Rebekah looked at the padlock on the floor, barely daring to believe she’d succeeded, then flipped back the hasp on the hostel door.
Ahead of her, a corridor extended out, dusty, semi-lit by the building’s windows.
She hurried inside and stopped at the first door. It was a plain bedroom: two beds, two wardrobes. But the beds had blankets on them. She would never have guessed that the sight of something so simple would elicit such a profound sense of relief, but she let herself breathe it in before she checked the wardrobes. They were empty.
Returning to the corridor, she discovered that two of the doors led into poky identical bathrooms, and one at the end into a simple kitchen. In the corner, there was a generator, but it looked like it had been disconnected for the winter: it was sitting away from the wall and part of the back had been removed. If it had been working, she could have fired up the hot water and taken a shower in one of the bathrooms, but any disappointment she felt soon dissolved: when she checked the cabinets, she found teabags, coffee, some cans of chicken soup, two rows of canned clam chowder, some beef barley soup and a pack of root beer. She started to gather them up, feeling another intense rush of elation: these discoveries were so small, so perfunctory, but it felt like she’d struck a vein of gold.
After she’d loaded all of the food into the Cherokee, she went back for blankets, then switched her attention to a mattress. She pulled one off the nearest bed and dragged it out to the car. Once it was loaded, a second thought came to her: what about Johnny?
He’d need a mattress too.
This time, because of everything else she’d put into the Jeep’s trunk, she couldn’t get Johnny’s in. She shoved at it as hard as she could, face red, but it kept folding and springing back to her. Eventually, she paused, watching the second mattress slide out, over the tailgate onto the damp grass.
Did she need a mattress for Johnny?
Am I really going to find him alive?
She pushed the thought down before it could take hold, and began trying again, getting under the mattress this time and using a shoulder. It worked. It wobbled one way and the other, then finally slid over the headrests into the back seat.
She stopped for a second, getting her breath back, before returning inside and taking the stairs to the first floor.
The rooms were almost an exact match to their counterparts on the ground floor, but in one of the last, she spotted something different. A wedge of paper, bent in half and placed under a leg on one of the beds.
Something printed on it had caught her eye.
She bent down and rocked the paper out from under the frame. As the bed tilted towards her, uneven now, she unfolded the piece of paper, its faded surface covered with years of dust and grime. It was an old leaflet, printed for tourists back in the eighties – and on the back there was a map.
It was of the island before Hurricane Gloria had changed its entire topography, but it would do just fine. It showed its layout, some of the routes around it, the beaches and dunes, the estuaries and marshes, and the full extent of the forest where she and Johnny had last been together.
As she left the hostel with a microwave and a kettle, for the first time in forty-eight hours she was feeling vaguely positive. She still needed to check out the second hostel, but it was getting darker and it could wait for now.
Today had been enough of a success.
All of a sudden she felt she could exist on the island for a few days, maybe even a week. If she could somehow get the electricity working at the store, if she could find a supply of drinking water, if she could get some heating going, a kettle boiling, a microwave cooking, she could survive until a rescue came.
Because it had to arrive soon.
Noella was her best friend. Gareth was the man she’d spent twelve years with and she was the mother of his children. They would have reported her missing by now.
Well, Noella definitely will have.
She thought about Gareth, about their turbulent history, about the phone she’d found in the Jeep. She thought about where the name Willard Hodges had eventually led her.
And, as she did, she wondered to herself: Would it be easier for Gareth if she never made it home alive?