My words were lost to the winds and the waves.
Pulling out my phone, I trudged in the direction I’d last seen him. I turned on the phone’s flashlight. It made it easier to see where I was putting my feet, but it ruined my night vision. I turned the flashlight off again, and then I couldn’t see anything. Somehow, the ocean sounded even louder. Maybe the tide was coming in. Was this the right time? I had no idea. I picked up the pace. It was easier going now as I followed the narrow strip of beach along the face of the cliffs. Waves slapped down hard to my left, and the swash rolled up, missing my sneakers by inches. This had been a bad idea, I decided. Deputy Bobby—if it even was Deputy Bobby—wanted to be left alone. That’s the whole reason he’d walked away. He was upset, and he needed some time to calm down, to get control of himself. He wouldn’t appreciate me barging in on him, even if I was doing it out of friendship.
And then, ahead of me, against the pale luminescence of the stone, I made out a shape. The swash came in again, swirling around that dark bulk. It took me a moment to realize it wasn’t a rock. It was someone lying on the ground.
“Bobby?” I started to run. “Bobby!”
But when I reached him, it wasn’t Deputy Bobby. It was Gerry Webb, and he was dead.
It looked like he’d fallen—his body shattered by the impact. I couldn’t help myself; I looked up. And there, on the cliff above me, someone was looking down. They were too far away for me to make out more than their shape. But they were there.
And then they were gone.
Chapter 3
Deputies came. They hauled lights out to the beach, portable generators, protective barriers—to preserve the crime scene, I knew. It was a losing battle; nothing could keep back the tide. I stood there and waited. In the glare of the LEDs, with the waves crashing louder and louder, men and women calling back and forth to each other, it felt like I’d stepped out of my body and into a movie.
Deputy Salkanovic, who went by Salk and had been Hastings Rock’s star quarterback (take that however you want), and who got compliments from little old ladies when he wrote them speeding tickets, and who had once—when I’d stopped by the station for some reason—shouted, Dash-y, my man! and then given me double high fives—walked me back to the surf camp, and he let me sit in his cruiser with the heater running. A little later, Deputy Dahlberg—who had moved here to learn how to paint and who now gave a weekly class called “Rip His Head Off: Self-Defense through Video Games,” who still wore her hair in a blond Rachel cut, and who had once spent fifteen minutes telling me who in the sheriff’s office had, um, carnal knowledge of whom (Deputy Bobby earned some extra points that day for, apparently, being smart enough not to play on his own doorstep)—brought me some coffee from a thermos.
I asked Salk about Deputy Bobby. I asked Dahlberg.
Nobody knew where he was.
And then Sheriff Acosta opened the door of the cruiser, leaned down, and said, “Hello, Mr. Dane.”
Sheriff Acosta was stocky, with warm brown skin and her hair in a ponytail. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen her not in uniform, and her only affectation—if it was one—was to gel her baby hairs to her forehead, where they almost hid a neat little scar. Although Acosta hadn’t been sheriff when I’d been framed for Vivienne Carver’s death, she still seemed to hold it against me that I hadn’t happily gone along with my own conviction. She’d been even less happy when, a few months later, I’d helped my ex, Hugo, prove his innocence.
I told her everything—not that there was much to tell: how Gerry had assaulted me; how Deputy Bobby had stepped in; the argument with West; and then my decision, if you could call it that, to check on Deputy Bobby and make sure he was okay. I told her about the figure I’d seen moving against the backdrop of the bluffs, and then finding Gerry’s body, and then the figure I’d seen above me on the cliffs, looking down at me.
When I finished, the sheriff said, “That’s a long way from camp. Why’d you need to talk to him so bad?”
“I just told you.” Acosta didn’t reply, so I said, “He was upset.”
Acosta still didn’t say anything. In her silence, I heard a bigger, larger silence—the party was over, a distant part of my brain noted. And I thought I heard a question.
“I understand,” Acosta finally said, “there was an altercation.”
“What?”
“You mentioned that Deputy Mai stepped in when Mr. Webb put his hands on you. But according to several witnesses, it was more than that: Deputy Mai punched Mr. Webb hard enough to knock Mr. Webb to the ground. Then Deputy Mai stood over Mr. Webb, threatening him.”
“That’s not—” I almost said true. Because it wasn’t true, the way she was saying it. Deputy Bobby hadn’t—I mean, yes, technically, he had. But it hadn’t felt like that. It hadn’t been like that. “—the way it was. He did punch Gerry, yes. But only to get him away from me. And Gerry only fell because he’d had too much to drink.”
“Was Deputy Mai intoxicated?”
That big silence rushed in again.
“Hold on,” I said. “You think Deputy Bobby had something to do with this? That’s ridiculous.”
“All I’m asking is if Deputy Mai had been drinking.”
“He had a beer. One. He wasn’t drunk. He certainly wasn’t out of control or aggressive or—I can’t believe this!”
“Is there anything else you want to tell me?”
“I told you about the person I saw on the cliffs. Why aren’t you out there looking for them?”
Acosta’s face didn’t change as she straightened. She rapped on the hood of the cruiser. “Think about it, Mr. Dane. Believe it or not, the best thing you can do for everyone involved is tell me everything.”
“I am telling you everything—hey!”
But Sheriff Acosta didn’t look back.
A moment later, Salk ducked down to look into the back seat. “Sheriff told me to drive you home. Your friends already left.”
“You don’t actually believe Bobby had something to do with this.”
Salk gave me an embarrassed half-smile, his cheeks flooding with color. “Dash,” he said with a weird little shrug. “Come on.”
He drove me back to Hemlock House.
I called Deputy Bobby; he didn’t answer.
I did not sleep.
Okay, I did. But it was awful; I slipped back and forth between sleeping and waking, hanging on the gray edge of dreams. I dreamed that I was following Deputy Bobby, only then it wasn’t Deputy Bobby, and then he was following me, and he was Gerry Webb with the side of his head cracked open, and he had his hands on me.
