by Leah Stewart
Josie nods and smiles and thanks him, and they wait. The clerk is staring at her face openly now, as if to memorize or place it. Long minutes drag by. Josie pretends interest in a rack of brochures beside the desk. Finally he calls her back over, hanging up the phone. “They cannot find Mystery, I’m sorry to say. But the housekeeping manager says she’s happy to accommodate you. Here’s how you reach her.” He writes a name and number on the back of a card.
“But no one knows where Mystery is?”
“No, I’m sorry.” He frowns. “No one can find her.”
At Charlie’s cottage, it looks like nothing has changed since the day before. If he’s been back, he’s ignoring her note. Maybe he’s angry and punishing her, but that would be unlike Charlie. Maybe he’s devastated and avoiding pain, or he’s over her and avoiding an uncomfortable scene. If he hasn’t been back, what does that mean? No matter which window she tries, she can’t get an angle that allows her to see whether the note is still there on the floor. She crouches in the driveway looking for fresh tire tracks, then feels ridiculous. What show does she think she’s on? If only Agent Corbett were here.
Cecelia, Josie would say, should I go talk to the police, or is that crazy? Cecelia, after all the hours logged faking expertise, might actually know. She’s interviewed real FBI agents. She knows the next step when someone is missing. But Josie has no cell service and only herself to ask. How can she persuade the police that anything is amiss? Because Charlie, who planned overnight hikes, is not home? Because a maid looked at her funny and said his name? No doubt this will sound ridiculous. But Josie’s expertise, like that of all heroes, is in believing she can do impossible things.
There’s no police station in the tiny town with the church and the upscale market, but a woman who sells handmade soap near the parrot stand directs her to the next town farther up the main road. This one is larger, with double-decker strip malls lining a half-mile stretch and bars already raucous with locals and vacationers. It’s still light out, but some of these people are very drunk. As Josie emerges from her car in the station parking lot, she witnesses someone walk down the steps from a bar deck to vomit on the sidewalk.
Inside the station, she finds one policeman who speaks English. He listens to her with the air of someone humoring a small child. He is only thirty, more than ten years younger than Josie, but he is one of those men who treat all women like they are much younger than they are. He has heard nothing about Charlie, nothing about any incidents involving an unidentified white American man. He thinks that if Charlie has not been to his cottage since yesterday there are many reasonable explanations. People go on hikes, long hikes, he tells her, hikes they sleep on. He also implies Charlie might be with another woman, which is nothing Josie hasn’t thought of herself. Charlie and Mystery.
“If he went hiking, where do people hike?”
“Oh, everywhere, everywhere. You would not find him.” He tells her that 80 percent of the island is wilderness. He tells her there are some places you can reach only by foot, only by helicopter, only by boat. He says Charlie could be anywhere. Only he doesn’t say Charlie he says your boyfriend, because that’s who Josie told him Charlie is. He’s forgotten Charlie’s name, as proven when he stops Josie as she rises to go. “Wait,” he says. “Is his name Ben Phillips?”
“No,” Josie says. “Why?”
The policeman attempts to retract his eager interest. He is not a good actor. “I thought it might be.”
“Why?”
“Someone said there is an American named Ben Phillips.”
Josie frowns. The name sounds familiar, but she has no idea why. “I’m sure there is. I’m looking for Charlie Outlaw.”
The policeman shrugs. “Charlie Outlaw I don’t know.”
Back at the resort, there’s a new clerk at the desk, a woman, so Josie risks trying her story again. She is not yet desperate enough to call the manager and enact a further charade. This time, when the clerk calls housekeeping, the report is that Mystery left early.
“Is she sick? Where did she go?”
The clerk smiles with regret at the disappointment she must cause and says she doesn’t know.
Four.
