wasn’t his boat we found, then he might still be looking for one.”
And getting more and more bitter with every failure, she thought. She leaned over Chris’s shoulder to pinpoint the next village down the coast. Conche. No road connected it directly to the one they were in, so they’d be forced to retrace their route inland to the main highway. More miles on that bone-jarring dirt road.
“Do you think we can make it to Conche this afternoon?” she asked. “We’ve lost a day with this lifeboat business, and we’re falling farther behind him.”
He folded the map and glanced at his watch. “Days are still pretty long, so yeah, I think so. Unless the road is even worse than this one.”
The road was rough, the terrain even more rugged, and the hills steeper, but at the end of the trip, they were rewarded with a spectacular jewel of a village nestled in a bay between towering green mountains. The village of Conche was larger and more settled than Grandois, with a grocery store that doubled as a hardware store and a bustling harbour filled with boats. No sooner had they begun their inquiries at the local store than the villagers drifted in to offer help and to volunteer information. Word of their quest had already travelled from Grandois.
The villagers had seen no trace of barefoot men possibly speaking a foreign language, but Phil and his son had been through a couple of days earlier, wanting a boat. This time he had wanted to buy one outright, but he hadn’t enough cash.
“Boats are our life out here,” one man said to Chris. He was a burly, weatherbeaten man with a florid face and hands the size of hams, who introduced himself as Casey. “I offered him my wife instead, but it was no go.”
Laughter ensued among the other men in the store.
“I might have liked my chances with him,” one of the women shot back.
“The boy really wanted to go out on the sea, so Thaddeus took them out for a spin around the peninsula to the back harbour,” said Casey, pointing out the window to a man unloading wood from his truck. “It was a short run, didn’t even get to show them one whale before your friend wanted to go back in. Then he took off without even a thank-you.”
“Your friend needs a good slap upside the head,” added the wife with the caustic tongue.
“Where did he go?” Chris asked. “Back up the highway toward Roddickton?”
“No, he was after a hike along the shore —”
At that moment Amanda spotted what had escaped her notice in the sea of old pickups parked helter-skelter by the wharf. A rusty black Chevy like the one Phil owned was parked near the entrance to town. She broke away and jogged down the steps of the store and along the street for a closer look. Phil’s licence plate! Her heart leaped. She shouted to Chris. As he made his way over, she cupped her hands to the glass to peer inside. Maps and chocolate-bar wrappers littered the floor. She peered into the truck bed, which was piled high with camping gear and clothes, along with several two-fours of empty beer cans and a pile of empty vodka bottles.
“Looks like Phil was doing some serious drinking,” Chris muttered.
Casey came puffing up behind them, his face now nearly purple. “Yeah, I was getting to that. We never touched the beer. He already had a snootful when he arrived. Like I was telling your boyfriend here, he and the boy took off on foot across to the back harbour. Never came back. The kids went looking yesterday but didn’t see hide nor hair.”
“What’s in the back harbour?” Amanda asked, visualizing the map. Nothing but cliffs and woods, she recalled. She didn’t like the sound of this. Phil’s behaviour sounded erratic and desperate — driving drunk on rough mountain roads with his son by his side and no clear idea where he was going. As if he were in full flight mode.
Casey shrugged. “Just Old Stink. Keeps to himself. Your friend won’t get much help out of him. He hasn’t hardly said a word in sixty years.”
“Except to himself,” the wife added. For all their apparent discord, they were clearly in sync, Amanda thought.
“Is he dangerous?” Chris cut in.
“Old Stink?” Casey snorted. “Might have been at one time if you got in his face, but he must be getting up toward ninety by now. Harmless as a fly.”
“Well —” the wife began, but Chris was thinking like a cop.
“Does he have a gun?”
“For hunting, yeah,” Casey said. “An old Winchester 94. Shoots mostly ptarmigan and rabbits these days, and last time I saw him, his eyesight wasn’t so good.”
“How far away is he?”
“Oh, a couple of miles up the back harbour, on the cape across the way. You have to reach it by boat, but my brother’s got mine out. Maybe in the morning —”
Amanda jumped in impatiently. “But if it’s across the bay, our friend won’t be able to reach it on foot, either. He’ll still be on this side.”
“There’s an old boat,” the wife said. She was getting in the spirit of the drama. “Part way up the harbour. You can walk to it, and there’s a footpath that we use for berry-picking.”
Amanda glanced at her watch. The sun had already slipped behind the mountains to the west, and within a couple of hours, darkness would settle in. Another day lost, another day farther behind. She called Kaylee, but before she could set out, Chris shook his head at her.
“We might make it there before dark,” he said, “but we can’t make it safely back. And Old Stink’s doesn’t sound like the ideal spot to spend the night.”
“But every night is a night wasted! We have flashlights. Kaylee will keep us on the path.”
Chris’s eyes narrowed as he studied the distant cliffs and the steep forested mountains along the shore. “One wrong step, and we could be in serious trouble.”
“Please, Chris. I don’t like the sound of things. Phil sounds desperate!”
She knew he wasn’t happy, that as a cop he should be the voice of caution. But damn it, you don’t trek through the gun-toting jihadi hordes of northern Nigeria without learning how to survive.
She threw some power bars and emergency supplies into her day pack, tossed it over her shoulder, and set off. A short reconnaissance trip, that was all.
Either he’d follow, or he wouldn’t.
He followed, as did Casey and an entourage of villagers, who picked their way single-file along the shore path. The tide was coming in, and tongues of foam licked over the rocks toward their feet. As the harbour widened, Amanda scrutinized the distant cape ahead. Had Phil been fool enough to try to swim across? Even if he could manage the distance, the waves and tides, not to mention the cold, would kill anyone who ventured out.
As she was crossing a small patch of stony beach, Casey suddenly called out from behind. She turned to him inquiringly. He was scanning the rocky hollows and scrubby bushes along the side. Finally he shook his head.
“Boat’s gone.”
“Whose boat?”
He
