Page 100 of Secrets Along the Shore (Beach Read Thrillers #1)

CHAPTER

SIX

I woke to light.

Not dawn seeping through the curtains or the moon slipping past the branches. No, this was blinding—artificial. Every bulb in the lodge, upstairs and down, burning bright. I blinked against it, disoriented, heart knocking in my chest like a drum. My bedroom door was cracked open.

I never kept it that way.

I sat up slowly, unsure if I’d left something on and forgotten. But I knew I hadn’t. I never did. Not since the fire drills at the school, where I had to memorize which lights signaled certain dangers. I always double-checked things now.

My phone was on the nightstand. No notifications.

I slipped from bed and pulled on a sweatshirt over my pajama tank. I shoved my feet into the boots I kept at the ready near the door.

The lodge was glowing.

Every single room—bedrooms, kitchen, dining, library, even the third-floor landing—was lit like a stage set.

I texted Mr. Monroe.

Lights are all on. Something’s wrong. Please come first thing.

My fingers hovered. Should I call the police? But what would I say? I didn’t hear anything. I couldn’t. But there was no evidence of a break-in, as far as I could tell. The doors remained locked .

No footprints on the rug.

No windows open.

No sign of broken glass.

Still, I didn’t feel alone. I sensed someone breathing behind me, but turning, I found no one.

I moved room to room, phone in one hand, the other clenched in a fist, just in case I ran into an intruder.

My bare legs prickled against the cool air.

The kitchen lights blared above the old pine table, still holding my plate from dinner.

Nothing out of place. The stove clock blinked 12:00, still not reset from when the power went out. First an outage and now this.

Scanlon’s bedroom burned bright, the bookcase door flush to the wall. I opened it anyway. Everything was as I had left it.

I moved toward the basement. If someone had cut the breaker before and flipped it tonight, maybe they’d used the access door down there to get into the house.

The lights beneath the stairs were steady with light—unlike the flicker I’d seen when I’d explored the basement days ago.

Someone had been down there to install new bulbs. Like tonight.

My stomach rolled.

I started down, every footfall vibrating like thunder in my chest. Everything appeared untouched. The broken washer, the dusty crates, the rowboat’s outline still missing from the corner where I’d dragged it out.

But as I neared the bottom of the stairs, I stopped.

One of the boxes left by Scanlon was cut open. Its contents were scattered in a semicircle across the floor.

Papers. A photograph.

I crouched and picked it up.

It was of me. Here. In this lodge. Standing at the edge of the dock with Livvie beside me, a memory frozen on glossy paper. The image was dated July 24 th on the back.

Four days before my birthday.

I shoved it into my pajama pocket and rose, backing out of the basement quickly. I reached the top of the stairs and slammed the door behind me .

Then I noticed it.

Out the kitchen window—the back deck post caught the light just right. A metallic shine.

I moved closer.

My breath fogged against the glass.

There was something stuck to the post. A long knife. A kitchen knife from the lodge’s own drawer, and it had been driven through a folded sheet of paper.

I didn’t have to read it to feel the dread settle in my chest like a stone, but I went anyway, fingers trembling as I unlocked the door and stepped into the humid night.

I reached out carefully, heart hammering.

The note read:

You killed her. Murderer. See how close I came to you. Get out, or you’re dead.

My knees nearly gave out as I stared at the note. The writing was jagged. Angry. All uppercase. Sharp angles.

A man’s? A woman’s?

I had no idea. And that terrified me more.

My mind snapped back to my dreams—the water, the girls late…until one arrived. Livvie. She had met me that night after the fireworks…and I had been so angry.

But murder her?

That was impossible.

But could I have caused her death without meaning it? Maybe I left her alone on the water, and her boat tipped. Had she called me for help, but I couldn’t hear her?

I ran back inside, locking the door behind me, every window now feeling like an open invitation. Had someone been watching me since I got here?

Had they known I was opening Scanlon’s secrets?

Did they enter the house? My room?

I backed away from the door. From the truth that now stood too close to ignore. Scanlon had left this place to me —a girl chosen not because she was special, but because she was part of something. But what?

An experiment?

A cover-up?

A death?

No. I would never believe any of it. I would remember if any of it was true.

Wouldn’t I?

Sleep was gone. Any illusion of safety vanished with it. I crept back up the stairs, phone in hand, texting 911. But when no response came, I realized the text-to-911 service was not available this remotely.

I reached the landing, but I didn’t turn toward my room.

I turned toward his.

