Page 68 of Just Another Missing Person

“You all right?” he asks in surprise.

“I’m not sure.”

He gestures for her to come in.

She closes the door with a soft click behind her. He sits back on the bed. There’s no chair—the room is tiny, barely big enough for a double—and so Julia takes the floor, herback to a radiator, which heats her shoulder blades fiercely. Even the radiators think it’s still winter.

Art folds the corner down on his novel and places it on the bedside table next to his alarm clock. He begins to work his socks off with his big toes. He isn’t looking at her. Julia thinks about Olivia, and Lewis and Sadie, and Matthew and Emma, and Genevieve and, finally, about herself.

“What do you think defines a good person?” she asks Art.

Art, being Art, considers the question seriously. “Selflessness,” he says.

Julia leans her head back against the radiator. Is she being selfless? She thinks so. She’s trying to find Sadie’s body. That’s all she’s doing; all she wants. And that will benefit Lewis, not her.

But is she doing it to cover her own tracks? And is she doing it in the right way? She thinks about Matthew’s frightened, yellowing eyes lit by the car’s interior light and shudders.

Art doesn’t speak for several seconds, and then he says: “What doyouthink defines a good person?”

“I’m not sure I know any more,” she says. And, despite everything, she is at home here, in Art’s room, with him. Able to say anything, without explanation, without preamble. Nothing.

They lapse into silence. Art has a cup of tea on his bedside table, which he wordlessly offers to her. She declines it with a wave of a hand. “Had too much coffee already,” she says.

“Always have.”

“Yeah. Have you slept?”

“A bit,” he says.

Julia leans her head back. The radiator creaks and puffs behind her. After a few minutes, she speaks.

“Would a good person go to any lengths to get justice?” she says, not sure if she’s talking about herself, or Lewis.

“Is something going on?”

“Maybe.”

Julia cocks her head and looks at him. “I’m at a crossroads,” she says. “I need to investigate something but—I don’t have...”

Art looks down at Julia from the bed. There is something strange about the atmosphere between them, about his uncertain expression. Out of place in the cozy setting, the lamp, the sea, the salted windowsill, the constant, unerring waves outside.

“Legal means,” she finishes.

To her surprise, Art shrugs, like it doesn’t matter at all. That’s right, she thinks. He isn’t always judgmental. The law has never meant very much to him, actually. And perhaps it doesn’t to Julia, a sickening but comforting thought to have after all this time.

“You’ll figure it out, Julia,” he says, looking suddenly tired. “You always do. And if not—you can always send me a worry list.”

Julia’s eyes fill with tears, as she thinks about Matthew, about legality, about corruption, and about Art, too, and his allusion to the way they used to be.

31

Emma

You remain in custody right now, and I haven’t slept at all.

I’m in your bedroom, but also somewhere in the hinterland between your innocence and your guilt, where I always am. Sadie, Olivia, Prudence. It’s a jigsaw with no image, not one I can see. Or perhaps I just don’t want to look at it.

I am sitting on the edge of your bed, trying to pluck up the nerve to call your therapist.

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