Page 9 of By the Time You Read This (Raisa Susanto #3)

Chapter Six

Raisa

Day One

The address Isabel had included on the letter to Raisa was in a small fishing town on the coast of the peninsula, one like so many others dotted along the stretch of land.

The cute red wooden house stood on the edge of a rise overlooking the water, the blue of the sky stretching out for days beyond it. Raisa tried to imagine more picturesque scenery and failed.

Kilkenny pulled to a stop in front of it, looking as hesitant as Raisa felt. Out of all the places Isabel could have sent them, this seemed strange.

There was nothing else to do but go forward, though, so Raisa hopped out of the SUV.

A woman in her late fifties, early sixties, opened the door wearing loose working jeans and a cable sweater despite the heat of the day. Her thick white hair was braided back away from a face weathered from a lifetime spent outdoors near the water.

“What do you want?” she asked.

They both flashed their badges. “We were wondering if we could ask you a few questions.”

The woman squinted at them. “What’s this about?”

“Could we go inside?” Raisa pressed.

“You tell me, is this ...” The woman was getting worked up enough that words seemed to fail her. “Is this about my girl?”

Raisa’s chest tightened. “Can we come inside, ma’am?”

“Helen,” the woman offered, pulling a tissue out of her sleeve, and waved them in. “Yes, come, come.”

The house was dark despite the fact that it was midday, the shutters all closed tight, the air stale with the grim neglect universally recognized as a sign of a recent loss.

Is this about my girl?

Raisa didn’t know what she’d expected to find, but a victim hadn’t been on her mind.

Helen led them to a small sitting room that probably normally had a beautiful view of the water.

The furniture was worn in a comfy way that fit the rest of the house, but that was the only thing normal about the room. Every inch of space was covered by photographs of a pretty young woman—alone, with friends, on a boat, with big groups at special occasions. But always the same girl in all of them.

Raisa touched one of them, and Helen whimpered, a soft, distraught sound that punched Raisa in the gut.

“Is this your girl?”

“Lindsey,” Helen said, her eyes locked on the picture Raisa had chosen. It was a selfie of the young woman, alone on a boat, her smile wide enough to crinkle her eyes into oblivion. “She died two months ago.”

Her attention shifted back to Raisa’s face, everything about her sharpening. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

Probably, Raisa thought.

“We have some questions regarding another investigation,” Raisa said as gently as possible. “Can you tell us what happened to Lindsey?”

“What other investigation?” Helen asked.

“We can’t disclose that,” Raisa said.

“No one believes me.” Helen sank down onto her couch, her eyes still locked on the photo as she brought a tissue up to swipe at the escaping tears. “Everyone keeps saying it was a tragic accident.”

That sounded all too familiar to how Isabel liked to kill. Plenty of other family members had been told they were crazy for suspecting foul play. “What happened to Lindsey, Helen?”

“She drowned,” Helen said, her lip wobbling. “They say she drowned.”

There were so many pictures of Lindsey on a boat all around the room. It would certainly be an easy way to kill her without anyone—except her mother, apparently—thinking it was anything but what it looked like.

“What do you think happened?” Kilkenny asked.

Helen looked up at him, distraught. It was as if she’d just heard the news that morning instead of two months earlier. Maybe her grief had been frozen in time until someone listened to, and believed, her suspicions.

“There was a storm coming in, and Lindsey ... she was so smart, she never went out when a storm was brewing,” Helen said. “Everyone says she didn’t know it was coming, but she knew it was coming. We’d talked just that morning.”

“Did she mention going out on the boat?” Kilkenny asked.

“That’s exactly what happened. And I said, ‘Check the weather, girlie.’ It had changed overnight,” Helen said. “And Lindsey said she’d better wait until the next day she had off.”

“Where did she work?” Raisa asked.

“She was a crew member on one of those tourist sailboats,” Helen said. “They always only took out a handful of people. But on her off days, she borrowed her friend’s boat and took it out whenever she could.”

“So she was an expert sailor,” Kilkenny commented, even though that was obvious from the pictures.

“A natural—she spent more of her life on the water than she did on land,” Helen said, her mouth trembling once more. She made a valiant effort to hold back her tears, but was only half-successful. “She wanted to sail around the world solo one day.”

Raisa chewed on her lower lip, debating the right way to ask what she needed to know. Sometimes she marveled at the fact that she was considered an expert at language, but could be clumsy when it came to spoken words. She retreated to the safety of Kilkenny’s previous open-ended question. “What do you think happened to Lindsey?”

Helen sniffed. “I think she was murdered.”

“Why do you believe that?” Raisa pressed.

“She wasn’t wearing a life vest,” Helen said.

Raisa waited for more, but it didn’t come. “And she usually wore a life vest?”

“Always,” Helen corrected. She waved to the photographs. “Just look.”

Now that Raisa knew what to search for, she saw it. In every single picture taken on a boat, Lindsey wore some kind of flotation device.

“My husband, her father, he drowned,” Helen said, and Raisa’s eyes flew to her. Helen had gone to sit by the window. What must that be like, to have lost both a husband and daughter to the water? And yet still live so close to it. “She was with him.”

“Oh,” Raisa murmured softly. How horrifying that must have been. “How old was she?”

“Ten,” Helen said, the grief clearly faded, less jagged. But how could this not all bring everything back up? “They were swimming off the boat, some kind of current must have grabbed them. He used his last bit of effort to shove her on board. The coast guard found her hours later, just sitting in the boat by herself.”

“My god,” Kilkenny said. “Yet she wasn’t scared of the water after that?”

