Page 5 of Secrets Along the Shore (Beach Read Thrillers #1)

I’d seen death before. When I was twelve, I’d walked in on my foster dad laying in his bed.

He’d had a heart attack. I’m guessing the empty 1.

5 liter of vodka next to the bed had somehow contributed also.

I stared into his lifeless blue eyes and wondered if the last thing he’d seen before he died was burned into his retinas.

When emergency services had arrived, they hurried me from the room, afraid I’d be traumatized.

I was more curious than anything. I had no affection for him, no attachment.

So he was just a cadaver and in retrospect, I’d wished I touched him to see if he’d been cold, or stiff, or still warm and spongy.

It was different this time.

I saw her foot before I saw anything else. Sophia Bergstrom’s foot was bare, the padding of her foot creased with dirt. Reuben must have noticed I’d stopped at the water’s edge, in the swampy part, where the cattails grew thick and it was hard to see anything because of their root system.

I waved him off as though I’d not found Sophia. I don’t know why I did that. I think—I just wanted her to know I saw her, before the frenetic chaos of what would come next ensued. Forensics teams, grieving family, stunned search party members . . .

I didn’t touch anything. I knew better. I didn’t even take a step, and my own tennis-shoe-clad feet began to sink into the mud.

My vision traveled up Sophia’s leg, toned and bare, to the hemline of her jean shorts.

From there, all I could see was half of her torso, her arm submerged in the lake water, and her head face down in the muck, with strands of long blonde hair matted with dirt and algae.

Eighteen years. That was all the life she’d been given on this earth. Then it had been stolen from her. Swift and sure.

I angled my head in an attempt to see her neck. I had to. I had to look and see if the Serpent Killer had risen from his slumber and taken credit for this kill. I saw no evidence of a carving of what appeared to be a snake in a basket. That didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

“Sophia!” Livia’s call for the missing woman echoed across the lake and met other echoes that had been issued from the opposite shore by others in the search party.

It was time.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered to Sophia. My breath hitched and I bit the inside of my bottom lip. I bit it hard, until I could taste the blood. Somehow, I had to share in her pain.

“Tell me what happened to you.” I stood there a moment longer, studying and observing.

Maybe I noticed things that the police would, so it didn’t really matter.

But for a while, my mind catalogued everything.

From the fact a cattail stalk was wedged between Sophia’s right-hand pinky and third finger, to the fact that a notch of shirt was torn from the hem of her purple crop top.

A dragonfly fluttered over her hair, danced along the lake’s edge, and then whizzed its way to her inner thigh.

A bruise was there—at least I think it was a bruise.

There was a smudge of something below it too—it looked like dried blood maybe.

It was probably sixty-eight degrees this evening, but I noticed in spite of the cold water she laid in, her body didn’t react to it.

There were no goosebumps. No bluing of the skin.

I noticed also that, in the water and tangled around the base of some cattails, was a thin strand—like sewing thread. It was black and why I noticed it, I didn’t know. I’m sure it wasn’t even important.

“I’m sorry, Sophia,” I said again, and then I raised my head and called for Reuben.

“What were you thinking?” The hiss from the female sergeant alerted me to the fact that Detective Walker—Reuben—had messed up. I averted my gaze but my peripheral vision made note of the way the sergeant jerked her thumb in my direction.

“You don’t abuse a victim by bringing them to a crime scene!”

Thank you. I appreciated her sensitivity to my situation.

“Yeah.” Reuben’s hands were at his hips, elbows sticking out, but his response didn’t sound particularly remorseful.

He was as consumed by the Serpent Killer case as I was by avoiding it.

I wondered what protocol he’d overstepped—if any—by coercing me to help in the search for Sophia.

And if he hadn’t violated protocol, he’d apparently crossed the lines of ethical responsibility.

“Can I take Noa home?” Livia asked the sergeant, turning a cold shoulder to Reuben. “She’s a wreck,” Livia added .

I wasn’t a wreck. That wasn’t true. The strange thing was, I felt more awake than I had in years. Even now, I watched as the forensics unit joined with the coroner, congregated in the area of Sophia’s body.

Cameras flashed.

Voices muttered.

There was careful deliberation over the scene, their low voices and I imagined they were discussing potential evidence.

“I don’t want to go home.” I was met by three sets of eyes. The sergeant, who studied with me with a narrow expression, gauging my words. Livia, who didn’t even try to disguise her incredulous look. Reuben, whose expression remained impassive, dark, and void of feeling. “I don’t want to go home.”

This time I stood from where I’d been perched on the back of a SUV’s bumper. I glanced toward Sophia’s body—I couldn’t see it, of course, not visually. But it was there. Imprinted on my mind. Awakening something inside of me that I hadn’t expected.

“She was facedown,” I stated. “In the marsh.”

“All right?” The sergeant, who I’d heard someone call her Sergeant Dickson earlier, crossed her arms and waited.

I gave her my attention, excluding Reuben because, well—he didn’t deserve it. “That doesn’t fit.” I knew I was talking in short sentences, but I wasn’t quite sure where I was going with this.

Dickson tilted her head, her short brown pixie cut giving her middle-aged features a harsher look.

She probably had it cut that way to offset the roundness of her face and the gentle brown of her eyes.

She wasn’t a fierce looking woman like one might expect on a TV show.

Take her out of her dark clothes and put her in a dress with an apron, and she’d make the perfect fifty-something mom from a storybook.

“What doesn’t fit?”

I sucked in a breath and couldn’t help but steal another look at Sophia’s final resting spot. Resting, being the questionable word in that thought. I looked back at Dickson.

“He buries his victims. In a grave. I don’t know where he buried me, but I wasn’t in water. I was dry. The soil was damp, but—there wasn’t a marsh, and when I—made it out, I was filthy, but not wet. ”

“What else do you remember?” Reuben inserted.

“Ghost, back off!” Dickson snapped.

“No, no.” I held up my hand not to excuse Reuben, but to keep the conversation fluid.

Livia took a step toward me, her deep eyes concerned. A small twig stuck in a blue spiral of her curl. I reached for it and snagged it out of her hair as I addressed Dickson.

“I’m just saying, I don’t think he did this.”

“The Nahash ?” Dickson used the killer’s personally-assigned moniker.

“The Serpent Killer?” Livia interjected. I think she might have been trying to spare me having to revisit it or even ask for clarification. But I was just assuming.

I gave her a tiny smile to reassure her once more that I was all right. Strangely enough, I was better than I had been earlier—better than yesterday even.

“Whatever you want to call him.” I didn’t call him anything. He wasn’t worth a name. “But I don’t think this is his doing.”

“There was a snake under her window,” Reuben suggested. Was he trying to prompt a response from me?

“Snakes die all the time.” I finally gave him my attention. “Just because there was a snake under her window doesn’t mean it’s him. He never left dead snakes before.” I looked at Dickson. “Did he?”

Maybe there was more than even I knew.

Dickson and Reuben exchanged glances. I wasn’t sure how to read their expressions.

“Noa, let’s go home.” Livia’s hand on my arm surprised me. I jerked away out of instinct. She winced. “Sorry. I just thought?—”

“I’m fine. Really. I am.” My reassurance must have convinced her, because Livia’s shoulders relaxed. “I’m fine.” I stated again, mostly because I was trying to wrap my own mind around it. Although, I felt like I had repeated it so many times that I would have believed it with more clarity.

Something was off—it wasn’t right. Finding Sophia Bergstrom’s body had made me feel . . . better.

I was nervous to explore it. Her death had made me a little more alive.