by Nora Roberts
But quiet area or not, she didn’t like the idea of leaving her car on the side of the road with her prints locked inside.
She got the leash, which immediately had Tag racing in the opposite direction. Since she had his number, she only shrugged and started down the curve of road.
He slunk after her.
She stopped, took a dog cookie out of her pocket. “You want this, you wear this until we’re off the road.” She held out the leash.
Dislike for the leash lost to greed.
He strained against the leash, tugged it, did his best to tangle himself in it. Naomi clipped it to her belt with a carabiner, then stopped to frame in some white wildflowers the rain had teased open like stars on the side of the road.
He behaved better in the forest, occupying himself by sniffing the air, nosing the ground.
Naomi took carefully angled shots of a nurse log surrounded by ferns and blanketed with lichen and moss—yellows, rusty reds, greens on wood studded with mushrooms that spread like alien creatures. A pair of trees, easily ten feet high, rose from it, the roots wrapped around the decaying log as if in an embrace.
New life, she thought, from the dead and dying.
The long rain soaked the green so it tinted the light, seducing wildflowers to dance in sunbeam and shadow. It scented the air with earth and pine and secrets.
After an hour she nearly headed back, left the shoreline for another day. But she wanted the sparkle of sun on the water after the misty damp of the forest. She wanted the deeper, rougher green of those knuckles of land, the strong gray of rock against the blues.
Another hour, she decided, and then she’d pack it up, run her errands.
Thrilled to be off the leash, Tag raced ahead. She turned onto the bluff trail, one he knew well now. He barked, danced in place whenever she stopped to take other pictures.
“Don’t rush me.” But she could smell the water now, too, and quickened her pace.
The trail angled down, and proved muddy enough from the rains that she had to slow again. Considering the mud, she realized she’d now have to wash the damn dog before running into town.
“Didn’t think of that, did you?” she muttered, and used handy branches to support herself on the slick dirt.
All worth it. Worth it all in that one moment when the water and pockets of land opened up through the trees.
She balanced herself, risked a spill to get shots of the view through low-hanging branches with their fernlike needles.
Down below it would be bright, sparkling, but here, with the angle, the fan of branches, the inlet looked mysterious. Like a secret revealed through a magic door.
Satisfied, she picked her way down to where the dog barked like a maniac.
“Leave the birds alone! I want the birds.”
She scraped her muddy boots on rippling rock, climbed over them. Caught the diamond glint she’d hoped for, and happily, just beyond the channel, a boat with red sails.
She blocked out the dog barking until she got what she wanted, until the red sails eased into frame. When he raced back to her, she ignored him, took a long shot of the inlet, of the twin forks of water drifting by the floating hump of green.
“Look, if you’re going to tag along, you just have to wait until I’m done before— What have you got? Where did you get that?”
He stood, tail ticking, and a shoe in his mouth.
A woman’s shoe, she noted, open toed, long skinny heel in cotton-candy pink.
“You’re not taking that home. You can just forget about that.”
When he dropped it at her feet, she stepped around it. “And I’m not touching it.”
As she picked her way down, he grabbed up the shoe, raced ahead again.
She stepped down onto the coarse sand, the bumpy cobbles of the narrow strip. Tag sent up a fierce spate of barking, a series of high-pitched whines that had her spinning around to snap at him.
“Cut it out! What’s wrong with you this morning?”
She lowered her camera with hands gone to ice.
The dog stood at the base of the bluff, barking at something sprawled on the skinny swatch of sand. She made herself walk closer until her legs began to tremble, until the weight fell on her chest.
She went down to her knees, fighting for breath, staring at the body.
Marla Roth lay, wrists bound, her hands outstretched as though reaching for something she’d never hold.
The bright, sparkling light went gray; the air filled with a roar, a wild, high wave.
Then the dog licked her face, whined, tried to nose his head under her limp hand. The weight eased, left a terrible ache in its place.
“Okay. Okay. Stay here.” Her hands shook as she unlooped his leash, clipped it on him. “Stay with me. God, oh God. Just hold on. Can’t be sick. Won’t be sick.”
Setting her teeth, she pulled out her phone.
—
She didn’t want to stay; she couldn’t leave. It didn’t matter that the police had told her to stay where she was, to touch nothing. She could have ignored that. But she couldn’t leave Marla alone.
