The Sighting

by Christopher Coleman

  “So you talked to her then?” Danny asked. “After she saw you there?”

  “I told her who I was and asked her if she wouldn’t mind answering a few questions for my story.”

  “And she agreed?”

  Sarah nodded. “But not after doing a whole metamorphosis out of her hypnotic delight into something a bit more appropriate for the circumstances. She never acknowledged what I saw and heard right before she noticed I was there, but there was an understanding between us. An understanding that whatever she told me from that point on wasn’t going to be the whole truth.”

  “But you interviewed her anyway.”

  Sarah shrugged. “I had to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she could have convinced me that it all went down the way it did in the police report, and that whatever she was doing on the beach that morning was strange, yes, but not an implication of her complicity. Or maybe she would breakdown and confess.”

  “I’m guessing none of those things happened?”

  Sarah shook her head and looked off to a space on the ceiling, pondering. “She was lying to me. I knew it the second her story started. I recognized some of the same words and phrases she told to the police, words and phrases that don’t come the same way twice. Lyle Bradford may have drowned on that beach back in ’07, but it didn’t happen the way Lynn Shields says it did. Honestly though, I could have printed her interview anyway—it’s not really important whether the person is lying, as long as I don’t lie about what they’ve said. But I couldn’t do it. I just told my editor she wouldn’t talk.”

  Danny gave the woman a somber nod, knowing that her decision not to run any further with the story was due to her decency. Sarah Needler could live with someone’s lies being accurately printed, but not when they involved the loss of an innocent life.

  “Have there been other unusual deaths around here in the past?” Danny thought it best to get off Lynn Shields for the moment. He cut the air with his hand when the bartender motioned him for a reset, thus starting the process of bringing the whole meeting to an end.

  “Drowning isn’t all that unusual in a beach town. Especially in an ocean front town like Rove. Riptides and rough seas claim people all the time. Add in alcohol and out of towners, people who don’t know the waters or even how to swim sometimes, and you’ll get your share of drownings.”

  That made sense to Danny. The ocean had been swallowing people up for as long as there’d been people. And now sitting at this bar on a Friday afternoon, two beers in, he, for the first time, wondered on how many occasions the ocean had been used to cover a murder. Was it in the thousands? Hundreds of thousands? And what was the connection between the woman he saw—whom he still didn’t know for sure was Lynn Shields, though he was going on that assumption—and the creature he’d seen on the beach? After hearing Sarah’s story, he was convinced there was definitely some tie between the two. Based on the prayer motions Sarah had described, maybe the woman even worshipped the thing. He had to find her. He had to find someone who could explain to him what he’d seen. It was now the only thing in his life he could imagine doing.

  “How was the trip?”

  Danny shook his head and looked at Sarah. “Huh?”

  “Looks like you just traveled off somewhere. And somewhere far by the looks of it.”

  “I...I have to go,” Danny said softly and threw a twenty on the bar. “Thanks...again...for meeting me.”

  “I told you...”

  “I know, you asked me. But thanks anyway.” Danny walked toward the door and then stopped and turned back to the bar. “Sarah?”

  Sarah cocked her head a quarter turn toward Danny’s voice. “Yo.”

  “That piece of yours that I read on the internet, that was the original piece?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Why did you mention the part about not suspecting foul play? Before you ever even met Lynn Shields.”

  Danny could see Sarah cock her head to the side, a motion that acknowledged the question was a good one. “Reporters have hunches sometimes, Danny. Like I said. I guess I just had a hunch after reading the drowning report. One that told me there might have been more to the story. It was a good one I guess.”

  Danny paused. “A hunch, huh?”

  “You got it, Danny boy?”

  Danny waited at the door for a few more beats, waiting to see if the reporter had anything else to add. “See you around, Sarah Needler,” he said finally, and then walked out the door.

  Chapter 6

  Lynn gave a discreet peek at her watch and abruptly stopped walking, turning sharply toward the water and the horizon beyond. The sun would be rising soon and they would need to head back. The arrival spot was not negotiable; it could be any day now. “Let’s just take it in for a moment,” she said, sighing with content, “and then we’ll head back.”

  “Take what in?” Lyle snickered. “The sun has another twenty minutes at least.” He was playful in his response, Lynn thought, and had seemed to warm to the early walk after only a few minutes.

  “I love the ocean at this hour.” Lynn wasn’t sure she had ever mentioned this intimate piece of information to Lyle previously, but there it was.

  “Since when?”

  “Since forever. I just have a hard time getting up.” Lynn flashed her eyes up at Lyle, batting her lids once for effect. “But I want to start. This week. And I want you to come with me.”

  Lyle frowned down at Lynn, his eyes narrow and doubting. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You discovering religion or something?”

  Lynn let out an anxious chuckle, and she covered her mouth in embarrassment.

  “What’s going on with you, Lynnie?”

  She was still smiling, thinking about how close Lyle had been with his guess. Of course, the reason behind her newfound love of morning beach strolls wasn’t religion exactly, but there was some resemblance to it. “Nothing baby. I’m just thinking about happy things.”

