Missing Pieces

by Tim Weaver

  Jamming the Jeep into reverse, she began backing out. But the second the wheels started turning, she knew something wasn’t right. The car felt imbalanced, as if something was weighing it down on the left side.

  Getting out again, she looked towards the trunk.

  The back rear tyre had been slashed, cut so deeply that the rubber had folded over on itself. In her hurry, she hadn’t noticed it.

  She wanted to scream into the trees.

  Popping the trunk, she began looking for a spare tyre, even though she was already certain that there wasn’t one. When they’d bought the car, she remembered overhearing the salesman telling Gareth how the tyre-inflator kit worked – but it was worth less than nothing when the damage was to the side wall. Sure enough, a kit was all she found.

  She slammed the tailgate shut.

  What now?

  She had no cellphone and no vehicle and it was at least a mile back up the track to the Loop. But it was her only choice.

  The track was hard going, full of ruptures and holes, and halfway up, it began to rain. It didn’t take long for the cracks in the mud to split, and Rebekah was slipping, the wind gathering and scattering leaves from the trees.

  When she finally got to the top, the clouds were even denser than before, knotted together like clumps of wool. Out to sea, a leaden wall of rain hung like a stage curtain – and then the entire sky blinked white.

  A storm was coming.

  She looked both ways along the Loop, hoping to see a car close by, a truck, a person, anything. The road was empty, save for the flickering shapes of buildings, drifting in and out of the rain, and debris, perhaps from a truck: she could see wood chips and plastic fasteners dotted across the road.

  The most direct route to Helena was to her right, but the buildings she could see were on her left, so she headed there first. If just one was occupied, that meant people, and people meant help.

  The rain jagged in towards her, needles against her face. She was already wet from the climb up the track, but now the cold came too: her clothes were stuck to her, like a skin she couldn’t shed, and as the first of the buildings edged closer, she started shivering.

  It was ugly, crumbling, with a gunmetal-grey roof and no windows at the front. She tried the door. It was locked. She started banging on it and – when there was no response – moved around to the back. It was full of junk, a graveyard of old machinery and mangled vehicles. It was clear no one had lived here for years.

  Lightning flashed again.

  The next building was a couple of minutes away but, before she got there, she could see it was a dead end. It was boarded up, part of its roof collapsed. The next house was the same. The only difference this time was that the front yard had a mobile home in it. Rebekah stopped outside the trailer and banged on its walls. They vibrated against her fist.

  ‘Hello?’ she shouted against the rain. ‘Hello?’

  She tried the house too, but everything was locked. No one was at home. No one was anywhere.

  She needed to get to the ferry.

  There would be help there.

  She set off again. All the time the rain kept coming and now it was getting dark. That meant it must be after 4 p.m.

  The day before, Chloe in one arm, Kyra at her legs, she’d opened the doors of the brownstone and remembered seeing the sky through the back windows, starting to colour. She remembered Kyra asking if she could watch TV, then the sound of the Dora the Explorer theme coming from the living room. Dora, Rebekah had learned, through routine, through repetition, started at four every day, and it was like a rescue boat. It was a thirty-minute pause on a videotape that never stopped. For that short period every day, her girls would sit and watch Dora, and Rebekah would get to cuddle them. She didn’t have to make anything, didn’t have to prepare any food; they didn’t wriggle away from her; she wasn’t telling them off or kissing them better.

  It was just the three of them.

  She tried to think of other things about her life, memories that would give her momentum, that would energize her muscles and bones as if she wasn’t already soaked through, freezing and exhausted, and for a while, it worked: she pictured Kyra playing with her building blocks on the living-room floor, Chloe reaching a hand up to the toy bar that arced over her bouncer.

  Rebekah was thinking of Kyra, of the structures she used to build with the blocks, of the sound they would make as the tower finally collapsed, when the images of her daughters began to flicker. And as the storm intensified and the rain lashed against her, desperation began to overwhelm her.

