Page 13 of Secrets Along the Shore (Beach Read Thrillers #1)

CHAPTER

SEVEN

“Who was Sophia Bergstrom?”

I had asked myself this question more times than I wanted to admit.

Each time I’d asked it, I reminded myself of my emotional breakdown outside of the warehouse, and how I’d been relieved no one had seen it.

I’d finally managed to get to my feet and return to work, but pushing all the thoughts into their places? That was another trick altogether.

Somehow, my experience had merged with Sophia’s. I guess I could understand now why Reuben was so dogged about trying to find connections. One couldn’t deny there were similarities.

“Who are you?” I ask aloud now, as I drove, aimless. Sophia filled my mind’s eye and the rearview mirror with that expression that indicated I couldn’t give up on her. Not yet.

Be my voice .

Her voice? I could barely be my own voice, let alone hers, or any of the others’.

“Who were you?” I asked her, directing my question at her reflection. Sophia stared back at me.

But there was nothing that told me a story. Sophia was silent. Expressionless. My own thoughts were empty of answers.

Because I didn’t know Sophia. My personal experience helped my mind conjure the visions of her death, but who she was in life ?

On a whim, I turned the steering wheel a bit too dramatically and my tires squealed as I adopted an unplanned left turn. Sophia’s house wasn’t too far from here. It couldn’t hurt for me to drive past it. To see in person the place she’d lived.

I didn’t know the exact house number, but it took all of thirty seconds to find it online.

Within five minutes, I saw her home—she’d still lived with her parents—and its two-car attached garage, beige vinyl siding, and a few gables thrown in to make it look architecturally interesting.

It was a basic structure in a rural sub-division. Nothing fancy, but nothing poor either.

So the Bergstrom family was middle income?

The photos that Reuben and Dickson had shown me marked the window at the far end of the house as Sophia’s. A row of shrubs blocked it from view of the neighbor’s home, which gave it an element of privacy.

All I knew about Sophia’s abduction was that she’d been taken from her room.

I remembered the story of the young girl kidnapped in the nineties made possible because her bedroom window was open.

I’d always locked my windows at night after hearing that story.

If Sophia hadn’t locked her windows, it would have given her abductor easy access.

And around Whisper’s End? Not too many had home security systems. It was shame—but then—this was rural Wisconsin.

Where everyone knew everyone, and everyone should be safe. Should be.

I drove past the Bergstrom home because the last thing I wanted was to raise someone’s attention and get accused of casing the place.

Tapping my fingers on the steering wheel, I found myself comparing experiences with Sophia in the back seat.

She maintained her vacant look, but there was something on her face that made me pause.

She seemed—content. I wondered if it was because she was confident her murder would be solved.

That I would figure this out on her behalf.

As though I somehow could unravel the mystery of her death better than the professionals.

When I’d been abducted . . .

I willed away the sting of anxiety that was instant companion to memories.

When I’d been abducted, it’d been night, I’d been heading to my car, and was grabbed from behind.

It was straight up out of a routine abduction case.

No one had slipped through my open bedroom window or accosted me in my bed.

The stealth and silence that must have required in that scenario!

To not awaken an entire household? To keep your victim from screaming?

I didn’t admire Sophia’s killer, but rather sensed that maybe that was another key why my case was different than Sophia’s.

Because, for all the methodical nature of my abductor, stealth wasn’t an attribute I’d give to him. Stealth and sly were two very different things. I knew, beyond all doubt, that my offender was sly. He was smart and savvy and terrifyingly good at what he did. But stealthy?

Even now, I remembered the crunch of stones beneath his feet as he’d approached me in the parking lot. He’d grabbed me mid-turn when I’d assumed a friend had followed me.

No. He wasn’t stealthy.

Sophia’s killer was. He had to be. How else did someone abduct a grown woman from her bedroom without alerting her parents who slept probably just down the hall?

May he’d drugged Sophia? And the other two women?

But then, I’d pulled a dead cat off the road once in deference to its demise, and the creature was so much heavier than I’d expected.

There was something in the phrase, dead weight , that was accurate.

I’m sure the cat weighed the same while alive, but ten pounds alive felt like twenty pounds deceased.

