Page 15 of Secrets Along the Shore (Beach Read Thrillers #1)

CHAPTER

EIGHT

“You’re crazy.” Livia hurried alongside of me as I hiked down the sidewalk. “They’re not going to want to talk to you.”

I shot her a quizzical glance. “Of course they will. They’re looking for their missing mother.

They’re desperate for help.” I paused outside of the flower shop, my hand on the door.

I needed to gentle my approach. I was trying my hardest to distance myself from the emotions conflicting inside of me, but I think it was making me more caustic and bitter.

I didn’t want to be that. Aloof was fine. Cynical and unlikeable, not so much.

“I need to do this, Livvy.” I allowed my feelings to show for just long enough so that Livia could see how important Sophia’s death was to me.

Her brows pulled together. “O-okay. Yeah.” She gave my wrist a squeeze.

It was automatic for her—the whole reaching out and touching me to show reassurance.

Except, I didn’t like to be touched, and Livia had a hard time not reassuring me with pats and squeezes. I’d grown used to it for the most part.

The bell above the door did its little dance and ding-a-ling song.

The air was saturated with flower perfumes, and my eyes instantly itched.

Allergies were a beast. Livia oo’d and aa’d at all the arrangements.

Her face lit up as she paid special attention to a bouquet of lilies with some greenery that hung from the side of the vase like a vine.

I preferred the potted fern. Green. Predictable. It also wouldn’t make my eyes itch.

“Can I help you?” A woman at least six inches shorter than me exited the back room. Her eyes were framed in cat-eye glasses and her hair was short and spiky. But I could see it. The sadness. The fear. The anxiety.

For a moment, I was tongue tied. I had felt all along that I had the credibility to walk into the flower shop owned by Rosalie Fiends and explain who I was.

That my past alone would be enough to build rapport and give me the open door to ask my question.

But now, I had lost my ability to speak.

To put my thoughts into words. I didn’t want to announce who I was or identify myself based on my history.

I didn’t want to be known by it. I didn’t want to reveal it—not to a stranger, anyway.

So that left me with nothing but what would come across as sheer curiosity—and that seemed really wrong.

I was about ready to order an unnecessary bouquet of roses and get the heck out of there when Livia nudged her way in.

“I’m Livia.” She extended her hand with her disarming smile.

The woman shook hands with a cautious expression in her eyes.

Livia continued, releasing the woman’s hand. “We’re here on a sensitive matter. It’s in regards to Rosalie Fiends.”

“Rosalie?” Eyebrows shot up. Suspicion mixed with hope warred for first place on the woman’s face. “What about her? Do you know something? I’m her sister, Jean.”

Livia gave me a frank, dark-eyed look that told me it was my turn, and I’d better step up.

I made quick work of introducing myself, but it was when I mentioned that I’d been the one to find Sophia’s body, Jean’s expression shifted dramatically. She held up her hand to make me stop and then waved it toward herself.

“Come. Into the back room.”

Livia and I rounded the counter and followed Jean.

Flowers were propped in buckets, bundled together by bands.

Carnations, roses, baby’s breath, and more.

It was a colorful kaleidoscope and the mixture of floral scents was both intoxicating and overwhelming.

I was grateful Jean led past them and into a small office.

It held a desk, some chairs, a computer.

There were a few photographs framed, but other than that, there wasn’t much to adorn the room. It was simple and private.

Jean closed the door and motioned to the two chairs opposite the desk. She hurried to her chair and sank onto it, hopeful expectation in her eyes. “I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you reached out.”

I prayed my visit didn’t instill false hope in Jean. I would need to be cautious about what I said.

“I’m thankful that you were able to find Sophia,” Jean said.

“Yes. I—” Where had my words fled? I had a lump in my throat, and it wasn’t one of emotion, it was one of heartburn.

I had a lot of nerve coming here, facing the sister of a missing woman, pretending to be able to help.

I swept the small room with my eyes and there was no Sophia.

Even my imagination wasn’t strong enough to conjure her up as a quasi-cheerleader.

Livia interceded once again. “Noa has been consulting with a detective on the Sophia Bergstrom case.”

Consulting was a stretch, but I let it go.

Livia continued. “She was—also an abductee herself. Ten years ago.”

I guess Livia had no way of knowing that I didn’t want to bring that up. I hadn’t specified confidentiality, and I’d intended to even use my experience to find shared commonality. Livia was innocent of wrongdoing. But a pit settled in my stomach.

“Oh my word!” Jean’s hand clapped over her mouth. She stared at me, tears in her eyes.

I squirmed in my chair.

Livia cast me a questioning glance.

I managed a wobbly smile, so Livia continued. “Noa wanted to ask you some questions about Rosalie, if you are open to it? To see if there are any similarities?—”

“Between Rosalie’s disappearance and yours?” Jean leaned forward. “Because the thought crossed my mind that what if they were related… ”

She reminded me of Reuben. Stretching to make the pieces fit and tie it all back to the Serpent Killer.