  Why is this happening to me?

  She tried to calm herself, going over what Johnny had told her earlier, using it to reassure herself: the ferry back didn’t leave until five o’clock, so she still had time. If she missed it, it would be bad, but not irretrievable. The island didn’t close until tomorrow. She could still get home then. And if she had to wait until tomorrow, she had time to find Johnny.

  She looked out to sea, through a wall of rain. A few seconds later the entire horizon bloomed with white light. The storm was still a long way out, but it was getting closer, sailing towards her, to the island, like a warship.

  But then, something else slowly tilted into focus. Not a memory, but something real, here – now – up ahead, faint and imprecise.

  She broke into a run.

  42

  Stelzik had set up a desk in one corner and his laptop was still on top of it. There was a pile of books in the corner, stacked waist-high, and a folder of notes, hole-punched and clipped to a binder. Rebekah went to the closet first: inside, there were rows of dog-food cans, and above, Stelzik’s clothes. Stelzik, the real Stelzik, hadn’t been a large man, so Rebekah suspected his clothes would be a decent fit for her – better, certainly, than the ones she’d found at the gas station.

  The whole time, Roxie kept doing circles.

  Rebekah beckoned the dog towards her while trying to focus her attention on Stelzik’s desk. But she was finding it hard to concentrate: Roxie just kept moving, stopping only occasionally to sniff the bed, the mattress, the unmade sheets and blankets. ‘It’s okay, Rox,’ Rebekah said. ‘I understand.’

  The room wasn’t much, but Roxie had known it for almost seven months. She’d been here with Stelzik every day. Now he had simply gone.

  Except not entirely.

  She could still smell him in everything.

  Roxie finally came to a halt. Rebekah had removed the dressing from her face: her eye remained a little pink, even though it had healed, but Roxie had been blinking a lot, as if it were irritating her. And, in that moment, in the slump of her body, she was so human.

  Inconsolable. Heartbroken.

  Rebekah put a hand on her. ‘I get it,’ she said again. ‘I get it more than you can ever know.’

  She started going through Stelzik’s desk.

  In it, she found three notebooks. He’d already filled one and had been on his way to filling a second, but the third was blank. Rebekah fanned through the empty pages.

  At the store, she’d been using the inside of a cereal box to make lists of food and supplies, to keep track of what she had, what she needed, and how long the canned food would last. But the notebook would be better – and it would allow her to do something else.

  For the entire time she’d been on the island, she’d been trying to work out why she and Johnny had been targeted. Why had Hain and Lima wanted them dead? What could they possibly have done? Rebekah was a doctor and a mother. Johnny was an unpublished writer and the assistant manager at a failing electronics store. It made no sense. Rebekah had lain awake at night, trying to set it out in her head, but too often it dissolved into chaos. It was the kind of chaos in which her friends and family had never reported her missing; in which Noella took her kids from her; in which Gareth cried crocodile tears whenever people asked where Rebekah was and he told them he didn’t know.

  She kept thinking about Johnny on that last day as well, the little things
that had embedded in her memory. Like when her brother had begged Lima to spare them, offering to pay him when they got back to the city, and then Lima had cut him off, gun raised, and said, She ain’t going back, John. She, not you. Not you and your sister. Not both of you. Just Rebekah. She ain’t going back. Did that mean Rebekah had been the main target? And what about the look Johnny had given her after that – like he’d been confused somehow?

  Like he’d been betrayed.

  Had she really seen that in his face?

  Or was it just the terror of the moment?

  Roxie brushed against her legs. Rebekah ran a hand through the dog’s coat, switching her attention back to the empty notebook, trying to dismiss the thought about Johnny. Instead, she concentrated on what the pages of the notebook would allow her to do: write everything down, slowly, meticulously, and try to make sense of it. And then she looked at Roxie again, and a different idea landed.

