Chapter 43 Jade

43 JADE

NOW

Shit, what have I just agreed to?

I head back toward the villa, replaying the conversation in my mind. But I have to do better at acting like nothing is wrong. After Darcy and Camilla told me what they’d learned about Rob, he kept asking me what was bothering me. I ended up telling him I was feeling sick, and he was over the moon in case it meant I was pregnant, which made me feel worse.

I stop at the beach and look at the lights from the boats out at sea, trying to imagine what it would be like to be free of him. God, even the thought of it makes me feel like I can breathe easier. No more watching what I say, and how I say it, or how I look when I say it, or how I look when I say nothing at all.

And now that I know he might have killed all those people, I am extra conscious of how I am around him. Walking on eggshells, not even breathing too hard.

I dig my toes into the sand, fighting the urge to cry. He’ll ask me why I’ve been crying and I’ll have to lie again. He knows me too well.

The thing is, I’m probably crazy for trusting these women. I really like Kate, and a huge part of me believes she’s for real. I believe that she’d really give me that money and put me up. But a voice in my head is also shouting at me. It’s saying, What the fuck, Jade? You don’t even know these women’s last names! You don’t know anything about them! And yet you’re offering to help them corner your husband?

I decide to look it up on Google. Spinnaker Guesthouse massacre . Shit, there it is. No mention of Kate, Camilla, or Darcy, but I find a picture of one of the victims. Cameron, Camilla’s brother. And a girl, about my age, called Briony Conley. She looks like Kate. No, she is Kate. The girl who survived.

I spend a long time reading through every news article I can find. There isn’t a lot, but enough to prove it did happen. No mention of Rob, but I find loads on the killer, Hugh Fraser. His face isn’t familiar, but suddenly I’m remembering a trip to the zoo with Rob and his step-nephew, Reece. We were looking at the elephants, and Rob asked me a strange question. “When does an elephant become a thousand wings?” I told him I didn’t know. “In death,” he said. “When it’s eaten by flies.”

I told him it was gross, and he said someone called Hugh had taught him that.

God. This is all actually real.

I’D HOPED ROB WOULD STILL be asleep, but he’s in the living room of the villa wearing nothing but a towel around his waist, and as soon as I come inside he rushes up to me.

“Are you all right?” he says.

“Yeah,” I say, a little taken aback. “Has something happened?”

“ Yeah , something’s happened,” he says. “My wife went AWOL, that’s what happened.”

“Sorry,” I say. “You were sleeping and Kate from villa two texted me.”

“That frumpy old bitch?” He sneers. “What are you doing hanging out with her?”

“Don’t be cruel, you.” I laugh. “She just wanted some painkillers….”

He wraps his arms around me, pulling me close. For a moment I drink in his smell, that deep, warm fragrance that used to make me feel safe. But then he takes me to bed, slowly pulling off my clothes, kissing me, and my mind flashes to the news articles I’ve just read. The faces of the victims. The way Camilla sat earlier, weeping over her dead brother.

A dead elephant, its corpse eaten by flies.

I want to ask him who Hugh Fraser was to him, but I dare not. He’ll know why I’m asking. Rob is the most suspicious person I know. He thinks everyone is out to get him, is always looking over his shoulder.

And now I know why.

“JADE! GET UP. WE’RE GOING to miss the boat.”

I stir.

“Jade!”

I sit up and look at my watch. It’s light outside, but my watch says it’s just past six in the morning. I’ve barely slept, waking every half-hour.

“You were tossing and turning all bloody night,” Rob says angrily, pulling on his T-shirt. “Must have woken me up half a dozen times.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. My head is banging.

“Hurry up !” Rob shouts, stuffing a pair of trunks into his backpack. “We’re going to the Ari Atoll, remember? To dive into the shipwreck?”

The memory of last night thuds back. Kate told me I need to bring Rob to the gym by eight this evening. “What time will we be back?” I ask him.

He shrugs. “Dunno. It’s an all-day trip, I think.”

“EVERYONE ABOARD?”

The boatman does a head count, then lifts a pen to sign off on the sheet next to me.

“Eight people. That’s everyone.”

He gives a thumbs-up to the crew member at the side of the boat, who casts off. The engine roars into life, and we’re off.

Rob puts his arm around me, holding his phone up for a selfie. I lean my head on his shoulder and grin, the perfectly happy wife on her honeymoon. He edits the photo, then posts it to his Facebook page. He loves the adoration, the way he can curate a reality so different from the one we live. It makes me want to be sick.

“You want a drink?” he asks me, and I nod, surveying the cooler that Farug, the diving instructor, has opened—bottles of Coke, iced coffee, and Fanta sitting on ice.

“I’ll have an iced coffee,” I say.

Rob gives me a look, then plucks out a Fanta and hands it to me.

“You should avoid caffeine,” he says. “In case there’s a bun in the oven.”

He cracks open an iced coffee for himself and drinks it in front of me, smirking.

“Babe,” he says, rubbing the back of his hand against my arm, “don’t be sad. It’ll be worth it. You’ll see.”

And there it is again: the desire inside me for the old Rob to return. I still carry it, even though I know it’s so messed up. Half of me is certain that everything Kate, Camilla, and Darcy told me about him is true, that he’s a cold-blooded killer. And the other half still loves him, would do anything for him.

The island shrinks behind us, eventually disappearing over the curve in the horizon. New islands appear in the distance, as though they’ve just popped out of nowhere. I look at the other people on the boat with us. Another couple, and one family with two teenage girls staring into their phones. They look so bored. I keep my eyes on the horizon, trying to work out an escape route. I’m electric with fear, my mind spinning. I might already be pregnant. I might be married to a murderer. If I try to escape, he’ll kill me.