“I don’t think they are.” My blunt response was not well delivered.

Jean’s shoulders sagged.

Livia nudged my arm with her elbow.

“But—” I chirped a bit too energetically. “I—think I can—I was—” Wow, this was going nowhere fast.

Jean held her palm up toward me again. She took a deep, steadying breath.

“You see things through a different set of eyes than most of us. You’re a brave woman, Noa.

” Jean assessed with words I hadn’t been able to put together.

“I would imagine Sophia’s death—and Rosalie’s disappearance along with Lilian Thomas’s—brings up all sorts of emotions and memories.

Things that many of us wouldn’t even know to be sensitive to. ”

“Yes.” I nodded. I hadn’t imagined a florist would understand me so thoroughly.

“I’m guessing you’re hoping to see something from your unique perspective that the rest of us may have missed?”

“Yes!” I moved to the edge of my seat. “We know that the abductions of Sophia and Rosalie and Lilian are connected because of the—the snake left behind. But what connected them in life? There has to be something.”

“There isn’t.” Jean leaned back in her chair. “At least, not that we can see. Or the police.”

“Tell me about Rosalie.”

My invitation was not unlike opening a waterspout that had built up water pressure.

For the next hour, Jean regaled Livia and me with Rosalie’s life story.

How they had been raised by a single mother.

How Rosalie had left Whisper’s End in the late nineties to go to university.

She had dropped out of the university when she became pregnant with her daughter.

Five years later, Rosalie had met her now husband who, ironically, was also from Whisper’s End.

They had gone to high school together but had run in different crowds, only to meet up later and fall in love.

Whisper’s End called them back and they raised Rosalie’s daughter and then had their own son.

“What type of things did Rosalie enjoy investing her time in?” It was an insightful question that Livia had posed and Jean dove right in to the answer.

She loved to bake, to garden, to be a mom. She never missed her son’s football games, and she video chatted with her daughter every other day. She was active in her local church, and even served on the board of the local food pantry. Rosalie was as wholesome as they came.

“Would there be any chance Rosalie and Sophia crossed paths through the high school?” I ventured. “Sophia sounds like she was close to Rosalie’s son’s age.”

Jean nodded. “Sophia was a year behind Rosalie’s son, Josh.

But they never did anything together. Not even extracurricular.

Josh played football and that was about it.

The police said Sophia was into the arts.

She didn’t take part in the athletics program aside from required P.E.

She took art classes down at the local civic center.

So while Josh and Sophia may have passed in the hall and known of each other, there was no connection to each other. ”

Sophia. Artistic. Young.

Rosalie. Motherly. Late forties.

That left Lilian Thomas. “And Lilian?”

Jean winced. “Also no connection. I guess Lilian didn’t go to church. She volunteered at the local retirement home and helped lead activities. When she wasn’t there, she was home with her two dogs.”

“Did Lilian or Sophia buy flowers here?” I was stretching now—and probably asking all the same questions the cops had. I really had no right to be here.

“We checked the sales records and didn’t find any.” Jean replied. “I know. It feels . . .” she choked back tears. “Hopeless.”

“Nothing is hopeless.” Livia reached across the desk. “It just takes one thing and Rosalie might be found.”

Jean and Livia clasped hands.

I watched them and I felt like I was outside of the moment, looking in. Hovering. No longer was Noa Lorne—I—in the room. It was just Jean and Livia. One clinging for support, one trying to imbue hope in the other. And then me, watching from the outside and knowing the truth .

The truth was that Livia was wrong. There were a lot of situations that were hopeless.

Fingers gripping mine in the darkness.

Livia was wrong in trying to encourage Jean into believing her sister would be found.

A clutching grasp, trying to hold on.

Livia was wrong that it took “just one thing”. Sometimes it took millions of “things” and even then, those “things” never fit together to make a complete answer.

Fingers slipping away, and then her scream . . .

“Noa?”

I jerked my head toward Livia who was drilling me with a worried gaze.

“Do you need a glass of water?” Jean pushed to her feet.

“No. No, I’m fine,” I answered.

Jean and Livia weren’t holding hands any more. Instead, they were unified in watching me as though I was coming out of a coma and they were waiting to see if I was all right.

“You totally blanked out on us.” Livia lifted her hand, and I knew she was going to reach for me with her instinct to give comfort.

I drew back in my chair.

She dropped her hand.

“I’m sorry.” I blinked rapidly to clear my eyes. My head. I had been somewhere else and I had been here, both at the same time. It was unnerving. I didn’t want to remember. I didn’t want to feel anything. “I think—I think that’s all the questions I had.”

I pushed to my feet and Jean rounded the desk, her arm out prepared to catch me if I fell.

I didn’t. I wasn’t on the verge of passing out or anything. I was just bewildered. The lies we tell ourselves . . .

It took everything in me not to speak as we left Jean and the florist shop behind. It took everything in me not to turn and tell Jean what we both knew but just didn’t want to say.

Rosalie isn’t coming home.

She’s dead.