“Let me—” I began.
“Please be quiet,” he whispered.
And then the sounds filtered through the chaos inside my head: voices—indistinct, but, I thought, male; the tread of footsteps through sand; the crackle of a radio.
I could feel Deputy Bobby’s question. My face was still pressed into his shoulder, but I nodded.
The voices came closer, although the words remained indistinct. Deputy Bobby tensed. His whole body seemed like it was worked in iron, and I was suddenly, dangerously aware of him, like the flicker of a flame inside me, a fire that was still trying to catch. I thought maybe it would be a good idea (for everybody) if I put a little distance between us, but when I tried to move, Deputy Bobby let out a vexed breath and tightened his grip.
Oh. My. God.
After what must have been an eternity, the voices moved back the way they had come. Deputy Bobby didn’t relax until the rolling thunder of the waves had completely swallowed them. Then he whispered, “I’m going to let you down now.”
I nodded into his shoulder again, and he eased me to the floor. Aside from being a bit sandy, the floorboards were smooth from decades of use. I was having a hard time looking Deputy Bobby in the face, so I focused on his knees and said, “Thanks. I didn’t—I didn’t understand why you were telling me to be quiet.” And then I felt like I had to add, “Obviously.”
And in a tone that could have meant anything, he said, “Obviously.”
He sat crisscross opposite me. The gloom of the shelter made it hard to pick out the expression on his face. Then a smile gleamed, and he held up something that glinted in the weak light. He pressed it into my hand, his fingers sparking against mine and then gone again. Whatever it was, it was cool and round and felt like glass.
“A marble?” I said, which was still the only thing I could come up with, even though I could tell this was too big to be one.
“Japanese fishing float.” His tone still could have meant anything. “They used them to keep the tops of their nets afloat.”
“Oh.” And because that had to be the lamest mouth-sound any mouth had ever mouthed, I managed to top myself by saying, “Um.”
For some reason, that made Deputy Bobby laugh, and his real grin—the big, goofy one—flashed out.
“Well, I’m still processing!”
That made him laugh harder. He had a nice laugh; it wasn’t something I heard often. I decided the best, most mature, most adult response to that sound, which I could never get enough of, was to be slightly offended.
“Thanks, I guess,” I said. “Were those guys from the surf camp?”
“Those were deputies.”
“Because Jen called them and said I was trespassing.”
“You were trespassing.”
“Whose side are you on here? Hey, wait! Does that mean you weren’t going to arrest me?”
“What?”
“When we got here.” I gestured to the door. “You said, ‘Get inside, or I’ll arrest your skinny white butt right now.’”
“I never said that. And of course I wouldn’t arrest you.” He considered that. “Have you paid all your parking tickets?”
“Rude!”
“What were you doing on that cliff?”
“Inspecting. Investigating. Detecting.”
“Like Will Gower?” he asked drily.
Definitely like Will Gower, I thought, although I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of an answer. Will Gower didn’t take guff from anybody. He was a cynical private investigator with a bad case of white knight syndrome. He was an honest cop who nevertheless played by his own rules. In one disastrous attempt, he’d been a whalebone corsetier with a thirst for revenge (and whale bones). (A corsetier, by the way, is a person who makes corsets, which, let me tell you, typing Person who makes corsets profession into Google was one of the more surreal experiences of my life.)
“Do you know what I found up there?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter what you found up there,” Deputy Bobby said, “because you’re not a law enforcement officer, and you’re certainly not part of this investigation, and I’m sure, because you’re a smart young man—”
“You’re three years older than me, not thirty-three.”
“—you would never do something so foolish as to be snooping.”
“First, I object to the term snooping—”
“Dash.”
“Nothing! There was nothing up there. No footprints. No scuffs. Nothing. There’s soft soil. There’s bare stone. There’s a stretch of gravel. It should have been easy to see where Gerry had been—an impression in the dirt, or a print he tracked onto the stone, or even just displaced gravel to show where he’d stepped. But there’s nothing!”
Deputy Bobby didn’t say anything.
“Someone covered it up!”
Deputy Bobby still didn’t say anything.
“That proves it’s a murder, see? Gerry couldn’t have covered his own tracks because he fell. So, it had to be the killer, and they were so scared about leaving evidence behind that they overcorrected and wiped out any sign at all.”
