Broken Bay, page 5
Emma, full of nervous energy, began doing an inventory of the food: the possibility of being stranded suddenly felt very real.
“Let me give you a hand,” Georgia said, and Emma smiled.
They looked in the fridge and pantries. “We brought lots of snacks and stuff for sandwiches, so we should be all set. Lots of wine, obviously. And we have eggs and breakfast stuff.”
“Let’s throw that together now, I’m starving,” Georgia said.
The two got to work and soon they had a brunch buffet going—complete with coffee—and its appearance mollified the group.
“I have no appetite,” Stephanie said, nervously downing cup after cup of coffee.
“You’d better eat something or that coffee is liable to turn your stomach,” Georgia said.
Stephanie sullenly plucked a piece of toast from the plate and nibbled at it.
“I’m a stress eater,” Abby said. “When shit hits the fan, I always feel like I could eat a horse.”
The lights flickered as they were loading up their plates. Abby brought the bottle of whiskey with them to the coffee table they congregated around, and as she settled back into her seat, tipped the bottle into her coffee cup. “I’m making it Irish,” she said, “I’m so hungs.”
Stephanie rolled her eyes. “You want?” Abby said, proffering the bottle. “No? Anyone else?”
Everyone but Stephanie took her up on it. Their nerves were shot. The sky was darkening by the moment outside. Presently, rain began pounding the window as though demanding to be let in.
For what seemed like ages, they sat eating and sipping coffee in silence.
“Okay, truth time,” Abby said, having poured herself and the others a second round, their coffee more downer than upper now. “What do you guys think about Steven?”
“Hannah’s Steven?” Georgia asked.
“No, Soderbergh, the director,” she said smiling. “Yes, of course Hannah’s Steven. I’ve only met him once, I want to know what he’s about.”
An uncomfortable silence pervaded the group, their eyes darting back and forth to one another.
“Meh,” Georgia finally said.
“Meh?”
“Well, I’ve only seen him at holidays and stuff. But he’s kind of . . .” she let the thought hang, “and my mother can’t stand him.”
“Really?” Emma asked.
“Yeah, I mean at first I just thought she was being prickly because she’s always suspicious of white dudes.”
“Seems reasonable,” Abby said.
“But she’s warmed up to white boyfriends of mine in the past. Steven? Not so much.”
“Why?” Emma asked. She had her own reasons to feel dubious about Steven, but she was not ready to share them.
“Well you know Naima Cho isn’t one to elaborate. She just says, ‘I don’t like the cut of dat boy’s jib,’ ” Georgia said in a spot on impression of her mother. She had the most marvelous voice—Kenyan layered with the British English she’d grown up with, layered with American idioms from decades in the States.
“Fascinating!” Abby said. “What about you guys, Emma and Stephanie? You’ve spent the most time with him. What’s your take?”
Emma looked warily at Stephanie and was relieved when she spoke first. “He’s great. I mean, he’s fine. He’s good-looking, smart, he’s charming, he’s got a great job. He treats Hannah like a princess. What’s not to like?”
The women shifted uneasily. “Like a princess” did not sound like anyone’s idea of what Hannah wanted.
“What do you think, Emma?”
Emma shrugged and before she could speak up, Georgia jumped in.
“He reminds me of John Edwards,” she said, scrunching her nose.
“The politician? He doesn’t look anything like him,” Stephanie said.
“Not that.” Georgia took another long sip of what was now a whiskey with a coffee floater. “He just has that vibe, you know? Seems squeaky clean until you find out he’s boning his campaign manager while his wife is dying.”
The group absorbed this. They had to admit it had the ring of truth. The brilliant, obscurant smile, the practiced expression that said he was listening to you intently, that he’d worked on being the kind of man who listened intently.
“Please don’t tell Hannah I said that,” Georgia added.
“In the vault,” Emma said, reaching out to squeeze her arm.
“Emma, what do you think?” Abby repeated.
