Missing Pieces

by Tim Weaver

  To a stranger, it would look like an untidy waterfall of names.

  To Rebekah, it was a suspect list.

  50

  The list had started in January with just five pieces of paper, all torn from Stelzik’s notebook by hand. The edges were imperfect and the sizes all slightly different, but it didn’t matter. She’d knelt in the corridor, laid the pieces of paper out in a row on the floor in front of her, and written a name on each one. Johnny. Gareth. Noella. Hain. Lima.

  Under each one, on a fresh piece of paper, she wrote a possible motive. For Hain and Lima, it was difficult. She still had no idea why they wanted her dead, didn’t even know who they were and how or when she might have crossed paths with them, so instead she concentrated on what she did know: what they looked like, and what she could remember them saying the night they’d come back to the island. Beneath that, she posed the same question below their names: Are they working alone – or with other people?

  She turned her attention to the other people.

  Writing Working with Hain and Lima? under each of the three names, she set about coming up with possible motives for Johnny, Gareth and Noella. Using a ball of string she’d found in the general store, she began slicing off lengths of twine with a cooking knife, then mooring the suspects to one another, the string indicating a confirmed connection. That became easier as she added more names to the wall: there was a confirmed connection between Gareth and Karl Stelzik because of the email; there was one between Johnny and Kirsty Cohen, whom she added as well, based not only on the fact that Johnny had known Kirsty but that Kirsty had called asking to speak to Rebekah about Johnny the day before they’d left for the island.

  Over the course of the days and weeks that followed, she added more and more names to the walls: doctors she’d worked with, other mothers she knew, friends from college, a few people she’d fallen out badly with down the years. She’d even written Daniel at the top of a piece of paper, and the names of other men she’d slept with before Gareth, trying to remember if there was anything that might be worth thinking about further. There wasn’t. One of the last names on the list was her father’s, although he’d already been dead for over two years, so it was hard to imagine how he could be connected to any of this. Maybe someone he’d arrested. Maybe someone out for revenge.

  Even though some of it felt like a stretch, under each name she listed things she’d done with that person, major events or memorable occasions that might be linked to what had happened to her on the island. She tried especially to think of times when both she and Johnny had done something as a pair with that person. That looped back in Gareth and Noella, perhaps Kirsty as well, but Rebekah struggled to think of many other mutual acquaintances. But, still, it was reasonable to assume that the catalyst for Lima wanting them dead was something that Rebekah and her brother had done together.

  After weeks of collation and study, she kept coming back to the same five names. The first three were the people she was closest to: Gareth, because of the email to Stelzik, and the affair he’d had with a woman Rebekah had never wanted to ask about; Noella, because she’d described Gareth as good-looking, confident and charming, and because of that weird last phone call in the forest, when she’d stayed silent on the line before appearing to hang up just after Rebekah had told her they were on Crow Island. And then there was Johnny. In her heart, she still believed her brother had had nothing to do with what had gone on, but there were small questions she couldn’t answer or deny: the way he had simply vanished after Rebekah had fallen into the gully, or getting the last day of the season wrong, or the way he’d said to Rebekah, as they stood waiting to be shot, that everything was his fault.

  The fourth name on the wall was a separate reason she couldn’t dismiss her brother yet: Kirsty Cohen. Because, under both her name and Johnny’s, pieces of string coming from each and joining at the top of a fresh piece of paper, there was another name: Louise. The woman Johnny had been dating, the woman he and Rebekah had, briefly, talked about on the ferry over. Rebekah remembered how reluctant Johnny had been to discuss Louise, although she knew it wasn’t unusual for him to be guarded about his love life. In fact, it had happened many times before. He didn’t make a big deal of dating until it looked like it might actually be going somewhere.

  He and Louise hadn’t gone anywhere.

  Rebekah had never met Louise, didn’t know anything about her, even her surname – but, still, for some reason she’d decided she didn’t want to see Johnny any more, and it was Kirsty who’d originally set them up, so there remained question marks.

