Chapter 8
8
JACOB
T his island has zero redeeming qualities.
It’s possible it would have redeeming qualities if running itself had any redeeming qualities. I don’t mind a sturdy treadmill in a temperature-controlled gym. I don’t even mind the occasional jog outdoors on a paved trail.
I do not like tearing through the wilderness in Italian leather shoes.
Catherine holds my hand and we run over a wretchedly rocky beach interspersed with sand. Occasionally, thick, gnarly roots from the forest protrude toward the waves. The plane disappears from view before we’ve gone far.
I know we haven’t gone a great distance, but my legs feel leaden and my lungs burn. The pain in my head throbs dully with every step. All of my bones ache. The scratches on my sides must’ve fully split open, because they feel remarkably similar to the fresh cut on my forehead.
It’s like running in a nightmare. Every cell in my body wants to slow down, or sit down, or lie down and accept my death, but those same cells pulse with a fierce thirst for life.
Or maybe they just want water. Or food. I don’t know what they want, but I know they’re very fucking unlikely to get it on this island.
I’m assuming it’s an island. I’m assuming Raymond Harris wouldn’t take us anywhere that could be considered mainland and thus inhabited by people who might interfere with his murder plot. The beach curves in a tight circle, which might mean it’s a very small island.
On the other hand?—
On the other hand, it could mean precisely nothing.
A rock presses into the bottom of my foot through my shoe. I will level this place when we get out of here. I will buy this park and turn it into a rundown strip mall. Once I find Catherine, I’ll?—
But Catherine’s hand is in mine. She hasn’t run away from the SUV. I’m not searching for her on a path through the woods.
We’re sprinting away from certain death in the form of deranged pilot Raymond Harris.
It’s highly unfortunate that the plane is the only landmark we have to go on. It’s even more unfortunate that Raymond Harris is still with the plane.
I don’t know how far we’ve gone when Catherine tugs me treeward and puts her hands on her knees, gasping for breath.
“Can you—see him?” She tries to straighten up, but doubles over again. “I have a stitch in my side.”
“I don’t see him. But we should probably go a different way.”
Catherine lets out a groan. “Because of our footsteps, right? Because we’re leaving a trail that leads right to us.”
“Yes.”
She gathers her hair in one hand and stands tall, peering into the darkness under the trees. The forest is relatively thin closer to the sand, but the shapes of the trees disappear into what looks like complete darkness.
Insects sing. An ominous clicking sound travels through the trees in a pattern I don’t recognize.
I let my breathing slow and listen for footsteps on the beach.
Oceanside property is, of course, treasured for its proximity to the ocean. The white-noise roll of the waves is usually a redeeming quality, particularly if you’re not fond of things like sand and sea creatures.
It’s not redemptive tonight, when I’m trying to hear if Raymond Harris is approaching. I can’t hear anything but the waves behind us and the undisturbed hum of the forest ahead of us.
“I don’t have any idea where we are,” I announce to Catherine. “The original plan was to go to Montserrat, and I’d disappear from there. If Harris followed the plan in the beginning, the flight wouldn’t look out of the ordinary to anyone on the ground, and wouldn’t arouse suspicion.”
“So we could be near Montserrat,” says Catherine. “But we could also be…anywhere else.”
“Not anywhere. We must be in the Atlantic.”
“I guess that narrows it down a little bit, then.” She swings my bag off her shoulder and repositions hers, then searches through it until she finds her phone. The glow brightens her face like concentrated moonlight. With the color in her cheeks from our escape, she’s stunning. A Botticelli painting come to life. A thing of beauty that should not be on an island with me. “And I still don’t have any service, so I can’t find us on Maps. Should we try yours?”
“I don’t have mine. I left it at the hotel.”
“I know. I brought it with me. It’s in my bag, it’s just probably at the bottom. I turned it off so it wouldn’t be dead.”
“We should wait. You might want to turn yours off, too, kitten.”
“Yeah,” Catherine says softly. After a few seconds, the light goes out. “So…we don’t know where we are, and we have no idea what kind of wildlife is going to be in those trees.”
“We do not.”
“You haven’t developed a secret interest in wildlife, have you?”
A guffaw bursts out of me. The trees echo it back.
“ Shh .” Catherine holds a finger over her lips as if I might not understand her meaning. “He could hear you!”
