The Hunted - Softcover

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Roz Nay is the bestselling author of Hurry Home and Our Little Secret, which won the Douglas Kennedy Prize for best foreign thriller in France and was nominated for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Mystery and the Arthur Ellis Best First Crime Novel Award. Roz has lived and worked in Africa, Australia, the US, and the UK. She now lives in British Columbia, Canada, with her husband and two children. Visit her at RozNay.com or connect with her on Twitter @RozNay1 and Instagram @RozNay.

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Chapter 1: Stevie

1 STEVIE

Stepping off the plane in September, Africa explodes onto us like shouting, like light. After seventeen hours of travel and three stops in places I’ve barely heard of, I feel like I’ve entirely switched planets. But we’re not at our final destination yet. Tanzania is still a long bus and train ride away.

It was the cheapest route we could find to go from Maine to Kenya. Each time we landed, all the overhead compartments flew open and everyone’s bags fell out. And the weather got hotter and hotter at each stopover. In Abu Dhabi, we were herded out of the plane and given mint tea and dates to eat by cafeteria staff, although for us it was three in the morning. And in Aden, Yemen, I was slapped on the knees in the passport lineup by an old lady in a burka because I was wearing shorts.

“That was an oversight,” Jacob said. “Are you okay, Stevie? All this planning we’ve done, and we forgot to research the dress code for Middle Eastern transit lounges.”

“It’s fine,” I replied, although my legs felt shaky. I couldn’t believe I’d just offended the woman so badly.

“We’ll get the hang of it,” Jacob said. “It’s all part of the adventure.”

Getting slapped by old ladies isn’t my kind of adventure, but I didn’t say anything as we joined hands and walked across the hot runway asphalt to the plane that would take us to Nairobi.

Jacob’s taken a job as a diver off the coast of Tanzania. He’d been offered the post a year ago but had turned it down because back then we were safely settled into our routine in craggy, stormy Anchorite Bay. That was before everything changed and the ground got ripped out from under us.

Six weeks ago, I was running my grandmother’s stony old pub, Jacob and I were living in the one-bedroom apartment above it, and Jacob was working with his dad as a commercial diver. They own a hull cleaning company together: Jones Boys’ Boats. They scrub barnacles, mostly, and on an exciting day, mollusks. It wasn’t a glamorous life, but it was one we knew inside and out.

Then, my grandmother Nattie died, and everything went with her. She’d always promised me her share of the pub, as well as the apartment, but she spoke of it so often and so matter-of-factly that she never did write it down. When she died intestate, as the lawyer kept calling it, it meant that on top of the tailspin of loss, suddenly I had no job and no apartment. To be honest, I’m not sure I’ve processed it all. I’ve been trying, but the more things I dig through, the more memories I seem to unlock. Jacob said a change of scene would be good for us, so rather than fight it out with Nattie’s business partners in a small-town scrum, or pick like buzzards through the belongings she’d left behind, he got back in touch with the Tanzanian dive company. The job is for three months. We need a break, Stevie. Think sunshine, warm water, and coconuts. We’ll go and shake off all the darkness, exhale for a minute, come back new. It sounded so great when he said it.

Once we’re through Kenyan immigration and the border guard has licked a stamp and stuck it to a page in our passports, Jacob turns to me.

“Let’s get a cab,” he says, tucking all our documentation into a tightly zipped side pocket of his backpack. “We’ll head straight to the hostel. Take a shower. Settle in.”

“Okay,” I say, looking around at the hubbub of the Arrivals hall.

Already it’s clear that at twenty-four, we’re older than the average backpacker, and yet everyone else is moving through the airport as if they have a map of the layout in their heads. Jacob and I haven’t traveled beyond the States—not because we didn’t want to explore, just that we never had the money—and yet here we are in Africa. It’s not a dipping-your-toe-in kind of decision. It’s not like we tried a road trip to Canada first. No, we went straight to level ten on the traveling scale and in moments of total privacy, I’m aware of a shrill hum of panic in my head.

But Jacob and I deserve an interlude, an opportunity to calm down. I mean, if we grow apart, what else do I have? And change is like a holiday, Nattie used to say, though she was always hell-bent on keeping me still, slowing me down, settling me. Anchorite Bay and Jacob Jones. What more do you need, child? Why go haring off elsewhere? She spent a lifetime trying to erase the genetic blueprint of my mother in me—a woman who’d excelled at being spontaneous—although that’s not what Nattie had called it. So if I had a roil in my blood as a teenager, an early rumble in the deepest parts of me, that life was bigger than the town in which I lived, I’ve buried it. I’ve buried a lot of things.

But we’re here, and we’re together, and Jacob’s pumped. In the lineup for cabs outside the airport he pushes a dark strand of hair away from his brow. He has a beautiful face, oak-brown eyes, with just enough tragedy behind them. In high school, he’d have gotten a million dates if he’d gone to a few more parties.

“If anyone offers,” he whispers, breath warm against my ear, “let’s not share a ride into the city. I saw a movie about that once and they track where you go and then come back later to get you.”

“Who does?” I ask.

“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “Bad guys.”

I look around at the throng of other Westerners waiting alongside us. Beaded necklaces. Velcro-strapped sandals. Happy tattoos. “Jacob, there aren’t any bad guys here. You watch too many scary movies.”

Even so, I make sure the cab door is shut before I tell the driver the name of our hostel.

We take off into the city, braking sharply for lights, cutting corners inches away from neighboring vehicles. The cab driver has CDs hanging from the roof of his car as decoration, and as he changes lanes, they swing and bang against the side of his head. On his radio is sunny guitar music, and the city is all car horns, women carrying wood on their heads down the sides of the road, and men in nylon pants selling corn and boiled eggs.

When we get to the hostel, we exit the car and the cab driver presses the tinny buzzer at the entrance for us. Jacob pays him from a security pouch he has strapped around his middle, counting out bills against his thigh before handing them over. Beside us, there’s a click of a lock releasing, and we push open the metal-barred door and step into a damp stairwell.

“Okay, then,” Jacob says, shouldering his pack. He googled the hostel, but neither of us really knows what to expect. We’d have booked a hotel, but until Jacob’s job starts in four days’ time, we’re on a tight budget.

“Here we are,” I say, my smile a little watery as my mind flashes Nattie’s face, the reliable fury of the Anchorite Bay sea, the smell of coffee in our kitchen above the pub. We’ve literally been jettisoned.

But I need to be brave, so I take a breath and we climb the stairs, passing a couple of sunburned boys in Ralph Lauren shirts who for some reason step to the side for me, nudging each other, pushing out their chests. Jacob gives them a knowing nod.

“Is it me,” he says...