Page 9 of Secrets Along the Shore

“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.”

“TheNahash?” 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.

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.