Page 7 of Secrets Along the Shore (Beach Read Thrillers #1)

CHAPTER

FOUR

“Why Stillwater Lake?”

I was folding clothes I’d taken from my apartment’s laundry room and hauled back to my living room. The clean clothes were dumped on my couch and I picked up a T-shirt and creased it into a square.

In my imagination, Sophia Bergstrom sat in the corner in the recliner, her legs pulled up onto the seat and her arms wrapped around them, chin resting on her knees. She was watching me. Watching me do my household chores and listening to me ruminate about her death.

“Did you have a tie to Stillwater Lake? Did Dereck?” I asked her, but she didn’t answer. She just continued to watch me. “Or was it just an out of the way place to get rid of you?”

I tossed the shirt onto a pile. “Because,” I continued, “Your killer didn’t try to hide your body. You were just dumped there—it was . . .” I searched for the word . . . “convenient.”

Sophia nodded, and I took that as affirmation I was at least doing a basic good job of interpreting the scene.

“Yes.” It was easier to think if I spoke out loud.

I matched a pair of socks and folded the top of one over the other to make sure they didn’t get separated.

“Nothing was staged about your body. The disposal of your body didn’t communicate any specific message.

If nothing else, it seemed your killer was in a hurry to get rid of you. ”

Which meant, it was another strike against Sophia’s killer being my attacker from a decade ago. He had been methodical. Planned. He had cared about how I was buried.

A flash of memory came so intently, my knees buckled and I dropped onto the couch and pile of laundry.

Methodical.

I could hear the scraping of the shovel as he’d dug my shallow grave.

It was a new memory—a connection to that day.

I was on the ground in a heap, naked as a means of humiliation not victimization.

I remember wishing stupidly I had a blanket, but knowing that I had to lay still.

So still. He thought I was dead, so I had to play the part if I wanted to live.

Scrape.

I dared to open my eyes—it was painful to do so. But I saw him squatting, his back to me, his arm stretched out measuring the distance of the grave from head to foot with an invisible ruler.

He was careful.

The grave had to be specific.

I opened my eyes and this time I was back in my own apartment. The couch pillows cushioned me as I sat frozen. I looked at the corner of the room and the recliner. Sophia was gone.

I had never told anyone that detail because it was new, even to me.

The reality of it stole my ability to move, to breathe even.

I had never associated a personality trait to the Serpent Killer.

For the last decade, he was simply a name I didn’t want to speak.

Like Harry Potter’s Voldemort, his was the name not to be said aloud.

At least not by me. Because it made him real.

And if I couldn’t recall his personality, or his face, or his smell, or the feel of his hands, and if I didn’t say his name, he could remain as distant to me as horror film’s villain.

No. This memory was a step to proving that he existed. Not that I needed proof. I didn’t want proof. My logic and my body and my spirit told me he existed. Why would I want to remember it also?

I ran my hand over my face and returned my focus to Sophia’s chair.

That’s what the recliner was now .

Sophia’s chair.

And I saw her again. Only this time she was holding a phone. She lifted it toward me.

“No,” I said.

Sophia raised her eyebrows with an insistent stare.

“I’m not calling him,” I replied.

Sophia continued to stare.

“He’ll just interrogate me. I don’t have more information,” I argued.

She never seemed to blink. I looked away from Sophia’s glassy blue eyes. In death, she lacked many of the physical signs of life—which made sense.

Only I could feel what she was trying to tell me.

You need to call Reuben. Tell him this is another way our killers are different, so he doesn’t waste time looking for the Serpent Killer.

“I don’t want to get involved.” I snatched a pair of underwear from the clean pile and nervously stretched the waistband. “It’s one thing for you and I to—to try to figure this out, but not Detective Walker. Not Reuben.”

I need you to speak for me .

“No!” I threw the underwear onto the side table and launched to my feet.

Sophia vanished.

The recliner was empty.

“No,” I said again, softer and with weaker resolve.

How did anyone with a heart tell a dead woman no?

I didn’t call Reuben. I didn’t call Livia. But I also couldn’t ignore Sophia or my memory. The problem with nighttime and trauma is that instead of falling into bed, exhausted and ready to find solace in the unconscious depths of sleep, you were more awake than you ever wanted to be.

