Gabriel Hunt - Hunt at World's End

“What was that?” he asked.

Without slowing down, Noboru took both hands off the wheel to light a cigarette. “She’s warding off evil spirits,” he explained. He took a deep drag and gripped the wheel again. “The farther out you get from the cities, the more superstitious the people become. It’s beautiful here, loveliest place on earth—when I came here after I retired from the service, I never considered going anyplace else. But you wouldn’t believe how much people here cling to the old ways. They don’t trust anything new. Or anyone. It’s taken five years for them to start trusting me. Most of them think outsiders bring bad luck.”

“Joyce was an outsider,” Gabriel said. “Did anyone give her any trouble?”

“I don’t know,” Noboru said. “I only saw her the one time, when I picked her up at the airport and dropped her off at the guesthouse we’re going to. It’s strange. I was supposed to drive her to the hotel your brother arranged for her, but she said she’d made her own arrangements to stay in this local hostel. She said she wanted to be closer to the jungle.”

“Why?” Gabriel asked. “She was here to study some materials at the university.”

“I know—that’s what was strange. I told her your brother had put me at her disposal, that I was supposed to take her wherever she needed to go, do whatever I could to help with her research, but after I dropped her off, she never called me. Not once. I guess she didn’t need any help.”

Gabriel thought back to the incident with the skinned knee. “Or thought she didn’t,” he said.

“Don’t get me wrong, Mr.…Gabriel. She was a nice girl, very friendly, easy to get along with. Reminded me a lot of my daughter, actually. She’s in university in Singapore now—my daughter, I mean. I don’t get to see her very often; it was nice to see a girl her age, with the same sort of personality…” He fell silent for a moment. “I was upset when your brother told me that Joyce was missing. I hope you’ll be able to find her.”

“Any idea what might have happened?”

Noboru weighed his words carefully before speaking. “As beautiful as it is here, the country has a dark side. People get kidnapped all the time by bandits and held for ransom, especially out in the jungle.”

“As far as we know, there hasn’t been any ransom demand,” Gabriel said.

“That’s not necessarily a good thing,” Noboru said. “If they get someone they think no one will pay for, they kill them. Or worse, for women. It would be better if she’d broken her leg somewhere in the jungle—then at least she would die of starvation, or exposure. Much better than what the bandits would do to her.”

Gabriel knew Noboru was right about the country’s bandits—but he couldn’t bring himself to hope she was lost in the jungle. Borneo was the third largest island in the world. He wouldn’t even know where to begin looking. “Michael told me he called the university to see if she showed up, and they said they never saw her. Did she tell you if she was planning to go anywhere else? Any particular part of the island?”

“No, we only talked in general terms. She was very interested in the island’s history. She had a lot of questions.”

Gabriel could picture her putting Noboru through the third degree, squeezing every bit of information out of him that a budding cultural anthropologist would find interesting.

“The only thing she asked that was about a specific place,” Noboru continued, “was right before I dropped her off, she wanted to know if anyone had ever found an ancient cemetery in the jungle. I asked her if she was thinking of the Bukit Raya nature preserve—they have a cemetery nearby that’s fairly old. But she said no, she meant in the jungle itself. I told her unless the orangutans had started burying their dead, there weren’t any.” Noboru shook his head. “She didn’t look happy with the answer, but what could I say? There aren’t any cemeteries in the jungle. Not that I know of, anyway.”

Gabriel reached into his pocket and unfolded a sheet of paper Michael had given him, a grainy color blowup of Joyce Wingard’s passport photo. She’d come a long way from the seven-year-old girl Gabriel had met in Maryland. The blonde pigtails were gone, replaced with shoulder-length hair she wore pulled back in a tight ponytail. She still had the same wide smile, but a little more jaded, a little more cynical. Her eyes were crystal blue, her chin and cheeks slender. She’d become a beautiful woman.

What have you gotten yourself into? he thought.

The sun was a hazy red ball sinking toward the horizon when Noboru turned off the road onto a narrow dirt lane. Thick, leafy branches crowded the path on either side, pressing inward as if the foliage were trying to reclaim the road. Birds shrieked and cried, and unseen animals shook the branches above them. Half a mile in, the road widened and they found themselves entering a small village. Wooden houses with rusty corrugated metal roofs were arranged roughly in a circle around an open central area marked by a single, small pagoda. The villagers stopped what they were doing and stared at the jeep as it passed. A man filling a water bucket from a hand pump stiffened when he saw them, then spat and touched his forehead twice, once above each eye. It reminded Gabriel of someone protecting himself with the sign of the cross.

Noboru brought the jeep to a halt in front of a ramshackle two-story building. Most of the paint had peeled off long ago, leaving small patches of coppery red stuck to the flat concrete walls. Gabriel reached into the jeep’s backseat and pulled two items out of his suitcase. The first was a holster, which he strapped around his waist. The second was a Colt .45 Peacemaker, fully loaded. He slipped the revolver into the holster.

As they stepped out of the vehicle, the front door burst open and an old woman ran out shouting and waving a dirt-smeared shovel. Gabriel tensed, but Noboru stepped in front of him.

The old woman stopped running but continued gesturing with the shovel and shouting.

Gabriel had picked up many languages in his journeys around the world, but Bidayuh wasn’t one of them. It was close enough to Indonesian Bahasa that he was able to make out a word or two, but that was all. He leaned over to Noboru. “What’s she saying?”

“Her name is Merpati,” he said. “This is her guesthouse. She wants us to leave. She says your presence here as an outsider is bad luck and will bring evil spirits.”

Gabriel frowned. It didn’t make sense. If Joyce had made arrangements to stay here, if it was a guesthouse used by visitors to the island, why would this Merpati react so negatively to their arrival? This wasn’t a matter of bad luck or evil spirits, Gabriel decided—something had happened, something that had changed this old woman’s mind about letting foreigners through her door.

Gabriel held up the passport photo. “Ask her when she saw Joyce last.” Noboru spoke, and Merpati lowered the shovel, answering in a quick and anxious voice. She passed her hand over her face, from forehead to chin. Though Gabriel didn’t recognize the words, the fear in her expression was unmistakable.

Noboru nodded, then turned to Gabriel. “You’re going to love this. She says ghosts came in the night and took her.”

Upon hearing the word “ghost” in English, Merpati nodded and passed her hand over her face again.

“Ghosts without faces,” Noboru went on. “She says they took Joyce into the jungle. This was a few nights ago.”

The old woman pointed toward the far end of the village, where the houses thinned and the jungle rose in a thick green wall beyond them.

“Does she know where these…these ghosts would have taken her?” Gabriel said.