"We forgot her," he said at last. There was a catch in his voice. "We packed up and were halfway back to the guest house before we remembered her. We went back, of course, and searched and searched, calling her name over and over.
Finally we realized we'd have to go to town for help, then, it was dark. A search party was formed immediately and the whole town came out, I swear, to look for her. T couldn't find her that night, nor the next day. The poor little thing had crawled into a cave, you know. I guess she frightened, she must have been terrified of being alone in dark. She was only four. They'd already looked in that cave but she had crawled down a shaft they didn't see at first.
"Maybe she was playing hide and seek, you know, loved that, and we always went along with it. We would pretend we couldn't see her behind the tree, and go look for her while she giggled loud enough for us to hear They didn't find her for almost three days!" he said. "Three days!" He was almost shouting. "She was dead!" He be to weep uncontrollably.
"We were sent home," he said, finally, dabbing his eyes with the tissue I'd handed him. "Gordon was the only who stayed in the field. He went to another university to complete his studies. I heard he was working in Peru, here. But I guess eventually the siren call of Rapa Nui him. Seth became a history teacher, Dave a builder, Jasper, who dropped out of college before he graduated made a fortune as a stockbroker before he retired to become an adventurer. My own career path, I've told you.
"I still dream about her, cold and frightened and abandoned in that cave. I've often wondered if that was Jasper and Seth and Dave never had kids and why all my relationships end so badly. Dave got married, you know, he never wanted kids. Seth didn't marry at all, and Jasper married every woman he slept with, as near as I can tell, he never had kids either. We should never have come back.”
"And why did you?" I said.
"I don't know, except that we were invited. No, I'm being honest here. I came because I wanted to see Jasper again. Despite the way he treated me, there is still such feeling there. Dave and Seth had stayed in touch, although not regularly. I had stayed in touch in a way, I suppose, through the Internet, although I never identified myself to them that way. I never told them about my, well, you know. I told them I was an actor, which is true, after all. Seth and I talked maybe once every couple of years. Maybe not even that often. We stayed interested in Rapa Nui over all the years. You can laugh about Lemuria, but it is possible there is a sunken continent in the Pacific. Dave and Seth should have stayed in the field, too. They were good at it, especially Seth. Rongorongo, I mean. He told me he just kept working at it in his spare time. He set up an office in his garage. A terrible waste, really. Dave was the same. He told you, many times, no doubt," he said, with the hint of a smile, "how he was watching a TV show and an idea about how to move and raise the moai just came to him. Rapa Nui drew us, you know. We were still in its thrall.
"Dave emailed Seth and me to say he'd received an invitation to this Moai Congress. I had, too. We talked on the phone a couple of times. Dave thought maybe if we went we'd exorcize a few demons, you know. He said Jasper had emailed him and asked him to come, so maybe it was time we got together again. He said he'd persuaded Seth to go as well. They'd emailed Gordon, but he said he was too busy. He didn't suggest they come and visit or anything. Bad feelings still, I guess, between him and Jasper. That and the ghost of little Tavake.
"I told them I couldn't come, that I was in a show and couldn't leave it. At the last minute, though, I changed my mind. I came incognito. Seth recognized me, but respected my request for anonymity. The others didn't know me at all. I suppose that is what saved me. Dave brought Jasper's rongorongo tablet with him, as Jasper asked him to, and Dave and Seth both had a look at it. Dave must have suspected it was the one we'd found years ago, because he'd called Seth at home and asked him to bring a copy of the photograph of the group of us from that summer if he could find it, which Seth did. Dave wanted to compare the tablet in the old photo with Jasper's tablet. I think Dave and Seth were almost certain they were one and the same. They tried to persuade themselves otherwise, but I don't think they could.
"Seth said the tablet was a sign, a warning of what was to come. Whoever is doing this wanted us to know. Jasper, being the kind of person he is, didn't seem to notice. He was so intent on his big find in Chile that proved what he wanted to prove that he didn't see the resemblance. Dave was going to talk to him, to warn him, but I'm not sure he did. He may have been killed before he could. Dave also planned to tell everyone at the congress that it wasn't from Chile. He thought that was a travesty, for Jasper to say such a thing. If he did manage to talk to Jasper, then Jasper didn't believe him or he wouldn't have gone on to make that big announcement in front of everybody.
"In a way we got what we deserved, you know. We were unbelievably self-absorbed, terribly careless. As a result, a little girl died. If you make that announcement in the dining room, tell everyone who I really am, then maybe I'll pay the price, too. Maybe this is as it should be."
"But not for Gabriela," I said. "She has done nothing to deserve this."
"But her father has, hasn't her* He may be the least culpable. He left the beach first. But he is still paying, isn't he? The rest of us have no children. It is Gordon who is to learn what it is like to lose one.
"It was thirty years ago that it happened. Thirty years ago! Life held such promise then. There was nothing we couldn't do. It ruined our lives, I think. It ruined many lives. The Pedersens divorced, I heard. As far as I know, Professor Pedersen never remarried. I don't know what happened to Tavake's mother, but I am sure she never completely got over it. How could she?
"For me, at times over that thirty years, days would go by when I wouldn't even think about it. But it was there, and when I came back here, it was as if it had just happened. I imagine the others felt the same."
"So who is Anakena?" I said.
"I don't know," he replied. "I'm just pathetically grateful it isn't you."
12
THE SHADOWY FIGURE I'd come to know as Anakena was very slowly beginning to take shape in my mind. Like the hooded individual in my nightmares, I didn't know if it was man or woman. I did know that this was a person of keen, if malignantly misdirected, intelligence, someone of almost infinite patience. This war of retribution had been devised down to the last detail, and it had been planned for a very long time, each piece of the strategy carefully put into place over a period of at least three years and in such a way as not to raise any alarm.
It had to come down to the Internet group. There were others at the congress, certainly. Several Chilean experts had flown in to present papers, a fellow from CONAF, the Chilean national park service, had come to present a paper on efforts to reforest the island, for example, but he had come and gone, in one day and out the next. Other Chilean archaeologists had done the same. The people who had stayed for the whole event and who hadn't been able to leave were the Moaimaniacs, Kent Clarke Films, Moira, and me. I knew who all the members of the group were, with the exception of Anakena. Technically that should have meant that none of the people whose aliases I knew were Anakena, but I didn't think I could count on that. It would have been easy enough for any one of them to have a second alias.
Andrew and I had talked for a long time after he told me about Flora Pedersen. He told me that he regularly checked Jasper Robinson's Web site out of sheer curiosity about his former schoolmate's exploits, even if that schoolmate had rejected him in such a harsh fashion so many years before. He'd signed up for the Moaimaniacs the moment the notice appeared on the Web site, about three years before. The anonymity it afforded was very appealing to Andrew, and he'd been pleased, he said, when he realized that both Dave and Seth were members.