Page 27

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CALIFORNIA, 2011

“Where’s Daddy?” asks Hannah, coming into what used to be our bedroom. Our safe haven, where we hid from the world—at least until a week ago, when the world decided it was coming to find us.

“He had to leave for work super early,” I lie, wondering if there’s anything in the room that might suggest to an eight-year-old that he hadn’t slept here at all.

I don’t blame him for leaving. We both need time and space to get our heads around the secrets we’d kept and the lies we’d told. Well, the secrets I’d kept and the lies I’d told. But as he slammed the door, I doubted that he’d ever come back. Our problems seemed too insurmountable, our issues too deep-rooted to overcome. How can we move forward when he knows even less about his wife now than he did this time last week? This new version paints a very different picture to the original he’s been admiring for all these years.

“M-my sister called? Here? ” I’d floundered when he dropped the bombshell last night.

“Are you shocked because she got our number, or that she’s come back from the dead?” Brad had said, his tone dripping with sarcasm and vitriol.

“I… I…”

“What the fuck is going on, Nicole?” he’d spat, unable to contain his fury any longer. “How is none of what I know about you true anymore?”

“Brad…” I’d said, going toward him with open arms.

“Don’t!” he’d yelled, before storming out.

His bitter dejection still weighs heavily on my chest.

“What woke you up so early?” I ask, patting his side of the bed as Hannah climbs in.

“The phone in your office,” she says, contentedly snuggling into the pillow. “It wouldn’t stop ringing.”

Confused, I reach over to my mobile on the nightstand and sit bolt upright when I see more than ten missed calls and voicemails. It must have been on silent.

On seeing Hank’s name appear more than once, my stomach lurches and I instinctively turn to check that Hannah is, in fact, safely nestled in my bed. I head to the bathroom, quietly closing the door behind me as I wonder what could possibly have happened, because having the police chief call this many times at this early hour can only mean that something is wrong.

An all-consuming nausea threatens to overwhelm me as I force myself to recall the look on Brad’s face as he left last night. It wasn’t anger, it wasn’t guilt, it was a gut-wrenching sadness and disappointment. Disappointment that I wasn’t the woman he thought I was. The woman I’d made him believe I was.

I grip the sides of the basin as my phone rings again, its shrill tone reverberating around the windowless four walls.

“Nicole?” says Hank, when I eventually pluck up the courage to answer. “I need you to come up to La Jolla.”

I can’t bring myself to ask why. I can only numbly hang up, call Barbara across the street on autopilot and pass her at the door as she comes in to look after Hannah.

The fifteen-minute drive is tortuous, as image after image assaults my senses, making me question everything I know about the man I married. Would he be so hurt that he’d do something so finite? Would he be so selfish as to leave a child who adored him? Would he be so malevolent as to do it here— in a place that has always been so sacred to both of us?

There’s a small crowd looking on in horror from behind a cordoned-off area, keeping them off the beach; the irony that this was the very thing I was appealing for last night is not lost on me. I steel myself for whatever I’m about to witness, but nothing could have prepared me for the sea of red that assaults my senses.

“It’s OK,” says Hank. “It’s not what you think…”

“Wh-what…?” I start, as he gently steers me down to the once-golden sands.

“It’s spray paint,” he says, at pains to pull my tortured mind back from thinking it was the blood of slain seals. “We got a call at four o’clock this morning from a concerned local resident who was woken by the seals barking. She said it was much louder than normal and they sounded panicked.”

“B-but… I can’t even…” I stutter. “Why… why would anybody do this?”

Hank shakes his head. “It’s the world we live in: The youngsters are bored and looking for entertainment, and some warped individuals think this is it.”

Too angry to cry, a furious heat creeps up my neck and I clench my fists.

“I just don’t understand who would do this,” I say, imagining a crowd of students from the nearby college getting so drunk or high that they couldn’t possibly account for their actions this morning.

“Well, that’s the thing,” says Hank. “The only way I can even begin to get my head around this is to believe that it must have been a moment of madness. That some louse, in his heightened state, thought it would somehow be a laugh.”

“But…?”

“ But ,” says Hank, the unease etched into every furrow on his brow, “there seems to be a specific message they wanted to get across.”

I follow him to a half-submerged rock, where four full-sized male seals perch on high-alert, the little trust they had for the human species now shattered once and for all.

“It’s impossible to piece together, but there are random words that might mean something to someone, and if we can find out who , we might be able to track down the perpetrator.”

Although the words daubed onto the animals’ fur don’t form a sentence, it doesn’t take me long to see a pattern forming.

“ LIAR, ” “ MURDERER, ” “ FRAUD ” are just some that I can read, but it’s not until a female seal hobbles to the water’s edge that I catch sight of a capital “ B ” emblazoned across her back. I can’t yet see the rest of the word. I half-run toward her, doing my utmost not to spook the colony any more than they have been already, but if we have any chance of catching whoever did this, I need as much information as possible.

“I’ve not noticed this one yet,” says Hank, close on my heels.

“We’ve got to hope that something they’ve written will give us a clue as to what this is all about,” I say. “Because someone clearly has an axe to grind and won’t have gone to all this trouble for it to fall on deaf ears.”

“Could it be political?” he moots.

“I would have thought it’s going to have something to do with the city council decision next week,” I offer. “I spoke about it at a conference last night, and it seems like too much of a coincidence for it not to be connected.” I don’t tell him that it’s one of many.

“B… E…” Hank reads aloud as the seal nears the first wave-break. “Is that BE-ACH ?” he questions, sounding disappointed. “Or BE-WARE ? Maybe it’s a threat of some kind…”

I attempt to get closer, knowing I only have a second or two to see what someone so clearly wants to be read. But when I see “ N ” as the third and final letter, my blood turns icy cold and, as the seal disappears beneath the surface, taking my secret with her, I realize that this isn’t about the petition or politics. This is about me.