I pushed the door open slowly and turned to the bookshelf…but not to open the secret passage. This time, I wanted to look at the books on this side.

Most of the spines were cracked. Thick hardcovers, some medical. Some religious. A few about early language acquisition, linguistics, and developmental disorders. One was a full encyclopedia set dated 1987.

They had been left behind. Unwanted. Worthless in the eyes of his family, I imagined. But maybe they weren’t worthless at all. If his relatives hadn’t thought these books were trash, they would have looked more closely and would have found the study behind them.

I ran my hand along the spines slowly, letting my fingertips trace over the dust, the grooves. Then something caught my eye. Lower shelf. Large, wide bindings.

I bent down and pulled one out.

Yearbooks.

There were twenty-four. Leather bound with gold-stamped titles, the oldest dating back fifteen years.

I sank cross-legged onto the rug and flipped open the first.

There he was. Aaron Scanlon. Vice Principal at the time, according to the caption, a tall, lean man with dark hair going gray at the temples even then. The same piercing stare. He didn’t smile. His eyes didn’t need to. They commanded attention without it.

I flipped through the pages, finding names I didn’t recognize. Students with quiet smiles, fingers frozen mid-sign in candid pictures. My stomach turned as I flipped to the next yearbook—2004.

This was my first year.

I found my picture in the second grade, a little girl with long dark hair and wide, startled eyes. My name listed below.

Scarlett McBride.

I didn’t remember the picture being taken. But I remembered being that girl. The one who didn’t know how to sign yet. The one who stared at mouths moving like they might suddenly make sense.

I’d been hearing before that.

I didn’t remember the fever I was told I had that left me Deaf. But I remembered my mother a little. I remembered her tears.

Then she was gone not long after.

Car accident, they told me.

The school became my guardian. Scanlon signed the papers himself, though I didn’t understand what that meant at the time. Just that my world had gotten smaller and quieter. Until he brought me to the lodge one summer and acted like he wanted to give me something more.

Like he cared.

Like I was special.

But looking now at the old yearbooks, flipping through the rest of my years, a pattern emerged. Each year, I recognized the faces of the students I spent time with up here at the lodge.

Tessa, who used to braid my hair.

Joel, who showed me how to catch frogs at the lake.

Even Elijah, who always brought his sketchbook, drawing the pine trees with fingers smeared in charcoal.

I studied each of their photos. As I did, I realized something horrifying. Every one of them had been orphaned, just like me. We also had all been born hearing.

And none of us appeared in yearbooks before 2003. We’d all come after Scanlon became headmaster. Had all of us had been a deliberate selection? Chosen…for a reason?

I set the books aside and grabbed my phone, heart pounding as I searched each name. Tessa Lang. Joel Ramirez. Elijah Boone.

Dead.

Dead.

Dead.

Tessa—car crash outside Bozeman, eight years ago.

Joel—found dead from an allergic reaction at a camp for the Deaf in Oregon.

Elijah—listed as a suicide, but the details were vague, conflicting.

My breath caught, thinking of the note stabbed into the post. A threat of death if I didn’t leave here.

It couldn’t be a coincidence.

It couldn’t be.

I looked for more of the students from the files I’d read in the study. More deaths appeared, all gone like Livvie.

Slowly, I looked at the yearbook from my preteen years, flipping back through the yearbook to the Bs, scanning the class photos. Then I saw her.

A small girl, listed as a kindergartener, with long pale hair in a pink bow. She was there when I was, but our paths wouldn’t have ever crossed as she was five years younger than me. But there she was, a student at Bayberry. Which only meant one thing.

Livvie had been Deaf.

There were no more pictures of her in the following yearbooks. She vanished…or never came back to school. But why?

I didn’t remember her at the school, but I remembered her here .

I gripped the edge of the bookshelf, trying to stay grounded. To remember more. But all I could feel was a rising nausea—the certainty that there was more for me to learn, but it was far too dangerous to try.

But I needed to know what happened to Livvie—what happened to all of us here at the lodge. Scanlon had chosen us for a reason, maybe even Livvie. Not for achievement. Not for promise. He had chosen us because we had all once been hearing .

And we had all been made Deaf after birth—except for Livvie. I wasn’t sure how she fit in. What was her story?

I looked at the bookcase again. The secrets behind it held our personal accounts. They also told of what heinous things had been done to us—things I couldn’t remember for some reason. Blocked trauma, perhaps. I needed to find out. I needed the key to that cabinet.

I needed the truth.

But how could I keep looking with a threat to my life?

And yet, how could I not?