Page 20 of Secrets Along the Shore

That had to be the tie-in to the other missing women. It was the same tie that had Reuben thinking they might be connected to me, to the Serpent Killer, to the crime history in Whisper’s End.

I realized that no one had stated exactly where they believed Sophia had went missing—or where she’d last been seen. I made a quick guess out loud. “Sophia was taken from her house, wasn’t she?”

My conclusion was met with a narrow-eyed stare from Reuben. “Why do you assume that?”

“Because everyone keeps talking about the snake under her window. It wouldn’t matter if she’d been taken from somewhere else. No would’ve been looking under her window for any evidence. And I’m guessing the same thing happened to the other women.”

Reuben’s jaw worked back and forth. “You’ve put more thought into this than I expected.”

I didn’t want to validate his observation any more than he wanted to validate mine. I tried to shut him out.

“Because I want you to leave me alone,” I lied. If I really wanted that, I’d never have gone to Stillwater Lake the first time, let alone the second time. I certainly wouldn’t be trying—for the first time in adecade—to remember my nightmare. “If I convince you Sophia’s murder doesn’t have anything to do with me, then I can go home.”

My argument had sounded stronger in my head.

Reuben’s eyes softened and for a moment, the furry-cat-smoking-a-pipe T-shirt suited him a little more. It made him approachable, even quirky. And I highly doubted the alpha male detective had ever been accused of either of those things.

“If you can help these women, Noa, it could maybe save one of them.”

Unlike the ones I’d left behind? No one had saved them. It had been ten years of silence. Ten years without any more bodies, or bones, or evidence, or clues. They deserved more. They deserved better. They deserved what I could maybe help give Sophia Bergstrom. Justice. Answers. And truthfully, it hadn’t occurred to me that any of the women recently vanished from Whisper’s End could still be found alive.

Be our voice.

I looked over Reuben’s shoulder.

Sophia stood there. The expression on her face gentled her unblinking eyes.

She was right. I was too late for the ones I’d left behind. But maybe I could be a voice for the victims. And in turn, save one before their story became the same unanswered tale whose ending evaporated with the years until eventually, they were barely a memory.

CHAPTER

SIX

“You’re okay with this?”

Reuben’s question was belated and probably meant to assuage his guilt than out of concern for me.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

Dickson cleared her throat and she raised an eyebrow. “Just show her the photographs.”

Reuben laid a series of photos in front of me. I was trying to ignore the room we were in. The station had the talent of an interior designer who loved steel and gray and more steel. The only thing missing, as I sat at the table, were handcuffs fastened around my wrists and hooked to the bar that spanned the table. But hey, I’d agreed to help—if I could—to see if I noticed any similarities between my case and Sophia’s. So I shouldn’t feel like I was guilty of something. I figured it was just the room’s aesthetics. They needed help. A throw pillow or something.

Sophia gave me an encouraging smile. She stood in the corner of the room, behind Dickson and Reuben. Her arms crossed, she waited to see what evidence might be presented.

I looked away from my imaginary vision of the dead woman.

“These are the four windows of the bedrooms where the women were taken.” Reuben tapped the first one with his finger. “This was Sophia’s.”

There it was.

The infamous snake.

“These are the other windows.” Reuben pointed.

The remains of a snake lay beneath each. All of them were the typical garden snake variety. All of them were fully intact and appeared to have died naturally.

I studied the photographs, sensing Reuben and Dickson’s eyes as they studied me. I really wanted to provide them with something. Something that would help make sense of these disappearances, of Sophia’s murder, and shed light on what had happened to me years ago—not to mention the other victims.