I find myself imagining where I would go, what I would do. Few women work on the islands, but the ones who do work in the massage centers. I could easily set up a nail salon on one of the islands. I bet they’d love that.

“What are you thinking about?” Rob asks, putting an arm tightly around me.

“Nothing,” I lie.

He kisses the side of my head. “Not thinking of leaving me, are you?”

“Hardly,” I say with a nervous laugh. “You’ve got me on a tight leash, haven’t you?”

“Super tight,” he says. Then, licking my ear: “Just the way I like it.”

AFTER AN HOUR AND A half the boat comes to a stop in the middle of nowhere, no islands in sight. No other boats, either. The water around us is neon blue and perfectly clear, as though I could step in and find it only comes up to my knees. For a moment, I wonder if we’re lost. But then the crew begin pulling out plastic boxes from the storage cupboards, opening them to reveal dry suits, vests, and flippers. My heart begins to race. It looks so complicated, all the equipment and gear you have to wear. I’ve got my PADI license but we’ve only ever gone diving in an estuary back home.

I glance at Rob, suddenly panicked.

“It’ll be fine,” he says in a low voice. “It’s easy. They’ll show you what to do.”

Farug lines up the equipment, lots of different devices and tubes. I watch as the others on the boat get suited up, hefting oxygen tanks onto their backs.

“This is your regulator,” Farug says, handing me a device that looks like a hose. “And this is your gauge. You want to keep an eye on the pressure. Repeat after me: no bends.”

Everyone repeats it. “No bends.”

“It’s when you surface too quickly,” Rob tells me in a low voice, even though I know perfectly well what bends means. “It’s fine. You’ll be with me, remember?”

“The wreck is thirty feet down,” Farug says. “So not too deep. Remember your dive signals. S omething is wrong is like this”—he moves his hand from side to side—“this means we’re descending ”—he gives a thumbs-down—“and this is the distress sign.” He raises a hand to the side, makes a fist, and pumps his arm up and down. I try to remember it all.

“Now, make sure you all have a diving buddy.”

Rob nods at me. “Diving buddies for life, eh, babe?”

The oxygen tank weighs a ton, and Farug straps a weighted belt around my waist. I feel like I’m going to sink to the bottom of the ocean. “That’s the idea,” he says, smiling.

Two teenage girls are the first to step off the boat into the rich blue water, shrieking with excitement. I was like them once. This kind of thing would have made me excited. I’d have embraced the challenge.

But I feel wary. Rob is being super nice to me. I should be relieved, but I’m not. I think he knows something. My blood runs cold.

What if he overheard them telling me about the massacre? What if there’s something on my phone that lets him hear everything I do?

I watch how the others step out of the boat, one flippered foot stretched outward, then let themselves fall into the water. I’m shit scared but I do it anyway, sucking deeply on my oxygen as I let myself drop down, down, into the blue.

It’s terrifying for about thirty seconds, until the oxygen kicks in and I realize I can breathe. The sound of it is weird, though, like Darth Vader. Bubbles everywhere. Rob appears in front of me, making the sign for OK , and I nod back at him, signing it. OK. Thank God. I haven’t drowned.

He takes my hand and leads me down with the others into the depths, where the water is deliciously cold and a little hazy, transforming the world here into a dreamy realm of shadows and soft edges. I see a small shark flick away from us, too shy to stay close. There’s a manta ray, too, about thirty feet from us, gliding through the clear water like a magic carpet. It’s insanely beautiful, and I start to relax. I’m glad I came to see this.

It’s a whole other world down here. For a moment, it feels as though I can pretend the last twenty-four hours never happened. That everything is all right.

The shipwreck comes into sight as we descend, a ghostly spectacle revealing its parts like an echo. There’s the shadow of a mast, then the curve of the bow. I feel my heart pound as Rob pulls me forward, as I kick my flippers, pushing myself alongside him. The wreck is so much bigger than I’d imagined, about a hundred and fifty feet long. It’s well preserved, too, the round windows filled with fish, coral swaying delicately from the deck.

Farug is ahead, signaling us to come to him. I let go of Rob’s hand and swim ahead, more confident now.

Farug is suspended above the deck, pointing down. I see it: the ship’s wheel, still intact, thick wooden spokes garlanded by seaweed. It’s sad and amazing in equal measure, something so magnificent suspended here, colonized by new ecosystems. So many types of coral grow here, and I recognize some of the fish from the chart at the kayak hut. I see nudibranchs and pipefish nestled in its corners. Moray eels weave through the railings of the deck, lionfish and fusiliers bustling in the stern, a few large jellyfish suspended in the blue, their tentacles dangling down in delicate twists.

Farug signals again, and we follow him up to the boat’s stern, where several reef sharks have appeared. He makes the OK sign, which means it’s safe, though I’m quickly on guard. These sharks don’t seem as shy as the ones I saw earlier, moving so close to me I can see a round eye sliding back and forth, cold and fearless.

Suddenly, I feel a jolt at my back, as though something has caught me. Bubbles begin to spiral upward next to me, and when I take a breath I realize I can’t. I pull the breathing tube from my mouth and reinsert it, my lungs already aching, but it doesn’t work. Something is wrong, and I can’t see Rob. I start to flail, the bubbles making it too hard to see.

I can’t tell which way is up or down. My weight belt has made it impossible to tell.

I feel something grab my arm, pulling me. A shark , I think, feeling the tug of it, and I try to yank my arm back.

But the grip is too strong. My lungs are burning, and I claw at my throat, desperate for air. I gulp back seawater and the fringes of my vision go blurry.

Everything goes dark.