  It took a couple of journeys back and forth, as Rebekah took blankets up the stairs to Stelzik’s room, and the supplies she’d gathered over the course of seven weeks. Every minute, Roxie got more excited and, by the time they’d finished, she didn’t know what to do other than sprint from one end of the corridor to the other.

  Rebekah had only remained at the store to watch the ocean, to watch for the rescue she had hoped would come. Now that seemed forlorn. It was possible a helicopter might come back and, if it did, she’d have a pretty good view of it out of the hostel’s first-floor windows. But there seemed little hope of a boat – at least one unconnected to Hain or Lima – passing so close to shore that they could see her waving them down. She’d come to the conclusion that the fishing lanes must be much further out, because she’d seen nothing on the water in seven weeks, which meant that, at this time of year, trawlers didn’t come close enough to the island to register her as a person, let alone to instigate some recovery.

  Nevertheless, after Rebekah had locked up the store as best she could and placed board at the window she’d smashed, she wrote SOS on the wood using some paint she’d found at the gas station. Once that was done, she collected some rocks, rubble and old pieces of masonry from a patch of scrub just out of town, and brought them all back to the harbour. As Roxie waited patiently, Rebekah created a series of messages in the empty parking lot – HELP ME and NEED RESCUE and LEFT BEHIND.

  She got back to the hostel as it was growing dark.

  Using the rope from the car to secure the door from the inside, she tied it to a metal railing on one of the interior walls, then moved through to the kitchen to double-check the generator. Just as when she’d checked earlier, it was obvious that, like the other hostel, everything had been disconnected. She spent a while trying to reconnect wires, just in case, but something had been removed from the front panel, a battery or a power source, so any fantasy she’d had about a warm shower soon ended.

  She headed back up to the room.

  Roxie was curled up at the end of Stelzik’s bed, completely ignoring the one Rebekah had made for her. ‘I’m not sleeping on the floor, if that’s what you’re thinking.’ She smiled, and went to the desk.

  There was a calendar on the wall above it: she could use it to replace the pebbles she’d been using at the store to count down the days.

  There was a laptop too.

  She flipped up the lid, expecting it to be dead after going months without use – but, to her surprise, it sprang into life.

  There was still nine per cent battery left.

  Grabbing a blanket, she wrapped it around her shoulders, sat down and used the trackpad to open some folders. Luckily, Stelzik hadn’t used a password, so she had access to everything, but it soon became evident there was nothing of any real interest. Most of the documents were scans of textbooks, notes he’d made, or papers he’d been writing.

  She opened his email.

  No new messages loaded because there was no internet connection, and as she searched the room, she saw no phone line, and no router. It probably meant Stelzik had been using his cellphone as a hotspot whenever he needed to fire off an email. She spent a couple of minutes digging through his things to see if she could find his cell, but she couldn’t. Most likely, Lima had taken it, just as he’d taken Rebekah and Johnny’s.

  She looked at the Inbox again.

  This time, something caught her eye.

  Slowly, she began scrolling down. The further she went, the more she realized what was missing. She checked the Trash, just to be sure – but there was nothing in there either.

  Dread slithered through her stomach.

  She leaned away from the screen as if a part of her didn’t want to have to look at it, and as she did, her mind spun back to the day Johnny had come to the house, when he’d first asked to borrow her car: I’ve got an interview lined up for this Saturday, he’d told her, with a curator from the Museum of Natural History. It’s taken me almost three months of emails to get him to commit.

  Except there were no emails from Johnny.

  Not even one.

  He and Stelzik had never been in touch.

  Before

  Helena. Rebekah could see a hint of it in the distance now.

  She pushed herself harder, running faster, the Loop empty ahead of her, like a road at the end of the world.

  Keep going.

  Thunder rumbled. She tried to count the gap between claps, tried to work out how far away the storm still was and how much time that gave her.

  Keep going.

