A Body on the Beach Read online

  My room was at the far end of the hall. When Page saw it, she commented on how much larger it was than her room, and I insisted that the movers had simply unloaded my things in here. However, Mr. Donaldson had informed me that the room at the end of the hall was the best room, and I’d submitted a special request to the moving company for that room in particular.

  Sure, it was a lie, but also, I deserved the big room. We wouldn’t have even been in the house had it not been for me. So, in a way, I’d earned the biggest room. Jasper ran between my legs and sprinted into the room, immediately jumping on the bed and laying down, his stub of a tail still wagging.

  “What have I gotten us all into?” I asked Jasper, petting him between his ears until his leg began to kick, thumping on the comforter.

  One wall was rounded with a built-in window seat, sunlight streaming through the windows and casting the room in a warm glow. The sea was visible through the trees, and the sight of it seemed to calm me. For the first time, I could see myself living here. I could picture myself making a home in the house. I could imagine guests filling the empty rooms, gathering in the large dining room for breakfast and brunch. I could see it all.

  Then I remembered what Mr. Donaldson had said about a private beach. The house was not only large, but it sat on a truly massive plot of land, one of the biggest on the island. And that kind of prestige had earned a private beach. Of course, it had mostly been for the guests of the bed and breakfast, but it remained part of the property even when the business failed and the guests stopped arriving.

  Looking at Jasper, I had an idea.

  Less than a minute later we were both running across the dried up lawn towards the beach. I hadn’t even bothered to put on shoes. Beyond the hedges was a path that led down to the beach. It was overgrown with weeds and littered with fallen leaves, but it was still visible, and Jasper and I followed it, him running just behind me as he always did, waiting for my instruction. In no time at all, the foliage became more sparse, and the beach was visible.

  The sand was filled with pebbles that stuck to the skin of my feet, but I didn’t mind. There wasn’t a single other visible person in either direction as far as the eye could see. The sea wind lifted my hair and whipped it around my face, making me feel spontaneous and free. Jasper, too, was enjoying the moment. He ran along the shore, his paws sinking into the wet sand with every step, his tiny jaws snapping at the waves as they washed over his feet.

  This was right outside my front door. This beach and this ocean and this breeze. Suddenly, everything made sense. I was meant to live on Sunrise Island. I was born for the island life.

  Jasper had pulled away from the ocean and his nose was now buried in the sand.

  “Are you digging for buried treasure, boy?” I asked, clapping my hands to call him to me.

  Normally he would run to me immediately, however, he didn’t appear to have even heard me. I clapped again. “Jasper!”

  Still, he buried his nose deeper in the sand, and then began digging in it, a spray of sand kicking up behind him.

  “Jasper!” I shouted, running toward him. “Stop that!”

  I’d read an article about dogs that dug holes in the sand, and then people refilled the holes, but they didn’t fill them well enough, and an air pocket would remain. Then, people walking on the beach later would step in that spot and fall into the sand. They would be swallowed by the earth. They’d completely disappear from view as if they never existed. I didn’t assume Jasper, being a French bulldog, would be able to dig a hole large enough to swallow an entire person, but still, I didn’t want to hear about someone falling into the sand in the future and have to question whether it was because of my dog.

  I reached him and pushed him back from the hole with one hand. “What has gotten into you?” I asked.

  Jasper whined and leapt over my arm, eager to get back to the hole.

  “No,” I said, my voice firm. “Bad boy.”

  His ears went back as they did every time I scolded him, smoothed to his head, but still he tried to get back at the hole.

  “Did you find something?” I wondered aloud, turning towards the hole.

  I moved aside some dirt, and sure enough, there was a swatch of red fabric. I tried to grab it, but it resisted, feeling as though it were weighed down.

  Jasper whined.