If he’d drugged Sophia, he would have had to haul her through the house and out the front door, or hoisted her limp body through the window to the ground. Neither made a lot of sense when I considered stealth.

That meant she’d gone with him willingly. Maybe she was at gunpoint? Her family’s wellbeing threatened? Or maybe she knew him? Trusted him?

I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel again and glanced at the image of Sophia in my rearview mirror.

“You’re not helping me very much.”

A smile curved her lips .

“Did you know him? Did he threaten your family? Why did you follow him and what did you do to make him so angry that he killed you?”

Sophia did what she had a tendency to do now. She lifted her two fingers and held them for me to see.

Two.

I really was getting quite perturbed with that number.

Two killers. Hers and mine.

Two conflicting meanings about the snakes: dominance and submission.

“There are more twos in your story?” I bother to filter the sarcasm in my voice. I steered the car toward a fast-food place. I need a hamburger. Protein. Saturated fats and grease.

Two.

It dawned on me then—and maybe it was elementary, and maybe Reuben and Dickson were already leap years ahead of me.

But there were two sets of victims. Sophia, and then the other two missing women.

Reuben and Dickson were focused on profiling Sophia’s killer—with Reuben very focused on finding any ties to the Serpent Killer case.

But then who were the two missing women? The ones whose bodies had not been found, and who may still be alive?

I couldn’t imagine that these questions weren’t being explored by law enforcement, but I wasn’t exactly at the detective round table.

Blest be the tie that binds, Sophia whispered in my ear, but when I glanced into the back seat she was gone.

Wasn’t that a line from an old hymn?

Without the slightest clue why Sophia had dropped that nugget into my mind, I pulled into the drive-through and ordered my hamburger with tomato and lettuce and mayonnaise and yeah, sure, slap on a side of pork bacon.

Since I was opting for future heart disease, I decided to ask for a Diet Coke too.

Because while the aspartame made me feel healthier, I ignored it would contribute to a higher probability of brain cancer.

Scientific? Who knew. But wasn’t most of life based on theories?

I slouched in my car waiting for my burger and gave a short laugh. It was sad that so much of life was figured out by wrestling with theories and ideas. I guess that’s why some people felt that life would be better if it came with a manual. A step-by-step approach.

It’d be nice here too. A step-by-step process to solving Sophia’s murder and locating the missing women. Not to mention untangling my own blurry past.

I was bound to Sophia now, whether I liked it or not. I just was. And that?—

I froze.

Bound.

Blest be the tie that binds.

“What are you trying to tell me?” I asked the non-existent Sophia.

“You want me to see what ties you to the missing women?” It’d seemed natural to try to tie her to the killer, but to the other women?

I hadn’t considered that before. It was a logical step in the process to figuring out Sophia’s murder.

And while coming up with that step didn’t make me a shining light of brilliance by any means, I couldn’t help but think I’d see it differently than Reuben or Dickson.

They were looking at the potential commonalities between the victims from an outside viewpoint.

But me? I was an insider. I had been there.

I had clutched the cold fingers of the unnamed woman before she was torn from my grasp.

I knew that we were tied by circumstance and emotion and?—

I couldn’t go there. Not too deep. It’d cripple me and then I’d be worthless to Sophia.

“Here’s your burger.” The attendant materialized at my window shoving a paper bag of food in my face.

I realized a blood-curdling scream in the teenager’s face and my Diet Coke went flying out of his hand into the air.

I spent the next few minutes feeling like an idiot, not to mention thirsty.

I guess that was one lesson, if nothing else came from this: when approaching a customer’s car, make your presence known before you shove your hand through their window. It might spare your ear drums.

Reuben’s hair was ruffled, and for a brief and unexpected moment, I realized I liked that look on him. Tonight, he sported a T-shirt with a can of beer and “I love you beer-y much” scripted above it.

That stole the words from me completely as I stood on the doorstep to his house with my fast food in my hand.

“You brought me supper?” he asked, breaking the awkward silence.

“No.” I hugged the bag to my chest. “This is mine. What’s with your T-shirts?”

“My what?” He glanced at his shirt and back at me. Even confusion made him look cute tonight.

Something was wrong with me.