I have to know the answers.
We have to meet.
Blood roared in my ears, my heartbeat erratic, mounting higher. Tremors shook the letter from my hands. I pressed my palm to my chest, inhaled deeply, trying to control the climbing panic.
I hyperventilated until I shut down, blacked out. My body’s response to the flood of adrenaline. Its own defense mechanism since the attack. I just turned off.
No one discovered me in that state, which I was thankful. My mother had been through enough. When I came to, I had balled the letter in my fist. I clutched it tighter, attempting to crush it into nonexistence.
Even now, I don’t fully understand my response to the message. It was vague, cryptic, and no actual threat was made in those blocky letters, but the veiled warning rung clear.
It could’ve came from some deranged person. A sick individual that just wanted a connection to a crime. When I became involved in true crime writing, I learned there were a lot of people like that, obsessively following crime stories.
Or it could’ve came from the killer himself.
Or the person who pulled me from the water.
I analyzed the note, the words, trying to decipher the meaning. Whoever sent the letter, it didn’t matter. I realized that I didn’t only have my killer to fear—there were other disturbed, unhinged people in the world that wanted me dead.
In the end, only one action could be taken in response.
My killer had no face. Fear is a living, breathing entity when you’re staring into the unknown. When you don’t know who is your friend and who is an enemy. Any choice, any direction, and I could collide into the wrong person.
I packed a bag that night and boarded a bus.
I left Florida. I took the money I had in my college savings, and I pulled up a map on my phone and chose the most obscure place I could find. Then I promised myself that I wouldn’t run forever. I swore that I would catalog the events, the details, everything the police were overlooking in connection to my attack, and I would solve my own murder.
And I did that with a vehement hunger for six months before my case ground to a halt, the leads dried up, and it went cold.
It would be years before I returned to Silver Lake.
15
Charge in the Air
Lakin: Now
A storm hovers on the edge of Melbourne. The sky over Melbourne Beach swirls in striations of grays and purples, as if an angry hand swiped the sky. Bruised clouds roll over the rising deep-blue waves. It’s beautiful and violent, a turbulent dance. A kind of promise lingers in the air. How the waves reach toward the sky, the crest kissing the sand like an angry lover, trying to fuse a connection. But the sand keeps receding.
The packed grains beneath my bare feet corrode with the outgoing tide. Captured by its lover, after all.
I remind myself that this is only my perception. Hundreds of skin-clad bodies dot the beach, viewing the doused sun as a cool reprieve from the heat. Rhys and I stand out amid the beach goers in our slacks and pressed shirts. Anyone trying to avoid the cops can make us a mile away.
He walks along the hard-packed sand while I choose to get my feet wet. We’re returning to the Tiki Hiv
e, but this time we’re here to talk to the beach bunnies. They’re not difficult to locate. Three women in their late-fifties with skin the color of tawny leather, the texture just as coarse.
“Yikes,” Rhys comments, and I laugh despite myself.
“That’s Florida for you,” I say. “No fear of the sun.” I don’t think my mother knew what sunscreen was when I was a child. I have a spattering of freckles across the bridge of my nose to prove it.
Rhys lifts his shades for a second to get a better gawk at the women. “Least you don’t take if for granted. I can count the number of days I saw the sun in my childhood. When it did peek out, we got the day off of school.”
I glance at him. “You’re joking.”
“Seriously. Other kids got snow days. I got sun days.” He gives me a wink.
I don’t know whether or not to believe him, but I appreciate his effort to keep the mood light. Our first day here met with a rocky start. I can trust his opinion on the lotuses; Florida is a haven to the white lilies. Maybe somebody did plant them there in memory of Joanna—not the killer—but a friend, or a family member.