Emma shrugged. There wasn’t anything exactly objectionable about Steven, but nor had she seen between him and Hannah what she might have hoped for between her friend and her soon-to-be husband. She remembered so vividly how she felt right before marrying Spencer, seven years before. They were both nervous—sure—but those weeks and days leading up to the event were haloed with love and certainty, the rightness of it. It lingered even now, after everything.
And she’d seen Hannah in love before, just once, right after law school. A minor-league baseball player who’d broken her heart. But while they were together, they were luminous. They moved through a room as though connected by invisible strings, one always aware of the other; they shared a catalog of inside jokes and oblique references that spoke to an intimacy built over countless hours together. She saw no such connection between Hannah and Steven; they always appeared a bit more like coworkers with a little crush than anything: two people who found each other’s company pleasant. But the air was dead between them.
“I don’t totally get it. But I guess it’s not for me to get, really.”
“That’s a bad sign,” Abby said. “I’m telling you now, I too do not like the cut of this boy’s jib.”
Just at that moment the lights flickered off, then on feebly once more before going completely out. There was still plenty of light from the window but they lit several of the candles anyway.
“It’s the universe telling us not to talk trash about Hannah’s fiancé,” Stephanie said imperiously.
“Wow, the universe has weird priorities in your spiritual paradigm,” Abby said. “But we can change the subject. Okay! So, Georgia, are you bringing a date to the wedding?” There was a frantic need to keep the conversation going, lest their fears about Hannah consume them.
Georgia shook her head. “There’s a guy I see sometimes when I’m down in Seattle, but he’s not really wedding-date material.”
“Oh . . . Hot Chef?” Emma asked. She’d met this man before, what was his name, Conrad? Cormac? Something like that. She could never remember because they always just called him Hot Chef. He had long lustrous hair that he wound into a bun, full sleeves of tattoos, gorgeous green eyes that might convince a girl who was not as wise as Georgia that she could save him from himself.
“You know it.”
“Oh can you please? I would die laughing to see him sitting next to Naima.”
“She’d murder me.” Georgia laughed.
“What about that guy Beau?” Emma asked, mentioning a guy who had made more than a few appearances in Georgia’s email dispatches from her Alaska life.
“Beau? Nah, we’re just buddies. What about you, Abby?”
She shook her head. “Nah, no wedding-date material on my bench either.”
“Your bench?” Stephanie asked.
“Yeah, you know. The bench, the players waiting to get on the field. You gotta keep a strong roster as a single girl in these hard times.”
“Sounds complicated,” Stephanie mumbled into her coffee. She might as well have said sounds slutty, or at least Emma knew that’s what she meant.
“But so is marriage, right? That’s why I’m just going to be single forever and eventually move to the Babayagas’ house for old-ass feminists in Paris when I’m eligible. It’s a real place.”
“Maybe I’ll join you,” sad Georgia, leaning forward once more to refill her cup. None of them wanted to say what was really on their minds: there would be no wedding to take dates to if they couldn’t find Hannah.
Despite the fact that only Georgia’s phone seemed to be working, they all kept checking theirs nervously, reflexively, in case Hannah had somehow gotten through.
The girls distracted themselves with games of gin rummy as the storm raged on outside the windows. But Emma could hardly focus; she kept getting up to go to the window, looking down to the bay below—visible through the glass walls of the balcony. Violent waves whipped up by the fierce winds crashed on the beach. Something else was moving along the shore—a piece of debris set tumbling by the winds? No, it was someone moving along the shore. A woman was pacing the shore staring into the waves, a shock of long dark hair blowing around her.
“There’s someone down there!”
The girls looked up from their game, stunned. “What?”
Emma was already racing toward the door, pulling her trail boots on over her thick house socks and grabbing her shell jacket.
“Emma! You can’t go out there,” Stephanie said.
“I have to, where’s the Maglite?”
“Emma, it’s not safe . . .” Georgia started.
