by Banks, R. R.
This was my first job since coming back after the long months that I hadn’t been able to work and I was eager to take whatever came to me. When I met with this client, though, I immediately felt like something was a little off. I couldn’t identify a reason why Eleanor would be a target to this person. Just like any wealthy woman, I knew that she had to have some jewel-encrusted skeletons dangling in her walk-in closet, and that those were probably enough to piss someone off enough to justify hiring me, but not understanding the background had a strange effect on me. It prevented me from being able to give myself an out when thinking about what might happen to her, but rather than making me sympathize with her or have any level of concern for her, it seemed to have the opposite effect. When I looked at her, I felt irrational disdain. The fact that it wasn’t immediately clear why she had a bullseye on her back meant that she was one of the slimy, reprehensible human beings who were able to hide their misdeeds behind calm, beautiful exteriors, allowing them to move through their lives and weave through the people they encountered without anyone ever knowing what they had done.
Soon enough the fact that I hadn’t shown up would become troublesome and I didn’t know what the reaction would be. I couldn’t imagine that someone willing to hire a person to capture an enemy by whatever means necessary would have a tremendous amount of patience or goodwill when disappointed.
Feeling as though I had spent enough time wallowing in my own misery, I stood and headed toward the tree line. The pressing need for shelter wasn’t any different here than it had been on the first island. The only difference was that I was the only person who would be working on this shelter and wouldn’t have to listen to anyone else try to convince me that building a big dome was going to be worth the effort that it would take. I roamed slowly along the trees, trying to choose the one that would be best to be the basis for my shelter. I had dragged the life raft up onto the beach with me and intended to use it to create a roof for the shelter, not at all interested in having another drop of rain hit me. That, though, meant that I needed to find a place that would have enough room to fit the raft without the branches being too far apart so the raft either fell down on top of me while I was in the shelter, or flew away the second that any wind hit.
I had made my way all the way to the end of the beach and found a craggy rock formation. I scrambled up it and used the vantage point to look out over the water and what of the island I could see. The trees were too thick to see much, but I could see that the rocks continued along the shore until I couldn’t see any further. This gave me some hope that I would find another waterfall or pool that I could use for fresh water and maybe some fruit trees. Abandoning my plan to build a shelter in the trees, I decided that I would make my way around the island on the rocks, using any caves or dips in the rocks that I found to protect me if the need came. Staying on the rocks would keep me at a distance from the dangers that might be amongst the trees and gave me some hope of being visible if there was a boat or helicopter sweeping past. Hoping for the best, but fully expecting that I was going to end up in the mouth of a volcano because that was just the way that this entire experience was unfolding for me, I started along the jagged rocks, constantly looking back toward the water, hoping that somewhere out there, someone was looking for me, even if that meant not knowing exactly what was going to happen when they found me.
****
Noah
“You what? ”
I heard Snow shouting from the living room and I rushed from the shower toward her, wondering what had happened. She was standing in the middle of the room, one hand cupped over her mouth and the other gripping her phone to her ear.
“What is it?” I asked, crossing to her as I tossed the towel I had been using to dry my hair onto a chair.
She turned and looked at me, her bright blue eyes wide, making the bold contrast between them and her shock of silky black hair even more noticeable. She took her hand from her mouth and reached out with it, grasping my shirt.
“You call me back the second that you know anything, do you understand me?” she demanded. She waited a few seconds and rolled her eyes. “Yes, that means that the telephone ban is lifted until further notice.”
She ended the call and dropped her phone to the sofa beside her before turning to me.
“Who was that?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Robin,” she answered, her voice sounding tremulous with fear. “Those people missing from the cruise ship?”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding to encourage her to keep going.
“It was Eleanor and Hunter.”
I felt my heart drop into my stomach and something felt like it exploded in my brain. I shook my head, trying to clear my mind enough to speak. I couldn’t possibly have just heard what I thought I did. That couldn’t be what she said.
“What?” I asked.
“Eleanor and Hunter,” Snow repeated. “They haven’t been seen in several days. They didn’t attend any of the activities that Eleanor had planned and she missed her night at the Captain’s table. Finally, Robin started to worry and he went to the crew. They tried to get in touch with both of them, but their phones went directly to voicemail, so they eventually accessed their cabins and realized that neither of them had been used in days.”
“It took that fucking long for them to realize that?” I shouted. “When did that happen?”
“Three days ago.”
“Three days?” I exploded, knowing that my voice was far too loud but not caring. “He’s known that my aunt had disappeared off of a cruise ship for three days and he didn’t bother to call you? The news outlets know that people are missing, but we didn’t get informed?”
“He didn’t want to disturb us.”
“Well, I’m pretty fucking disturbed.”