  More often, though, her gaze would be drawn to the same part of the wall, to a fifth name she’d added much later than the others. She’d been awake one night, unable to get warm, a rainstorm buffeting the hostel windows, when she’d begun to think about the Why? again. And that was when she realized she’d missed someone.

  Her mother.

  Rebekah knew nothing about her, barely even remembered what she looked like, but that only added to her sense of disquiet. Was it more likely that all of this stemmed from the actions of someone like Johnny, whom Rebekah had trusted and known her entire life, or from the type of person who would just abandon three young children? ‘With Sympathy’ cards don’t count, Rebekah thought, remembering the envelopes that had turned up in the mail after Mike and her father had died.

  She couldn’t imagine where her mother’s life, and whatever she’d done with it, intersected with hers and Johnny’s, let alone why someone would want them dead because of it. But of all the people she’d put up on the walls of the hostel, all the names she’d added – all the theories she’d constructed and tried to shackle together into a cohesive argument – she knew the least about her mother.

  To Rebekah, Fiona Camberwell was a total stranger.

  Midwinter Pier

  She watched Axel from the living room, all the lights off, the only glow coming from the television, which was playing reruns of old shows. He was letting himself into the house, being as quiet as he could, and he paused, the door still open, snow flittering inside, and looked up the incline of the stairs. He was trying to figure out if he’d woken her, seemed genuinely concerned about it.

  Most of the time, that was what he was like.

  ‘Hey,’ she said.

  He looked in her direction, became aware that the television was on, that light was dancing along the corridor towards him, painting its walls and floors, and he turned, the soles of his shoes squeaking on the parquet.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘hey. I thought you might be asleep already.’

  ‘Just watching some TV.’

  He came forward, stopping in the living-room doorway, the TV bleaching one side of his face so it looked like he was wearing half a mask.

  ‘Have you had a good day?’ she asked.

  ‘Long.’

  ‘Even though it’s late, I thought we could get takeout.’

  ‘Okay.’ He smiled. ‘That sounds nice.’

  ‘You choose.’

  But he eyed her: he could see something was up.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You just seem a little …’

  They looked at each other and he didn’t say anything else, because he knew what was wrong with her and it didn’t need repeating. Instead, he came further into the room, eyes switching to the TV, to the LA Law rerun that was silently playing. ‘Oh, I love this one,’ he said, eyes lighting up, looking at her as if they were in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely. It was like he didn’t have any cares in the world. ‘This is the one where Rosalind turns around and just steps into that elevator …’

  She watched him.

  ‘Oh, this is it,’ Axel said, smiling again to himself, moving closer to the TV. Blobs of snow were melting on the hardwood floor now. ‘This is where she drops.’ He chuckled, perching on the edge of the couch. ‘Here we go.’

  Onscreen, the doors to an elevator
opened and one of the characters – not realizing the car hadn’t arrived – stepped into the empty shaft.

  ‘Damn,’ he said quietly. ‘What a way to go.’

  He glanced at her and smiled again, she smiled back, and when his eyes returned to the television, she kept looking at him, turning things over in her head. She started thinking about relationships, about how they evolved over time – and about how, sometimes, hard as it was, they left you no choice.

  You just had to walk away.

  Early the next morning, Tillman was waiting for her on a bench at the end of Pier 15. The city was in deep freeze, the sky gunmetal-grey and hanging like a ceiling on the verge of collapse. With the wind whipping off the river, and the snow straying in and out of existence, it was a smart place to meet: as she made her way off the esplanade and along the bleached wood of the pier, she didn’t pass a single other person. No one was brave enough – or stupid enough – to be out here.

  No one, except them.

  She sat down next to him, pulling her coat tighter around her. Next to her, Tillman didn’t move, just kept his gaze on the river. He had his coat collar up and a scarf over his mouth, but his skin was still scoured red and his eyes were watering. He said, ‘Whoever made the decision to meet out here is clearly a moron.’