  Chapter 7

  Danny recognized the woman to his right immediately. He had always been good with faces anyway, but in this case, he had no doubt about who she was. It was the woman he’d seen on the dunes a couple of mornings ago, the woman he now believed to be Lynn Shields.

  He slowed his pace as he reached the corners of Fromme and Pickering, a lightly trafficked intersection at which he normally never broke stride. But he was extra careful today, coming almost to a stop as he gave one slow glance to his right in an ostensible check for oncoming cars.

  The woman in the Cadillac adjusted her sunglasses and turned away, then looked at her watch and took a sip of her coffee, pretending not to notice Danny in the slightest. But he knew the profile from the dunes, and the same look of worry.

  He was on his way home from the beach. It was only the fourth day since Danny had seen the creature, and, almost inconceivably, he’d already begun to doubt what he’d witnessed. Four days. Even with the ambiguous photos, which he still stared at several times a day, the memory was becoming elusive, like a dream that seems destined to change your outlook on life forever the few minutes after you wake, but which somehow fades into oblivion by the middle of the day.

  Danny had to fight against his instinct to run to the car, to knock on the window and ask the woman if she had a few moments to speak with him. This was his chance to see if she was, in fact, Lynn Shields, and if she had any connection to the beast on the beach.

  But Danny’s restraint won over, and, after only a second or two, he recognized the obvious: it was no coincidence that the woman from the beach four days ago was on this street at this hour, just as he was passing by. She was watching him.

  Danny had played back his conversation with Sarah several times in his mind, and specifically the words she had heard Lynn Shields say on the beach that morning following her boyfriend’s death.

  There’s always more. I can always give you more.

  These two sentences, in combination with the accompanying prayer m
otions, left little doubt in Danny’s mind that Lynn Shields had offered up her boyfriend as some kind of sacrifice. It was almost obvious.

  And now, for the first time since he’d drawn that conclusion, he had another thought: What if Lyle Bradford wasn’t the only one? What if there had been others before him? And after him? And as Danny followed this thinking further down the line, he now considered that the reason he was being followed was because he was on the woman’s short list of possible future victims. He was at the beach alone almost every day. He was the perfect target.

  As he did on every one of his running days, Danny crossed the intersection at Fromme and Pickering and ducked through the passageway of hedges that led to a sidewalk a half mile from home. Here he stopped and waited. He was out of the view of Lynn Shields now, so if she was indeed following him, monitoring his schedule, in just a few moments she’d drive off.

  Danny pushed back through the hedges and walked again up to the corner of the two streets. The Cadillac was gone.

  Danny walked to the spot where the car had been parked and started down the street toward the home Lynn Shields’ niece had pointed out to him. But then he thought better of it. If she was following him, and if she did know something about the creature he’d seen on the beach, he didn’t want to spook her. He’d let things play out a little further. The time didn’t seem quite right. But it would be soon.

  Chapter 8

  “I want to go with you today.”

  Tammy was sitting at the table in the breakfast nook, her shoulders high and eager. She was donned in a raspberry-colored running suit and her hair was tied back tight in a ponytail. Danny thought she looked great.

  “I feel bad about the other morning, about what you saw and the way I was...well, making fun of you. I would be mad too.”

  Danny wasn’t mad, not anymore, but he understood why Tammy would have thought so. He’d barely talked to her since that morning, since his discovery of Lynn Shields and the follow-up details that were provided by Sarah Needler.

  “If you don’t want me to go...” Tammy stood up and frowned, and then walked to the kitchen counter where she began fussing with an invisible mess, making a show that she was hurt by Danny’s hesitation.

  “No...no, it’s fine.” It wasn’t entirely fine, especially considering his new belief that he was being stalked. But he was stuck, unprepared for an excuse about why she couldn’t come along. “I’m not ready yet, though.” It was only 5:30 in the morning; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Tammy up before 7:00, barring some travel day.

  Danny ate a light breakfast of blueberries and toast, put on his long, nylon running pants and a tee shirt, and within ten minutes, he and Tammy were out the door and en route to Rove Beach.

  “So now that a few days have passed, do you have any more theories about what you think you saw?” Tammy smiled and shook her head. “What you saw, I mean?”

  Most of the catharsis that Danny gained through his morning runs came from the quiet and solitude they provided. He didn’t mind the company—Tammy was his wife, after all, and he was glad that she had shown some initiative with her exercise—but he wasn’t going to be game for chatting the entire time. Especially not about a topic that had become as heavy and gnawing as the sighting. As it was, he had to slow his pace to about half just to stay close to her; he’d have to drop it to three quarters if she intended to have full on conversations about serious events. “No, not really. I don’t know what it was.”

  “Of course, but what do you think?”

  “The more I think about it, the more I think you might have been right,” he lied. “It was dark. Maybe it was just a man. Some big guy in a wet suit or something. He would have had to have been enormous, I’ll admit that, but I suppose it’s not impossible. And maybe he had a snorkel that I couldn’t see, and that’s how he just disappeared back into the water.”

