Stelzik’s laptop died fifteen minutes later.
Rebekah stared at the black screen, the whole room dropping into darkness as night settled outside. Reaching for her flashlight, she flicked it on, her gaze returning to the computer. Why were there no emails from Johnny in Stelzik’s Inbox? Had Stelzik deleted them? If he had, why weren’t they in Trash? Rebekah glanced at Roxie, saw her staring back, and muttered, ‘Do people delete emails after putting them in the Trash folder?’
Maybe some people did, maybe Stelzik did, but it seemed a weird and very deliberate thing to do. Johnny had told Rebekah the day he asked to borrow her car that he’d been chasing Stelzik for three months. Had Stelzik become pissed off with Johnny’s requests? Would that explain why he might go to the trouble of completely erasing Johnny’s emails from his laptop?
No, that didn’t make sense either.
If he was so pissed off, why agree to be interviewed at all?
She looked at Roxie again and a deep, pervading sense of unease spread inside her, like an oil slick.
Could Johnny really have lied to her?
Why?
She closed her eyes, hating the idea, an image forming in her head of the snowglobe he’d bought her. She could see Kyra tilting it and letting it settle again, over and over, the night before Rebekah had come to the island. She could still see her brother, with the gift box in his hands, a couple of days before that, when he’d handed it to her. I saw it and thought of you, he’d said.
Her mind went even further back, digging through her best memories of him, trying to bathe in the certainty of them, and one in particular lodged with her.
When Rebekah was seventeen, in her second year of A levels, Johnny had flown to London to visit her. He’d managed to sell a 5,000-word short story to a literary magazine on the west coast – the one and only time he had sold any of his writing to anyone – and had been paid $400 for it. When he talked to Rebekah on the phone, elated at the idea of being published, he told her he was going to use the cash to come and see her. She told him he didn’t need to, that he should spend the money on himself – but he insisted. ‘I miss you,’ he said, and the more she and Johnny talked, the more excited they became. She’d show him the city again, all the things that had changed since the family’s move to America; and when she was at school, he would go and see all the literary sights – the British Library, Baker Street, Highgate Cemetery, the homes of Keats, Dickens and Samuel Johnson.
He landed on a rain-soaked morning, and Rebekah met him in the arrivals hall at Heathrow, both so glad he had come. They laughed on the Tube, catching up on the things they’d missed in each other’s lives. They dropped off his bag at the cheap, dreary B&B he’d paid for, close to where Rebekah boarded at school, laughing about the sinister-looking woman on Reception and renaming the place the Bates Motel. Then they went into the city and straight to the pubs, Rebekah high on the adrenalin of being with her brother, Johnny slightly delirious with jet lag. He told her it was so good to be back in England, to be able to share those moments with her in the country they’d grown up in. He said exactly the things that Rebekah expected from Johnny: kind words, earnest, loving. He might not always be demonstrative, he might never say I love you, but he didn’t need to: like their dad, he could convey what he felt in the way he looked at you, in the simple act of spending all the cash he had on a flight.
But then she came crashing out of the memory, and her thoughts darkened, and she remembered the last day of the season. She remembered how he’d told her that the island shut on 31 October when it actually closed the day before. Even though she’d been confused the night she’d made it to Helena in the rain, questioning her brother’s motives – a man she thought she’d known better than anyone – she’d eventually put it down to a mistake, not deceit. Mixing up dates, forgetting the fine detail, those were traits of his, and always had been. He was a dreamer. His mind wandered because he was creative. She trusted her brother. He wasn’t capable of deception, of cruelty, of such damage.
But then that trip to London crawled back into her head.
It had been perfect for two days, the pair of them as happy as Rebekah could remember them being. They went to museums, ate fish and chips beside the Thames, talked for hours and laughed even more. And then, on the third night, they went out with Rebekah’s friends. She’d been so desperate for them to meet her brother. She’d been so proud of him.
It turned into one of the worst nights of her life.