Chapter Nine
Nine
Skye stared at her phone.
One bar of signal, that was all it had taken to drive a stake of dread through her heart. He was always going to reach out, to demand an explanation, but the silence of the past few days had allowed her to hope.
“Is everything OK?” Andreas asked as Skye shoved the phone back into her pocket. “Has something happened?”
“No, nothing,” she said, her teeth clenched as she hefted her bag of purchases.
“éla, let me—”
She stepped away, making for the exit, the bubble-wrapped mirror awkwardly pressed to her side. He followed, the birdhouse left forgotten on the counter behind them, and didn’t object when she suggested they head back to the truck.
The interior was baking hot, and having started the engine, Andreas promptly switched on the air-conditioning.
“Have you decided yet what to do about furniture?” he asked, turning in his seat as he reversed out from their parking spot. When Skye didn’t answer, he glanced across at her.
“There are good stores in Santorini, more in Paros, and many, of course, in Athens. You can pay for the delivery or travel across on the ferry to collect things yourself.”
Skye was only half listening and moments later found herself apologizing for having ignored him.
“You say sorry a lot,” he observed.
“Do I?”
“This is not a very Greek behavior.”
“Oh,” she said distractedly. “Sorry.”
Andreas groaned.
“éla re,” he muttered in mock despair, shaking his head over the steering wheel.
Skye tried to focus on the view, but the vast sweep of sea no longer felt like a security blanket, the desolate land that flanked the highway an empty surface from which she could easily be snatched.
Shifting in her seat, she took out her phone and once again read the text.
Where are you?
There was no way of knowing when it had been sent, not without opening it properly—and doing so would alert the sender.
“Pantelis’s taverna has Wi-Fi,” Andreas said. “If you want to stop to send a message?”
“No need.” Skye’s tone was too shrill. “It’s fine.”
As they reached the hillside in Ano Meria, she was ready and leaped out as soon as Andreas applied the hand brake.
The scene was lively. Two other trucks were parked outside the large house, one a gleaming Toyota that looked fresh off the line, the other a dented wreck.
A flustered-looking man with sand-colored hair was struggling beneath the weight of a potted orange tree.
Andreas hurried forward and grasped one side of it.
Skye could tell the newcomer was British from the grateful “Thank you” he issued, though the woman who emerged through the front door moments later, svelte in form-fitting gym gear, greeted her with a cheerful “Hey” in a distinct American accent.
“I’m Victoria,” she said as she and Skye did the strange dance of whether to shake hands or kiss cheeks. In the end, they did neither, though Victoria did not once stop smiling. Having learned Skye’s name, she enthused that it was “so pretty,” adding, “I have an aunt named Star.”
“We have a Joy here, too,” Skye told her, and Victoria nodded with enthusiasm.
“Yeah, we met her already. She’s just over helping the other guy—Theo, I think he said his name was. Has his kid with him. Little boy, doesn’t say a lot.”
Skye craned her neck and saw a stack of boxes piled up outside one of the shabbier single-story dwellings, a battered red Jeep parked nearby. Andreas and the man had deposited the tree and were now lowering a static exercise bike from the rear of the newer truck.
“That’s my husband, Adam,” Victoria said. “He’s English, same as you, but we live in the States—or did, I guess.” She looked around, ponytail swinging. “I didn’t expect it to be so…”
“Quiet?” Skye suggested.
“Everywhere is quiet after New York,” Victoria replied.
“But it’s more than that. It’s not so much silent as forgotten, you know?
Like a closet nobody’s opened for a long time.
It has that aura about it.” As she spoke, she rubbed the tops of her arms. “God, listen to me being all spooked, talking about auras as if I know anything about them.”
“You’re not a psychic, then?” Skye said, and Victoria laughed.
“Try fitness instructor, although I doubt there are many gyms in this place.”
Skye had to agree. But who wanted to run on a treadmill when you could swim in the Aegean Sea?
“Adam’s a lawyer,” Victoria went on, flinching as a large insect hovered close to her nose.
“He’s on a short sabbatical for now, but eventually he’ll need to set up remotely.
The lady we collected our key from a short while ago said there’s no broadband up here.
I thought Adam was going to faint right there on her office floor. ”
“Is it just the two of you?” Skye asked.
Victoria appeared to droop a fraction.
“Yeah,” she said with reluctance. “Just the two of us.”
They went to offer the two men some assistance, and Skye pushed all thoughts of the text message to the back of her mind as she ferried possessions into the big house.
Despite her claim of having “packed light,” Victoria seemed to have brought an inordinate amount of clothing and cheerfully told Skye that her heaviest case was “literally just cosmetics.” Adam, whose shirt was soaked with sweat, tripped while carrying a crate of white wine into the kitchen and promptly cut his hand open on the broken glass.
“I have no idea where the first aid kit is,” Victoria wailed, only for Andreas to magic one up from the glove compartment of his truck.
“That bloke’s a bloody marvel,” Joy remarked. She had rolled up with a welcome six-pack of Mythos and was busy flicking through a cardboard box of framed pictures. “Who’s the photographer, do you reckon?” she asked Skye. “Her or him?”
Skye, who had seen Adam cradling a camera bag on one of her trips out to the car, felt confident enough to make an educated guess.
“Whoever it is, they have a good eye,” Joy said, extracting an image of the Manhattan Bridge and holding it up. “It’s real tricky to get a fresh angle of a structure this well known.”
“I like all those old photos of New York,” Skye said. “Seeing how people lived, what they wore, how they were day-to-day.”
“You’re more interested in faces than landscapes?” Joy said. “That’s fair enough. Hey, do you reckon there are any old photos of this place, you know, from back in the days before the war?”
“There must be,” Skye reasoned. “Even if the people living here didn’t have access to a camera, there would have been visitors—European tourists if nobody else. There are plenty of photos taken in and around Athens, and loads of Corfu, too, both before and after the occupation.”
“Greece was occupied?” Joy asked.
“Yep. The Italians were here, along with the Germans and the Bulgarians,” Skye said, casting her mind back to her university textbooks.
“I think I’m right in saying that Folegandros was one of the islands that the Italians took until the country surrendered in 1943.
After that, the Germans moved in, though by then, of course, things were beginning to unravel for the Axis. ”
Joy slotted the framed photograph back into the box.
“I wonder if any of those Nazi drongos took over one of our houses,” she said.
Skye grimaced.
“There would’ve been fewer soldiers here than on the mainland,” she said. “But there’s always a chance. Some of the things that happened in Greece were appalling. I read that—”
“Don’t tell me.” Joy slapped her hands over her ears. “My imagination is bloody bad enough.”
Victoria came out through the kitchen doorway and smiled briefly at them before heading for the stairs.
“Your hubby all right?” Joy called, just as Andreas emerged, followed closely by Adam. There were spots of red on the front of his shirt, a wad of bandages around one finger.
“Apologies for all the fuss,” he said, looking faintly embarrassed. “The trouble with everything being so white around here is that it shows the blood far more dramatically.”
“I think I’ve got some bicarb of soda under my sink,” Joy said. “I’ll go and fetch it.”
“Hey, guys,” Victoria’s voice called from above. “You’re not going to believe it, but I have signal up here.”
Adam almost stumbled in his haste to join her, but Skye went straight for the front door, keen to escape, to run far beyond the reach of any signal.
Why hadn’t she just turned the damn thing off or, better yet, thrown it overboard from the ferry on her way across from Piraeus?
Fully intending to take if not the second then definitely the first option, she ran along the stony path outside only to freeze as she felt it.
The vibration of a ringing phone against her side.