Page 109 of Secrets Along the Shore (Beach Read Thrillers #1)

CHAPTER

FIFTEEN

I gripped the oars tighter, my fingers sore and numb from the cold water dripping off the handles as I followed Becca to the shore. I glanced back to see the shadowed man with his hand up. If he was saying anything, I couldn’t hear it.

He hadn’t made a move to enter the lake. His presence was a shadow etched into the blackness of the trees, a blot on the landscape. His identity was as faceless as the dead body in the basement. Had he destroyed the electrical panel? Leaving me without sight, cut off from the world completely.

I turned back to see Becca waited on the shore, beckoning me forward to safety. Each stroke cut through the water like a blade, rhythmic and harsh. The further I got from the man on the shore, the more my breath slowed, even if my heart couldn’t.

Becca leaned close, reaching to pull my boat alongside hers. She offered no words, only gestured for me to follow. Her face was pale, almost waxen, and I saw a tremble in her lips before she pressed them into a line.

We reached the deck, and Becca ascended the stairs ahead of me. She didn’t wait for me. I hurried to catch up as she climbed each step, moving fast and silent. I didn’t call out. Couldn’t. And something in me didn’t want to.

Becca held the door open for me, her face unreadable .

Inside, the house was dry, warm, still. And yet something felt off. Like the calm before a storm, like the inhale before a scream.

I stepped inside.

“Sit,” Becca signed, motioning to the couch. I obeyed, watching as she moved around the room, her hands twitching at her sides like she was unsure what to do with them.

She turned an end lamp on, casting a yellowed glow to the room, and sat across from me.

“She went to meet you. And she never came back,” she signed.

I nodded slowly. A thousand shards of that memory pierced me. Livvie’s face lit by fear. Her tears. The message not to come over. I swallowed hard.

“You left her,” Becca added. “You let her row back alone.”

“She told me not to come. She was scared,” I signed, my movements slow, each letter stabbing through the air. “She didn’t want me here. Said it was unsafe.”

Becca’s jaw tightened.

“And you still let her go.”

I looked down. The guilt was a wound that was still so fresh because I had blocked her presence from that night. “I don’t remember,” I signed. “What happened that night? Why weren’t you with her?”

Becca leaned forward. “She was hysterical,” she said. “She saw me with someone, and it made her angry and scared.”

“The boy?” I asked slowly. “People are telling me you had been with a boy. Was that true? Did Livvie know him?”

“I found her journal,” Becca signed, not answering my question. “After. She wrote about dreams. About being in a room. Strapped down. Lights on her eyes. Voices she couldn’t understand.”

A chill swept over me.

“She said she wasn’t the same anymore,” Becca continued. “She said you were the only one she trusted…because you were there, too.”

I looked up sharply. “Me?”

Becca nodded. But her expression twisted, like the words hurt to form. “And you let her die. She trusted you, and you let her die. ”

I flinched. The accusation in her silent words was louder than any scream. “Becca, I didn’t know.”

Her hands clenched. She stood.

I stood too. My knees shook. “I wanted to go with her. But she told me not to. She was trying to protect me. She knew something was wrong. That it wasn’t safe. Who was here?”

Becca turned to the window. Her shoulders hunched. She cut me off with her face turned away.

I stepped closer to see her lips. “What did they do to her?”

Becca turned to face me, her expression fractured, pain layered on fury.

“They changed her. She was bright. And so funny. Then she stopped laughing. She had to pretend. She was so scared. She told me they were watching her. That they would come for her if she said anything. Anything about Scanlon’s experiment. And she didn’t because of you.”

“Why me?”

Tears spilled down her cheeks. But her mouth twisted. “Because you didn’t believe her. And now I believe you need to answer for that.”

She turned and walked toward the front door, locking it.

“What are you doing?” I signed.

She didn’t look back but went to the back door and did the same.

Panic surged through me.

I ran to the door, but didn’t make it before she hit me from behind, knocking me to the floor. Becca grabbed my hands and put handcuffs on before I escaped her grasp.

“Let me go!” I yelled, feeling the panic rise in my chest. What was she doing?

But at the same moment, a flash from another time of feeling the same wrist constriction came to mind, leaving me to wonder how and when.

Becca turned me over to see her lips. “You’re not going anywhere,” she said. “You’re not going anywhere until you admit the truth of happened to you and her. The same way Livvie couldn’t leave. Trapped. Now you’ll know what it felt like. ”

I could barely focus on her words because, oddly enough, I think I already did.

The cuffs dug into my skin, the sharp metal biting at my wrists while ropes rubbed against the skin of my ankles every time I shifted.

My arms ached from being twisted behind my back, my legs stiff from where Becca had yanked them together and bound them tightly.

I lay on Livvie’s old bed, twin bed with its yellowing quilt and matching wooden dresser between two windows, curtains drawn.

The wallpaper, once a cheerful floral print, peeled at the edges like the corners of a long-forgotten photograph.

Becca hadn’t touched anything in fifteen years.

A shrine to her dead sister.

My breathing came hard and fast. I tried to calm myself, to think rationally, to not scream—because no one would hear me anyway. No one could out here when the closest house was my own.

