The Ophelia Killer
Page 16
In June, Brett had uprooted her entire life to come and live with Amma in Crestwood, a salt-encrusted fleck of nowhere town in Washington, less than an hour’s drive from the Canadian border. Part of their arrangement was that Brett could stay on rent-free indefinitely as long as she helped out with the things Pop used to do. Like raking leaves, and cleaning gutters, and climbing into the attic on her day off to set traps for imaginary rats.
As far as Brett could tell, no one had been in the attic since Pop died of a heart attack five years ago. A thick layer of dust covered the beams and eaves and boxes stacked underneath. She wiggled a trap into the narrow space between an old wardrobe and the wall. Once all the traps were in place, she worked her way back toward the open hatch, weaving through the cluttered odds-and-ends her grandparents had accumulated during their sixty years together. At some point, she and Amma would have to go through it all and decide what was worth saving.
Downstairs, a door slammed. Brett startled at the sound and bumped into a stack of boxes. The top one fell, and the lid opened. Cameras, film canisters, and stacks of curled, faded photographs spilled across the attic floor.
Brett sat a minute listening, in case Amma needed help. She’d been losing her balance recently, tripping over uneven thresholds and her own feet. It’s nothing, she’d say, waving away Brett’s concern. I’m getting clumsy in my old age, that’s all.
When no other sounds came from downstairs, Brett assumed everything was fine.
During the summer months, Amma took her breakfast of black coffee and toast onto the back patio, where she would watch cormorants glide across the glinting surface of Sculpin Bay and scan the horizon for whales. Though it was mid-October now, and most mornings were too cold to sit out on the porch for long, Amma would sometimes wrap herself in a sweater and do it anyway. According to her, the murmur of water against the pebbled beach calmed her nerves.
Brett returned her focus to cleaning up the mess she’d made. She put the cameras and lenses back into the box without much thought but took her time with the photographs.
Many were black-and-white, abstract glimpses of light and shapes, her grandfather dabbling with his artistic side. She took a minute flipping through a small stack of pictures where the subjects were people rather than buildings and landscapes. Pictures of Amma and Pop together and impossibly young. A baby in Amma’s lap grinning toothless, followed by more photos of the same baby in a frilly, white dress. Then in a diaper, crawling across the dock. Then in a sailboat with Pop. Then sitting in the grass outside this very house that hadn’t changed much over the years with its wrap-around porch, Victorian turret, and wind vane shaped like a whale. The baby in these pictures was Brett’s mother. The cowlick curl over her forehead was the same cowlick Brett had been trying to tame her whole life. In a later picture, her mother’s cowlick had disappeared, her hair turned honey-blond and soft, her eyes mischievous. The resemblance to Brett’s older sister was startling enough, she did a double-take. She had never realized how much Margot looked like their mother.
As girls, Brett and Margot spent every summer from the Fourth of July to Labor Day in Crestwood with their grandparents. Wild days, golden days, she remembered them as glinting and saturated bright, until the summer of 1964 when their lives shattered. Brett hadn’t thought she would ever return to Crestwood after what happened that summer. Yet here she was twenty years later, and though her heart was no less broken than the day they found Margot’s body, she had at least gotten better at pretending.
The smell of burning toast wafted into the attic.
“Amma?” Brett called down. “Is everything okay?”
When she received no response, Brett abandoned the rest of the mess to pick up later. She climbed down the ladder and went into the kitchen, where gray smoke billowed from the toaster. Brett fumbled with the handle until the damn thing finally popped. She pinched a corner of the charred toast and tossed it into the sink. A flush of water and the smoke dissipated, though the stench of it hung thick in the air.
“Amma?” Brett called out again.
From the small radio on the counter, two pundits discussed tomorrow’s second presidential debate between Reagan and Mondale. A mug beside it had been filled to the brim with coffee and left to go cold. Brett flicked off the radio.
The double french doors leading out to the back porch hung wide open. A cool breeze blew through. Brett slipped on a pair of rain boots, grabbed Amma’s favorite sky-blue cardigan from its hook beside the door, and went outside. She stepped off the porch and walked across the backyard that sloped to a pebbled beach.
Amma, a petite silhouette against a damp gray October sky, stood on the beach a few steps from the dock and a small boathouse, painted the same cheerful yellow as the main house. A fourteen-foot sailboat bobbed in the water, tugging against the ropes that kept it lashed to the dock. Amma’s back was to Brett, but she wasn’t looking out over the bay. Her head was tilted, and she was staring at her feet. Not at her feet, Brett realized as she walked closer, but at a pile of wet clothes. She quickened her pace. Even this far away, she could tell that what had washed up this morning was more than rags.
She stepped off the lawn. Pebbles crunched underfoot.
Without looking up, Amma flapped her hand and said, “Don’t come any closer, Brett, dear. This isn’t something you need to see.”
Brett grabbed Amma and pulled her away from the body.
Small waves rocked the man gently. He was on his stomach, face pressed into the rocks, his arms trapped beneath him. The skin of his neck, visible above his shirt collar, was bloated and splotched purple. Working as a sheriff’s deputy for the past ten years, and now as a detective, Brett had seen enough bodies to know without needing to bend close or check his pulse that this man was unmistakably dead.
She swung her gaze along the beach and out across the water, looking for a wrecked boat or something else to explain how he’d come to wash up on this particular shore. There was nothing out of the ordinary. An empty stretch of sand and stone, the soft pull of the tide, a seagull eyeing them from the roof of the boathouse.
Brett turned her attention back to Amma, who was shivering so hard her teeth chattered. She had been out here only a few minutes, but the thin linen pants and short-sleeved blouse she was wearing did little to protect her from the mist and light breeze coming off the water. They were close enough to the shoreline that waves rolled over her bare feet. The cuffs of her pants were soaked past the ankle.
Brett spread the cardigan over Amma’s shoulders. “What are you even doing out here?”
“I was going to take the boat out for a jaunt.” Amma wrapped the cardigan tight around herself.
“You don’t have any shoes on.”
Amma looked at her feet, confusion rippling across her face, then she blinked and straightened her shoulders. A frown tugged at the corners of her mouth. “A man is dead, Brett. I hardly think now is the time to hassle me about my choice of attire.”
“I wasn’t trying to hassle you. I just—”
“I’m going to call the police.” Amma spun away from her and marched up the hill toward the house. The long hem of her cardigan a fluttering scrap of sky against the gray mist and steel-colored clouds.
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To keep reading On A Dark Tide, please visit: www.valeriegeary.com
Acknowledgements
A quick but heartfelt thanks to Alisa Callos for being my second pair of eyes, Ken Brayton for suggesting Trixie make her entrance a few scenes earlier, Caroline Starr Rose for cheering the loudest while reminding me to take breaks, and Ryan Geary for his steadfast belief in my wildest daydreams.
And extra thanks to you, Dear Reader. For always being excited to hear from me. I hope you have as much fun reading this one as I had writing it!
About the Author
Valerie Geary is the author of several books, including the Brett Buchanan Mystery Series and Croo
ked River, her debut and a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and a rescue dog named Charlie Waffles. Connect with her on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube to find out what she’s reading. Or sign up for her monthly newsletter to receive discounts, free books, and a behind-the-scenes look at her writing and hiking life: www.valeriegeary.com