Missing Pieces

by Tim Weaver

  ‘Hey, Mommy,’ Noella answered.

  The reception was poor, crackly and distant.

  ‘Hey, Noe, is everything okay?’

  ‘Sure. Why wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘I, uh … I don’t know, I just …’ Rebekah swallowed. What the hell is the matter with me?

  ‘You all right, honey?’ Noe asked.

  ‘I just … I just wanted to see how you guys were doing, is all.’ She tried to keep her voice even and upbeat. ‘I loved the picture you sent me. Thanks.’

  ‘What’s going on, Bek?’

  Noe had seen through the lie.

  Rebekah looked towards the hostel, to where Johnny was waiting. Their eyes met and he held out his hands, shrugging in frustration.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rebekah said, almost to herself, and let out a hard breath, as if she’d been holding it in for days. ‘I just had this stupid feeling.’

  ‘Feeling?’

  ‘Like I needed to call you.’

  ‘Well, you can stop worrying,’ Noe said, voicing it like an order. ‘We’re fine. Aren’t we, honey?’ A brief pause. More wind turning to fuzz on the line.

  ‘Mommy?’

  Rebekah’s heart swelled. ‘Ky?’

  ‘Ice cream, Mommy!’

  Rebekah burst out laughing. Everything’s fine. They’re fine. It’s a few hours and then you’ll be home again. ‘I know you’re having ice cream, baby,’ she said to Kyra. ‘I bet it’s yummy.’

  There was no reply this time, just the sound of smacking lips.

  Rebekah smiled. ‘You must be good for Aunty Noe, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Mummy will see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Okay, Mommy.’

  ‘I love you, baby. Give your sister a kiss for me.’

  Noe came back on the line. ‘Relax, Bek. I’ve got this.’

  ‘I know you have. I’m sorry.’

  Johnny was on his way back, so Rebekah said goodbye to Noella and hung up. He pulled open the car door, eyes still on the hostel. ‘No response,’ he said, ‘and he’s still not answering his phone.’

  Rebekah could see he was pissed off.

  Back when they’d been kids, Mike was the hothead. ‘Mike the Psych’, as Rebekah always called him. He was the one who bit back most, and stewed over angry words. Often it was because he lacked patience, the ability to allow others to make mistakes. To him, it was all much simpler just to tell someone what they needed to know, needed to hear, or needed to accept. There was a kind of irony in the fact that those flaws in his character had ended up being the reason he was so successful. Rebekah loved him so much, even when they argued. He was brilliant, funny and irritating, but he was so different from Johnny it was sometimes impossible to imagine they could be related. Johnny rarely lost his temper. He always listened to what you had to say. Rebekah couldn’t remember him saying anything bad about anyone, even the kids at school, who’d picked on him for a time, making fun of his mid-Atlantic accent, his dress sense, and the fact that he preferred to paint rather than play sport.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ Rebekah asked him, watching as the colour slowly drained from his face, the ire, the frustration.

  ‘I guess he must be busy somewhere,’ Johnny said.

  He was gracious too – and always kind. Not that Mike wasn’t, it was just that Johnny’s goodness came from somewhere different, a place that was unspoiled by the type of anger and outbursts that Mike would sometimes unleash.

  ‘So what’s next, big brother?’

  He looked at the hostel and then at her.

  ‘Next is Plan B,’ he said.

  29

  She headed into the forest.

  It had been almost four weeks since she’d looked for Johnny properly, and it felt like a betrayal. Yet a part of her didn’t want to pick up the search again. She was into December. She was into her second month. She was on day thirty-four and, despite all the effort she’d put into looking for him, she’d never found a hint that he was alive.

  There was only one way this was going.

  It was complicated, Lima had told Hain that night on the beach. At the time, Rebekah had entertained the idea that complicated meant Johnny had escaped, got away and made it out. Now it seemed like the hope of a child, simplistic and artless. It had been complicated that day because Lima hadn’t had time to get back and bury Rebekah’s body, not because of something that had happened to Johnny. There was nothing complicated about Johnny.

  Lima killed him, and then buried him.

  Admitting it with such candour stopped her dead. She gazed out at the forest. She’d brought the map with her because it had some old trails marked on it. But as she looked around her, she saw the truth: whatever trails had existed in here had long faded from view.

  She was never going to find him.

  She checked off parts of the island, one by one, using the map. She’d drive to them, get out of the car, wander around looking for food, for clothes, for things she could use – she found some old flares in a derelict house on the north coast – and if she came up with nothing, she put a cross through it and moved on. It was tedious work, relentless and repetitive, not helped by the map being over thirty years old: most of the landmarks – like an old sawmill she found near the lighthouse – had either been abandoned or wiped out entirely.

  Eventually, she arrived at the other hostel.

  Its exterior was the same design as the one she’d already cleared out, just a lot smaller: there was one floor, with four windows on either side.

  The building had another difference too. Both entrances, front and back, were key-locked, not padlocked. The windows were exactly the same as the ones at the other hostel – barred, the glass reinforced – but if she wanted to gain access, she wasn’t going to be able to rely on her strategy of smashing a lock until it snapped.