  Forgetting all about the man-eating holes and why it was unsafe to dig in the sand, I began scooping out handfuls of wet sand, curious what Jasper had found. Every so often I would pause my digging to tug on the red fabric and try to free it from the ground. After the fourth time of doing this, the fabric ripped in my hand, surprising me, and sending me falling backward.

  I chuckled at myself and looked around to see whether anyone had seen my fall, but of course no one had. That was the joy of a private beach. It was private.

  I studied the fabric in my hand. It didn’t seem as worn as I would have expected for a piece of cloth that had been buried in the sand. In fact, the red was vibrant and unstained. It felt like cotton between my fingers.

  Curious to see if there was more in the hole, I crawled toward it on my knees. Then I saw it.

  At the bottom of the hole was something hard, solid, flesh-colored. I looked at Jasper, who was in a full on panic at this point, ears laid back, tail between his legs, entire body shaking, and then I reached hesitantly into the hole. As soon as my finger made contact with the object, I pulled my hand away and scrambled backward in the sand. My breathing became haggard, hard to steady. My heart lurched in my chest.

  The object wasn’t only flesh-colored. It was flesh. Human flesh.

  Jasper and I had found a body.

  Chapter 5

  I knelt in the sand for a minute, trying to catch my breath and sort out my thoughts. Then, an idea hit me. What if the person wasn’t dead? What if, like in the article I’d read, they had merely been swallowed up by an air pocket in the sand? That seemed unlikely, but would I really be able to live with myself if I didn’t check? No. Definitely not.

  Scrambling back toward the hole, I used my arm to begin pushing sand away from the body until the torso became visible and then the neck and then the head.

  Immediately, it was clear the person was no longer alive, but something wouldn’t let me stop digging. I had to free him. Upon seeing the face, I discovered it was a man. His lips were blue beneath his dark mustache, which was still thick unlike his deeply receding hairline, and his stomach was round and plump. I thought of the meals he’d eaten to get that way, of the way he may have combed his hair to hide his baldness. I thought of the life this stranger might have led, and suddenly decided I couldn’t leave him in the ground.

  I kept pushing away sand until he was entirely uncovered, his red shirt and blue jeans vibrant against the yellowish white sand.

  Then, I remembered. The body. The body in the cove. I’d seen this man before. The red shirt and blue jeans lying, arms outstretched, on the beach. Of course, the cove was several miles away from this stretch of beach. How had the man found himself here? He could have been caught in the tide and washed up on shore, but that wouldn’t account for his burial. No, this person had been murdered.

  That was when I began to panic. The moment the man in front of me went from a dead body to a murder victim, my brain went into overdrive. I spun in a circle, searching the beach for any sign of the murderer. What if they were still nearby? What if they were watching me uncover the corpse? What if they were going to murder me and dispose of my body in the same way?

  Jasper began sniffing the dead man’s pants, digging his nose at something, and I snapped at him to stop while still scanning the beach for any potential murder suspects. Jasper continued nosing into the man’s pocket until I could hear paper crinkling in his mouth.

  “Jasper, no!” I shouted, but before I could grab him and take the paper out of his mouth, he sprinted past me in the direction of the house.

  Without Jasper, I felt more exposed than I had only moments be
fore, so I ran after him. When I got to the cover of the trees, I pulled out my cell phone and, feeling oddly like Blaire, lifted it into the air in search of a signal. Nothing.

  I stuffed the useless phone in my pocket and ran back up the overgrown path toward the house. On the way down to the beach, the path had seemed short, pleasant even. However, on the way back up, it felt endless. The darkness of the trees was pressing down on me more and more every second until I began to wonder if I’d ever make it out. Finally, I broke through the line of trees and sprinted for the house. Before even making it inside I was screaming for Page and Blaire.

  They ran down the stairs, faces identical masks of horror.

  “There’s a body,” I said, my breath coming out in gasping huffs, my words barely audible.

  “What?” Page asked, running down the stairs, Blaire close behind her.

  “On the beach. There is a body. A man. A dead man.”

