Hunt at World's End (3 page)

“And you know I’ve never been comfortable with it,” Michael said. “I certainly wouldn’t want to be the cause of it.”

“You wouldn’t be the cause,” Gabriel said. “Joyce Wingard would. Besides, I haven’t been to Borneo in ages. About time for a trip back.”

“You might not recognize it,” Michael said in a quiet voice. “Half the rain forest’s gone.”

“All the more reason to go now, before they cut down the other half.”

“Gabriel…”

“She’s probably fine, Michael. I’ll probably find her in the museum archives, elbow deep in notes and files, with her phone turned off and no idea how long it’s been since she last e-mailed you.”

“But what if you don’t?” Michael said.

Gabriel thought of the headstrong, impish, pigtailed girl chasing him around her uncle’s picnic table, squealing with laughter as she tried to catch him. He remembered her showing him her toys, how she took special pride in one in particular, a Barbie dressed in safari gear and an explorer’s pith helmet. He remembered her playing tag in the woods with Michael, who’d been only a couple years older than her. Joyce had fallen, skinned her knee on a rock, and wouldn’t let anyone pick her up and carry her back to the house. She’d insisted on walking, even with blood trickling down her leg, and
shouting that she could do it herself, didn’t need anyone’s help.

But this time maybe she did.

“Then you’ll be glad I went,” Gabriel said. “How soon can you have the plane ready?”

It was Monday afternoon local time when the Hunt Foundation’s jet touched down at Sepinggan International Airport in Balikpapan, on the southern coast of Borneo. In the airport’s waiting area, small suitcase in hand, he scanned the crowd. Michael had arranged for a man named Noboru to meet him here. Formerly Japanese Intelligence, now employed by the Hunt Foundation, he’d been Joyce’s contact on the tropical island. If anyone was in a position to turn up any clues as to what had happened to her, it would be Noboru—though he hadn’t found any yet when Michael had spoken to him from New York.

The waiting area was crowded with people holding signs written in Indonesian and Malaysian Bahasa, Kadazandusun, Iban, Bidayuh, Arabic and a dozen other scripts. Despite the air-conditioning, the room smelled of sweat and spices. Small vendor huts were set up along the walls, selling dumplings, pork buns and bowls of noodles.

A hand fell on Gabriel’s shoulder. “Mr. Hunt?”

He turned. A man of about fifty stood behind him. He had long, shaggy black hair, Asian features, a jawline spotted with dark stubble and a face deeply wrinkled from the sun.

“Mr. Noboru?”

The man nodded and shook Gabriel’s hand. “Your
brother told me you were coming. Welcome to Borneo. I just wish your visit were under better circumstances. Here, let me get that for you.” He took Gabriel’s suitcase and led the way outside. The moment Gabriel passed through the sliding glass doors into the open air, an oppressive humidity pressed down on him like a heavy, moist blanket. He followed Noboru to the parking lot, where hundreds of cars gleamed in the sweltering sun. Noboru threw the suitcase into the backseat of a mud-spattered, topless jeep and climbed into the driver’s seat.

Gabriel joined him up front. “Where are we headed?”

“Inland, toward Central Kalamitan,” Noboru said. “Where I dropped Joyce when she first arrived. It’s a long drive, but we ought to be there before nightfall, Mr. Hunt.”

“Mr. Hunt was my father,” he said. “And these days it’s my brother. I just go by Gabriel.”

Noboru nodded. “Make yourself comfortable.” He started the engine, stepped on the gas, and the jeep lurched out of the parking lot with a great roar and a plume of black exhaust. Gabriel grabbed the roll bar as Noboru sped through a series of hairpin turns to get them onto the highway.

The farther they got from Balikpapan, the more it felt like they were traveling back in time. The highway devolved into an unpaved dirt road and the tall apartment buildings of the city were replaced by wooden shacks surrounded by dense jungle. They passed a line of women walking alongside the road, dressed in the brightly dyed linens of the indigenous Dayaks and balancing water jugs and baskets of rice on their shoulders. A few minutes later, Gabriel saw another woman kneeling beside the road and hammering something
into the ground. As they drove past, he saw it was a wooden post with the skull of a goat lashed to the top.

