Desperate hope kept me company as I passed her my phone with Jacob’s photo on it. “Do you know him?” My voice trembled.
The woman with skin still perfect and hair slightly less black than her fellow villagers shook her head. “If man don’t want to be found. He won’t be found.” She passed my phone back to me.
I paused, trying to work out her riddle. “Is that a yes or a no?”
She shrugged. “You seek but not find.”
My temper escalated, but I daren’t get argumentative with a village elder in the middle of nowhere. Instead, I nodded. “Okay, I appreciate your time.”
“Bye, bye.” She nodded and carried on with whatever duties she was in charge of.
I left the clearing where fish dried on strings and coconuts lay in big piles ready to be used. The girls who’d helped me before had vanished.
Somewhere in the dense jungle, there was a path waiting to take me back to my driver.
This was yet another dead end.
Another false lead.
The sun slipped down the sky, and thick clouds brewed a storm on the horizon. My time was swiftly running out.
But I couldn’t leave without trying one more time.
Another couple of hours passed as I made my way into the jungle, following the crushed seashell paths around simple but elegant homes. There was something so fundamentally perfect and in keeping with the landscape that the houses morphed into the forest as a friend rather than an enemy.
Children played in small gardens, and a few elderly men sat on decks smoking pipes. Everyone was gracious and kind when I encroached on their property, asking if they knew anyone by the name of Jacob Wild.
No one recognised the man in my photo.
However, occasionally, I’d be stared at, thoughts racing in dark eyes, and secrets swallowed down tanned throats, and I’d get a wash of unease—the sense that they were keeping something from me.
Even though I believed they hid something, I didn’t know how to change their minds to tell me, and when the first fat raindrop plopped on my head, I knew my time was up.
If I didn’t hike back now, I’d end up sleeping on a windswept beach with lightning for a blanket.
With rain falling lazily, teasing me with the downpour about to arrive, I traversed the sand with hunched shoulders.
Out to sea, the temple no longer glittered with sunshine but cast an ominous shadow over the bay. The clouds above it were blacker than I’d ever seen.
Was that what the driver meant about the temple of the dead?
That it lured in unsuspecting visitors only to murder them with a change of weather?
Clutching my phone, I walked faster. Raindrops landed on my eyelashes, blurring a pack of children playing in the shallows. They weren’t fussed about the tennis ball-sized droplets hitting them intermittently.
I stopped.
I should just keep walking.
But the wind kicked up, blowing my dress, whipping it in their direction.
Fine, Della, one last try.
Kicking off my sandals, I jogged through the icing sugar sand toward the children. They paused as I drew close, eyeing me warily.
Slightly puffed, I kept one eye on the storm and one on them, dropping to my haunches. “Hello. Do you speak English?”
One tiny girl nodded. “Little.”
Bringing up the photo of Jacob on my phone, doing my best to shield it from the rain, I turned the screen to her. “Have you seen this man?”
Her cute face wrinkled. “No.” Backing away, she tucked herself next to a skinny boy who looked like her brother.
Another girl came close, her hair hanging down to her hips. She touched my phone, tracing Jacob’s shaggy blond mop and the surly position of his mouth. Behind Jacob was Forrest, the horse staring into the distance with sunshine picking up the strawberry roan of his coat.
“Pretty.”
I smiled. “Yes, very pretty. Have you seen him here?”
“Horse?” She pointed at Forrest. “Village over hill has horse.”
“And the man? Do they have him too?”
She bit her lip. “No.”
“What happening?” An older boy, early teens but as scrawny as a wiry monkey interrupted us, black glossy hair flopped over one eye as he squished between the girl and me. “You annoying my sister?”
I shook my head. “No. She’s helping me.” Angling the phone so he could see clearly, I asked for the millionth time, “Do you know this man? His name is Jacob Wild. He’s my friend, and I’m looking for him.”
The boy frowned. “That not his name.”
Everything inside me froze. “You mean…you know him?”
He crossed his arms over a powerful but skinny chest. “Sunyi.”
“Sunyi?”
He scowled. “Sunyi. Name is Sunyi.”
The girl pushed him aside. “That Sunyi?” She peered closer at the photo. “Not Sunyi. Hair not right.”
I looked from child to child as they launched into squabbling Balinese. Their voices pierced my eardrums, almost as loud as the thunder rumbling in the distance. Both made my heart pound as electricity and violence crackled in the air.