“What if it’s Hannah? I’m going.”
Before anyone else could disagree with her, Emma charged through the door and was on the path down to the beach before anyone could catch up.
The narrow footpath that led down to Broken Bay was so protected by the dense forest that surrounded it, that the ground beneath her feet was nearly dry. It gave Emma the surreal feeling of being in a tunnel that led from the house to the beach. None of the animals the girls had seen the day before were in evidence; all had taken cover from the storm. Emma nearly lost her footing several times on the steep, rocky path down to the bay. She was vaguely aware that the other girls were behind her, further up on the trail, in pursuit.
The path ended abruptly, spilling onto the sand, and Emma was immediately plastered by the sheets of rain that were coming down; these mixed with the sea spray that came off of the waves, which were crashing perilously close to her feet. Emma looked frantically for the woman she’d seen from the house. Then a flash of red—had Hannah been wearing red yesterday?—caught her eye, right at the tip of the crescent where the beach ended and the forest again met the sea.
“Hannah,” Emma screamed, the sound of her friend’s name quickly swallowed by the wind. She took off running at full speed, her feet clumsy in her heavy trail boots. The woman, Hannah or not Hannah, disappeared into the tree line and Emma ran faster. Then it was as though she’d collided with a dense, cold wall of sand. It took her a moment to even realize she’d fallen, having caught her toe on a pale piece of driftwood buried in the sand. It had been so long since Emma had had the wind knocked out of her that she’d forgotten how it felt—like one was, for a brief but terrifying instant, drowning on dry land. Before she could fully catch her breath, Georgia was at her side.
“Oh my god, honey, are you all right?”
“I . . . saw . . . her,” Emma said, her voice nearly strangled still from the fall.
“You saw Hannah?”
“I don’t,” Emma said, on her knees in the hard, freezing cold sand, “I don’t know. But I saw someone.”
Georgia looked worried. “There’s no one down here. At least not that I saw.”
“But I swear,” Emma said. The spray coming off of the surf was bitter, unforgiving. “I saw . . .” she trailed off. Red, like the night before. She shivered.
“Regardless, we can’t stay down here, it’s really and truly not safe.” Georgia knew better than to mess around with nature. She’d seen people die from bravado, from foolishness, even from the pure, good-hearted desperation to save a friend.
Back at the house Stephanie and Abby had been at a window looking down at the beach, and ran to the door when the others arrived.
“Oh, thank god,” Stephanie said, “Emma, are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Emma said, though she did not feel okay in the slightest.
“We saw everything from the window,” Abby said.
“You saw her?” Emma said, her voice rising. So she had not been imagining things!
“No, we meant that we saw you fall,” Stephanie said gently.
“You didn’t see the woman?” Emma asked desperately. “That’s why I started running, I saw her on the edge of the beach, she . . . she went into the trees. I thought it might be Hannah.”
They shook their heads; worried looks passed among all three.
“Come on you, you need a shower,” Georgia said, wrapping an arm around Emma’s shoulders. She’d had that motherly authoritative tone since she was about twelve. One imagined it did her a great deal of good in the Arctic. You just didn’t argue with Georgia.
Emma was dazed and shaking from fear or cold or both, and stood dumbly by as Georgia turned on the shower.
“Georgia,” Emma heard herself say, her voice still throttled by shock, “You don’t think Hannah . . .”
She trailed off. She couldn’t even say her next thought aloud, but she didn’t have to.
“Oh honey, no. I don’t think it’s that,” Georgia said, stepping forward to wrap her arms around Emma. “That was such a long time ago.”
But the specter of the moment was called back for both of them: for Georgia who’d actually found Hannah lying on the bathroom floor, her lips blue, and for Emma, who’d gotten the call from Georgia and had imagined it so vividly and frequently that she might as well have seen it with her own eyes.
