Rebekah woke suddenly, the image of Kyra – arms out to her on the morning she’d left Noella’s house – burned onto the back of her eyes.
She rolled onto her side. Everything hurt, but not from working so hard: from doing so little. Her weeks of inactivity were petrifying her, seizing her limbs. She flipped back the blankets and watched the leak in the ceiling for a while, dripping into a bucket she’d set under it.
The image of Kyra flashed in her head again.
Would that be the last time she saw her daughter? The vague hint of her face on the other side of a car window? Why the hell hadn’t she told Noella exactly where they were going? Why hadn’t Noe listened when Rebekah said they were going to Montauk? Maybe because she did listen, but pretended not to hear. Maybe because she’s not the woman you think.
No. Rebekah squeezed her eyes shut. No.
She forced through an image of the Noella that, in her heart, she knew was real. Her best friend. Her sister. After that, she thought about what Noe definitely did hear that morning, and about what she and Gareth would actually be able to tell the police. The only thing Rebekah was certain that Noella had heard was ‘Long Island’ – so that was what she would tell the cops, and that was where the cops would start.
Rebekah’s heart sank.
Long Island was a search area of more than fourteen hundred square miles. That made it three times bigger than New York City. Not only that, but the disappearances would have been reported to the NYPD but worked by police departments in Nassau and Suffolk counties, which relied on the sort of co-operation Rebekah had seldom seen as a doctor. She’d rarely heard about it from her father either, and as she thought of him, his voice formed like an echo: Cops are the most selfless and selfish people I know. The case you’re working, it’s everything to you. Anyone else’s, it’s irrelevant. And even if there was some level of co-operation between cops, what were they going to do? They could try following street cameras. Maybe, in Johnny’s house, they might find research for the book he was planning, or the name of the curator from the Museum of Natural History he was due to meet. Maybe, after that, they might realize that Long Island wasn’t the ultimate stop-off for them.
But it felt like a long shot.
If the police knew where Rebekah and Johnny had ended up, why hadn’t they come yet? And, anyway, was a beat cop really going to piece together the journey of a car from Brooklyn using traffic cameras? Were they going to keep following it along 128 uninterrupted miles of freeway? Was it more likely they would gain access to Johnny’s house and turn the place upside down – or that the missing persons report would get written and filed, then put in a cabinet along with thousands of others? In the world of missing people – from what Rebekah had seen as a doctor – two adults, with no red flags in terms of their mental health or criminal record, would be left to drift if there were no fast leads.
It was just the cellphones that bothered her.
Johnny and Rebekah had had phones on that first day, and before they were taken, they’d made calls on them, or had tried to. Those calls would have pinged the tower on the island. So, had the cops not checked the cellphone records? Surely even beat cops would have done that much. The second they did, they’d have seen the cellphone activity and they’d have had a last location for Rebekah and Johnny.
Yet they still hadn’t come.
Her thoughts were shattered by the squawk of a fish crow. She watched it pass the windows – a black blur – her heart thumping in her chest. It had been two and a half weeks since Hain and Lima had come to the island, and she was still jumpy. But it couldn’t go on.
Something had to change.
She had to try to move forward.
She needed to wash her clothes, and it would be too cumbersome and awkward in the bucket that was catching the leak. She needed to go down to the sea and get them clean. She needed more food as well. She was down to five days’ worth of cans – a week, if she was conservative – and she’d cleaned out the first hostel. She could try to find a fishing rod, but that really was a last resort. It could take her days – weeks – before she was proficient enough to catch the amount of fish she’d need to feed herself, even longer before she got to know the best spots for bagging the most fish. Before it came to that, she was going to try to raid the second hostel for more cans, and cover the rest of the island too: she still hadn’t searched whole swathes of the north coast, the west coast – where the lighthouse was – and big areas of the centre. Deep down, she didn’t expect to find much in any of them: even on the old map, created at a time when the island was still doing well, there appeared relatively few places of interest in those parts. But she had to try.
Hiding was no longer an option.
She had to fight.