“I can’t believe he didn’t call. I know that I told him not to, but this…”
“He thought that he was doing the right thing,” I said, trying to comfort her even though it was the last thing that I really wanted to be doing.
The thought that Eleanor and Hunter had disappeared off of the ship was already upsetting enough. I didn’t need her going through the additional stress of feeling like her best friend had betrayed her.
“What are we supposed to do now?” she asked. “Why haven’t the authorities contacted us?”
“Technically they don’t have to,” I told her. “I’m not the next of kin.”
“Who is?” she asked. “Your father?”
I shrugged.
“Maybe. But if he was, he would have called me.”
Suddenly I could feel the color drain from my face.
“What is it?” Snow asked.
“Virgil,” I said. “They called Virgil.”
“Who’s Virgil?”
“Her ex-husband.”
“Ex?” Snow asked. “If he’s an ex, he wouldn’t be her next of kin.”
“Virgil is anything that he wants to be when it comes to Eleanor. At least he was until she finally got up the nerve to divorce him.”
“The nerve?” Snow asked. “What do you mean?”
This was the one thing about my family that I hadn’t told her about in the little more than a year that we had been together. It was a dark blot in their history that I didn’t want to think about much less give any more attention to by sharing it with my wife. Now, though, he realized that by ignoring it, he might have made the situation even worse than it already was.
“Eleanor’s marriage to Virgil was not exactly the picture of domestic bliss. I was only seven when she married him, but I remember what it was like before he came around and the way that things changed after they got married. She and I have always been really close. I don’t even remember my mother, so she was the closest thing that I had when I was little. We were together almost every day. She and my father had always been close, too, so the whole family would have outings or eat together. Go on vacation together, the very rare occasions when we could pry Dad away from his wo
rk long enough to take them. Once she married Virgil, though, things changed. She still came around, but not nearly as often, and when she did, there was something different about her.”
“That must have been really hard for you.”
“It was. I was too young to really understand it and it broke my heart to see what it did to my father. Part of what made it easy for her to understand me was that she had lost her mother, too. My grandfather and her brothers were all she had. They were all each other had. Then her other brother died. It was suddenly just the three of them. Having her pull away from him made my father feel like his world was falling apart.”
“You and Eleanor don’t seem like you had a falling out.”
“We didn’t,” I insisted. “There was never any fighting. Never any animosity. Virgil just kept her from us and when she was away, the way he treated her chipped away at the woman that we knew until she seemed like she was just a shadow of the Auntie I had always known and loved so much. When I got old enough, I started going to her house to check on her. Virgil hated that. He hated any time that she was with anyone but him, but I wouldn’t let him stop me. That’s how I found out what he was involved with.”
I suddenly felt like my legs couldn’t hold me up anymore. I sat down and reached for a cup of coffee that had been sitting and cooling on the breakfast tray. I swallowed it down before continuing, telling Snow about the criminal activity that Eleanor told me Virgil was involved in. She had been so scared, terrified that the people who were part of the shady business were going to turn their sites on her. Of course, they had, but that only came after she had used the documents that she had scanned and the other evidence she had spent years gathering to convince him to finally give her a divorce.
“Why didn’t you go to the police?” Snow asked.
“I should have,” I said. “I should have, but I didn’t. She begged me not to. She said that she just wanted to be away from him, that she didn’t care if anyone ever found out what he was doing. I told her that he deserved to pay for his crimes, not to mention the way that he had treated her, and she said that one day she would make sure that he did, but she didn’t want to do it yet. She didn’t want to leave one horrible situation only to dive right into trials and paparazzi and everything that would come from such a high-profile case.”
“Virgil,” Snow said under her breath as if the word was reminding her of something. “Virgil.” I knew what she was thinking, but I let her get to it herself. Her eyes rose to me when she did. “Virgil McIntire? The crime boss?”
“That makes him sound much cooler than he actually is,” I said, “but, yes. She was married to Virgil McIntire the white-collar criminal of the century. The one good thing that he ever did for her was keep her so cloistered in the house and away from anybody but the legitimate clients that he hosted that her name and picture didn’t make it into the media.”
“I don’t understand,” Snow said. “If your father and Eleanor were so close, why didn’t he do anything to save her? Why did he let Virgil treat her that way?”
“For a long time, I don’t think that he knew. I really don’t. I think that he loved his sister so much and wanted so much to think that she had a wonderful life with this husband who would take care of her and not use her for her money that he just closed himself off to the possibility that anything else might be happening. He listened to what she said and chose to believe it. I was too young to know that I should have said something to him about the worries that I had, and by the time that I was old enough to make a difference, Eleanor was so deeply entangled that we couldn’t just swoop in and save her.”
“Why not?”
I sighed. Now I had another reason for not wanting to talk about this to her.