“Lots of people have suicide attempts in their teens and then they balance out. They never do it again. I mean, Hannah hasn’t seemed suicidal to me recently, has she to you?”
Emma shook her head. But then, neither had seen it coming the first time, though they had been teenagers then, naturally too self-absorbed to notice much else.
“We’ll find her. She’ll probably show up as soon as this storm passes, I’m sure she just took cover somewhere,” Georgia said, squeezing Emma’s shoulder and assiduously avoiding mention of calling the police. Both of them silently wished away the possibility that it could come to that.
When Georgia and Emma returned to the main room, Stephanie and Abby were huddled together on the floor—their backs up against the couch—peering into Abby’s phone.
“Abby, are you getting service?” Georgia asked, surprised.
“No,” Abby said, “we were just looking through the pictures from last night.”
Georgia and Emma curled behind them to have a look.
“Hannah certainly looks like she’s having a blast in these,” Georgia said.
“Uh-oh, it’s our boyfriends,” Abby said as they came to a series of photos that featured the group of twentysomething guys, also over from the mainland. They all remembered dancing together, doing shots together—Abby had even made out with one of them in the corner booth for an hour or so. Even if she’d been single, Emma would have felt too embarrassed to be with someone that young and conspicuously beautiful. But Abby was shameless; she’d gone right for him like he was a prize kill. Now that Emma thought of it, hazy though her memory was, it had mostly been Abby who’d encouraged their advances.
“Ugh, so fratty,” Stephanie said as they ran through a shot of several of their drunken faces squished together in a selfie shot.
“They were harmless,” Abby said.
“Not this one,” Stephanie said as they came to a shot of the ringleader—no one could remember his name. Seeing him now, it struck Emma that he was the clear alpha of the group—the other men bending toward him the way the young ones do, dogs in need of a pack leader. She also remembered that he’d been unpleasantly aggressive in his pursuit of Hannah’s attentions, deciding her lack of interest meant he just needed to draw her out of herself, that she—a soon-to-be-married woman—was simply playing hard to get. “You’re really cute,” he’d told her, “but you’d be so much cuter if you’d smile.” “Come on, take another shot, you have to, it’s your bachelorette, don’t be boring.”
“There’s always one,” Emma said, and they all nodded.
“You guys don’t think that creeper has anything to do with Hannah being missing?” Georgia said.
They all went quiet as the possibility settled on them.
“Do they know where we’re staying?”
Georgia cringed. “We must have mentioned it, right?”
“But they were drunk, too,” Emma said. “How likely is it they’d remember the details?”
Suddenly Stephanie gasped and looked accusingly as Abby.
“You.”
“Me what?”
“You brought him home. Or rather, you snuck him in. I was getting up to go to the bathroom, I thought I was hallucinating.” Stephanie practically spit the words at Abby, her voice laced with betrayal.
Abby sighed and rolled her eyes. “Not that it’s any of your business,” she said, “but fine. You’re right. Josh came back here after everyone went to sleep; we fooled around for a while and then he left. I walked him to the front door and saw him leave myself. So what exactly is your theory? That he went back and told his creeper friend where Hannah was staying so that he could come back and kidnap her? Come on.”
“Bryce,” Georgia said suddenly, “I just remembered his name. It sounds like the villain in a John Hughes movie.”
“You saw the way he was with her. Men like him,” Stephanie said, “all they want is a challenge, and what’s a bigger challenge than a woman who’s about to get married and is definitely not interested?”
“What if,” Georgia said, her eyes shining, the conspiracy catching her, “Bryce followed . . . Josh, is that his name? What if he came back to the house with him?”
“I just don’t think we have any good reason to think that those guys are involved here,” said Abby, her voice taking on a defensive edge. “Josh was alone, he came back by himself. Bryce wasn’t with him.”
“I’m sorry but when something bad happens to a woman, you can almost be certain that there was a man on the other side of it,” Stephanie said. “And they’re the only men we’ve met since we’ve been here.”
