do this without, you know, you printing her diaries or whatever.’

  ‘When you say “her wishes”, you mean …?’

  ‘She wanted more privacy, not to be more exposed than she ever had.’

&nb
sp; ‘But surely she would’ve known that if she left, and told no one where she was going, that it would—’

  ‘I know,’ Mike said. ‘I know.’ He threw up his hands. ‘I’m just trying to do my best here, okay? I don’t know why she left without telling me. Maybe she didn’t. I mean, maybe she did tell me. I was thinking, she could’ve called and left a voicemail, but, like, accidentally rang the wrong number or something?’

  It took Audrey a moment to realise he was actually asking her this.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said. ‘Yeah. That’s possible. But, ah, wouldn’t she have heard the voicemail greeting and realised it wasn’t you?’

  It was written all over Mike’s face: he hadn’t thought of that.

  ‘The Gardaí are here,’ Audrey said to change the subject.

  ‘Yeah … Our next-door neighbour called them.’

  Audrey was confused. ‘About Natalie?’

  ‘No. She, ah, she saw some woman creeping around the back garden earlier. While I was out. She called 999 to report a break-in.’ He sighed. ‘It was probably just one of Natalie’s crazy followers. She has a few.’

  ‘But surely they don’t know where she lives?’

  ‘You’d hope not. But there, um …’ Mike hesitated. ‘There was an incident a couple of weeks back. This woman knocked on the door. Natalie thought it was a neighbour and invited her in.’

  ‘What happened?’ Audrey said. ‘Who was she?’

  Two loud electronic notes rang out: the doorbell. Mike got up so fast that his chair’s legs screeched on the floor.

  As he hurried out of the kitchen, Audrey sank back into her chair, deflated. Just when things were getting interesting … She pressed PAUSE on her phone.

  She could hear the front door opening, then voices in the hall. The shuffle of footsteps. The voices moved away and then were muffled suddenly by the closing of an interior door. It sounded like someone had arrived and Mike had gone with them into the living room where the two Gardaí already were.

  Audrey looked around the kitchen.