But she went back to the rocks, climbed up enough to sit so the air could wash over her clammy face. The dog paced, tugged on the leash, barked until she hooked an arm around him, pulled him down to sit beside her.
It calmed them both, at least a little. Calmed her enough that she realized she could do the one other thing she wanted. She took out her phone again, called Xander.
“Hey.” His voice pitched over loud music, noisy machines.
“Xander.”
It only took one word, the sound in her voice on a single word, to have his stomach knotting.
“What happened? Are you hurt? Where are you?”
“I’m not hurt. I’m down below the bluff. I . . . It’s Marla. She’s . . . I called the police. I found her. I called the police, and they’re coming.”
“I’m on my way. Call Kevin. He can get down there faster, but I’m coming now.”
“It’s all right. I’m all right. I can wait. I can hear the sirens. I can already hear them.”
“Ten minutes.” Though he hated to, he ended the call, jammed the phone in his pocket, swung a leg over his bike.
On the rock, Naomi stared at the phone before remembering to put it away. Not in shock, she thought—she remembered how it felt to go into shock. Just a little dazed, a little out of herself.
“We have to wait,” she told the dog. “They have to get down the trail, so we have to wait. Someone hurt her. They hurt her, and they must have raped her. They took her clothes off. Her shoes.”
She swallowed hard, pressed her face against Tag’s fur.
“And they hurt her. You can see her throat. The bruises around her throat. I know what that means, I know what that means.”
The panic wanted to rear back, but she bore down, forced herself to take careful breaths. “Not going to break.”
The dog smelled of the rain that had dripped from wet trees, of wet ground, of good, wet dog. She used it to keep centered. As long as she had the dog, right here, she could get through it.
When she heard them coming, she drew more breaths, then got to her feet. “I’m here,” she called out.
The chief broke through the trees first, followed by a uniformed deputy carrying a case. Then another with a camera strapped around his neck.
She couldn’t see their eyes behind their sunglasses.
“She’s over there.”
His head turned. She heard him let out a breath of his own before he looked back at her. “I need you to wait here.”
“Yes, I can wait here.”
She sat again—her legs still weren’t altogether steady—and looked out to the water, to its sparkling beauty. After a time, Tag relaxed enough to sit down, lean against her.
She heard someone coming, too fast for safety on the steep, muddy track. Tag sprang up again, wagged everywhere in happy hello.
“They want me to wait here,” she tol
d Xander.
He knelt down beside her, pulled her in.
She could have broken then—oh, it would have been so easy to break. And so weak.
He eased back, skimmed a hand over her face. “I’m going to take you up to the house.”
“I’m supposed to wait.”
“Fuck that. They can talk to you up at the house.”
“I’d rather do it here. I’d rather not bring this into the house until I have to. I shouldn’t have called you.”
“Bullshit.”
“I called before I . . .”
She trailed off as the chief walked back to them. “Xander.”
“I called him after I called you. I was pretty shaky.”
“Understandable.”
“I . . . I’m sorry, the dog . . . I didn’t see her at first. I was taking pictures, and I didn’t see her. He had a shoe—her shoe, I think. I just thought . . . I’m sorry, I know we weren’t supposed to touch anything, but I didn’t see her at first.”
“Don’t you worry about that. You came down to take pictures?”
“Yes. I often do. I—we—I mean the dog and I walked from the house, through the forest. I spent some time in there getting photos, but I wanted to take some here. After the rain. There was a boat with a red sail, and Tag had the shoe. A woman’s pink heel. I don’t know what he did with it.”
Sam took the water bottle out of her jacket pocket, handed it to her. “You have a little water now, honey.”
“All right.”
“You didn’t see anybody else?”
“No. He kept barking, and whining, but I didn’t pay any attention because I wanted the shot. Then I yelled at him, and turned. And I saw her. I went a little closer, to be sure. And I could see . . . So I called the police. I called you, and I called Xander.”
“I want to take her up to the house. I want to take her away from here.”
“You do that.” Sam gave Naomi’s shoulder a light rub. “You go on home now. I’m going to check in with you before I go.”
Xander took her hand, kept it firm in his as they started up the track. She didn’t speak until they were in the trees.
“I hurt her.”
“Naomi.”
“I hurt her on Friday night, at the bar. I meant to. And she walked out of there with her wrist aching, her pride ripped up, and her temper leading her. Otherwise, she’d have left with her friend.”