Where is Mystery? She was supposed to arrive on the beach yesterday. Twice today Denise has had Thomas inventory the supplies. He was surly the second time she asked him, but uncharacteristically she ignored it, preoccupied by Mystery’s failure to appear. He was surly—still is surly—in no small part because this morning Denise decided to restrict food consumption. He’s hungry, and he’s sick of sand in his clothes, and every time he looks at the limp figure in the hammock he feels a nauseating disgust. The world is full of beggars and weaklings, people who do what they’re told for no good reason. Why should he be one of them?
Denise worries. She is not used to worry. She would like to tear the worry out and stomp it to death. She pictures herself with a writhing snake gripped in her hand, its frantic thrashing tail.
Five.
Where is Mystery? Still not at work, and the clerk this morning is wary in the face of Josie’s questions. Josie discards a half-formed notion of trying to act her way into possession of Mystery’s address. Then what would she do? Just go knock on her door?
She arrived here with a plan—go to Charlie’s rental house—and despite the lack of results, she’s struggling to find an alternative. So she reenacts it, another rehearsal, or maybe this time the show. Already the drive has a comforting familiarity. The tree tunnel; the little church; all those hibiscus flowers, casual in their glory; the lonely trailer. “Hello,” she says out loud as she passes it. For the hundredth, thousandth, millionth time, she plays out the scene in her head: This time, when she pulls up, a rental car will be in the drive, and when she knocks, Charlie will open the door. Charlie rises early even when he doesn’t have to be on set, even on vacation, and he’s probably been getting up with the sun, especially in that cottage with its uncovered windows. She imagines the sun all but comes in and shakes you awake. So he woke in that bed, under that canopy, and he stretched his long body until his feet pushed off the edge, and then he did a spinal twist and made a sound of either satisfaction or exasperation, depending on whether he achieved the sharp crack he wanted. Then he’d prop his head on a couple of pillows and reach for his phone. Many times she’s woken to find him like that, phone in his hand, but not looking at it, looking at her. “Why are you always looking at me when I wake up?” she asks—though he isn’t always—and he says . . .
Anyway. When she knocks, Charlie will open the door. He’ll be wearing an old soft T-shirt and sweatpants. His hair will be charmingly tousled. He’ll smell like sleep and fresh coffee. He’ll look surprised to see her. He’ll look astonished. And then she’ll say . . .
Maybe she won’t even get as far as the door before he opens it. He’ll hear her wheels on the gravel drive, and he’ll be startled and wary. He’ll come out to see who the hell it is. Have people recognized him here? Will he think she’s a stalker who’s managed to track him down?
And then she’ll say, “I’m pregnant.”
She’ll say, “Your mother sent me.”
She’ll say, “Well, Charlie Outlaw, you’re a hard man to find.”
I love you.
Hi.
Can we please get the writer to the set?
But there is no car in the drive. All is as it was yesterday and the day before. Even the peacock is still at it. The peahens persist in their indifference. Or maybe it’s not indifference but wary watchful distance. Indifference requires either confidence or despair. If they were truly indifferent, they wouldn’t avoid the peacock like that. Where they go is determined by where he is not. She, too, repeats herself, looks in the windows, checks the ground for clues.
Now what? Think of something, Josie. Something besides wishing really hard.
Mystery, policeman, long hikes, Charlie’s moth
er, going dark, the policeman saying You would not find him, Mystery staring at her stomach, that photo of her with Max.
Ben Phillips.
She feels an internal jolt, a sudden cold alertness. That was the name of Charlie’s character on the show he did with Alan Reed. The policeman asked if she was looking for Ben Phillips. Is Charlie going by that name? If he is, why does the policeman know it?
At home—at his house—Charlie often forgets to lock the glass door that leads into his tiered backyard, an absence of mind that Josie, who once had a stalker appear in her own backyard, finds alarming. When she stayed there, she always checked before bed or before they went out that the door was locked. Why can’t he remember? Why do we make the same mistakes over and over? Before we can correct ourselves, one conviction must gain the strength to override another. Charlie, who grew up in a big suburban house, believes that if you have sufficient faith to leave the back door unlocked, that’s how you know you’re safe.
