thinking of going back for Jeff, he started down the steps, taking them two at a time, his breath coming in quick gasps from the effort.
Somehow he made it to the bottom without tripping and raced down the beach to the spot where he’d last seen the object. But it seemed to have vanished, as if the tide had swallowed it up.
Stripping off his shoes and socks and throwing them as far up the beach as he could, Josh waded into the water.
He’d seen it! He knew he had! But where was it?
He moved a few feet farther down the beach, and then felt something bump against his bare foot. Recoiling, his first instinct was to run back out of the water, but then he took a deep breath, stooped down and groped in the sandy water.
His fingers closed on the object.
A shoe, almost the same size as his own.
A shoe just like the ones most of the kids at the Academy wore, and that he’d been hoping his mother might be able to get him for Christmas.
Washing the sand from it, he examined it carefully.
Even though it was soggy, the tread was unworn and the shoelaces still looked almost new.
Then he noticed something funny about the shoe.
Across the top—and the sole, too, when he turned it over—were twin crescents of gashes, puncturing right through the leather of the upper part of the shoe and gouging deeply into the hard rubber of the soles.
Marks, like tooth marks.
As if something had bitten the shoe—bitten it really hard.
His heart suddenly racing, Josh gazed back into the sea once more.
And this time he saw the object again.
A wave was building, and as it towered up in preparation to break, the sun shone full upon the thing he’d seen from high up on the highway.
It was a corpse.
Or at least it was what was left of a corpse, for even from where he stood at the edge of the water, Josh could see what had happened.
The wave broke and the water surged forward, tumbling the broken remains of the little girl up the beach, depositing them at Josh’s feet as if they were some sort of grotesque sacrifice being offered up to the boy by the sea in penance for whatever mysterious sins it might have committed.
Josh gazed silently at the mutilated body. One of its arms was completely missing; great chunks were torn out of its torso. But despite the damage it had absorbed, Josh was still sure he knew who it was.
Amy Carlson.
His stomach heaved, and the half-digested breakfast he’d eaten only a couple of hours earlier spewed out onto the sand. He knew he should run and find Jeff—or anyone else—but somehow he couldn’t.
He couldn’t just go away and leave Amy lying on the beach.
Gingerly, he reached down, took hold of her one remaining arm and pulled her farther up the sand, out of reach of the crashing surf.
What had happened to her?
And then, as he stared fixedly at the ruined body of his friend, he remembered a movie he’d seen on television a while ago.
He knew what had happened to her.
Sharks.
She had been attacked by sharks.
A crowd had gathered on the beach, the usual curious throng that seems to form out of nowhere whenever a tragedy occurs. Some of them had walked out from the village, where the news of the discovery of a body washed up on the sand had spread like wildfire.
Above, on the road that ran along the edge of the bluff, cars were lined up, the first ones drawn by the car that had responded to Jeff Aldrich’s frantic signals after he’d spotted Josh sitting quietly on the beach next to Amy’s corpse. He hadn’t even yelled to Josh, but instead waved down the first car that came along. After the first car stopped, two more quickly followed. By the time Hildie Kramer had arrived, responding to a call from the police department, there had been barely enough room for her to edge off the road. After trying to jockey her Acura into a just-too-small space that had been left between a pickup truck full of surfboards and a motor home, she had abandoned the car, leaving its rear end sticking out a couple of feet into the lane of northbound traffic, and hurried across the pavement to the head of the stairs.
Already there were more than twenty-five people on the beach, half a dozen of them police officers and medics, the rest a milling throng