  Danny hadn’t actually ever thought about any of this as a possibility—the words were just coming from him, creatively, like a child inventing a story to stay out of trouble. But as he said them, he started to frame the picture in his mind, comparing it to what he had actually seen. Or thought he saw. Was something like what he’d just described to his wife a possibility? Maybe Lynn Shields and Lyle Bradford and Sarah Needler all had nothing to do with what he’d seen, and he’d just filled in the gaps of the story that didn’t make sense with his own narrative. Or, perhaps, they were connected somehow, but in a way that was more scientifically explainable, even if still nefarious.

  “But...you said you saw it. Is that what you saw? A man in a wet suit?”

  “Jesus, Tammy, what do you want me to say?” Danny stopped suddenly on the path, allowing Tammy to pass him a few steps before she stopped as well. “A few days ago you thought I was delusional, and now—”

  “I never said you were delusional. That’s not fair.”

  Danny closed his eyes and scoffed, shaking his head slowly; it was a motion that let Tammy know he was wrong to go against his instincts and should have maintained the regular privacy of his morning routine. He said nothing more on the subject, and began his run again, this time at his normal pace, which had become quite fast over the last nine months. Tammy followed in silence, but she lasted only twenty yards or so before Danny pulled well ahead of her, out of the range of conversation.

  Twenty-five minutes later Danny reached the path side landing and ascended the staircase to the overlook, where he waited at the top for his wife to arrive. Another fifteen minutes passed before Tammy finally appeared, hands on her hips and gasping, her lungs well past capacity as she climbed the stairs in a slow, plodding walk.

  “Thanks for waiting,” Tammy said in the middle of huffs, the phrase sounding to Danny simultaneously grateful and sarcastic. She sat on one of the benches and wiped the sweat from her face with a towel, continuing to catch her breath. “You must have been very worried.”

  “I knew you’d make it. I’m actually impressed. Three and a half miles is not a joke if you’re not used to running it.”

  Tammy gave a thumbs up, still working hard to steady her breathing. “You’re not going to swim are you? That water must be damn cold.”

  “It’s always cold at 6:30, but trust me, it’s warmer out here than yesterday. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, I don’t swim anymore. My daily-dip-in-the-ocean days are over.”

  “Really? I didn’t know that. Since when?”

  Danny looked at his wife and frowned, clicking his eyebrows up, giving her a chance to reach the answer on her own.

  Tammy mouthed a silent “Ohhh” in understanding. “I guess that makes sense. I wouldn’t swim in sea-monster-infested waters either.”

  Danny chuckled at this and started down the steps to the beach. He stood alone on the sand for several minutes, staring toward the area of the ocean that had bred the creature. He closed his eyes and tried to remember it all exactly, recreating it in his mind, and then his mind went to the woman, Lynn Shields, and he wondered if she was watching him now.

  Danny turned back toward the overlook where he could see the outline of Tammy, standing meditatively in the pre-dawn morning, leaning against the railing and staring out over the water. “Do you want to see where it was?” he said “Do you want to see where it happened?”

  Tammy was broken from her spell and nodded with apparent excitement, walking quickly down the wooden planks that formed the access staircase. When she reached the beach side landing, she looked across the beach and said, “Man, it’s dark out here.”

  Danny took this statement as a subtle inquiry, that she was indirectly asking Danny how it was possible he could be sure about what he’d seen last week in this visibility. He argued the point in his head on two counts: first, he wasn’t sure about it; and second, the sun had risen. Tammy had seen the pictures. It was still a bit dark when he first heard the sound in the water and the thing started to walk out, but by the time he’d run back up to the top of the overlook and grabbed his phone, there wa
s a decent amount of sunlight. He said none of this to his wife, of course, knowing that she would have interpreted his unsolicited explanation as defensiveness, what she would have called ‘projecting.’

  “How far away were you when you saw it?”

  “I was here.” Danny walked back to the second step from the beach landing.

  “And where was the...whatever?”

  Danny didn’t have a good landmark to choose from, since the beach was void of any lifeguard chairs or benches. But he could line up roughly where the thing came out by the houses that rose up beyond the dunes. He looked at the one Tracy had pointed out to him, the one belonging to Lynn Shields, and then grabbed Tammy’s hand and guided her to the approximate spot in the sand. He then he turned back toward the staircase they’d just descended. From this distance, at this time of morning, it was virtually invisible, and now that he’d paced it off, he may have gone a bit too far. But not much. This was about right, he thought. “About here.”

  “Here? Really?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Why?”

  “I...I don’t know. It just seems kind of far. How could you have seen something that was here from the beach steps?”

  “The sun had come up, Tammy. You see how it’s almost up now.” Danny’s snappy voice was emerging. “You know you can see better when the sun is out, right? I mean you saw the pictures. It was light out.” There goes keeping the peace.

  “All right, all right, no need to get nasty. You need to be able to answer these questions.”

  Danny frowned, mostly out of disappointment in himself for allowing Tammy’s doubt to upset him. The truth was she was right: her skepticism was probably a good thing. If he, himself, was going to believe what he’d seen, he needed to be able to answer these questions in his own head. It probably wasn’t a great sign for his relationship that his wife wasn’t a little more supportive, but that was another topic entirely.