It wasn’t the insoles. Once I’d checked, I sat back on my heels and said, “It wouldn’t make sense anyway. You have to recharge them every night, unless he had two pairs and switched them out. But—no. You’d want a chip. They can last a year.”
Gray said, “May I look?” When I nodded, he sat on a kitchen chair and took the shoes from me. He removed the insoles, then the laces, felt inside, and pressed around the outside edges. Finally, he turned them over and checked the heavy soles.
I said, “It can’t be on the bottom. How could it be? You wear those shoes everywhere. Through the mud. Everywhere.”
Gray said, “Here.” He was rubbing a section along the thick edge. “I can feel a line here that isn’t on the other shoe. Hang on.” He pulled some sort of multipurpose tool out of the pocket of his jeans, sat down on the chair beside me, and started to dig.
“Glue,” he said, switched to a knife blade, and began to cut.
The plug of white rubber slipped out, revealing a hole, and then the chip did. A round thing about the size of a dollar coin, but twice as thick. Gray held it in his palm and told Fruitful, “You got rid of your shoes the minute you could. Your instincts were good. Just like your sister’s.”
Fruitful said, “He followed me.”
“He did,” Gray said. “But he can’t do it anymore.” He looked down at the chip some more, then said, “One question. Why would he come at five-thirty in the afternoon? If you’re going to break into a flat, to come after your estranged wife … wouldn’t you do it at two in the morning, when everybody was asleep?”
“He’d think,” Fruitful said, her voice tight, “that we’d be making dinner. He’d think dinner was at six, and at five-thirty, we’d be cooking it. He doesn’t know about … pizza. He knows about women cooking dinner.”
“Maybe he just wanted to talk to you, then,” Obedience said.
Silence from Fruitful. Finally, I said, “He wanted to take you back with him. He thought he could convince you.”
Fruitful said, “Yes.”
“Reckon he doesn’t know you as well as he thinks he does, then,” Gray said. He asked me, “Ready to go?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What will you do with the shoes?” Obedience asked.
“Chuck them in the dumpster,” Gray said. “And we’ll get your bike and your surfboard, Daisy, and anything else you want to take along. Bring your clothes. Bring that nightdress. Wear it in a room he’s never been in, a room where he’s never going to be. Wear it and know you’re free.”
He stopped at the entrance to Tunnel Beach. Somehow, I’d known he would.
Sunset had faded into dusk by the time we were walking the earthen track at the top of the cliffs for the second time today. Gray had Fruitful in his arms, since you couldn’t crutch on a beach, and I led the way, using his torch to light our path through the tunnel, the echoes of the sea bouncing off the black walls like holding a shell to your ear.
Otherworldly. Not eerie, though. Like entering another world. A better one.
We stepped out onto the hard-packed sand, and the sea was all there was. The hiss of the waves, the patter of the waterfall. The power of water.
Gray asked Fruitful, “Still have that wedding ring?”
“Yes,” she said, and pulled it from her trouser pocket.
He asked, “Ready to do it?”
“Yes,” she said again, and he walked out to the edge of the water, the two of them dark shadows in the gray. I couldn’t hear what he said to her, but I saw her arm draw back, and I saw it go forward.
Gilead’s ring, gone for good.
A second toss, and that was the tracking chip gone as well.
Beside me, Obedience said quietly, “He’s so kind. I didn’t know men could be kind, except Uncle Aaron, maybe. But Gray’s even kinder. And so was Matiu, tonight. Is that how men are, Outside?”
“No,” I said. “Not always.” That was all I had left in me. I was done.
We drove the rest of the way home without more conversation than that. Gray pulled into the drive and up to the house, Xena barked from inside, and Gray said, “Shit,” and braked to a stop.
“What?” I asked.
I could see his frown in the light from the dash. “Fruitful was wearing those shoes when she escaped,” he said. “That means he could have tracked them to the Wanaka house.