Missing Pieces

by Tim Weaver

  ‘Do you know what’s wrong with it?’ Rebekah asked.

  He shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘So can’t you just take it into the shop?’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said, ‘absolutely. It’s not that. I’ve got the day off today, so that’s fine, and tomorrow, for work, I can just get the subway. Or the day after. I can’t remember when my next shift is.’

  She frowned, unsure where this was headed.

  ‘So what’s the problem? Is it money?’

  ‘No, no. It’s not that.’ He grimaced. ‘I know it’s probably a total waste of time, but I’ve been thinking about maybe starting a new novel. I can’t get this idea out of my head.’

  That wasn’t what she’d been expecting.

  For some reason, Rebekah thought of Kirsty, of her parents, of all the lies she’d told them down the years about Johnny being a novelist. She’d always played down his imaginary success, saying his books were out of print, because she never wanted them asking questions about where they could find his work.

  ‘That’s great, Johnny,’ she said, and felt a stab of guilt. Was it great for him, because he was pursuing his dream again? Or great for her, because, if he got somewhere with a novel, she wouldn’t be embarrassed about what he actually did for a living?

  ‘You really think it’s good?’ he asked.

  But she’d lost the tail of the conversation and all she could think about was how ugly she’d been, how distressingly shallow. Johnny was everything to her. She adored him.

  ‘Bek?’ he said. ‘You don’t think I’m making a mistake?’

  ‘No, of course not. That’s so great, Johnny.’

  Her enthusiasm seemed to energize him.

  ‘Have you ever heard of Crow Island?’ he asked.

  ‘Vaguely,’ she replied, and she filled the kettle. ‘Is that going to be the setting of the book?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he replied, pulling out a chair at the table. ‘It’s this island one hundred and one miles south-east of Long Island. Basically, three hours on a ferry from Montauk.’ Rebekah enjoyed watching him, hearing the passion in his voice. She felt a charge of excitement for him that was completely selfless. It made her feel better immediately. ‘It’s actually called Cruys Island,’ he went on, ‘after the explorer Matthijs Cruys, who landed there in 1694, but when the British bought it from the Dutch, they couldn’t pronounce “Cruys” so they called it “Crow” instead, because there were also these huge colonies of fish crow out there.’ He saw her expression and rolled his eyes. ‘Sorry, that’s very boring. Anyway, these days, it’s a ghost. It was a popular vacation spot for a while, but then a hurricane razed it to the ground in the eighties. Now it’s only open from April to October to service the fishing industry. They get a few academics too – you know, marine biologists and those sort of people – because there are whales and seals off the north coast. But mostly it’s fishermen.’

  Now Rebekah understood where this was going. Academics meant potential interviewees for the research part of Johnny’s book, and if he needed to get to Crow Island to talk to them, he wouldn’t be able to do it in a busted car.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  Johnny frowned. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes, you can borrow the Jeep.’

  He laughed. ‘Am I that predictable?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, smiling, and started to make them some tea. ‘Is that what the snowglobe was for? To butter me up?’

  She asked the question, but knew the answer. Johnny didn’t think like that. Thinking like that required cynicism.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I promise it wasn’t.’

  ‘I know. Of course you can borrow the car.’

  ‘Thanks, Bek. You’re amazing.’

  She hugged him again. ‘I know.’

  ‘I’ve got an interview lined up for this Saturday with a curator from the Museum of Natural History, and I just need a car I can rely on. I don’t want to let this guy down. He’s been out on the island since April, researching the Niantic people, and it’s taken me almost three months of emails to get him to commit. I want to set the book on the island the year Cruys landed, and this guy is basically the world’s foremost expert on that period, and that location.’

  But then his expression clouded.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Rebekah asked.

  ‘I just hope I’m not making a mistake.’ He tapped out a rhythm with his fingers on the table. ‘You know, chasing around, trying to pretend I’m a proper writer.’

  ‘You are a proper writer.’

  ‘Bek, I don’t think it counts if you’re unpublished and the only person who actually read your failure of a novel is your sister.’

  She punched his shoulder playfully. ‘Cheer up, will you? I’m the one who kicked her husband out so that means I’m the one who’s supposed to be wallowing in self-pity, not you. So what if you don’t have a publishing deal yet? So what if you’re doing this on your day off from the store? Who cares? In a few years, when this book hits the shelves, and the New York Times is falling over itself to interview you, it’ll be worth it. Right?’

  He looked at her.

  ‘Right?’

  Johnny smiled. ‘You’re a bully, you know that?’

  That night, Rebekah missed a call from Kirsty.

  Or, rather, she chose not to pick up.

  She just watched the cellphone buzz on the nightstand until, finally, it fell silent. Ordinarily, she would have loved to talk to her, but there was really only one reason why Kirsty would try to get Rebekah on the phone so soon after they’d last seen each other: she wanted to talk about the night out they’d had. She’d heard something about the man Rebekah had met at the club. She wanted the details, the gossip.

  Rebekah turned off her phone.

  25

  She kept moving.

  She had no idea which part of the forest this was.

