Page 12 of Secrets Along the Shore

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 snakewaspart of her story. But there was no way for me toprove 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 shewascrying 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.

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.