Page 76 of The Vanishing Place
Effie swallowed. She’d read the headlines.Devastating 6.3 Magnitude Earthquake Rocks the South.Our Worst Day: A City Turned to Rubble. She’d watched the news. The devastation. The deaths. The heartache. All the while thinking Lewis was safe in Koraha.
“You were there,” she managed, “when they hit?”
“For the February one, yes. I was on a job in Edgeware, north of the city center.” Lewis shook his head. “It was like the whole house suddenly roared and shook around me…more violent than anything I’d known, and I had to brace myself.” His voice became quiet. “It wasn’t like the small earthquakes I’d felt before. It was jarring, like some impossible force was trying to snap the bones of the house in two. I kept looking up at the ceiling, waiting for it to collapse. I’d never heard noise like it.” He looked down at his hand in Effie’s. “By the time the first shakes stopped, the house was a mess. There were shelves on the floor. Tables and wardrobes smashed. And dust. Dust everywhere.”
Effie didn’t know what to say.
“I felt I had to stay in Christchurch after that, for a while anyway. To help.”
“That’s when you met Charlotte?”
He shook his head. “I stayed in Christchurch for about ten months. Then Nan needed a hip replacement, so I came back to help her out, and ended up back home for six years.” He teased a strand of Effie’s hair through his fingers. “I don’t know, maybe it was a post-disaster thing, but I felt that I needed to go back to Christchurch. Like I’d abandoned the city or something. So in early 2018, I returned.”
“And,” said Effie, “the city?”
“It was unrecognizable,” he said. “Completely rebuilt. But after seven years, people were coming back.” He smiled then. “And one of them was Charlotte.”
Effie forced a small smile in response.
“Charlotte lost her boyfriend in the quakes,” he said. “They’d been together since high school. And in a sense, I’d lost you. I guess loss, in its weird way, brought us together.” Lewis almost laughed. “Hardly a rock-solid foundation for a marriage.”
“No. I guess not.”
“And,” he continued, “as we healed, we no longer needed each other in the same way.”
Healed.
The word stung.
“I moved back to Koraha in 2023—Nan wasn’t doing so well. Charlotte stayed in Christchurch. We tried to make it work long-distance, but in reality, we were fighting to save something that hadn’t ever really been there. We both knew that.” Lewis sighed. “Charlotte moved to Auckland last month, to start afresh.”
Effie swallowed. “I’m glad Charlotte was there for you.”
He smiled. Then he brushed a hand through her hair.
“The next few days are going to be hard,” he said, his voice changed. “They’ll want to do interviews. You should rest.”
Effie touched the smoothness of his belt, her heart racing, then she placed a hand on his stomach, her fingers separated from him by nothing but a few millimeters of cotton.
“Effie…”
She pulled her hand back.
Stupid. Stupid.
She shoved her hands under her arms. What the fuck was she doing? She needed to focus. She needed to think about Anya and Tia and the next forty-eight hours.
She cleared her throat, her body stiffening against his. “Do you think Tia’s body was in the hut?” She spoke without looking at him. “That Dad could have moved her?”
“I don’t know.”
Lewis gave a sigh—a policeman again—and Effie dug her fingers into her arm.
“Or,” she continued, “do you think that Tia’s been dead for a long time? And that Anya hasn’t had a real mum for years?”
“It’s possible,” he said. “Trauma can do all sorts of things to the mind. And to our memories.”
“She’s afraid of someone,” said Effie. “Someone did something to her.”
