Chapter 32 #2
He rolled over to face the wall rather than people he should welcome only to realise that one of the maps plotting his parents’ route was missing.
He didn’t blame Louise for taking it down.
It rubbed in how off course his initial search had been, wreckage found so far from any of the ports featuring one of their blue pushpins.
He’d have ripped that map down too if she hadn’t got to it first. Ripped it down and torn it into a thousand pieces to scatter where the waves churned, white-tipped, outside the harbour.
Those scraps stood as much chance of washing up anywhere near where the One for Luck had.
His entire search had been useless.
Footsteps sounded again—Louise, he thought as they paused outside the door before moving on, noise receding.
She took the stairs instead of coming in to wake him.
A quick look at his watch had him sitting bolt upright.
Nearly lunchtime already and he’d prepared exactly nothing.
He let himself out, praying not to meet any of Guy Parsons’ posh readers prepared to pay five-star prices while he was still sleep-rumpled.
Taking the stairs came with a jolt of remembering the moment the PC screen had filled with the faces of that survey team who’d all got closer to his parents than Jude had ever managed.
He pushed open the door to the kitchen, tired to the bone like it was night instead of late morning, only to find lunch prepped already, mise en place arranged just how he liked it.
Even fresh stock simmered on the range, clear and fragrant.
He checked the refrigerator. That morning’s fresh catch from Carl already lay in neat fillets.
Rob.
“I don’t think he slept,” Lou said from behind him.
“I found him and Carl down here first thing this morning.” She smoothed a frizz-free strand of hair behind her ear.
“Susan came too, a bit later. She did my hair.” She sniffed, eyes welling even as she drew back shoulders surely far too narrow to bear this grief that kept on coming.
“She’s running the bar while I….” Her lips pressed together.
“How are we gonna do this, Jude?” she blurted, saying just what he’d been thinking, her reserves worn down to nothing too after keeping going for so long.
“How do we carry on now that we know they’re… ? How do we keep going like normal?”
Rob answered before Jude could. “You don’t.
” He looked so much like his own dad in the shadow of the doorway that Jude blinked, that stern illusion shattered the moment Rob stepped into the light, kindness right there on the surface.
“Because we’re all here to do it for you.
” His kiss on Jude’s cheek was quick, his squeeze of Jude’s arm reassuring.
“You don’t even have to be here. Take the day off.
Both of you. Stay out of the kitchen. Leave it to us. ”
Jude might have done as instructed if Rob hadn’t added a last order. “And stay out of the office.”
“Why?”
Rob opened his mouth and then closed it before breaking eye-contact so completely that Jude was halfway across the kitchen before Rob managed to get out a desperate-sounding, “Wait!”
Jude didn’t. His hand was on the office door before Rob caught up with him, this time his grip on Jude’s arm was much tighter. “Jude…. Listen…. It might come to nothing,” he said, wincing as Jude pushed the door open.
Marc glanced up from where he was writing, the office phone cradled against his shoulder, frozen until someone on the end of the line must have repeated a question. “Oui,” he said, pen poised over a pad of paper. His next burst of French was impossible to keep up with, let alone try to translate.
“What’s he saying?” Jude stood to one side as Lou joined them, her fingers twining with his.
“Who’s he speaking to?” Jude noticed what should have been obvious from the start.
“And why have you brought one of Mum and Dad’s maps down here?
” Four more steps brought him to it, Marc’s fast-paced conversation barely registering when Jude saw that someone had added new pushpins, red this time instead of blue, showing a different course than his parents had planned.
He reached for one of the new pins at the same time Rob said, “Leave it.”
Marc interrupted, speaking English this time, his hand over the phone receiver as he spoke directly to Rob. “You were right. They were university students. Someone’s putting me through to the right department.”
“What university? What department?” Jude shook Rob’s hand off his arm as he tried to restrain him again from pulling out the pins that had been added, ones that confused an already muddied picture of where the One for Luck may have gone down.
“Leave them,” Rob repeated, then said, “This really might all come to nothing,” his brow so deeply furrowed that Jude took notice.
“Tell me.” Jude lifted an arm for Lou to scoot under his shoulder. “Tell us,” he almost shouted.
“Okay, okay,” Rob said, placating just as Marc spoke again on the phone.
Rob reduced his tone to a whisper. “It was their T-shirts. The ones in the photo of—” he winced “—the wreckage.” He held Lou’s free hand very gently, cradling it really.
“I couldn’t sleep, so I googled the logo, and then I wondered why students from a French university would have been the ones to find it.
” He glanced at the noticeboard where a list of business ideas was pinned.
He pointed to an idea written below spas and guided tours , that said geography field trips .
“That’s when I figured out they must be on a field trip like the ones I thought might attract schools to Porthperrin.
Losing a beach is a big deal, so I wondered what they had gone to research. ”
He paused, Marc covered the phone with his hand again to say, “They were measuring the height of floodwaters inland on some islands, gathering measurements to make some kind of model.” He listened for a third time before adding some quick thanks in French and reading out the Anchor’s email address.
“Okay. They’re going to email it to us.”
“Email us what?” Jude asked, wondering if he was actually still upstairs in bed, dreaming.
Marc said, “They’ll send the coordinates and the date as soon as they can.”
“Date?”
“Yes.” Marc nodded, not a trace of anything but compassion in his expression. “They found the wreckage far enough inland to pinpoint exactly when it washed up.”
The exact date?
That was one of the missing links Trevor said was needed.
Jude found himself braced then by his sister, sounding so much stronger than she looked as she asked, “What are these new red pushpins for?” only for Rob to seem nervous, his high colour paling.
“Rob,” Jude said, his whole world stuttering to a stop for the second time in twenty-four hours. “What have you done?”
“I….” Rob wet his lips as if they were as dry, his voice an arid croak too.
“I used the postcards to plot where they actually went instead of the route they’d first planned.
” His hand shook as he touched the last pin in an entirely different patch of the ocean than Jude had searched.
“This island is where they sent the last card to Trevor.”
Marc made a small sound from his place at the desk. “The email. It’s here.”
“Jude,” Rob rushed. “It might come to nothing. I didn’t want to—”
“Get my hopes up?”
Rob’s brow creased again as he nodded. His gaze skittered between the map and Louise before settling on part of the ocean Jude hadn’t sailed anywhere close to aboard the Aphrodite .
“They sent the last postcard to Trevor on the 16th from here.” He then pointed to another pushpin, not all that distant. “This is where the wreckage washed up.”
Marc translated the email. “It says the storm surge waters only rose high enough to wash them that far inland on the 18th.”
Jude held onto his sister winded by hope he could barely breathe through, knees weak as what Marc and Rob had discovered sunk in.
“A two-day window,” Lou said, just as breathless. “That’s what Trevor needed to pinpoint their location.”
After months of searching alone, hope now steered them all together in a brand new direction.