An hour after getting up, she finally found the switch for the electrical grid: it was in a fenced area, cut into a bank, a quarter-mile out of Main Street.
Something had been removed from it.
A battery of some kind.
Rebekah broke the locks on the security fence, anyway, and tried pulling and resetting the switch – but there was no buzz, nothing came to life. Without the power source, she couldn’t turn on the lights in the store. She couldn’t use a heater if she ever found one. Worse, she’d hauled the kettle and microwave from the hostel for no reason.
She looked down at herself, despondent, in the same clothes for the fourth day running, and thought of her girls. What would they be doing now?
Who would be looking after them?
She jumped into the car and headed back to the forest, trying to keep her mind occupied. She walked its trails for the entire afternoon, using the map from the hostel to find new areas she hadn’t explored. At one stage, she became scared of getting lost, and then – for a while – actually did, but in the end she found her way back to the parking area. She got into the Jeep, tired and ground down, the sun burning out in the sky. Her legs were like lead. She was starving. Her voice was hoarse from repeatedly calling Johnny’s name.
And she still hadn’t found him.
She spent all of the next day outside the store, watching the sea.
She hardly moved from sunrise to sunset.
That night, after eating from one of the cans, the leak in the ceiling slowly returned, and she became convinced she could hear the faint chug of a boat. Springing to her feet, she rushed to the window again and stared into the blackness, forcing herself to see something. The harder she stared, the more she remembered from two nights before when she’d thought she’d glimpsed a light in the ocean. Could it really have been a boat?
Or am I seeing and hearing things now?
She definitely couldn’t see anything tonight, and the noise she thought she could hear kept fading in and out with the wind, making her even more uncertain that she’d actually heard anything at all. After forty minutes, she retreated to the mattress, and felt like she was going to cry.
But then she heard it again.
She jumped to her feet and, this time, ran for the door. Yanking it open, she sprinted to the back of the store, which faced out to the ocean, and peered into the night. When the chug of the boat failed to materialize, she began furiously waving her flashlight from side to side above her.
Nothing.
No sound, no light out to sea.
Finally, she gave up, feeling ridiculous, and retreated inside. And then, after a while, she thought she heard the boat again and rushed out to the back of the store for a second time. And for a second time, there was no boat and no lights in the water.
She went back to bed, tried to sleep, to close her eyes and tune out the rhythm of the sea – but then she thought she heard the boat again.
She raced back outside.
Still nothing.
It went on like that all night.