How exactly was I supposed to talk about this without making her uncomfortable?
“Money makes things hard, Snow.”
She bristled.
Well, that wasn’t it.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Eleanor and Virgil had a lot of financial interests together. They purchased real estate and investments together. They owned businesses. He came into the marriage with some money, but nothing compared to what she is worth. He convinced her that he wasn’t in the relationship for the money, but just as soon as he could he had her buying businesses, houses, and other things up and putting them in both of their names or even just his name. Early in their marriage everything was completely legitimate and they even donated to several charities through a fund that Eleanor had created in the name of the brother she lost. As the years went on, though, the things that Virgil put her money into got tangled up with his criminal activity. If she had just walked away from him without his cooperation, it would have been all too easy for the links between the legitimate purchases and the criminal ones, and what the money from her foundation had supported, to be uncovered, destroying her. I had to help her go about getting out of that web carefully. That way she had her money firmly in her control and his eventual collapse would have no bearing on her or her foundation. When we finally did, she was able to use all the evidence to secure the divorce.” I gave a short, mirthless laugh. “I didn’t even know she had all of that.”
“So why does it matter if they called him about her disappearance?” Snow asked. “If she has all of that evidence against him, doesn’t that mean that he doesn’t want to get involved?”
“That’s just the problem. I think he is absolutely involved. He’s been trying to get to her since just shortly after their divorce was final. He thinks that now that she got the divorce she should destroy the evidence, but she isn’t willing to do that. She told me that he’s been trying to get to her and she’s had a couple of run-ins with his hired men. They got to her on that cruise ship. I just know that they did. And since they called Virgil as her next of kin it means that none of us knew. They couldn’t release her name in the media.”
“And they wouldn’t even confirm it to Robin or the rest. He’s only making assumptions.”
“I think that it’s a pretty good assumption.”
“So, what do we do now?”
“We have to find them.”
“But how are we supposed to do that? They don’t have their phones, they don’t have anything.”
“Why Hunter?” Snow suddenly asked. “I don’t understand why they would disappear together.”
“They looked pretty chummy at the wedding,” I said. “Maybe they were spending time together on the cruise. Or maybe he saw something accidentally and they knew that they had to take him, too, or he would tell somebody and stop them before they could get Eleanor to Virgil.”
Tears had started to stream down Snow’s cheeks and I reached up to brush them away. I took hold of both of her wrists and looked into her eyes, doing everything that I could to stay calm so that she didn’t get any more upset than she already was.
“We are going to find them,” I told her. “Everything is going to be alright, I promise.”
“How?” she asked, her voice shaking.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But we’re going to figure it out. We just need to find out where they took them.”
She nodded and I leaned forward to kiss her forehead, catching a glimpse of the resort beyond the balcony doors as I did.
This was not in the brochure.
Chapter Seventeen
Eleanor
We worked on the new shelter until the sun had gone far enough under the horizon that we couldn’t see well enough anymore and then walked out onto the beach together. Cool air was rushing in from the ocean, bathing us in its bracing saltiness, and I filled my lungs with it. Over the last two days I had gotten accustomed to being so close to the ocean 24 hours a day and would like to think that the sea monster and I had come to a mutual agreement. I agreed that it could remain imaginary if it agreed that it wouldn’t spit the remains of the boat at me while I was walking on the beach.
We had gone back to the cave and taken up the bla
nkets and clothes that were left there, bringing them down to let them dry on the beach. The sun was so hot that they dried within an hour and I went to work shredding one of the most threadbare blankets so I could fashion some makeshift clothing for myself. After my encounter with Hunter on the beach I never wanted to put Gavin’s clothes on again. Instead, I wrapped a length of fabric around my hips to create a skirt and another around my breasts.
All the rage on this year’s runways from Paris to Milan – Jungle Boogie Chic.
“Do you think that they are looking for us?” I said as my eyes scanned the dark, unbroken line of the horizon in the distance. “Or do you think that they think that we just went overboard and there’s no point.”
I looked at Hunter and he reached his hand out to me.
“Come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
I took his hand much more willingly than I had the first time that he guided me down the beach and followed him as he made his way toward the rocks at the far end of the sand. They were the ones that he had come down when Gavin and I were on the beach, after Hunter had disappeared after our conversation in the jungle. I hadn’t been onto those rocks, sticking primarily to the jungle and the water rather than exploring these frightening-looking jags. I followed him anyway, though, and let him lead me up the easiest path onto the top of the rocks. The bottoms of my feet had gotten tougher in the time that we had been on the island and I had even waved away Hunter’s offer for me to wear his shoes, feeling more comfortable staying the way that I had been since arriving on the island. I was used to it now and part of me worried that if I changed anything I would throw off the balance of my understanding with the beach and the jungle and put myself in more danger.
