Page 13 of One Night Years Ago

“Natalie … Sheriff, I’m so glad you’re here.” Rob rushed towards the vehicle, opening her door. Natalie stood behind the door, holding on to it. She trusted Rob implicitly, but he was a big man and she didn’t like to feel crowded.

The body lay on the south dock, illuminated by the yellow light of a low wattage lamp. Somebody had covered the body with a blanket, but the feet were visible. As she walked towards the body, Natalie studied them. One foot was bare, the other one still wore a dainty, strappy sandal. The toenails were painted bright pink. It was a young woman’s nail color, and a young woman’s shoe, and Natalie felt her heart beat hard against her chest. Young women didn’t simply fall dead on their own.

“Who covered her?” she asked.

“It was Joe. He was on his way to his boat when he saw her. He called us immediately but said he couldn’t bear to leave her like that.”

She knew Joe, a local fisherman in his sixties. She’d gone to school with the man’s son. Joe had always hoped his son would follow in his footsteps, but the young man had become an English professor and only came back to Sharp’s Cove for Thanksgiving.

“Where is Joe now?”

“He’s in his boat, The Savannah, waiting for our call.”

And probably having a drink.

One of the best and worst things about a small town was the way everybody knew so much about each other. Joe Dante had been a drunk since before Natalie was born.

She kneeled by the body. “Did he move anything?”

“He claims he didn’t.”

Natalie reached over and removed the blanket.

“Have you called—”

The words died in her mouth as the girl’s face registered in her body.

Fuck.

Even with the heavy bruising around the eye and cheekbone, it was impossible not to recognize Lanie, the girl who served her coffee at J&J’s Diner on Tuesdays. Lanie was James and Jill’s daughter. She would have started her senior year in high school this fall. She worked at their restaurant in the mornings before school and on weekends. Natalie always left her the best tip, knowing she was saving up for college. She dreamed of a school in California. That wouldn’t happen anymore.

Rob took off the rest of the blanket. The girl was naked, and heavy bruising around her midriff suggested she’d been kicked or punched hard. But it was her breast that caught Natalie’s attention. Somebody had bitten her nipple—hard. Had Lanie lived, Natalie knew exactly what that injury would have looked like a decade later. She looked at one just like it in the mirror every day.

Natalie choked back a sob, thinking of the last time she’d seen Lanie. It’d been at the high school, where Natalie often volunteered to give safety talks. At first she’d avoided those talks, not wanting to become a cartoon representation of a rape victim, but then she realized people in this town cared about her and that sharing her story was a way of raising awareness about sexual assault and a chance to teach young men and women to be more empowered and able to defend themselves if they ever found themselves in a bad situation.

Natalie didn’t want to tell young girls in this town not to walk alone at nighttime or to avoid dark alleys. That wasn’t the kind of town she was supporting, but she wanted young women to be aware of everything going on around them in a way she’d never been. She pictured Lanie in the audience, nodding eagerly, and wanted to cry.

Natalie felt herself start to shake. For a moment, everything she knew about policing disappeared. She wanted to curl up into a ball and disappear into the ground.

Then Rob ran out from behind her, turning away from her and towards the water. He placed his hands on his knees and retched.

At least he didn’t contaminate the crime scene.

And just like that Natalie’s training came back to her. She took a deep breath then another. She could do this. Lanie needed her to do this.

“Rob,” she said, ignoring the fact that her deputy had just lost his dinner. “Go to the patrol car, grab the camera in the trunk. We need to take pictures of her, just as she is.”

Rob moved fast for a big man, eager to get away from the body. Natalie studied the body dispassionately. She couldn’t afford to miss anything.

When he came back with the camera, Rob’s hands were shaking so badly, she didn’t think he’d be able to take any pictures. She took the single-lens-reflex camera from him and started clicking away. She’d taken a three-day police photography course years earlier. Most of it had focused on the correct way of documenting car accidents, but there’d been a session on crime scene photography. She hadn’t had reason until now to put the tips to use.

“Rob? We need to get Charlie here.”

Charlie Simms was the owner of the town’s only funeral home. Sharp’s Cove was too small to have its own coroner. At first, the local ambulance had been dispatched to remove bodies and deliver them to the hospital morgue when needed, until one day, years earlier, the ambulance had received a call for life-saving purposes at the same time as they were removing a dead body. It’d become clear they needed to handle death differently. Charlie Simms, from Simms’ Funeral Home, had offered to handle it at no cost to the town. Sometimes the bodies ended up at his funeral home again after their trip to the morgue. Other times, their family managed the funeral elsewhere, but Charlie considered it a public service to the community and never complained about it.

“Charlie?” Rob said, his hand shaking around his smartphone. “We have a dead body. We need you here now.”

Chapter 6