The Girl on Shattered Rock_A gripping suspense thriller by Matt Hilton

Author:Matt Hilton [Hilton, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-01-23T22:00:00+00:00

22

There was no indication that Rob had ever been at the cabin, but Becks made a search of each room regardless. She wasn’t looking for clues that Leah was a crazy woman — who’d cut Rob into small pieces and secreted him around the cabin — she was simply inquisitive. While she satisfied her curiosity, Leah hurriedly packed her belongings into the suitcase she’d recently struggled across land with, as well as placing her laptop and other items into her rucksack. When rushing to the camp earlier she hadn’t dressed in the most appropriate clothing, so now added her waterproof jacket and wooly hat. Making the sea crossing in a kayak was going to be a cold and wet experience.

She made a last perusal of her bedroom, then hauled her bags into the narrow hallway. The three younger women stood in the living room, each of them posted by Becks to watch the door, kitchen window and patio doors — should Rob appear, she said, but genuinely on the look out incase Leah’s stalker made a reappearance. Becks crouched down, studying the small cupboard that housed the radio charger in the bunkroom. She snapped her opposite thumbnail repeatedly along the woven bands on her wrist.

‘He stole the radio transmitter last night,’ Leah said, ‘so I’d have no way of calling the mainland.’

Becks stood and approached her. ‘Yeah, I heard you tell Effie about that earlier. It kind of makes sense if he intended isolating you, but what’s the deal with that bracelet you found?’

Leah dug in her jeans pocket and pulled out the bracelet. She presented it to Becks. ‘Take a look. Like I said: I found this the first day I was on the island, back there somewhere—’ she waved a hand in the general direction of the crags to the south ‘—and brought it back here with me to clean up. I hung it on my computer screen the first night and it was gone the next morning. I tried to convince myself that I was being forgetful, and had misplaced it somewhere, but then the damn thing showed up again last night, but this time with my initials scratched into it.’

Becks’s face paled as she inspected the bracelet, parchment white beneath the frame of her raven hair. ‘Those initials…not yours, the original ones.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘M.J.K.,’ Becks read, then looked at Leah for clarification.

The original inscription wasn’t totally obliterated, and when held at an angle the three initials were still easily read. Leah nodded in agreement.

Becks exhaled, even as her left hand grabbed at her spiky hair. ‘The marine biologist that went missing, her name was Mary Jayne Kenner.’

‘No way!’

‘It’s years ago now, but her disappearance was big news around here. Her name still occasionally pops up in conversation around Machrihanish; her disappearance is kind of like a local mystery that every man and his dog have a theory about.’

Studying the bracelet closer, Leah said, ‘Do you think this really was hers?’

‘What are the odds that somebody on the island had the same initials?’ Becks countered.

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