“I know, I know. I’m sorry. But no. I have not—I would never develop a secret fascination with the outdoors. I’m thrilled to participate in excursions on horseback through beautifully maintained ancestral properties. I would be delighted to while away an afternoon in a cabana with staff service. I have no interest—and will never have any interest—in the unspoiled outdoors. Not even for research purposes. So anything could be in there.”
Catherine releases a breath. “Okay. No more wildlife after this, right? Like, we’re never going to go anywhere in the wilderness again.”
“Never. I swear on our marriage. You’ll never see an unapproved insect again.”
Catherine shudders. “Let’s not talk about insects. I really don’t want to see or touch any bugs. I think the right thing to do is pretend they don’t exist.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do unless there are…circumstances.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
There’s a moment of dead silence after that. I hold my breath until I’m sure my lungs will give out, and then Catherine lets out a nearly silent ha and that’s it—I can’t tolerate it any longer.
We laugh until I’m lightheaded and the lack of blood flow to my brain starts to seem dangerous, then get ahold of ourselves. Catherine puts her hand back in mine.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she says. “I’m glad it’s you.”
The smallest tremble in her voice betrays that there’s more she might say, that she might even want to say, but I don’t press the issue.
“I’m glad it’s you, too, kitten. I can’t imagine a honeymoon without you.”
“I can imagine being on a much better one with you. Honestly, I don’t think this one should count at all. When we’re in Mougins, then we’ll say it’s our honeymoon.”
“I’m in total agreement.”
We stand together and look at the darkness under the trees.
“The moonlight doesn’t go very far, does it?” Catherine poses the question as if we’re standing together at an art gallery. “It’ll only be light if we’re closer to the beach.”
“It seems so.”
The shadows under the trees shiver. No, it’s the leaves—wide and green, rustling in the breeze. Not the shadows themselves.
“I’m buying a flashlight for my purse at the earliest possible opportunity,” Catherine mentions. “Like, as soon as we’re at a store that sells one.”
“I’ll buy it for you,” I tell her gallantly.
“I know you will.” Her hand tightens on mine. “Do you think?—”
Catherine is interrupted by an explosion and startles toward me, pressing herself close to my side. Across the trees, an orange flame shoots into the night. It’s high enough for us to see. A black cloud burbles up after it, breaking apart into the sky.
“Oh, shit. Oh, no . That was the plane, wasn’t it?”
A smaller explosion sends a thin column of fire jetting up above the treeline.
“I think so.”
“That’s way closer than I thought it would be! Do you think he blew up the plane on purpose? Do you think he blew himself up?”
“I think we have to assume he didn’t. And either way, if the plane is a fireball, there’s no reason for him to stay with it anymore.”
“So he’s coming,” Catherine whispers.
I grab my bag off the sand, and we run into the terrifying shelter of the trees.
It doesn’t take long to leave the shrubs and the palm trees behind. The farther we get from the shore, the taller the trees get, and the thicker the trunks. If I had developed a secret interest in wildlife, I might be able to take a stab at identifying some of the various plants.
Since I haven’t, there’s nothing to distract me from the task at hand, which is walking.
The canopy blocks out most of the moonlight, leaving us in a darkness so murky it’s almost liquid. I hate it. Plenty of things move in my periphery, but none of them make enough noise to convince me that turning my head would help.
If there is a redeeming factor, it’s that the ground under the larger trees is emptier than it was in the forest Catherine ran into in New York. The soil is still completely inappropriate for Italian leather shoes, even if they are sneakers. I would choose a rundown strip mall over this.
But at least we’re not having to force ourselves through heavy underbrush.
“I think we should go back,” Catherine says. “Make sure we can find the ocean again.”
It takes longer to find the beach. The closer we get to the ocean, the more we stop to take listening breaks. It’s several centuries before we get to a place with a clear view of the sand and the sea.
“Are those lights?” Catherine whispers.
“I don’t know,” I whisper back. They look like stars. Then they look like they could be lights on a boat of some kind. Then they look like they could be a faraway city. “The line at the horizon could be clouds.”
“Maybe my phone was right and we’re going to get heavy rain.”
That would make it harder to move around the island. I do not relish the thought of slogging through the rain. However, heavy rain could erase our footsteps. “Maybe.”
There’s no sign of Raymond Harris, but that doesn’t mean much. He knows what direction we went when we left.