  It was a joke. It had been his.

  They stayed like that for a moment, because they both knew what they were here for and neither wanted to begin, but then Tillman shifted his weight on the bench, turned to her, and said, ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘I want to try to pretend we aren’t having this conversation,’ she replied, then glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. She smiled, although it was sad, fleeting.

  ‘We can wait,’ Tillman said.

  ‘Will waiting make it any better?’

  Tillman shrugged. His silence was him being generous. It wasn’t going to get any better. They had a problem and it would need to be addressed.

  ‘Look,’ Tillman said, ‘after today, Travis has three days left as a cop. From what I hear, he’s made absolutely zero progress. The whole case is in the swamp and he’s up to his neck with no way out. There’s no chance in hell this is going to be solved before he goes. So we can wait and see if anyone else picks up the reins. It might happen, and if it does, we can delay for now and make the decision then.’ Tillman paused as the wind came again, colder and harder than before. He tightened the scarf around his chin. ‘But, you know …’ He looked at her. ‘Even if Louise Mason gets filed and forgotten, it’s still in a drawer somewhere. This whole thing will still be hanging over us.’

  She watched as a plane dropped out of the clouds, like a dolphin diving beneath the surface of the ocean. It was banking in their direction, heading towards Newark. For a moment, she thought of escape, of taking a plane somewhere and disappearing for good. Then she said, ‘What was she like?’

  ‘Who, Louise?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Rebekah.’

  Tillman eyed her. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You never met her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I hear she was a doctor.’ She could see the concern on Tillman’s face. He was worried she was losing focus. ‘Takes a lot to become a doctor.’

  ‘Takes a lot to become all sorts of things.’

  He shut her down, maybe rightly. This was a discussion that wasn’t going anywhere good, and even if she ignored him and kept asking questions, she’d end up the only casualty. She’d look weak and indecisive in front of him when she needed to be ruthless and single-minded.

  Rebekah wasn’t the reason they were here.

  Neither was Louise.

  This was about someone else entirely.

  ‘Just give him a little longer,’ she said.

  51

  On 10 March, the gas station ran out of fuel.

  Rebekah had never expected there to be enough to last until her final month on the island, but even so, as the lever on the nozzle clicked empty, she felt an acute sense of loss. There were twenty-two days still to go until the ferry came, and during the awful, protracted nightmare of her enforced stay on the island, only the Jeep, her running, and Roxie had brought her any joy at all.

  She had enough in the tank to get the car back to the dig site, so – as Roxie sat watching from the back seat, sensing Rebekah was upset – they took the Loop east, pulling off onto the potholed track that took them down to Simmons Gully.

  At the bottom, she parked the car where it had been on the final day of the season, turned off the ignition and sat for a while. On the passenger side, the plastic wrap, bound to the door, popped in the wind.

  ‘I know, Rox. It’s dumb to be upset about a car.’ Rebekah put her hand on Roxie’s head. ‘But …’ For a few short hours every day, as ridiculous as it sounds, being in the car felt like I’d been set free. I had choices.

  Small as it was, I had a life.

  She got out and started ripping the plastic wrap off the window, then cleared the Jeep of debris, of things she knew hadn’t been left inside on the day she and Johnny came to the island.

  Then she and Roxie headed back to the hostel on foot.

  Using the bicycle to get around, Rebekah began making repairs to the things she’d broken. Some were beyond fixing – like the padlocks she’d smashed – but she worked around them. She wanted things to look relatively normal for when Hain and Lima docked.

  She got rid of the SOS sign she’d painted onto the board at the general store and gathered up all the messages she’d laid out at the harbour with rocks. She got rid of the pile of pebbles she’d been using to count the days off before she moved to the hostel. There was nothing she could do about the boats she’d tried to commandeer: the one with the engine had been carried out about half a mile, and had stayed there ever since; the rowboat had been tossed back into shore by one of the storms, part of its hull smashing as it crashed against the concrete walls of the harbour. She’d tried to drag it up the slipway, but it had been too heavy.