“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.

Noboru asked, and in response Merpati said something curt, biting her words off fiercely.

“She says,” Noboru translated, “the girl is dead now, trapped among the ghosts in the land of the dead. If you go after her, you will be trapped too. Become a ghost yourself.”

Gabriel put the picture of Joyce away in his jacket pocket. “I’ll take my chances. Will she at least let us see Joyce’s room?”

Noboru asked and Merpati chewed her lip. When she finally replied, Noboru said, “For fifty Ringgit she’ll let us up—that’s about ten dollars. It’s a lot here.”

“Hell,” Gabriel said, digging in his pocket, “I can do
better than that.” He pulled out a hundred-dollar bill, unfolded it and held it out to the old woman. She eyed him warily, then snatched it out of his hand. She stared at it briefly, crumpled it in her palm and hid it away in a pocket in her torn shift. She muttered something out of the side of her mouth.

“She says we can’t stay long. It’s a full moon tonight, and apparently that’s when the spirits are at their strongest. She doesn’t want you hanging around and bringing the ghosts back.”

“No, we definitely wouldn’t want that. Listen,” Gabriel said, “you should go. It’s getting dark, and you’ve got a long drive back. I can take it from here.”

“You kidding?” Noboru said. “I like my job. Nice hours, good benefits. How long do you think your brother would let me keep it if I left you in the middle of the jungle by yourself?”

“I’m not a Ph.D. student on her own in Borneo for the first time,” Gabriel said. “I can handle myself.”

“Against ghosts?” Noboru asked with a grin. “Two’s better than one against ghosts.”

“Against practically anything,” Gabriel acknowledged. “All right. Just stay close and don’t wander off. One missing person is enough.”

“You don’t have to worry about me. Didn’t I just tell you I’m not going anywhere?”

“You armed?”

Noboru lifted his pants leg to reveal a long knife strapped to his calf.

Gabriel nodded. “I guess that counts.”

Merpati led them to the door of the guesthouse. Gabriel noticed a short wooden post had been hammered into the ground by the door, and atop it was a goat’s skull, like the one they’d seen on the road. Merpati’s attempt to protect the house from the evil spirits that
took Joyce, presumably. The old woman brought them inside, past a kitchen that smelled like spicy stew and steamed pork, and up a wooden staircase to the second floor. The warped steps creaked loudly under their weight. Barring the culprits actually having been ghosts, which Gabriel was inclined to doubt, there was no way they could have sneaked up these stairs to take Joyce without being heard. Which suggested that whoever had taken her must have found another way in.

On the second floor, a long corridor ran the length of the building, five doors lined up along one side. Each door they passed was open, each room empty but for a neatly made bed with a short dresser beside it. Nothing on any of the beds, nothing on any of the dressers.

“The other boarders must have left after Joyce was taken,” Noboru said.

“Can you blame them?” Gabriel said.

Merpati stopped in front of the last door, which was the only one that was closed. She pulled a ring of long, heavy keys out of her pocket, unlocked the door and pushed it open for them. Gabriel and Noboru walked past her into the room. The old woman hung back, reluctant to set foot inside. She shouted something at Noboru. Gabriel didn’t need him to translate that time. Merpati wanted them to finish quickly and go.

Looking at the state of Joyce’s room, Gabriel could understand Merpati’s reaction. Everything was in a shambles. The dresser’s drawers had been dumped, the bed stripped, the mattress slashed. Clothing, books and personal items were scattered everywhere—Gabriel nudged a hairbrush with his foot. On the far wall, the window was shattered, the broken glass taped over with a bedsheet. He crossed to the window, pulled the sheet aside, and stuck his head through, taking care to avoid the jagged edges. This must have been how
they’d gotten in. It was probably the way they’d taken her out, too, maybe with a ladder or a rope, after tossing the room and its contents.