Here, what’s unlocked is the door that leads inside from the wooden enclosure around the shower. If she’d come inside yesterday or the day before, she might have touched the bed where Charlie had slept, pressed her face to his pillow. Now, though, she’s in no mood for melancholy longing. She’s operating at the register of anxiety and dread. She wants reassurance. She wants evidence. It could be a coincidence. Ben Phillips is not that uncommon a name.
Here’s what she learns: that Charlie is indeed without his phone, which she finds at the back of a drawer as if he hid it from himself. She tries to turn it on, but it’s not even charged, and she can’t find a charger. He must have brought it in case he needed it while traveling but left the charger behind so he wouldn’t be able to use it after that. He planned ahead against his own temptations. This thought gives her a pang of thwarted affection, and she clutches the phone in her hand until she realizes it hurts.
On a table by the big front window she finds a guidebook with pages torn out, pages the table of contents tells her are from a section on overnight hikes. A good clue, a reassuring one, except that people die on hikes, people vanish in the wilderness, it happens all the time, or at least often enough to be possible. She can’t figure out which overnight hike the torn-out pages describe, but maybe if she took the book to someone—that policeman?—he would know.
Ben Phillips is a common name.
Her dread is a tsunami, her confidence a fragile wall. She just stands there, but she’s flailing, and that is when she looks out the window and sees a figure moving stealthily toward the house, keeping close to the trees. Immediately she drops into a crouch, out of sight of the window, and even through her panic there comes that sense of having done this many times before. It goes without saying that her heart is rioting, but she has the presence of mind to position herself so she can see out the window without being seen, to reach in her pocket for her phone. The signal comes and goes here, but for the moment, she’s in luck. It’s weak but there. She doesn’t know what number to dial for the police. She has an absurd urge to call Charlie, so hard is it to believe he’s out there in the world without his phone.
Out the window, the figure moves closer. Without looking away, Josie reaches behind her for the guidebook, which surely contains emergency numbers. She looks down to find the number, and when she looks up again, the figure is stepping cautiously out from the trees and she can see that’s it a woman, she can see the woman’s face. It’s Mystery.
What the hero and the actor have in common is that they can think and think beforehand, but when the moment comes, they mustn’t think at all. This is why it’s called acting.
Josie drops the phone and the guidebook as she rises from her crouch, not even noticing the twinge in her knee, which she continues not to notice as she throws open the door, and shouts, “Where is he?” at Mystery, whose face flashes alarm, and who spins away into a run.
She runs into the orchard. Josie gives chase. Her object is to catch Mystery, and that is it, that is all that is necessary. She runs through the trees, pulping fallen fruit, scattering chickens into alarmed and indignant flapping. Catch her. Catch her. Catch her.
Mystery pauses at the end of a row, looking wildly around, and Josie is almost close enough to grab her, but then Mystery darts forward. Josie wills herself to greater speed and barrels into the other woman, knocking them both to the ground. Mystery is gasping, trying to wriggle away, but Josie catches her by the wrist and holds firm. She’s breathing hard. She thinks she might vomit. “Where is he?” she says.
Mystery shakes her head, twisting her wrist in Josie’s grasp, and Josie moves to pin her, putting her weight on Mystery’s chest so they are very close, the closeness we achieve only in love or violence. Mystery looks so frightened that it penetrates Josie’s consciousness that perhaps she, Josie, is the bad guy. Mystery is the maid for this property, Mystery made friends with Charlie, Mystery met him in a bar and is sleeping with him. Josie is a crazed attacker. She eases off Mystery into a sitting position but doesn’t release her wrist. “What are you doing here?”
Mystery swallows. “I follow you.”
It is one of the many strangenesses of Josie’s life that there might be an explanation for why someone would follow her that wouldn’t strike her as all that strange. Alarming, yes, but not strange. “Why?”
“You are really pregnant?”
Josie frowns. “Yes.”
Tears well up in Mystery’s eyes. “The baby. Is his?”