  After that, she started preparing a backpack, the essentials she’d need. There were candy bars and bags of chips in the store that still had a couple of months to go before their expiry date, and she dumped a load of them in the side pockets of a bag Stelzik had left in his closet.

  She emptied two bottles of Mountain Dew into a sink, and filled them with rainwater, which she’d collected in one of the fishing buckets. She added a first-aid kit, and some freshly washed clothes. They were her clothes, the outfit she’d originally come to the island in. For the trip back, she’d decided to wear Stelzik’s pants and the sweater she’d found at the gas station.

  There were two reasons.

  Lima knew what she’d been dressed in on the last day of the season – her hoodie, her denims, her sneakers – or, if he didn’t recall exactly, seeing her again would remind him.

  And the clothes might act as a disguise. It was part of the reason why Rebekah had cut her hair short. It was why she’d pushed herself so hard with her exercise, running more, using bricks and old pieces of masonry as makeshift weights: she needed to appear bigger and more powerful because she wanted to disappear in plain sight.

  She was going to try to pass herself off as a man.

  52

  But there was one thing she couldn’t bring herself to sort out.

  Roxie.

  As much as it hurt her to admit it, the second Hain and Lima came off the ferry, the dog would put Rebekah at risk. Lima knew what Roxie looked like – she had attacked him and he’d never managed to locate her afterwards. He’d tried to shoot her, and failed. He’d searched for her, and failed. In all probability, as long as he didn’t see her, he wouldn’t even consider her: he’d just assume Roxie was dead, unable to survive by herself through the hard winter months.

  Rebekah wavered for days, thinking about all the ways in which she could take Roxie with her, in which she could attempt to hide her, but as much as she’d grown to love her, Roxie was an animal, and th
at meant she was unpredictable. Unpredictability would get her caught.

  It would get her killed.

  And so the night before the island reopened, the evenings lighter, the air a little warmer, Rebekah called Roxie into the bedroom opposite the one they’d been staying in. In it there was a bed full of blankets, two big bowls of franks and a bucket of water. ‘I can’t do this in the morning,’ Rebekah said quietly. She had tears in her eyes.

  Roxie looked at her, at the food.

  ‘I can’t even stand to do it now.’ She dropped to her haunches and held out her hands, and Roxie came to her. ‘I love you, Rox,’ she said, her face buried in the back of the dog’s neck. ‘Without you, I never would have made it this far.’ Roxie turned her head and tried to nuzzle Rebekah’s jaw. ‘I’ll come back for you …’

  I promise.

  But there was a reason she couldn’t say the last two words out loud: she couldn’t promise. She didn’t know if she’d make it back. In all the preparation she’d done for when the ferry docked, all the things she’d repaired, all the ways in which she’d tried to disguise the fact that she was still alive, there was an unspoken truth that she could never quite bring herself to face: she’d survived five months, almost entirely alone, on an island one hundred and one miles from anywhere – and, by the next morning, it might all have been for nothing.

  By the next morning she might be dead.

  Crying, Rebekah stood again.

  And then she locked Roxie inside.

  Waiting Game

  Before bed, Travis finished reading Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Gaby had told him on the phone the night before that she was studying it this semester and, in their production of it, she’d been given the part of Maggie. She’d sounded excited, so he’d told her that was great, even though he had no idea what sort of part Maggie was, or even what the play was about. At lunch, he’d walked a couple of blocks to a bookstore on Broadway, bought a copy, and taken the play, a shredded-beef sub and a soda to the break room. It turned out that Maggie was one of the two lead parts, so he’d sent Gaby a WhatsApp with a selfie of him, holding up the play, and wrote that he was so proud of her.