The email was to someone called Gideon Burrows at the Museum of Natural History. Stelzik – or whoever had pretended to be him – had told Burrows he’d decided to extend his stay on the island for a while longer, into the winter months, because he was on the verge of making ‘a big, very exciting discovery’.
I’ve arranged transport back to New York for when I’m finished. I’ll be in touch.
Sooner or later, when Stelzik didn’t resurface, someone would start to ask questions about what had happened to him. But maybe that was the reason why the laptop had been left. If it was still here, browser history intact, along with Stelzik’s clothes and belongings, it looked much less suspicious. His body was buried next to the tree roots in the forest, but if it was never found, there was no evidence he’d been murdered and, given his apparent decision to stay during the winter alone on the island, if he went missing the only logical conclusion was that he’d had an accident. She could hear her dad for a moment, ticking off the obvious outcomes people would reach: He slipped somewhere and knocked himself out. He fell into the ocean. Maybe they might even think he killed himself.
Rebekah found herself nodding, as if her father were in the room with her. Whatever Burrows and the rest of the staff at the museum thought was the reason Stelzik hadn’t returned, it tied into something else Hain had said to Lima on the night Rebekah had followed them to the beach: You brought the wrong car back. He’d wanted the Cherokee, not Stelzik’s Chevy: if the Chevy had been left behind, it would have played into the whole idea of Stelzik staying on, then perishing unexpectedly in some accident.
Rebekah checked through the Inbox again, through his address book, some of the folders he had with photographs in them, trying to figure out why no one except Gideon Burrows might miss Stelzik. But then it started to become clear: Stelzik wasn’t married, and he didn’t have kids. A family wasn’t looking for him.
She leaned back on the stool, away from the screen, disturbed by what she was seeing. Could Johnny really have been involved in this deceit?
Rebekah shook her head, wanting to rid it of the thought. But she couldn’t, not quite. There were just too many truths: she’d never seen her brother after she’d fallen into the gully; all the timings on Stelzik’s laptop lined up perfectly with the idea of him coming here; and the memory of what her brother had done that night in London still burned brightly. There was something else too, something to which she’d barely given any thought since it had happened: Kirsty’s call to Rebekah before she and Johnny had come out to the island. She’d said she’d wanted to talk about Johnny, and when Rebekah had asked Johnny about it, on the ferry over here, he’d told her he had no idea what Kirsty might have wanted. But was he lying about that too? Why would Kirsty want to talk about Johnny?
And then, as she looked at the laptop again, at the folders in Stelzik’s email, she remembered she hadn’t checked the Spam.
She opened it.
Inside, there was one message she hadn’t seen.
It had been sent to Stelzik on the afternoon of 29 October, the day before Rebekah and Johnny had arrived on the island. When they’d found Stelzik in the forest that first day, Rebekah had guessed, from the condition of his body, that he’d already been dead for twenty-four hours – so it was possible that Stelzik had never read this message. That would certainly explain why it was still in his Spam.
Not that there was much to read.
The email was empty.
Confused, Rebekah’s gaze went from the message window, up to the sender and their email address.
It took her a second to recognize the name.
And then her world fell apart.