Page 10 of Secrets Along the Shore (Beach Read Thrillers #1)
“Sophia was only fifty yards or so from the parking lot. Whoever left her there, didn’t try very hard to hide the body. But, they didn’t make any statement with it either.” I paused.
Reuben waited.
“What I mean is, I think Sophia was killed where we found her.” The image of Sophia face down in the water, a man straddling her back and holding her under, flashed through my recollection.
“At first I thought maybe someone dumped her there—convenient and quick—but thinking about it . . .” I’d talked myself into a corner.
Reuben studied me.
“She just looked—put together.” That might have been the dumbest thing I’d ever said in my life. A put together corpse wasn’t evidence for anything.
“I get what you mean. The autopsy has to be completed, but first assessment indicates Sophia drowned, which makes it a safe bet that the place we found her also the place of the crime.”
I’d been right. I’d seen it happen—in my mind. “So, my point is,” I glossed past Reuben’s conclusions because I didn’t want him to ask how I’d drawn mine. “Sophia being drowned, left at the scene, and easily discovered . . . that speaks to an entirely different killer.”
“Why do say that?”
Another open-ended, non-leading question. I wanted to be annoyed at him, but I had a moment of appreciation for Reuben instead. At least he wasn’t trying to coerce me into stating something to support any unspoken theory he was kicking around. He at least wanted factual statements.
“Because I was buried in a shallow grave.” My answer wasn’t anything he didn’t already know. But I added the one new insight I was willing to share. “And it wasn’t where he’d tried to kill me.”
An alertness entered Reuben’s eyes. He pushed off the island, pressing his palms on the countertop instead. “Do you remember the location?”
“No.” I shook my head. I averted my attention to the almost-gone glass of water in order to avoid the second of disappointment on Reuben’s face. “I just—remember being in a new place. I remember seeing—” I bit off my words. I’d said too much.
“Seeing what?” Reuben leaned forward .
I ran my index finger around the rim. “The grave. I saw the grave he buried me in.” I lifted my eyes. “He’d planned it. There wasn’t anything impulsive about how he disposed of me.”
Reuben nodded and I guessed he was trying to digest my observation.
“You said there’s been two other women who have gone missing recently?” I verified. Mostly to get the concentration off of me.
He nodded. “Yeah. Neither has been found.”
“So you don’t know if Sophia’s death is even related to them?”
He glanced at me.
“You can’t talk about it?” I offered.
“I’m not supposed to.” His answer affirmed my observation. “But I will say we have other evidence to suggest they are connected.”
My mind skimmed the list I’d made of things I knew about Sophia.
The snake.
That stupid snake under her bedroom window.
That had to be the tie-in to the other missing women. It was the same tie that had Reuben thinking they might be connected to me, to the Serpent Killer, to the crime history in Whisper’s End.
I realized that no one had stated exactly where they believed Sophia had went missing—or where she’d last been seen. I made a quick guess out loud. “Sophia was taken from her house, wasn’t she?”
My conclusion was met with a narrow-eyed stare from Reuben. “Why do you assume that?”
“Because everyone keeps talking about the snake under her window. It wouldn’t matter if she’d been taken from somewhere else. No would’ve been looking under her window for any evidence. And I’m guessing the same thing happened to the other women.”
Reuben’s jaw worked back and forth. “You’ve put more thought into this than I expected.”
I didn’t want to validate his observation any more than he wanted to validate mine. I tried to shut him out.
“Because I want you to leave me alone,” I lied.
If I really wanted that, I’d never have gone to Stillwater Lake the first time, let alone the second time.
I certainly wouldn’t be trying—for the first time in a decade—to remember my nightmare.
“If I convince you Sophia’s murder doesn’t have anything to do with me, then I can go home. ”
My argument had sounded stronger in my head.
Reuben’s eyes softened and for a moment, the furry-cat-smoking-a-pipe T-shirt suited him a little more. It made him approachable, even quirky. And I highly doubted the alpha male detective had ever been accused of either of those things.
“If you can help these women, Noa, it could maybe save one of them.”
Unlike the ones I’d left behind? No one had saved them.
It had been ten years of silence. Ten years without any more bodies, or bones, or evidence, or clues.
They deserved more. They deserved better.
They deserved what I could maybe help give Sophia Bergstrom.
Justice. Answers. And truthfully, it hadn’t occurred to me that any of the women recently vanished from Whisper’s End could still be found alive.
Be our voice .
I looked over Reuben’s shoulder.
Sophia stood there. The expression on her face gentled her unblinking eyes.
She was right. I was too late for the ones I’d left behind. But maybe I could be a voice for the victims. And in turn, save one before their story became the same unanswered tale whose ending evaporated with the years until eventually, they were barely a memory.