The gas station was pitch black.
She flooded the forecourt office with light from the Cherokee, then hurried with Roxie around to the back. Once inside, Rebekah cranked on the generator, listened to it rattle out of its slumber, and then – as bulbs flickered into life above her – she went through to the front office.
She’d come armed with Stelzik’s laptop.
There was no juice left in the battery, so when she tried powering it on after plugging it in, she got no response. Tapping out an impatient rhythm on the desk, she felt Roxie brush past her legs, sniffing her way around the floor of the office. Rebekah looked down at her, and then her eyes drifted back to the denims she was wearing: she’d returned to her own clothes and, for the first time, saw what a state they were in. Blood. Mud. Grass stains. She’d torn one of the pockets on her first day here, so that it just flapped against the top of her thigh. As she thought of that, her mind went all the way back to what Johnny had told her. Tomorrow is the last day.
She didn’t know any more if it had been a mistake or a lie.
She switched her attention to the laptop and tried powering it on again. This time, it worked: the black screen turned white and it began to load.
As soon as it was done, she went to Stelzik’s email. When she’d used the laptop at the hostel, his Inbox had already been open, presumably because it had been left that way the last time the PC had gone to sleep. Now, though, because she’d been forced to reboot the laptop, she had to wait for the browser to fire up.
Once it had, she clicked on the shortcut for Stelzik’s Gmail and started scrolling through messages again. She wanted to make sure she’d been right the first time and there were no emails between Johnny and Stelzik.
There weren’t.
She checked Sent and Trash, then went through some of the colour-coded folders that Stelzik had created, and in which he’d stored things like important messages, research and scans.
Again, she found nothing.
Next, she went to the browser history.
The last three entries were all related to his email, and there was one entry each for Inbox, Trash and Sent.
Rebekah looked at the dates and times.
Saturday, 30 October.
14:45 through to 15:03.
She flashed on a memory of getting to the Cherokee after being left for dead in the forest, and of seeing 14:58 on the car’s clock. At that same time as she was bleeding, scared and confused, as she was wondering where her brother was, someone had come here, to Stelzik’s room, and spent eighteen minutes in his email. Between 14:45 and 14:56, they were in the Inbox; 14:56 to 15:00 in Sent; and the remaining three minutes were spent checking Trash. Had Johnny’s emails to Stelzik been deleted in those eighteen minutes? It made sense: if you were looking to delete emails, you’d go through the Inbox first, then check Sent, and then you’d make sure Trash was empty of them as well.
But who had deleted the emails?
Lima? Hain?
Johnny?
If it was Lima and Hain, why hadn’t they just taken the whole laptop or, at the very least, wiped the browser history? That would have meant fewer questions. As it was, it was still possible to track what had been happening on the PC that day.
There was another mystery too.
Wasn’t anyone missing Stelzik back in New York? He, like Rebekah, hadn’t come home on the last day of the season, so why hadn’t anyone he knew – or might have been in contact with – raised the alarm about him? Unlike in Rebekah’s case, the people he worked with would have known where he was. He’d have told them he was going to Crow Island.
But then she got her answer.
She’d missed it the first time, but now, as she looked again, she saw an email in the Sent folder she hadn’t paid attention to. It had gone out at 14:57 on 30 October. The timing coincided exactly with what Rebekah had already discovered in the browser history. More than that, it meant whoever had used the laptop hadn’t just been deleting emails.
They’d been using the account to write them too.