  Ahead of her, the man with the green eyes looked both ways, and headed right. Rebekah picked up her pace. He was weaving a path between a clump of withered oaks and, beyond him, Rebekah could see the beach and the ocean, then the trawler, to the right, bobbing at the jetty.

  She slowed down as she closed the distance between them and then, gradually, became aware of something else.

  Another shape in the shadows.

  She ducked into some nearby beachgrass, the noise disguised by the crash of the Atlantic, and lay flat on her stomach, hoping she hadn’t been seen. The grass was drenched with sea spray but she didn’t move. Instead, with her chin in the sand, she picked out the shadow again, between her and the beach.

  It was another man.

  She could see the dome of his head, could see he’d shaved his hair – but couldn’t tell which way he was looking.

  ‘Anything?’ he said.

  He was the caller. She recognized his voice.

  Green Eyes shook his head.

  ‘You ever hang up on me again like that,’ the caller said, taking a step forward, emerging from the night, ‘I’ll gut you like a fish. You’re just a grunt, remember that.’

  Rebekah tensed. The man had a New York accent and she could see he was shorter than Green Eyes, but he was wider – brawny and fibrous, like a wrestler. She didn’t recognize him, but she could sense the type of man he was just by looking at him. She’d seen his type in emergency rooms, over and over again, as they waited around outside the OR. They’d pretend to be brothers or cousins in order to find out if the patient was going to live. But they were never relatives. At best, they were messengers or spies, sent to find out if someone had died. More often, they were the reason the victims had ended up on a table in the first place. They were the men who’d fired the bullet, or embedded the knife between the ribs.

  ‘So we came all the way down here for nothing?’ the caller said, obviously annoyed at the lack of comeback from his partner. He swivelled to face him this time, his expression carved in anger. ‘Lima.’

  Lima.

  Green Eyes, the man who’d tried to kill h
er, was called Lima. She was certain now that she didn’t know him and had never come across him before – so why would a total stranger want her and Johnny dead?

  ‘She’s in there somewhere.’

  ‘You already said that,’ the caller responded coldly.

  Lima looked behind him, his headtorch hitting a spot about five feet to Rebekah’s left. Her heart lurched. She didn’t move a muscle, just watched him: she could see his gun in his belt, a knife in a sheath at his waist. She wondered if that was the knife he’d used to slash the back tyre on the Jeep.

  Wait. The Jeep.

  It wasn’t at the dig site any more. It was parked at the end of the beach, a quarter of a mile from here. What if these two decided to go back for it? What happened when they got to the dig site and didn’t find it there? They’d know she was still alive.

  Fuck.

  Should she go back for the car?

  No, wait, calm down.

  They came in by boat and docked here, to the east of the forest. As it was, they could barely find their way through the trees in the dark, so they weren’t about to hike through to the dig site. If they’d had a car with them, it might have been different – they could have looped around to it via the main road – but it was a long way on foot if they didn’t know an exact route through the trees, and they’d already said they couldn’t afford to hang around.

  ‘I know I screwed up.’ Lima’s voice brought her back. It had unexpectedly faltered. ‘I know I screwed this up for us.’

  The caller paused. ‘If you fix it, no one needs to know.’

  ‘Fix it how?’

  The caller turned, moonlight painting the top half of his face, eye sockets black as oil. He was scanning the trees, as if he sensed he was being watched.

  ‘Hain? Fix it how?’

  Hain.

  Now she had both their names.

  ‘We wait,’ Hain said.

  Lima frowned. ‘Wait? What are you talking about?’

  ‘We can’t afford to get caught here: we’re snooping around in the middle of the night, without a permit, in the off season. It looks suspicious because it is suspicious. That means we can’t come back. If you and I get caught out here, we’re gonna get charged and that puts us on the radar.’

  Rebekah glanced at their boat.

  For the first time, a thought came to her: could she make a break for it? Could she use the boat to escape? Would she even know how to operate it? There was a trail, running vaguely parallel to the beach, that she could use to come at the boat from further down the sand.

  ‘So what do you want to do?’ Lima asked.

  Hain didn’t reply, and in the silence Rebekah looked again at the boat. It would be an insane risk.

  And they had guns.

  ‘Hain?’

  ‘Wherever her body is, she ain’t going nowhere between now and next spring. It gets like the Arctic here with the wind, but this close to the ocean, there’s moisture in the air, so that means she’ll still be rotting the whole time. Even so, even if the animals scatter her, like you say they might, even if all that’s left of her by next year is earth and bones, if someone comes down here and we don’t get rid of her, there’ll be enough of her left to make things hard. We can’t leave her out in the open permanently. It’s too much evidence.’

  ‘So you want to wait until next year?’

  ‘April first next year. We get here minute one, day one.’

  ‘You want to wait until the island reopens?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Hain nodded. ‘In five months, this place’ll be open again and that means the ferry will be running. If we get the ferry, we don’t have to worry about the feds stopping us out in the channel and asking questions we don’t want to answer. We don’t have to worry about IDing ourselves. We do it that way, we also don’t have to worry about applying for a permit. We just come over, we find her in the forest, and we bury what’s left of her. We can bring the pickup and the trailer too. After all, we need to dump her car because you didn’t think it would be a good idea to take the keys from her before you killed her.’

