Chapter 3
Georgia
The folding chair squeaks when I lean back. Someone left it here two days ago, parked on the promenade overlooking the beach, and for some reason it hasn’t been stolen. Whoever gets here first, gets to use it.
The beach has barely changed. Same gulls and people and sun. Same inquisitive neighbor back at the house. Every day he watches me leave and every afternoon watches me return.
Last night he was poking around the Skoda, though I’ve concealed it with a cover I found in a downstairs cupboard, in the hope my thievery of it won’t be detected.
The landline Raina and James have in the kitchen has never rung, and I’ve not picked it up.
The calmness of this town is leaching into my flesh and bones. Without social media or news, apart from when I bother to turn on their TV, I am insulated from world events. It’s like being swaddled in salty-air-flavored cotton wool.
I adjust my huge, floppy hat and my sunglasses, stretch my arms above my head, and wonder if I’ve had enough sun.
A fold of my borrowed denim shorts is trapped under me, so I wriggle and pull out the fold of cloth, then I straighten my legs.
My thighs are a bit pink. I’m not sunburnt but that’s difficult to do here. I should go home.
Home. It’s not that though.
I’m lost, still. I don’t know what to do after this. Go to the Australian Embassy in London and ask for help returning? Go back to my so-called family. The arguments over the will were abysmal. No one is friends anymore.
My university friends seem as distant as aliens after everything that was done to me.
No one here cares who I am, except for the pest at the terrace houses. He’s like some sort of unofficial watcher. Am I the only one he watches? I haven’t figured that out yet. He yelled out his name yesterday. It’s Dave. I didn’t tell him my real one. I’m Janet, to him. I should’ve said Ripley.
Just in case he has nasty intentions, I’ve laid out an emergency kit in a drawer in the kitchen. Knives, a corkscrew, a hammer. Similar near the rear door, in a bag hung off a picture hook.
No one is grabbing me again without a fight.
I yawn and stand, gather my meagre belongings, and trudge toward the nearest steps, run up them.
While I walk, I recheck the cash in my pocket.
At this rate, I can last a week. The charge in the car might get me back to London, but maybe all I need to do is phone the embassy?
How do I even get the number to it without a phone?
The laptop I found in a cupboard needs a password.
My stalker might lend me his phone? I imagine myself asking him.
Dare I? Nervously, I handle the coins in my pocket, counting them again. I know the shapes by heart now.
I imagine him punching me and then me stabbing him with my corkscrew.
No. Just no.
I stop dead. A memory wanders in, sits down, and solidifies.
A lemony scent. A face in a blurred room, waves rocking the bed I’m on, and between me and the ceiling is a man wearing a black mask.
Not a surgical anti-COVID mask. Not a Halloween mask for scaring people, though it is scary.
I can’t see his eyes, they’re covered by shiny flat glass.
He leans over me and I flinch, sway on my heels.
Wrenched back to the street I’m about to cross, I focus on the traffic. A blue car goes left to right in front of me, and I feel the turbulence—I’m that close. I step back.
The deep thud thud in my chest reeks of fear and confusion.
A nightmare? Or was that a real memory? I take my palm off my throat, glance around and start walking toward the pedestrian crossing. No one around me has noticed my blunder. No one saw my fear, or that I almost walked into a car.
I’m fine.
And no one has found me.
Not Rafael. Not whoever sent killers after me. Alden didn’t deny it was his brother, Joseph. What happened on the yacht must have been because of him.
I’ll keep hiding my face when I’m out in public. Adjusting the rim on my hat a little lower should help. The coarsely woven fabric bends easily.
Not that Clampton has a surveillance network of cams with blinking red lights to watch its inhabitants, like in the horror movies. Or maybe it does but they’re installed in the seagulls.
That man isn’t waiting, for once.
The dread that something might happen doesn’t leave me though. This stolen beachside hideout was supposed to be a place to revive myself.
I should go tomorrow. Where though?
Tonight, before I lie down to sleep, I count out the collection of small weapons and arrange them in the top drawer of the bedside table.
It’s dark, windy, and no one else is with me, and I’m boarding a plane I can’t find the ladder to when something clanks. My eyelids slam open. The dream evaporates.
It’s night still. Cool air sneaks under the sheet as I roll over.
The room is pitch-black except for a sliver of light through the curtains.
As quietly as possible, I shift the sheet downward with my feet, then I roll over and slide out my emergency killing drawer.
I called it that because someone once said to me that if you want something to come true, you need to visualize it.
Well, I have. I wish it to be true.
Slipping off the bed and onto my bare feet, I find the knife and the hammer and set out to discover what made that noise.
The floorboards creak only a little. Light sifts across the hallway as I open the door.
Someone is rummaging in the kitchen, two doors to the left.
A streetlight lets in a shaft of light through the kitchen window and hits the opposite hallway wall a few yards ahead.
Shadows move across the light like some ancient Punch and Judy show.
I swallow.
It’s not just a rat. I’m not fantasizing a burglar into existence, or whatever. This is a real intruder. I heft the hammer, getting an idea of how it will swing, see its blurry shadow waver on the wall, then I edge further along until I can peer around the corner.