We go back into the forest and keep walking. The island keeps curving. It feels too exposed in the trees nearest the beach, so we detour into the darker areas every so often. There are, sadly, bugs. Catherine finally resorts to pulling a jacket out of her bag—the whole thing must crush down to the size of her palm—putting the hood on, and pulling the drawstring tight under her chin.
We pause again to look at the lights across the water.
“The lifeboat’s blown up now.” Catherine purses her lips. “There’s no way I’m getting in the water.”
There’s no way I’m getting in the water, because if I do, I’ll drown. I can barely keep my head upright as it is. Swimming is out of the question.
More walking.
I’m beginning to think my perception of time is out of whack. It feels like so long since we crashed that I should have died, but the sun isn’t rising.
It’s possible this is hell.
No, that can’t be. Catherine would never be sent to hell. She’s too perfect.
I lose track of time, so the new pain comes out of nowhere. My knees. My tongue. I feel like I’m swallowing sand.
“We should rest.” We have to rest, is what I mean. I have to rest.
“Okay.” Catherine yawns, then shakes her shoulders. She goes ahead of me to where the dark part of the forest begins in earnest, then sits with her back against a huge tree trunk. The tree must be ancient. I have a vision of the tree sprouting as a sapling when we landed on the island and growing while we walked and walked and walked.
I sit down next to Catherine. At some point, my head wound stopped bleeding. I can’t remember the last time I had to wipe blood out of my eyes.
“Here.” She’s holding out a bottle of water. “I only brought two, but I don’t know how many more of them I could have carried.”
“The others were near the front of the plane.”
“Oh. Nevermind, then.”
“Don’t be sorry, kitten. It’s all vaporized now.”
“I guess we can rule out learning how to fly the plane.”
“That’s better than—” Catherine interrupts me with a groan. “No. It’s not better. Don’t listen to me.”
“Don’t tell me who to listen to,” she teases. “I’ll listen to you all I want.”
“Serves me right.”
We restrain ourselves with the water and manage to limit ourselves to half the bottle.
“I really don’t want to get up,” I admit.
“I don’t either.” She rests her hand on my knee, and I put my hand over hers. “Do you think it’s getting lighter?”
I look at the ocean, and the sky beyond.
“No.”
Catherine snorts. “It’s not going to be dark forever. The sun will come up.”
“We’ll see about that.”
The sound happens between one wave and the next. That’s the only reason I hear it, and before I’ve processed it—before I could explain what I thought I heard—I put my hand over Catherine’s mouth.
Her eyes get wide.
I shake my head at her. If it’s nothing, then it’s nothing, and I’m hearing things. That’s not good, but it’s not Raymond Harris.
The sound happens again.
Catherine freezes. The only movement she makes is to close her eyes.
The third time I hear it, I know what it is—footsteps on the sand. The next footfall crunches on rocks.
Raymond Harris comes into view.
I don’t breathe. Catherine doesn’t breathe. I look down as much as I can without actually letting him out of my sight. The moonlight isn’t bright, but it could reflect in my eyes, and wouldn’t it be poetic to get murdered because of the moon?
He shuffles over the beach, then stops directly in front of us.
If the moon doesn’t get us killed, my heart will. It has to be beating loud enough for Harris to hear.
He’s wiped some of the blood off his face, making his eyes easier to see. They move over the trees—and over us—without stopping.
He looks at the ocean for a minute, or a full decade.
Then he goes back the way he came.
We wait for the rest of our lives.
It’s probably about twenty minutes. Maybe half an hour.
When we get up, Catherine’s shaking. I fold her up in a hug.
“No more beach,” she says into my chest. “We have to find somewhere else to go. Maybe, like, build a shelter.”
I don’t know the first thing about building a shelter, but I do know the first thing about walking away from the beach.
I’ll figure out how to build a wilderness shelter when the time comes.
We walk for another eternity, winding through gaps in the trees. The pain in my head doesn’t get better. It only gets bigger.
And I’m certain—almost totally certain—that we’re walking in circles. I’ve seen the shadow in the wedding dress at least three times, hovering in the same spot.
But then we turn a corner, and there’s light.
Not a glorious shaft of light. Just more moonlight than there had been. And those are?—
Those are straight lines, not tree trunks.
“Kitten, look.”
“Look at what?” Catherine lifts her head. She’s been watching the ground, trying not to trip over an errant root or a hole or whatever else might be lying in wait. “Is that?—”
“That’s a house.”