Page 6 of Secrets Along the Shore (Beach Read Thrillers #1)

CHAPTER

THREE

“It’s on the news. Everyone is talking about it.”

That was the first thing I heard when I walked into work.

If my co-workers had any inkling that I was the one who’d found Sophia Bergstrom’s body, they’d subject me to their own form of an interrogation.

A room full of gossipy ladies was more intimidating than a good cop/ bad cop combo and far less empathetic.

The air was thick with the scent of burnt coffee and Lisa’s perfume.

Lisa was my co-worker. We sold fireplaces and woodstoves and air conditioners, and we pretended we knew what a BTU was and how many of them a forced-air furnace needed to give out per square foot.

In reality, Lisa was a fifty-something woman putting tick marks on paper until the day she could retire—she really did—I’d seen them.

I was a twenty-seven-year-old introvert who had fully justifiable reasons to be one, an aversion to people, but a desperate need to make a living. Archer’s Heating and Cooling it was.

I did data entry when I wasn’t pretending to know what I was talking about to customers.

At the end of my sales pitch, I’d schedule my boss—Phil Archer—to go to their homes and do an actual quote for the unit and the installation.

They’d change their minds on what they wanted and needed, and my sales pitch didn’t really matter in the end. So I couldn’t care less about BTUs.

The door slammed behind me after I’d already maneuvered my way across the small sales floor maze of demo gas stoves, through the office of my four over-zealous co-workers who believed they were the blood of Archer’s Heating and Cooling, and into the back warehouse.

A blast of humid air hit my face along with the acrid scent of installers already sweating in the early morning, August heat.

Southerners could brag all they wanted, but Wisconsin could match their seventy-percent humidity any summer day.

“You see the news this morning?”

I hung back from the time-clock machine, watching as Toby slid his timecard into the slot and waited for the contraption to punch him in to work.

Whatever happened to technology? Scanning a QR code or something to log an employee’s time?

“Yep.” Toby was staring at me. I nodded.

He was twice my size. At least 6’2”, well over 250 pounds, and mainly muscle.

He had cropped strawberry-blond hair, his shirt sleeves were chopped off at the shoulder revealing freckled biceps, and his jeans were permanently stained from grease or oil or something.

His blue eyes scanned my face. “No. Yeah. I suppose you did.”

No. Yeah. It was a Wisconsinite’s way of saying “I guess so”. “Yes” sounded more sure of yourself if you added a “No” to its beginning.

I eyed Toby. “I didn’t read it in detail, though.

” I was curious about what all had been released to the public since I’d only skimmed it in an attempt to compartmentalize and not dwell on it.

I’d gone home with Livia the evening before, and then I’d been up half the night and contemplating going for a run.

I had energy. I was wide awake. I wasn’t even a runner, for heaven’s sake, so I had been more consumed trying to understand this new breath of life I felt and why I felt it at the cost of Sophia’s own.

“They found the missing girl, Sophia Bergstrom—out by Stillwater Lake.” Toby jammed his time card back into its holder. He flicked the end of his nose with his thumb and sniffed. “It was murder.”

I couldn’t help it. I gave Toby a blank look in response. I learned years ago and through necessity to temper my reactions. It was more than a poker face. It was a face of survival. Well, and numbness. Incidents that evoked emotional reactions did the opposite for me .

“Yeah.” Toby glanced over his shoulder. I followed his gaze to see some of the other guys loading boxes of triple-wall stove pipe into their vans.

“I gotta get goin’.” He hopped off the cement platform onto the warehouse floor, but then paused and looked up at me.

Something flickered in his eyes. He was single, but he was also forty.

Too old for me. But I think he saw me as a kid sister.

Whatever it was, his hesitation breathed something into me.

Camaraderie.

Toby was—a friend, I think. Not close like Livia, but someone I could trust. As long as I held him at arm’s length.

“Hey.” Toby lifted an index finger and waved it at me. “Don’t let the other chickens peck you to death today. K?”

I laughed then—and nodded.

The other chickens.

That’s what we called the office ladies who clucked and preened and poked around all day in their coop by their computers.

They were the hens.

I was the chick.

Only as usual, not too many people noticed me. I preferred it that way.

I punched my card and slid it back into its place in the time card holder. I was lucky to have a job this morning, since skipping out yesterday. Reuben had let Mr. Archer know I’d been helping with the search and Mr. Archer had been understanding.

But today? I needed to work. To face the chickens.

I turned back toward the door to the office and entered the chicken coop.

They had doughnuts and coffee. It was 9:00 a.m., but the ladies had already deemed it break time.

So the four of them, all over fifty-five and all with gray in their hair, huddled around the office manager’s desk.

Normally, at this point in the morning, Marge would pace the office with her chin tipped up, her permed brown-gray hair in a white woman’s version of an Afro, and a look of queenly power on her face.

It wouldn’t have surprised me at all if she yelled, “Off with her head!” and guillotined someone.

But this morning, she was conspiring with the others about who had killed Sophia Bergstrom and why. It was sickening, the way people removed from a crime turned it into a game of Clue and disregarded that it involved real people. Real families. A real deviant.

“They think it may be her boyfriend.” Powdered sugar from Lisa’s doughnut stuck to her red lipstick. She chewed and swallowed a bite, her blue eyes wide, her straw-like ash-blonde hair hanging to her shoulders. “Sophia was dating Dereck Hyde.”