  ‘How was I supposed to bring back two cars, plus ours?’

  ‘You weren’t. You were supposed to bring back yours and hers, not yours and that other one.’

  ‘In everything that happened, I just –’

  ‘You forgot to get her keys. You screwed up.’

  The tension between them simmered again.

  ‘Whatever,’ Hain said. ‘Point is, her car’s still where she left it. When we come back in April, the same rules apply as they should have done when you were here last week: if it’s too risky to take her Jeep back to the mainland, we burn it right here. If we think we can get it to the mainland without raising any flags – and that’s the preferred option – we drive it back to the city and crush it like a tin can.’ He paused, looking at the forest, at Lima, a grim darkness lingering in his face. ‘We’re gonna make it like this bitch never even existed.’

  Before

  The day after Rebekah agreed to loan Johnny her car, New York Presbyterian called, waking her from a dead sleep at 6 a.m., before either of the girls was up. They asked if she could come in and cover the day shift: through a combination of vacations and ill-timed sickness, they were short of orthopaedic surgeons.

  Gareth was away with work and Noella was at her dad’s, and although Johnny was great with the girls, he’d never had both of them for a whole day. That meant, if Rebekah was going in, the only real option was daycare. She hated leaving Kyra and Chloe for so long, good as the staff were with the girls, but she wanted to keep the hospital sweet: now she was on her own, she’d need the money – and that inevitably meant taking on more shifts.

  In the end the day turned out to be fairly routine.

  She’d done her residency at NYP so she always liked returning, even if it brought back memories of her constantly pulling midnight-to-midnight shifts. Restrictions meant she wasn’t supposed to have worked more than eighty hours per week or thirty hours in a single shift, but she’d quickly learned that the rules didn’t mean much on the ground. Some weeks she’d clocked a hundred hours, a lot of her nights filled with so-called ‘scut’ work: monotonous tasks like IV line replacements, stat blood draws, and accompanying patients to CT scans and X-rays. She liked the hospital and its staff, but she didn’t miss those years.

  An hour before she was due to leave and pick up the girls, she was asked to check on a patient with a suspected broken wrist. It seemed straightforward, but when she got to the ward, the injury was more complicated than it had initially seemed, and she left the hospital late. By the time she arrived at the daycare facility, it was after 8 p.m. and they’d already been closed for thirty minutes. The staff were pissed off at having to hang around, the girls were over-tired and agitated, and although she tried to feed them quickly and get them into bed, neither Kyra nor Chloe would co-operate, and Rebekah had to put up with an hour and a half of screaming.

  By the time they finally fell asleep, it was almost ten o’clock.

  Absolutely exhausted, Rebekah crept out of their bedroom and simply slumped onto a step halfway down the stairs. It took her a full ten minutes to uncoil, and when she did, she found herself staring at the picture of her, Johnny, Mike and her father in their favourite diner.

  This time, she reached up and took it off the wall.

  She remembered the lie she’d told Noella: that she’d been thinking about her dad a lot lately. Her eyes switched between him and Mike, and then she said a silent apology to them both for letting them slip so far from her thoughts. Johnny and she were either side of them in the same booth they always took in winter, when it was too cold to sit outside.

  Whenever they met, conversations would often wheel around to Mike because his was by far the most interesting life and he was a born storyteller. Between them, they had such a weird mix of accents – Johnny mid-Atlantic, Rebekah diluted English infused with countless American expressions – that people often wouldn’t bel
ieve they were related, but because Mike always sounded like a born-and-bred New Yorker, his stories somehow seemed more exotic. Their father would often ask him questions like, ‘What happened to that blonde you were dating?’ – knowing some anecdote would be attached – and Mike would seize the moment. His self-deprecation offset any charge of arrogance. He would frequently joke about how bad he was with relationships, or about his most recent app only being a success because no one had yet realized what a fraud he was.

  The last time the four of them had gone out, it was cold, trees reduced to bones, steam rising out of subway grates, as if the earth itself was breathing. Johnny brought their father, as he always did in those last years, and Rebekah arrived shortly after, completely fried, not just because she’d pulled an eighteen-hour shift but because she was seven months pregnant with Kyra at the time. Mike didn’t get there until thirty minutes later, by which point the others had ordered for him and were into a second round of drinks – or Diet Coke in Rebekah’s case. As soon as Mike slid into their booth by the window, the elevated train tracks outside like the belly of an immense beast, he said, ‘Any of you remember that girl I dated? Alice?’

  They all stared at him blankly.

  ‘This would have been ten, maybe twelve years ago.’

  Rebekah looked at Johnny, who shrugged, and it was clear it wasn’t just her who didn’t recall Alice. Mike looked shocked, ran a hand through his thick black hair, turned to their father. ‘What about you, Pa? You remember Alice?’

  Their father didn’t reply, but his mouth was turned up in amusement. He always looked like that before Mike launched into one of his stories.

  ‘No one remembers her?’ Mike asked.

  Johnny smiled. ‘Mikey, in fairness, the last official count put your number of former girlfriends at one million, six thou–’