  “There’s a dead man on the beach?” Blaire asked.

  I nodded.

  Page gasped, then turned to Blaire. “Do you have cell service?”

  Despite the situation, Blaire still took a moment to glare at her mom. “What have I been saying all day? This island is one big dead zone.”

  Seeming to realize her unintentional joke, she added, “No pun intended.”

  “There’s a landline,” I said. I’d seen it earlier in the kitchen. As tired as my legs were, I ran into the kitchen and picked the phone up. Again, nothing. Not even a dial tone.

  “It doesn’t work.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me!” Page said. “What if we had an emergency?”

  “You mean like a dead guy on our private beach?” I asked, my anxiety bubbling out as sarcasm. “This place is old. The appliances don’t work.”

  “There was a phone at the general store!” Blaire shouted, her finger in the air like she’d just had a brilliant idea. Which, I supposed, she had. “I saw it when we were there earlier.”

  Page clapped her hands together, a sure sign she was going into planner mode. “Okay. I’ll drive down to the general store and call the police. You two stay here and wait for whoever may arrive. Okay?”

  Before we could even agree, Page had grabbed her keys and was headed out the door.

  “No offense to the dead guy, but this is probably the only cool thing that has ever and will ever happen on this island. I want to see the body,” Blaire said, heading for the front door.

  “Your mom said you should stay here,” I reminded her. “Besides, there is no way I’m going to let you go near a dead body.”

  Blaire moaned. “I’m not a little kid anymore.”

  “Well, you’re sure fooling me,” I said, my voice sharper than it had ever been when talking to Blaire. “A man is dead. This isn’t a game or a horror movie. It’s real life.”

  Blaire pouted out her lower lip, and I could have smacked her. It was insensitive. How could she think it was appropriate to go ogle at a dead man’s body? It was then that I realized how exposed he really was. Sure, he was on our private beach, but with his bright clothing, he could be visible from several nearby houses. Perhaps someone should go stand guard over the body.

  “You stay here and wait for the police. If anyone happens to come up to the house first, send them to the beach. I’m going to go to the beach to make sure no one messes with the crime scene.”

  “No fair,” Blaire complained.

  “We’re not discussing this,” I said. “Stay here and keep an eye out for the police.”

  I ran out the front door, realizing I was still barefoot, and began calling Jasper’s name. He’d run past me toward the house, but wasn’t inside when I got there. I didn’t want him running loose. Partly because I didn’t know what the island’s policy was on loose dogs, and partly because I didn’t really want him digging up any other bodies. I shouted his name a few more times, and finally he came running from around the side of the house.

  “Good boy.” I stooped down to pet behind his ears, and then picked him up and set him inside the door of the house, closing it behind me. Then, as I had done twice now, I ran for the beach. I hoped I’d get there and find the entire thing had been in my imagination. That somehow I’d imagined Jasper digging up the body and the feeling of the man’s cold flesh against my fingers and the blue pallor of his lips. It would be difficult to explain to Page and Blaire and the police how I had crafted such an elaborately ridiculous story, but it would be better than knowing I’d actually seen and touched a dead body.

  Of course, when I finally broke through the tree line and my bare feet settled into the sand, I could see, even from a distance, the red shirt and blue jeans of the deceased man. It hadn’t been imagined. It had all been very real. Someone was dead, and someone else—most likely someone on the island—had killed and buried him.

  The sky, which had been a clear blue only thirty minutes prior, had faded to a dull gray, as if someone had leached the color out of it. The wind, which before had felt playful and refreshing, had grown crisp and cold, each gust a laceration across my skin. It whipped the sea into a frenzy, the waves rising and shattering on the sand like glass. Everything seemed more volatile. Once again, I scanned my surroundings, searching for any sign of another person. Another living person, that is. It seemed unlikely that the killer would hang around the area too long after burying a body, but what did I really know about murderers?