Helen glanced over her shoulder, looking thoughtful. “No. Not for a minute.”

Kilkenny’s mouth did something interesting, obviously hiding a reaction he didn’t want to reveal.

“But she always wore a life vest from then on. Religiously,” Helen continued, oblivious. “Why wouldn’t she have been wearing her life jacket?”

There were all kinds of reasons, ones that Helen wouldn’t want to hear. Maybe a bird pooped on it; maybe she always made sure to wear one when Helen could see her, not for herself but for her mother. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

A lack of a life vest and a knowledgeable sailor did not a murder case make.

But they were here for a reason. Isabel’s bread and butter had been accidental deaths, made to look so real no one questioned them.

Isabel obviously hadn’t killed Lindsey, since she’d been in prison two months ago.

But she could have had a hand in it.

Or maybe she had seen news of this drowning and simply wanted to mess with Raisa.

“This might sound like an odd question,” Raisa said. “But have you ever heard the name Isabel Parker?”

Helen squinted at her, thoughtful, but then shook her head. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Why? Does she have something to do with all this?”

Maybe, maybe not. This could be the first clue Isabel gave them to help solve her murder. Or sending them out here could serve a purpose Raisa didn’t yet understand. Helen didn’t need to hear all that, though.

So, instead, Raisa asked, “Did anything odd happen? In the weeks leading up to her death? Did she act strangely at all?”

“No. Well ...” Helen cut off her knee-jerk denial and stared off into space. “A few weeks before she died, she came home from her job ... rattled. Angry, almost, but also a little scared.”

“Rattled?” Kilkenny asked.

“Yes, and she never let the tourists bother her, so it was strange,” Helen said. “But that can’t be anything, can it?”

Raisa and Kilkenny exchanged glances.

Again, Raisa decided not to answer. “Would we be able to look around her room?”

Helen hesitated, but then nodded. “I don’t see why not, if you think it could help.”

Neither Raisa nor Kilkenny reassured her, but Helen didn’t seem to need it. She just led them down a hallway that ended in a bathroom. On either side was a tiny room, one of which was clearly Helen’s. The other was presumably Lindsey’s, but the door was closed.

“I can’t,” Helen said, waving toward it. “You all just let me know if you need anything.”

And then she was gone.

It was quite the strike of good fortune to be given free rein like this, but Helen didn’t seem to have anything to lose. The two of them must have seemed like a last gasp of hope for someone shouting into the void.

The doorknob gave way easily beneath Raisa’s hand, and she walked into exactly what she’d expected to walk into—a bedroom caught in time. Eventually, Helen might convert it into a shrine, much like she had the living room. But for now, she probably hadn’t even been in here more than once or twice.

There wasn’t much there. A narrow twin bed was pushed up against the window, this one overlooking the road that led into town. Oh, how Lindsey must have longed to rotate the house so she could see the ocean.

“What were you thinking?” Raisa asked without turning around. “When Helen said Lindsey wasn’t scared to go back in the water.”

A beat of silence passed, long enough to get Raisa to look over at him. Kilkenny was standing at the bookshelf, his finger paused where it had been dragging along the novels’ spines.

“I’ve seen people who have lost parents in plane crashes,” Kilkenny said finally. “And they worked for years to conquer that fear and become pilots themselves. I read about a case where a man’s father died of a bee sting, and just the sight of one sent him into near paralytic fear. Then he decided to make honey as a hobby to face that terror head-on.”

“Okay, so not so strange that Lindsey became an avid sailor,” Raisa said.

“ Became being the key word there,” Kilkenny pointed out. “Every other instance I’ve heard of like that, it took years for the person to work through their trauma. From how Helen made it seem, Lindsey was back out there the next day.”

Raisa turned fully. “Huh. What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” Kilkenny said, looking a little cagey right before he shifted so his back was to her.

“What are you theorizing, then?” Raisa pressed.

“Oh,” Kilkenny murmured softly as he pulled something from the shelf. Raisa would have guessed it was a delay tactic except he seemed genuinely interested in the book. He held it out to her. It was one of the more recent, popular true crime novels making the rounds. Kilkenny pulled out another and then another and then another.

“Safe to say she’s a fan,” Raisa said.

“It’s a loose connection, but how many podcasts have come out about Isabel?” Kilkenny asked.

Raisa was about to answer when she caught sight of something that had been behind the books Kilkenny had removed.

Journals.

Three of them that she could see, maybe more beyond.

Raisa reached for one and flipped it open.

The first few pages looked like nothing in particular—a dry diary entry about breakfast calories and drinking plans for the night.

Then Raisa got to a sketch. It was a graphic drawing of a man being tortured, bodiless hands peeling the skin from his bones.

How long would you live without your largest organ?

Carefully, Raisa skimmed through the rest, most of which were sadistic diatribes and lists of people’s names with what looked like possible “accidents” next to them.

Raisa exhaled a soft curse and realized Kilkenny had come to look over her shoulder. He didn’t seem surprised at the contents.

“A classic marker of an antisocial personality disorder is a lack of fear,” Kilkenny said, his voice grim. “It would have been noticeable even as a child.”

She thought of those letters that Isabel had kept. They had been signed “Your Biggest Fan.”

If they were looking for the author of those, a psychopath in training might be the exact place they should start.

But if that were the case, if Lindsey Cousins had been Isabel’s Biggest Fan, then that made two psychopaths who had died under mysterious circumstances.

Maybe ... maybe they weren’t hunting psychopaths at all.

Maybe they were hunting someone who killed them.