Rebekah stared at the pink giraffe, discarded between the two empty car seats, its tail chewed, the rest of it dotted with bits of food.
She swallowed her emotion.
She didn’t want to cry again.
But it was hard: as she looked at the seats, the giraffe, she realized it had been barely twenty-four hours since she’d seen her daughters yet it felt like days. Weeks. She thought of them being so far away from her, how confused and scared they must have been when she didn’t come home. And the hardest bit was, she didn’t know how to get to them. She didn’t have a way to contact home. She had no phone, her car was useless unless she found a new tyre – and no one knew where she was, or what had happened to her.
And where the hell was Johnny?
Hauling herself out of the Jeep, Rebekah headed back into the forest. She needed to find the dig site. If she found the place they’d ended up in the day before, she’d be closer to where she’d last seen Johnny. But the more she called his name and was met with the absolute silence of the trees, the more the doubts kicked in again.
She tried to dismiss the possibility that he wasn’t answering her calls because he couldn’t – couldn’t let the hopelessness of that thought derail her search. Instead, she forced herself onwards, upping her pace, trying to get warm through movement, through speed, through sheer effort and willpower. She’d spent thirty minutes inside the Jeep running the engine, sitting in front of the heaters as they pumped out full blast, but now she was cold again: it was the last day of October, and there was no frost on the ground yet, but it was in the air. Winter was coming, and it felt almost like a threat. It’ll be so much worse than this if you don’t find a way off this island.
And then her attention switched.
Ahead, she could see a clearing.
She broke into a run, weaving between the trees, trying not to trip – and, after a minute, she passed from the forest onto a sloped patch of earth.
The dig site.
She’d found it.
The ground dropped away twenty feet in a series of ridges, like a staircase. It was bereft of grass, trees, anything but earth, the ground cut into, carved out, brushed down, revealing shapes buried beneath the surface. A piece of thin red barrier tape encircled the site, flickering as the wind picked up and fell away again. Tools had been left scattered everywhere.
‘Johnny!’
She looked from side to side. The dig site was surrounded entirely by trees, by the density of the forest. Calling Johnny’s name again, she moved from the top to the bottom. ‘Johnny. It’s me, it’s Bek. Johnny!’
Heading into the trees beyond, she continued along the same trail they’d taken only twenty-four hours ago and then, eventually, stopped at the edge of a nearby ravine. Below her, breaking out of the side of a bank, was a set of exposed tree roots.
She recognized them immediately.
Beneath those was a mound of freshly dug earth.