  The wind swirled among the trees, the leaves clattering together to sound like footsteps running down the path. I lost count of how many times I whipped around, sure there was someone creeping up behind me. I began to doubt my decision to watch over the body. It wasn’t my job, after all. I didn’t even have a job. As fear and self-pity threatened to consume me, I glanced towards the trees edging the beach and noticed something strange.

  Tracks. Not animal tracks or footprints, but long, thin trench-like tracks, almost like tires. They were deeply imprinted in the sand, as if whatever made the tracks had been weighed down, carrying something heavy. I reluctantly looked back towards the portly man lying in the sand, and wondered how much he weighed.

  * * *

  Before I had much time to ponder a theory, help arrived in the form of two local doctors—a husband and wife pair who ran a small clinic on the island. They introduced themselves when they arrived, but I almost immediately forgot their names, too consumed by the day’s events to pay attention to something so trivial as a name.

  “We just need to be sure he is dead,” the husband said, his face gaunt and yellow. I wondered how long it had been since he’d seen a doctor himself. I didn’t know much about healthcare, but he looked positively ill.

  “He’s dead,” I assured them. “He was buried under a foot of sand and his lips are blue.”

  The wife placed her hand on my shoulder in a clear attempt to comfort me. “You’d be surprised how often people look dead, but are still alive. The human body is a mystery, even to the professionals. It clings to life for as long as it can before finally giving up.”

  I nodded, knowing full well the man in the sand had given up hours, if not a full day ago.

  After a moment of poking and prodding, metal stethoscopes pressed to his chest, fingers pushed into his thick neck and at the base of his wrist, his eyelids lifted and dropped, the husband announced the man as deceased, and the couple began packing up.

  “How did he die?” I asked.

  The husband shoved his equipment into a black bag, and rose to his feet with a groan. “Well, it could have been asphyxiation from the sand, but I’d bet it was blunt force trauma. He had a pretty large wound on the back of his head.”

  “Oh,” I said, subconsciously glancing back at the body. “I didn’t notice that.”

  “And I’d suggest you continue not noticing it,” the wife said, brushing her frizzy brown hair away from her eyes. “It’s not a nice thing to see, especially when you aren’t used to it.”

  “Oh, there’s Shep,” the husband said, waving
to a man in a tan police uniform who was making his way clumsily towards us, taking exaggerated steps to avoid sand filling his shiny black dress shoes. He spoke with the husband and wife briefly before they both waved to me, seeming entirely too cheerful to have just examined a dead body, and walked back into the trees toward their car.

  “Shepherd,” the man said, walking up to me, his chest broad and round, hand extended. “I’m the chief of police on the island. I understand you found the body?”

  I nodded. “Well, technically my dog found it, but I helped unbury it.”

  “You seem calm for someone who just found a body,” Shepherd said, and then hesitated. “That wasn’t meant to be accusatory, only to say that things like this don’t happen around here very often, and I always assumed they would involve a lot more emotion.”

  “I don’t know the man,” I said. “I’m more in shock than anything else.”

  “Right, of course,” he said, nodding. “I am too, honestly. I don’t know if an officer is supposed to say that, but my days are typically spent recovering lost or stolen bikes and helping stranded motorists. Murder investigations are not usually part of the job description.”

  “So, you’ve never handled a homicide before?” I asked, wondering if this man could truly be the chief of police with so little experience.

  “A homicide? No. But there was an accidental drowning a few years ago. Many of the islanders were certain she’d been murdered, but I looked into it thoroughly and ruled it an accident. That was the closest I’d ever come before now.”

  Shepherd moseyed over to the body, his thumbs hooked around his belt loops, and then bent down, giving the body a good visual inspection as if the killer may have signed his name on the corpse like an artist claiming his work. Next, he dug into the man’s pockets, rolling him slightly to gain access to the back pockets, and then stood up, hands on his hips.

  “He doesn’t have a wallet or any form of ID on him,” he said aloud.