Becca sat in the rocking chair beside the bed, one of Livvie’s notebooks clutched in her hands like scripture. She flipped through the pages with purposeful fingers, her lips pressed tightly together, as if she were trying to hold in the storm. But her eyes—her eyes were wild.

She read from the Livvie’s words again, over and over for hours. “June 27th…‘I hear them talking. Dr. Scanlon is happy with my progress. He thinks he’s cured me. He thinks he will be rich. He doesn’t know I lied.’”

Becca looked at me sharply, as if the weight of the lie fell squarely on my shoulders. My lips parted, but no sound came. My throat was too dry, my mouth too filled with fear.

“What was she lying about, Scarlett?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I told you already.”

She turned another page, more frantic now, her breathing lifting her chest faster and faster.

“July 2nd. ‘More students are here this summer. More students who will go through what I went through. I feel bad for them, because I know what will happen to them.’ ”

A lump rose in my throat. The words rolled over me, each one striking with the force of a memory I didn’t have. Yet it was as if I did remember. In the way my muscles recoiled from the confines of the ropes. In the way being tied up in this room made my skin crawl because it felt familiar.

I had been tied up before. And not just physically like this—but emotionally, mentally.

Conditioned . I remembered the lodge. I remembered not being allowed to leave my room.

The door that locked from the outside. The shadows at night.

The vibration of a machine near my head.

The dizzying sensation of days going by.

And a scent I couldn’t place.

“The boy knows I lied. I don’t know how, but he knows.” Becca leaned close to my face, hers red with anger. “Who is the boy, Scarlett? Who knew she was lying?”

I flinched. My heart pounded so hard I felt the reverberation all the way to my toes.

She jabbed her finger at another diary entry. “‘He tries to make me forget. But all he makes me do is lie again. I think the boy knows I’m lying. I’m afraid of him.’”

“I don’t know,” I whispered. My throat felt raw. “Becca, I don’t know who she meant.”

She slammed the notebook shut so fast I jolted even without hearing the sound.

“Don’t lie to me!” she screamed over me, her face contorted. “You were there! You knew her! You—” Her voice faded as she turned away, her shoulders rising and falling in an erratic rhythm.

“I don’t remember,” I said. “I don’t. That’s the point, isn’t it?” I swallowed hard. “He made us forget.”

Becca’s head snapped around.

“Who?” she said.

“Scanlon,” I said slowly. “He…I think he hypnotized us. Or…drugged us. Or both. I don’t remember entire months of my life. I have fragments. Smells. Vibrations. Flashes of light. A strange smell…rosemary, maybe? But they don’t connect. I think he wiped it all away.”

Becca stared at me, her eyes scanning my face as if trying to detect a lie .

“Why would she say she lied? Lied about what?” she asked. “Why would she say she was fine when she wasn’t?”

“She was scared,” I said gently. “She was trying to survive. Maybe she thought if she pretended to be cured, they’d stop.”

“But she was cured, Scarlett.” Becca leaned close again. “She could hear fine again.”

The words hit me like a slap. A realization of what the lie might have been.

“Yes,” I said. “She could hear. But perhaps she always could. Becca, are you sure your sister was ever Deaf? Or had she pretended to be for a reason?”

Becca’s mouth twisted. “What are talking about?”

“I’m just guessing here. But what was going on in her life that maybe she tuned out to the point she made herself deaf to her surroundings?”

Becca stood, pacing the room now like a caged animal. Her words made no sense to me as she kept turning away from me. But I could see torment on her face at the idea of Livvie having selective hearing but not deafness.

She stopped and stared at me. Her lip curled. “How nice for you not to remember.”

I stared at her, my pulse thundering. “Becca…please. Let me go. We can figure this out together. Livvie wouldn’t want this.”

“Don’t you dare say her name like you know her,” Becca snapped. “You don’t. Not like I did. Not like I do . She trusted you, and you left her out there. You left her. ”

Tears burned my eyes. “I was a child,” I whispered. “So were you.”

She moved toward me slowly, crouching beside me. Her breath was hot on my face. Her face was suddenly calm. Too calm.

“You think this is about being a child?” she whispered. “You think time erases what you did?”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“You didn’t save her either.”

I looked away, the shame too great to meet her eyes. My fingers twisted in the cuffs again, raw skin scraping against raw skin. I felt blood trickle. My wrists were slick now, wet with either sweat or blood or both. I pulled harder.

“Becca,” I said, forcing her name through the lump in my throat. “Please. This won’t bring her back. Hurting me won’t fix it.”

She tilted her head. “But it might balance it.”

“No,” I said. “It won’t. You said she knew things. That means she was a threat. Maybe…maybe that’s why she died.”

Becca froze.

A chill spread through my chest, but I had to ask the question. “Who were you with that night? Whoever it was, she feared him.”

Becca stood up again. “He was nobody. He came across the lake. I didn’t know him. We hung out, and I never saw him again.”

She left the room and closed the door behind her, locking it, I was sure.

I lay there in the dark, bound and afraid. Somewhere beyond these walls, the truth waited. Somewhere in my mind, behind all the erasures, all the lost time, the answer lived. And if I didn’t find it soon, I knew Becca would make sure I never left this room alive.