  She did a loop of the building.

  Neither of the doors appeared particularly strong – they’d peeled and warped, presumably because of the spray coming in off the ocean – so she felt confident she could lever them open. But she’d need something like a crowbar to do it.

  She got back into the Cherokee, grabbed the map and drew a square on the north coast, approximately where the hostel was. It must have been built sometime after Hurricane Gloria: on the map, where she was standing now, there was a blue-grey outline of a different building. It was marked ‘Museum’. There was an arrow coming out of it to an information box describing how the museum had housed an impressive collection of Niantic and early European items, including coins, bone-handled knives and period clothing.

  The museum was gone, and so was its collection.

  Next to the square she’d drawn on the map, she put a question mark, reminding her to come back.

  So far, she had nothing.

  But her luck was about to change.

  30

  The lighthouse sat at the end of a sliver of land called Schooner Point. It had discontinued operation long before the hurricane had hit, but they must have been doing tours of it back then because times and prices were listed on the map. Rebekah imagined it must once have been painted such a stark, clean white, it was almost luminescent, even during the day, but now its paint had sloughed away, like old skin, and it was a finger with frostbite, blackened and decayed. As she approached, she could almost smell the rot on the wind.

  She parked the Cherokee on a slash of cracked blacktop and took in the lighthouse through the plastic wrap on her broken window.

  Grabbing a flashlight from the trunk, she followed a wooden boardwalk across the surface of the dunes. The sun was still out, drifting behind clouds, but it was winter and already the light was dwindling. She zipped up her top and moved onto a red-brick path. It was loose beneath her sneakers, and shifted, like a floor in a funhouse.

  To her surprise, the door was open.

  Nothing, so far, had been this easy, so she stopped for a moment and took it in. When, finally, she reached out and pulled it towards
her, she realized she’d tensed, bracing herself for whatever surprise was coming.

  But there was no surprise.

  Someone had just forgotten to secure it for the winter.

  She stepped into old living quarters, stripped bare of anything that might have proved helpful, then shone her flashlight to her right, where a staircase spiralled upwards. Somewhere above her, a bird flapped its wings as the glow skittered across the white-painted walls.

  She started the climb, all the way up to the lantern room.

  It was hexagonal, and about forty feet in diameter, although it felt smaller inside because of the huge size of the light. Floor-to-ceiling windows gave an uninterrupted view of the island, the immensity of the Atlantic rolling out on all sides of her. A hundred and one miles north-west, the mainland was a smear in the distance. But it was alone. In every other direction, there was nothing. It was infinite ocean and the curve of the earth.

  She looked for any sign of life out on the water, circling the lantern, taking in each part of the island: it was different seeing it from an elevated position, a way to reinforce her knowledge of what she’d already figured out or checked and, potentially, parts she might have missed.

  And that was when her eyes locked on a set of small buildings off to her left, all with corrugated steel roofs.

  They were on the opposite coastline to the mainland, at the end of a mud trail coming off the Loop. Somehow, as she’d driven from the hostel down to the lighthouse, she’d managed to miss them.

  But it wasn’t the buildings that had caught her eye.

  It was something stored at the back.

  A motorboat.

  Before

  Rebekah followed Johnny’s directions, but they still almost missed the entrance to Simmons Gully. His Plan B was to go to the dig site Karl Stelzik was working at.

  The track down was full of potholes, sprinkled with frost, and almost entirely obscured by trees, but at the bottom, Rebekah swung the car in next to a dirt-spattered Chevy Traverse, and knew straight away that they’d found him. The rear seats had been folded down, and the cargo hold was full of tools and equipment. There was also a Museum of Natural History sticker on the front windshield with ‘STAFF’ on it.

  ‘Well, Plan B already looks better than Plan A,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ Johnny replied, and after Rebekah had locked the car, he led them into the trees. She’d worn an old pair of sneakers, and an older pair of denims, so it didn’t matter how muddy the path got, but as they trailed further into the woods, she could see that most of it was frozen hard anyway.

  Fifteen minutes passed, then ten more, then another ten, and finally Rebekah asked, ‘Have you any idea where this dig site is?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s too far,’ Johnny said, but he sounded unconvinced.

  A second later, his foot plunged into a puddle, disguised by the roots of a tree, the water coming all the way up to his ankle.

  ‘Oh, you gotta be kidding me,’ he muttered, stopping, his boot, his pants, both soaked.

  ‘You okay?’ Rebekah asked.

  Her brother flushed with irritation.

  ‘This is frustrating,’ he said, typically underplaying it.

  She guessed he wasn’t just annoyed about his wet foot or the search for Stelzik, but feeling guilty about accepting her invitation to drive him all the way out here. She wanted to reassure him but, in truth, she was starting to feel pissed off herself. This wasn’t sitting on the beach, listening to the sea. They hadn’t started the day in a quaint coffee shop with views of the ocean, nursing an elaborate pastry while a fire roared in the corner. She’d known the island would be basic, but not this basic. And she hadn’t thought they’d be doing a hike.

  ‘I’m sorry about this,’ Johnny said.

  ‘Why don’t you try giving him another call?’ Rebekah asked.

