but it was also cold to ignore and isolate your wife while stringing along a gifted young woman full of dreams.
She called a few others on the pretext of catching up, but no one had worry in their voice for anyone but Miriama. Whatever Will had found, whoever Will had found, it wasn’t a person who’d already been missed. It might, she suddenly realized, not be anything suspicious at all—one of the locals who lived rough could’ve had an accident. Sad, but not a thing of horror.
Despite that realization, she felt too restless to stay inside the cabin. She needed air, needed the salt, the sand. Pulling on a lightweight jacket, she slipped her phone into a zippered pocket. It was cold out, the sky heavy, but Anahera didn’t want to be too comfortable. She wanted to feel the chill on her face, wanted to experience the wind cutting across her skin, wanted to be brilliantly, painfully alive.
She closed the door behind herself but didn’t bother to lock it—though, surprisingly, the old lock on the door still worked. Whoever had picked it after Anahera left Golden Cove hadn’t damaged the mechanism. Josie had even dug up a copy of the key.
While Anahera used it at night, when she slept, she couldn’t see the point otherwise. She’d hidden her laptops, old and new, under a hiding spot beneath the floorboards, and there was nothing else for anyone to take. Anahera wasn’t naïve; she knew people stole even in a small town. But she also knew that if the clouds broke, someone might stumble out of the bush seeking shelter.
She was halfway down the porch steps when she paused.
What if the person who’d taken Miriama hadn’t done it because she was Miriama? What if he’d done it because she was a beautiful young woman?
Anahera didn’t consider herself beautiful by any measure. Neither was she tall and lissome like Miriama, but she was a woman. And some predators weren’t that picky. Frowning, she went back inside the cabin and brought out a blanket to leave on the chair outside. She added a bottle of water and several energy bars.
Then she locked the door and pocketed the key.
The winds were hard but not vicious today, and she scrambled her way down to the beach without too much trouble, though she did have to keep her eyes on the path the entire way down. A single slip and she would’ve gone tumbling.
Anahera did not want her headstone to read “Death by Stupidity.”
When she reached the beach at last, her heart was racing and her breath coming in hot puffs. Drawing in the salt-laced air, she looked up at the sound of chopper blades. Daniel, no doubt, being an arrogant ass flying in such portentous weather. Her guess seemed borne out when the chopper swept around to face her.
As if he was saying hello.
Anahera waved up at him. Yes, he could be an egotistical bastard, but it wasn’t looking like he’d had anything to do with Miriama in life or in death.
The chopper turned back around, the waves frothing under the wind created by its blades, and then it was gone, sweeping across the water. She wondered where he was going that he was crossing the water rather than heading inland. Most likely, he was taking the scenic route and would swing back inland soon enough.
Shrugging off the encounter, she began to walk down the beach. The waves were big today, huge smashing things that pounded hard onto the sand. It looked like they’d been in a mean mood the previous night as well; she could see mounds of waterborne debris deposited on the wet gray sand. Long streamers of seaweed; sea glass polished and rubbed until it was as smooth as stone, no edges to it; broken and battered shells along with the odd one in perfect condition.
Anahera picked up a couple of pieces of particularly lovely sea glass. She’d collected it as a child and as a young woman, lining them up along the window where the sunlight would hit them. She’d thrown away her collection after her mother’s death, but today, she found beauty in watching even the cloudy morning light spear through the glass.
It was as she was putting a third piece into a pocket that she spotted a huge hunk of seaweed up ahead. It almost looked like the seaweed had wrapped itself around a tree trunk or perhaps the carcass of a dolphin or small whale.