“Well, everyone thinks Gerry fell.”
Coffeehouse pop played softly in the background. Chairs scraped across the sealed concrete flooring. A grown man (we’re talking late forties) was whining to his mom that his frappe had too much whipped cream.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “I told the sheriff I saw someone. I saw someone on the beach last night, and I saw someone on the cliff.”
“Right,” Millie said. “Totally. And we believe you.”
Keme grunted around a mouthful of avocado, egg, and cheese to suggest that he might not believe me.
“It’s just…” Millie shrugged.
“Who told you it wasn’t a murder?”
“Dairek.”
“Dairek?” I barely managed not to say that Deputy Dairek flirted with every female tourist under the age of fifty, had an uncanny ability to find a way to bring up the fact that he was a deputy, still lived with his mom, and had once gotten caught in his own zipper in the restroom of the Otter Slide. (I’d been there. I’d heard the screams.) Instead, I managed to say, “Dairek doesn’t get to decide the manner of death. That’s up to the district medical examiner. And there’s no way the district medical examiner has already made a decision; in the first place, it’s been less than twenty-four hours, and in the second, it’s a weekend.” I tried to stop, but I kept going. “And I might not be a cop, but I’ve done enough research to know that with any suspicious death, the appropriate course of action is to treat it as if it were a homicide. That way you don’t lose valuable evidence. This is a procedural travesty.”
“Uh, right,” Millie said, “but I think they did investigate, and they didn’t find anything.”
“But I didn’t want any whipped cream,” the fortysomething wailed behind us. “And now it touched it!”
“That’s impossible,” I said. I was so outraged that I barely noticed Keme had stolen my s’mores latte and was now guzzling it. “That’s ridiculous. I saw somebody on the cliff! I’m an eyewitness!”
Which, okay, might have been stretching it a tiny bit.
Keme gave Millie a significant look over the rim of the mug, and her cheeks colored.
“There’s more?” I asked.
“Uh, no.”
Keme was still looking at her.
“What?” I asked. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“It’s nothing, really. I mean, it was just Dairek, you know. I don’t think it’s what the sheriff or—”
“Millie,” I said.
The words left her in a rush: “Dairek says you’re making it up for attention.”
I said some words that you can’t say around your grandma.
The fortysomething dropped his frappe, and his mom (who had to be in her sixties) covered his ears and led him out of Chipper.
A little girl who had been drawing smiley faces on the wall repeated one of the, uh, words. Loudly.
Keme’s eyes got huge, and the corner of his mouth started to twitch.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. I mumbled it a few times, in various directions, making sure Aric and Cyd and Brad all heard me apologize. I said sorry again to Tessa, who waved it off with a pained smile. I said sorry to the mom of the little girl (like Keme, the mom looked like she was trying not to laugh).
“Dash—” Millie said.
“Thanks for letting me know,” I said.
I slipped off my stool and headed for the door.
But when I got to the Jeep, I sat there, hands wrapped around the steering wheel.
I had not imagined someone on the cliffs. My eyes had not been tricking me. I was not an Edwardian heroine prone to hysterics. (I probably would have been, though, if I’d been alive then.) I knew what I’d seen.
I shifted into drive and drove north out of town.
Chapter 4
By day, the surf camp looked different. The gate was open, for one thing. The graffiti was more prominent. In the thin, tintype light, weeds poked through mounds of displaced earth. The clapboard buildings had a rough, unfinished look that the darkness had concealed. Flattened cans and plastic bottles lay tangled in scrubby clumps of grass. When I got out of the Jeep, the smell of marijuana met me.
I made my way to the central building, but it was locked and dark. Then I walked around it toward the square where, the night before, they’d had their party. The wind made a high-pitched noise as it whipped down the corridor of cabins, and the blued steel of the clouds rolled steadily overhead. The light was so diffuse that there were no real shadows, and it made the world feel disconnected from reality, outside of space and time.
The surf camp’s central square was in shambles. The bonfire had burned itself down to ash and the charred ends of logs. More trash—bottles, cups, vape pods, paper napkins, a forgotten shoe—stretched from the bonfire all the way to the palapa. A camp chair lay on its side. A drying puddle of vomit marked where someone had failed to make it to the restroom. Someone had tied an empty garbage bag to one of the palapa’s supports, and now it flapped like a black wing every time the wind picked up. There was no laughter, no friendly voices, no surf rock. A hint of old smoke made the air greasy.
I was still standing there, trying to decide what I wanted to do, when a guy emerged from the restrooms. He had dark hair under a beanie, and he wore a Baja hoodie and what appeared to be hemp pants with, yes, flip-flops. He picked a path over to the palapa and, apparently unconcerned that it was still morning, began mixing himself a drink at the bar. He put most of it back on his first try, and he finished on his second. He was setting down the glass when he noticed me and said, “Oh shoot.”
(He didn’t say shoot.)
Damian looked, well, rough this morning. His voice was rough too, like he hadn’t spoken yet today, and even from across the square, I could see he had dark hollows under his eyes. His color wasn’t great, and he didn’t seem too steady on his feet.
