One Way or Another(27)

I stood for minutes more, Chanel shoes in hand, dress blowing against me, my naked scalp prickling uneasily: I felt eyes on me, watching my every move, waiting for what I might do next. Panic fueled a scream that I strangled immediately; I must be silent, not make a sound. They couldn’t see me. Could they?

Suddenly, though I didn’t want to cry, tears sprang from under my closed lids, bringing the memory of the azure Aegean Sea pressing on my eyes as I was drowning, making me ask myself what I was doing here, how had I got here? I was just a simple girl from nowhere who wanted nothing from anybody. Until I was picked out by a psychopath looking for girls exactly like me to deliver his drug money.

I could bear it no longer. I ran into that marsh, splashed barefoot through the grassy mounds, up the muddy slopes, staggered heedless along the side of a brown river so silent and dark I hardly noticed it until I was ankle deep. It brought me to my knees, slipping on the mud. I got myself up again, started off again, heading only in front of me, not knowing where. I heard a roaring noise and came to a stop, almost falling over my own feet. Something was approaching, fast … could it be the sound of a car’s engine?

Filled with hope, I ran forward. “Please!” I yelled into the darkness. “Help me, please, I’m lost, I’m so lost.”

The darkness seemed to lift a little, a mere iota, just enough for me to make out the surging wall of water coming at me. I stopped dead. I knew what it was. This was a tidal river and the tide was turning with a great swirl into a wall of water whose pressure swept everything in front of it. Into it. And under it.

As it would me.

I could take no more. I flung wide my hands and shouted into the dark night.

“Welcome,” I called. “Thank you. And welcome.”

*

Watching through binoculars from the safety of the bank, Ahmet had to admire the way Angie awaited her end. She stood, arms flung wide, facing that wall of water, “As though she welcomes it,” he said to Mehitabel, who was by his side, also watching.

“By now, I believe she does,” Mehitabel said. “What’s left for her anyhow?”

Ahmet turned to look at Angie.

“Go get her back,” he told Mehitabel.

He watched again through the binoculars. Mehitabel got there, grabbed Angie’s arms, pinned them behind her, dragged her out of the way.

Just in time, Ahmet thought, satisfied, as Mehitabel hauled the girl back to the house and her imprisonment. He was not done with her yet.





21

It was a few days later and Marco had still had no luck tracing the black yacht he’d seen sailing fast out of Fethiye harbor; in fact, his inquiries were met with shrugs and sardonic smiles. Didn’t he know how many boats sailed this area? Was he a crazy man? Anyway, what was he doing looking for a particular boat? Marco did not tell why but found himself at a dead end.

Literally, he thought, gloomily awaiting his flight from Istanbul to Paris, with Em tucked inside his jacket next to his heart where only she and Martha belonged. He hated leaving his idyllic getaway cottage, hated leaving the glorious countryside strewn with boulders and alive with the sound of bumblebees in the hibiscus and oleander, with the faint ripple of the freshwater stream, silver and brown, trickling its way to meet the sea. His painter’s eye caught it all, kept it in his mind, and also in the many photographs he took for reference which he later plastered on his studio walls so he always had a part of the place with him.

He picked up a tiny cup of coffee from a stall, forgoing the sticky-looking pastries they also sold. Downing the coffee in one gulp, he gritted his teeth at the sandy texture. God, he couldn’t wait for a cup of good French coffee. But he would miss this place, and so would Em. As did Martha. He knew that because she’d called him and told him so. She’d also said she was missing him. She’d also asked if he had finally given up on the ridiculous quest to find a missing girl who nobody else seemed to know about.

She was wrong there. Zacharias knew about her. Artemis had seen her. The girl was no myth of his imagination and neither was the scene where she had fallen into the water and he’d trolled in the orange inflatable searching for her, seeing her coppery hair floating, only to lose sight of her altogether. He decided it was ridiculous even to give the matter any more thought, yet the similarity to his sister’s disappearance kept her in his mind.

Meanwhile, an announcement crackled over the public-address system, in Turkish, then in English: the flight was delayed, engine trouble; there was no guarantee what time it might be fixed and ready to depart. When Marco inquired at the desk along with a flurry of other outraged passengers he was turned away with an indifferent shrug of the shoulders and a what-do-we-know raise of the eyebrows. Shit. He was well and truly stuck.

He repaired to the bar along with most everyone else and ordered a beer. It was not cold enough. Sighing, he took out his phone, wondering who he might call and with what purpose; nobody was going to get him out of here and back to Paris. Not today anyhow.

He felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to see a young man smartly dressed in a dark suit, in which Marco thought he must surely be sweating. A conservatively striped tie was knotted firmly at the neck of his pristine white shirt. Marco glanced down at his own creased khaki shorts, at his blue T-shirt that even though it was clean was still only an old T-shirt, and at the beat-up suede loafers he’d been wearing for years on trips like this because they were comfortable and he never had to think about them. Though Martha did. She had even offered, with a small concerned frown, to buy him a new pair. With Em’s bright eyes peeking out from under his black Windbreaker, Marco had to smile. He certainly did not present the image of the successful, well-connected first-class passenger, a position to which he had been upgraded by an observant member of the staff who’d recognized his name.