“Charlie’s?”
“Yes,” Mystery whispers.
Josie nods. She lets go of Mystery’s wrist suddenly, dispiritingly sure she knows what’s going on here. This woman is indeed sleeping with Charlie and has imagined it will become something more. Perhaps he’s given her reason to imagine that. And Josie is the third-act obstacle, showing up with his baby in her belly to dramatically raise the stakes.
Mystery sits up cautiously and gingerly touches her wrist. “I will take you to him.”
“Where is he?” Josie asks, feeling fairly certain she no longer wants to know.
“He is . . . on a beach. We will go in a boat.”
“I don’t understand. Why is he there?”
“They took him.”
“They? Who are they?”
Mystery says, “Denise.”
“Who’s Denise? Why did she take him? Could you please just tell me what’s going on?”
Mystery meets her eye. “They took him for money.”
Josie goes cold. She notes with a weird detachment a buzzing sensation at the back of her skull, the way the world rushes away from her. She leans forward to put her head in her hands so she won’t faint. “They kidnapped him?”
Mystery nods. “Yes,” she says. “Kidnap.”
Josie speaks through her hands. “But there’s been no ransom demand. I talked to his mother. There’s been nothing in the news.”
“I was to send. But I did not.”
“You were supposed to ask for ransom? Why didn’t you?”
“Denise, she . . .” Mystery shakes her head. She digs in her pocket for a phone, touches its screen with trembling fingers, holds it out to Josie. On it there is a picture of Charlie—her Charlie—with his face so red and swollen that for a moment she didn’t recognize him. She makes a sound of horror, zooming in on his face to see the swollen nose, the hastily cleaned-up blood, the dull and helpless terror in his eyes.
“Oh my God,” Josie says. “Oh no. Oh my God. Why did they do this to him?”
Mystery’s expression is sorrowful. She shakes her head again to say she doesn’t know.
“We need to go to the police.”
“No.” Mystery snatches the phone back. “No police.”
“I’ll do it. I’ll go to them.”
Mystery gives her a hard stare. “They will not find me. They will not find him.”
“I have to do some
thing. Why are you showing me this? You want me to pay the ransom? Oh, that’s why you followed me. All right. Tell me what you want.” Josie tries to force the tremble from her voice, but it’s the tremble that causes Mystery to soften.
“No, no,” she says. She even reaches out as if to pat Josie’s hand, stops short with her own hand outstretched. “I do not want this. I will take you to him.”
“Why?”
“To save him.”
“How can I save him? Don’t these people have guns?”
“I am late to go there. I bring food. If I am late, they run out of food. Denise say if that happen maybe she just go. She go home and leave Ben there.”
“Who’s Ben?”
“I forget.” Mystery makes a quick, irritated gesture. “Charlie call himself Ben.”
“What do the police know about this?” When Mystery looks blank, Josie adds, “They asked me about Ben Phillips.”
“Darius sent letter, but we not know Charlie’s name.”
“Who’s Darius?”
“Darius is dead.”
“What happened to him?”
Mystery shrugs. “Police shot him.”
“Someone is already dead.”
“Yes,” Mystery says, as though this were obvious.
“I’m an actress,” Josie says.
“I know. I see you in the magazine.”
“You did?”
“You kiss another man. Ben—Charlie—he cry.”
“He saw that picture?”
“I take him magazines. He ask for something to read. So.” She shrugs again. “I did not know what he would see.” What Josie feels deserves the word anguish. “How many people are holding him? How many are there?”
“Three.” Mystery holds up her fingers. “Denise. Thomas. Adan.”
“And you think maybe they left?”
“I hope.” Mystery gets to her feet cautiously, as if afraid to provoke Josie into tackling her again. When Josie doesn’t move, she looks satisfied, then quickly impatient. She holds out her hand, and Josie takes it, because she’s forty-one, pregnant, bruised, terrified, and she needs help getting up. “I will take you to him,” Mystery says, as though they’ve already agreed.