  He showed her his cellphone. ‘No signal.’

  Rebekah checked hers. It was the same.

  ‘I think we should go back,’ she said then.

  Johnny eyed her.

  ‘We don’t know where the hell we’re going. We don’t know where the hell this guy is. We’re just following a vague path into the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘He said the dig site was down here.’

  She looked past Johnny to where the path disappeared. ‘Down where? We’ve probably walked a mile and a half already. It’s almost the end of the season, and the hostel where he was supposed to be staying is totally dead. How do you know he’s even still here?’

  ‘If Stelzik has left already,’ Johnny said, ‘why’s his car back there?’

  Rebekah just shrugged.

  Johnny took a step towards her – and, as he did, his boot squelched comically underfoot. He broke into a smile. ‘Oh, come on, Bek. Are you saying we’re not having a great time?’

  She couldn’t help smiling in return.

  He rocked back and forth on his foot, the wet sound repeating. ‘How about we make a deal?’ he said to her, in the soft voice he’d always used when they were kids – when he was warning her not to rub Dad up the wrong way, when he used to talk about their mother. ‘Ten more minutes and, if he isn’t here, we turn ba–’

  A noise erupted around them.

  They looked at each other.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ Johnny said.

  But he knew exactly what the sound was.

  They both did.

  It was someone screaming.

  31

  It was ten minutes back to the buildings she’d seen from the lighthouse.

  As she drove, she thought about the motorboat she’d spotted there and started to feel frightened. It wasn’t using the boat that scared her – even though she had no experience of boats – it was the thought of taking it out into the Atlantic. The vastness of the ocean, its ferocity, its unpredictability.

  When she got to the buildings, she could see that all but one were wrecks: the one still standing had been converted into some sort of workshop, and, behind two unsecured gates, there were some benches and tools.

  And then the boat.

  It looked intimidatingly huge out of the water.

  It was red and had Chrysler Marine written along its side. The top was open, there was no covering, no roof, just a half-window at the front, where the wheel was. In a stroke of good fortune, it was already mounted on a trailer.

  She opened the gates fully and found a rowboat inside too: it looked like it was in the middle of being painted. Dragging it out of the way, she reversed the Cherokee in and tried to lift the trailer up and onto the hitch at the back. The trailer was heavy, but after a couple of attempts – muscles straining – she managed to slot it into place. She checked the time.

  Almost four.

  It was thirty minutes to sunset, and inside an hour, she’d have no light left. As she looked at the boat on the back of the Jeep, her choice seemed clear.

  She’d have to wait until morning.

  The next day, it rained from sunrise to sunset. She watched from the store’s windows, waiting for the weather to clear, but there was no break.

  The day after that, it was still wet, relentless. She took a drive in the Cherokee, the boat and trailer still attached, looking again for food and clothes, but didn’t find any of either.

  On the third day, the sun finally came out.

  She got up early and drove the short distance to the harbour. It took her a couple of attempts to line up the trailer with the slipway, but once she did she started to inch the Jeep back, and the wheels of the trailer broke the surface of the sea, followed by the boat.

  She had no idea how much of the hull was supposed to be in contact with the water, so she stopped when it was just past halfway in, killed the Jeep’s engine, and unclipped the boat. She felt it shift against the rollers and inch a little way back, then start to slide.

  The boat hit the water.

  Immediately it was drifting in the wind, anchorless. Rebekah hurried forward, first
soaking her shoes, then her pants, and tried to grab at the sides. She missed, almost lost her balance and landed in the water. At a second attempt, she missed again, and by the time she’d finally grabbed hold of the boat, she was forty yards from the slipway, waist-deep in the ocean, and her skin was like ice beneath her clothes.

  She grabbed hold of a swim ladder that had been added, and climbed into the cockpit. There was no cover in the boat, so there was nowhere to keep out of the wind, but she found a compartment with a windbreaker, a blanket and another first-aid kit. Zipping up the windbreaker and putting the blanket around her shoulders, she returned to the stern. At her feet was a tube, unattached at one end, which must be the fuel line. Kneeling at the outboard engine, she detached a lever and dropped the engine into the water, then connected the fuel line to it.

  She cranked it.

  Nothing happened.

  She tried again, and again, kept repeating the action. Every time, the motor would wheeze for a couple of seconds, like an old man gasping for air, then die. She kept going, but after a while it ceased doing anything at all and she figured she’d flooded the engine – or, worse, there was no fuel in the boat in the first place.

  She collapsed onto the bench.

  Trying to think straight, she got down into the freezing cold water again and used one of the ropes – extending it to its full length – to tie the boat to a cleat welded at the side of the slipway.

  She then went back to the general store to change.

  She was still wearing the clothes from the gas station, but now she slipped back into hers, which were dry. She didn’t have any other shoes, so she had to pull on the soaked sneakers.

  After that, she returned to the boat.

  Except something had changed.

  The boat was gone.

  Before

  Rebekah and Johnny sprinted through the trees ahead of them, following the sound of the scream. Soon, they reached a clearing. On the opposite side, where the path headed into more trees, there was a holdall, tools spilling out of it.