“I looked at you instead of her. You want me to feel guilty about that, to try to work some blame up because it was you, not her? This isn’t about you and me, Naomi. It’s about the son of a bitch who did this to her.”
It was the tone as much as the words that snapped her back. The raw impatience with anger bubbling beneath.
“You’re right. Maybe that’s why I needed to call you. I wouldn’t get endless there-theres and poor Naomis from you. That sort of thing just makes it all worse. And it’s not about me.”
“Finding her’s about you. Having to see that’s about you. You don’t want any poor Naomis, I’ll keep them to myself, but goddamn I wish you’d gone anywhere else to take pictures this morning.”
“So do I. We sat right out on the deck earlier. And she was down there. She had to have already been there.” She took a breath. “Does she have family?”
“Her mother lives in town. Her father left I don’t know how many years ago. She has a brother in the navy, joined up right out of high school. A couple years ahead of me. I didn’t know him really. And she has Chip. This is going to flatten him.”
“They don’t care about that.”
“Who?”
“Killers. They don’t care about any of that, they don’t think about all the other lives they rip apart. He strangled her. I could see the bruising, her throat. He dumped her clothes near her. I think she was wearing those pink heels on Friday night. I think she was. She must’ve been with him since then, since she left the bar.”
He wanted to pick her up, just lift her up and carry her back to the house. Instead, he kept a solid grip on her hand.
“There’s no point in telling you not to think about it, so I’ll say yeah, it’s most likely he took her after she left the bar. We don’t know what happened after that. They’ve got ways to figure out if she was killed there or somewhere else and dumped there.”
“Yes, they have ways.”
When they came out of the forest she saw the two patrol cars, Xander’s bike.
“If he didn’t kill her there, why take her all that way? Why not dump her body in the forest, or bury it there? Or drop her in the water?”
“I don’t know, Naomi. But if you hadn’t gone down there this morning, it’s likely she wouldn’t have been found yet. You wouldn’t see her from the house, not as close as she was to the foot of the bluff. And from the water? Maybe if somebody came close to shore, maybe. So maybe leaving her there gave him more time to get away.”
As they approached the house he looked over at her. “Do you want me to have Kevin pull the crew off for the day?”
“No. No, for once I think I prefer noise to quiet. I think I’m going to paint.”
“Paint?”
“The second guest room—my uncles’ room. I wouldn’t be any good at work, and I don’t want to go into town. Errands can wait.”
“Okay. I’ll give you a hand.”
“Xander, you’ve got a business to run.”
“I get not wanting a lot of there-theres.” He had his arm around her waist now—a step closer to just carrying her—and kept his voice level. “I’d suck at giving them anyway. But I’m not going anywhere, so we’ll paint.”
She stopped, turned to him, into him, let herself just hold on. “Thank you.”
Because it soothed him, and hopefully her, he ran his hands up and down her back. “I’m a crap painter.”
“Me, too.”
She went upstairs to set up without him. She knew he lingered below to tell Kevin so she wouldn’t have to. When he came up, he set down a cooler.
“Some water, some Cokes. Thirsty work, painting.”
“Especially when you’re crap at it. You told Kevin.”
“The chief’s going to come up, check on you, so yeah. He’ll keep it to himself until then, and the crew will do the same to give the chief time enough to tell her mother, and Chip.”
“Mason says that’s the worst part, the notifications. I always wonder if it’s that hard to give, how much harder it is to get.”
“I think it has to be worse not to know. If she hadn’t been found, or not for a while longer. It’s got to be harder not knowing.”
She nodded, turned away. Some of the girls her father had killed had been missing for years. Even now, after all this time, the FBI wasn’t sure they’d found all the remains.
Bowes gave them another every few years—for some new privilege. And, as Mason had told her so many years ago, for the fresh attention.
“So . . . you don’t like this piss-yellow color?”
She tried to center herself, studied the walls. “I knew it reminded me of something.”
He didn’t fill the silence with small talk while they worked. Something else to be grateful for. Rolling the primer on the walls, covering something ugly with something clean, soothed.
The dog wandered in and out, and finally settled on stretching himself across the doorway for a nap, so they couldn’t leave the room without alerting him.
They’d finished priming two walls, and had begun to debate which of them had a lousier hand at cutting in, when the dog’s head