Adrenaline told my body that it was safer awake than asleep.

My mind spun in chaotic rhythms. Sometimes, in the past, I’d caught myself staring emptily out my apartment window, watching traffic go by on the highway.

The headlights were mesmerizing spots of interest and it wasn’t unusual for me to stand there over an hour.

Watching, counting headlights like sheep, and longing for my mind and my body to still enough to lay down.

Tonight was different.

I was awake—wide awake—but there wasn’t chaos. There was purpose. Resolve. I was standing at my window and yes, I’d counted at least eighty-three pairs of headlights. Now I spun on my bare feet and snagged a notebook from the table at the end of my couch. I reviewed my scratched notes.

Snake under her window.

Stillwater Lake.

Burial of convenience.

Purple shirt torn.

Black thread around cattails.

Boyfriend, Dereck—possible abuse?

Bare feet, shorts, crop top.

It was what I knew about Sophia’s murder. I compared it to the column of notes I’d taken about my murder—or attempted murder.

Shallow grave.

No clothes.

Bound hand and foot .

Methodical.

They were different. Too different to be the same person, unless, for whatever reason, they were deviating quite a bit from their preferred process.

The primary question in my mind—aside from the nagging dead snake element—was whether Sophia had been killed at Stillwater Lake and in the location where we’d found her body, or if she’d been transported and dumped there.

I’d made the latter assumption when I found her. But, I concluded now, that was based on the subconscious fact that I knew I’d been transported and buried after I’d been supposedly killed by my offender.

If our cases were truly as unattached as I believed them to be, then Sophia may very well have been at the lake of her own accord. Which meant, she’d either gone there with someone she knew, been taken there by force but yet alive, or gone there alone and ran into a known or unknown perpetrator.

Be my voice .

I spun around, staring at Sophia’s chair. She wasn’t there, but I would have given my left arm to prove I’d heard her speak. A whisper from behind me.

I wasn’t equipped to speak for the dead. I wasn’t qualified to do any sort of amateur, off-the-books investigation. I certainly wasn’t mentally healthy enough to investigate a murder after almost being the victim of one myself.

If therapy had taught me one thing, it was to slowly approach the memories, the trauma, and the process of healing in a slow and careful fashion. I’d made matters worse the last few years by not even doing that.

And now? Now something urged me to dive in recklessly at the deep end, ignore all clinical advice of dealing with my trauma, and try to play hero to a murdered woman.

Maybe it was just another form of survival. Maybe I’d crossed into a new phase—survivor’s guilt—no—survivor’s responsibility .

What did it matter? I had been on the verge of a mental breakdown for years now.

I grabbed my car keys from the kitchen table next to my notebook.

If Sophia’s murder was going to push me over the edge, maybe I could at least accomplish something worthwhile and bring resolution to Sophia before I fell.

Most people would question my judgement, coming to Stillwater Lake at 2:00 a.m., but I’d already lived through being abducted, held, listening to the screams of other victims, and then being almost killed and subsequently buried alive.

It wasn’t that I wanted to flirt with it happening again, but I was also desensitized to it.

I had a taser with me too, and I’d hooked a can of bear spray to the waistband of my jeans.

I’d bought it online figuring if a tiny spray can of MACE could do the trick, why not blind the culprit permanently with a concentrated aerosol bomb meant to stop grizzlies?

I wasn’t over confident. On the contrary. The minute I parked my car in the small lot at the lake, I wanted to turn around and drive home. I could hear the frogs peeping even with my car windows rolled up. Crickets chirruped. The night was warm—warmer than yesterday when we’d found Sophia’s body.

I turned off the ignition and sat there for a moment.

What was it I even hoped to find by coming here in the dead of night?

Aside from some inexplicable and innate tug to do so, coming here defied reason, not to mention, I really had no business nosing into Sophia’s murder to begin with.

Being the one to find her body hadn’t given me carte blanche to her case.

The fact was, the police were already probably leaps and bounds ahead of me in the investigation anyway.

But I had to see for myself. This time without the overarching shock of finding Sophia.