“Mmm,” Elise tsked tsked her seventy-five-year-old tongue.

She was as intent on staying relevant in the workforce as Lisa was in wanting to retire.

“I had that boy in Sunday School years ago, and I knew he was trouble then. He kept telling me his favorite Bible character was King Nebuchadnezzar. That says a lot.”

“He’s eight years older than Sophia.” Carol was a masculine version of a woman, but she was also in a common law marriage going on thirty-six years.

“He rides with Blake now and then.” Blake was Carol’s biker son.

Not the motorcycle gang type, just a good, old-fashioned biker who did Sturgis every year, could hold his liquor, and would fight to protect the innocent.

Marge ignored her. “Well, the last I heard, Dereck and Sophia were on again, off again. Her mother’s cousin’s best friend mentioned to me that they’d seen some bruises on Sophia and were wondering if Dereck gave them to her.”

Elsie tsked-tsked again, then said nothing.

“That’s a big leap,” I said against my better judgement.

Something about the sound of my voice stilled the chickens’ clucking for a moment and they stared at me like I was the fox that had just broken into their serene little circle.

“I mean”—I hesitated, unsure why the chickens made me feel nervous. “Just that—” I bit my tongue.

They stared at me for another long second and then Nancy broke the stillness. “There’s also question as to whether Sophia ran off on her own and then got picked up by some trucker or someone and they killed her.”

Every Wisconsin unsolved crime conclusion. I stifled a sigh. Truckers and bikers got a bum rap, in my opinion. Hadn’t anyone ever looked at Ted Bundy? He was a ‘70’s version heartthrob in a suit and tie.

I reached for a doughnut, the chickens ignoring me. That was all right, because eavesdropping helped a person gather a lot of information and for whatever reason, I still felt the same adrenaline coursing through me this morning as it had after I’d found Sophia.

“What about that snake beneath the window?” Carol presented the question.

I perked up, mostly because I was curious if they’d connect the snake to the Serpent Killer and then to me and then realize how insensitive they were in this moment.

“Oh gosh!” Lisa waved her hand. “Garden snakes are a horse a piece around these parts. You can’t read anything into that!”

“Why were they looking under Sophia’s bedroom window anyway?” Marge inserted. “It’s not like she was stolen from her bed at night.”

“Or maybe she was?” Carol ventured.

Elsie made her familiar sound of censure. But then she added in her thin, reedy voice, “It’s that serial killer. What do they call him?”

“Oh him !” Lisa’s eyes grew wide in a stereotypical blonde-girl sort of dumbness that was an insult to most blondes.

“My Arnie said he bet that man has come back to kill again,” Elsie concluded.

The doughnut stuck in my throat.

The only one of the chickens to dare a look in my direction was Carol. A sharp awareness entered her eyes and she was quick to interrupt Marge who was about to add her two cents. “I think we’d best get back to work.”

“I can say when we need to—” Marge started in with her lofty power of office manager.

“Good idea.” I offered my emphatic agreement and once again, my voice stilled the chickens. Lisa paled. Marge choked on her doughnut then patted her chest blaming the powdered sugar. Elsie was oblivious.

Only Carol had the kindness to mumble “Sorry, Noa,” as she hurried past me .

At least someone had a little bit of conscience.

I retreated to my own desk and into my own thoughts.

I had a feeling, as time went on, that people were going to want Sophia’s disappearance and subsequent death to be at the hand of the Serpent Killer.

The fact he had never been identified or caught didn’t seem to frighten as much as intrigue them.

There was something oddly intoxicating about a serial killer, to people who were removed from it.

I don’t think they had put two and two together and come to the conclusion that if it was the Serpent Killer, then Sophia was probably just the first of more to come?

That should scare the heck out of them. It should put them on alert for their daughters who fit the M.O. It should make them more afraid.

It should make me more afraid.

But it didn’t.

I picked up a job order from my desk and prepared to enter it into the database to be scheduled for the A/C installation crew.

The only thing that remotely connected Sophia Bergstrom to the Serpent Killer was a dead snake under her window. How had that tidbit even released to the public anyway?

And why a snake?

It wasn’t an odd line of amateur crime-solving questions. But it was odd for me, because until now, I’d never wanted to think about it.

Until Sophia.

Sophia.

I glanced around me then, a sudden wave of nervous energy coursing through me. I really hoped no one knew—no one had observed—that when I’d found Sophia’s body, I had also talked to her. Spoken to her as if she were alive.

That was what had really been the reason I was infused with adrenaline. The reason I was coming back from a sort of psychological death that I’d been in the last ten years.

Because, even though no one else had heard it, Sophia Bergstrom had spoken to me. In her death, I could hear her voice in my head. I could see glimpses of her last moments in my mind.

Yes.

The snake was part of her story. But there was no way for me to prove it. One didn’t simply go to the police and say the dead talked to them, and if they did, they claimed to be a medium.

I wasn’t a medium. I wasn’t a sensitive. I wasn’t anyone who played with the afterlife or life itself. I was just . . . a victim.

An empath, if you will.

I could put myself in the victim’s shoes because I had been there. I could see what others couldn’t. I could hear the unspoken plea of Sophia Bergstrom.

And she was crying out.

Be my voice , Sophia had asked me in the moment I stood over her at Stillwater Lake. Be my voice.

It was a tall ask, Sophia Bergstrom. But I couldn’t ignore it any more than I could ignore the fact that I had once been her.