  She kept repeating it to herself, dropping her head against the rain – but, as she did, she saw that, in the dark, she’d strayed off the road.

  She stopped, exhausted: the road was about fifty feet from where she was, but even such a small deviation felt like a defeat.

  She dragged herself back, keeping her focus on the yellow lines, but she’d lost her rhythm and was shivering uncontrollably. A minute later, lightning forked across the clouds above her – terrifying, beautiful.

  That was when she spotted the bicycle.

  It was leaning against an old shack. The back wheel – raised off the ground – turned every time the wind roused, each revolution bringing a muted squeal. Rebekah hurried to it, almost losing her footing in the water that was running out of the overflowing storm drains.

  Yanking the bike away from the shack, she wheeled it back to the road. She could feel one of the tyres was soft, the movement of the bike slightly off, but she didn’t care, just started cycling.

  Rain was coming at her horizontally and, as thunder exploded directly above her, she wobbled, almost losing control. But then, suddenly, the road started to drop away. It was subtle at first, then became steeper, and she could see the town clearly: grey roofs, the harbour.

  Her adrenalin spiked.

  I’m almost there, Johnny. I’m almost in Helena. I’m going to find someone here who knows the forest and I’m going to come back for you, I promise. Please don’t be dead, John, please don’t be dead, please don’t be d–

  She hit the brakes.

  The bike screeched. The sound was so loud she heard it over the snarl of the wind and the machine-gun crackle of the rain on the road.

  There were no lights anywhere in Helena.

  No cars, no vehicles.

  Nothing at the harbour.

  It had been ninety minutes, maybe more, since she’d got to the Loop, ninety minutes of being out in the rain, so she’d expected to miss the ferry back. It wasn’t a surprise to see no boat waiting for her. But where were the people who worked here? Why were there no cars in the parking lot?

  Why was there no sign of life?

  She hadn’t noticed it at a distance, in the darkness, but she did now: the buildings were already shuttered, wooden boards fixed at windows and doors.

  It wasn’t protection against the storm.

  It was protection against winter.

  ‘No, no, no,’ Rebekah muttered into the rain.

  She swung her legs off the bike and let it roll away
from her. It clattered to the ground. By then, she’d already broken into a run, sprinting down Main Street, the buildings on either side boarded, any sign of human life gone.

  At the bottom, the gates to the harbour had been pulled all the way closed, chains binding them together.

  On the other side, a padlock taunted her.

  ‘No!’ she screamed, her voice instantly lost in the rain. This must be a mistake. It must be a trick. It can’t be right. It can’t be. She yelled into the night, and as a vibration moved through her chest, a faint wail escaped from her throat, like the moan of an injured animal.

  Everyone’s gone.

  Everyone’s left already.

  She looked back along Main Street.

  Johnny had told her that tomorrow was the last day of the season. He’d talked about it on the ferry that morning. Even though it felt like centuries ago, she remembered exactly what he’d said: Halloween was the last day. But now she could see the truth: the island didn’t close tomorrow. It closed today.

  Which meant Johnny had been mistaken.

  Or something much worse had happened.

  He’d lied.

  43

  Stelzik’s laptop died fifteen minutes later.

  Rebekah stared at the black screen, the whole room dropping into darkness as night settled outside. Reaching for her flashlight, she flicked it on, her gaze returning to the computer. Why were there no emails from Johnny in Stelzik’s Inbox? Had Stelzik deleted them? If he had, why weren’t they in Trash? Rebekah glanced at Roxie, saw her staring back, and muttered, ‘Do people delete emails after putting them in the Trash folder?’

  Maybe some people did, maybe Stelzik did, but it seemed a weird and very deliberate thing to do. Johnny had told Rebekah the day he asked to borrow her car that he’d been chasing Stelzik for three months. Had Stelzik become pissed off with Johnny’s requests? Would that explain why he might go to the trouble of completely erasing Johnny’s emails from his laptop?

  No, that didn’t make sense either.