Death Comes Ashore

by Corinne O'Flynn

  Death Comes Ashore

  Witch Island Mysteries: Book One

  Corinne O'Flynn

  Death Comes Ashore, Witch Island Mysteries: Book One

  Copyright © 2019 by Corinne O'Flynn

  Published by Big Ink Books

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  For everyone out there who second-guesses, doubts, and wonders what they’re made of…

  The deepest mysteries lie within.

  All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.

  — James Thurber

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Corinne O’Flynn

  Chapter One

  Every once in a while, mundane humans on Nahant Island got a glimpse of what was really going on in the world. The ‘danes had long embraced Witch Island’s nickname and legend—and of course, the tourism dollars that came as a result—but very few humans actually believed this place was home to the first witch coven to set foot in America, or that the descendants of those magical families, and many more since, still called the island and the surrounding area home.

  The magical realm of Witch Island existed right alongside the mundane world, the veil between the worlds maintained by a team of Monitors—specially trained to the task. But every so often, things slipped through. In fact, any humans who came into contact with that part of reality were rounded up and those memories promptly charmed right out of them.

  Investigator Corey Proctor stood on the narrow strand of beach on Witch Island’s south coast, wondering which of the gathered crowd would have their memories erased today. She watched as the two Monitors from the Human Liaison Office—both dressed in the black trench coats the wizards in that department seemed to favor, waited near the yellow police tape for the go-ahead.

  She always found the blackcoats to be a bit creepy. It was bad enough they could walk up to an unsuspecting person and just erase an entire swath of memories from their minds. What was worse was that the memories were then taken back to the lab and studied, teased apart until everything was cataloged, indexed, and stored forever in a secret vault. She imagined some cobwebby basement full of glowing card catalog drawers that contained real people’s memories. How did they store them? She didn’t know. And she didn’t like thinking about it. She also didn’t like that today, she would be the one to give that order.

  Maybe there would only be a few people affected this morning. A cursory glance of the beach revealed nothing that stood out as overtly supernatural, witchy, or otherwise odd. This was good. In fact, this was very good. Despite having the blackcoats ready, the Office of Magical Law Enforcement had strict policies that any crime scene investigated in the presence of humans was to be done without a hint of magic.

  From the uniforms on the officers, to the signage on the van that looked just like the county coroner’s, to the bright yellow police tape that surrounded the scene, everyone here was making sure it looked exactly like a normal investigation being run by the Essex County Sheriff’s Office of Massachusetts.

  They all worked to get the scene contained and away from human awareness as soon as possible. Whenever magical events seeped into the consciousness of the ‘danes, there was an increase in magical chatter among the human population that made it more difficult to suppress. It seemed that no matter how well the Monitors did their job, there was always some residue left behind that sparked a resurgence of magical dabbling among the ‘danes, which made the job of monitoring chatter for true magical events very difficult.

  If there was one thing she really hated, it was that chatter. At this time of year, it usually involved her. Every year as the summer ended and Samhain holiday rolled around, she hoped it wouldn’t come up. That this would be the year if fell into ancient history, that she’d finally be able to put all of that behind her. She’d once been part of it all.

  Last year marked the fifteenth anniversary of her kidnapping, which had made headlines in both the magical and mundane worlds. When she was eight years old, she was taken off the streets in Salem during the Samhain Parade—literally grabbed and thrown into a van and stolen right under her family’s gaze. She spent three long weeks in captivity, tortured and abused by delusional magical wannabes who cut away her magical soul. They took what was hers and, not understanding anything about magic, they destroyed it and everything else in her life as a result. She’d never get any of it back.

  Without a magical soul, she was a husk, a broken witch. She had small magic—sometimes, but it was unreliable and as far as she was concerned, just enough to keep her in the magical realm. Being a broken witch in the Magical Crimes Unit made for some unique challenges, but her superiors didn’t care so much about her lack of magical abilities or her sad past. Her captain said it was an asset in a way, since she provided a different view and saw things they wouldn’t see. They didn’t see her as broken and without value, they just saw a good investigator who used a gun instead of a wand, drove a truck instead of using portals, and solved crimes using good old mundane footwork and evidence.

  Yellow crime scene tape had been staked in the sand, creating a perimeter around the low dune that rose along the seawall separating the beach at Dorothy Cove from Willow Road. Lieutenant Inspector Danny Halloran tipped his chin at Corey and stepped to the edge of the perimeter. He lifted the yellow barrier for her to enter.

  “How’s it going, Proctor?” Halloran asked. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with thick dark hair that he wore back off his face. At seven in the morning, his clean-shaven chin already hinted at the shadow that would be full stubble by the end of the day.

  Corey ducked under the perimeter. “Hey, Lieutenant. How’d you get called on this?”

  The big man shrugged. “I was on my way in when the call came. Figured I’d stop by and take a look. See how much ‘dane attention we’d have to manage.”

  Corey nodded and wondered if he was checking up on her. “Nice to be running the show this week with everyone away?”

  Halloran laughed. “Yeah. It’s grea
t. I’m thinking of promoting myself.” With most of the department gone for the week at a magical justice conference in New York City, Corey, her partner, Ethan Young, and Halloran were part of a skeleton crew left behind at the station.

  “Ha! Don’t tell the captain.” Corey nudged his arm. She tilted her head toward the crime scene. “How’s it look?”

  Halloran tapped the notebook in his hand but didn’t open it. “Dead body. Female. Early twenties, maybe. No ID yet. The Monitors intercepted the call to Nahant P.D. when the witness mentioned glowing bruises. The blackcoats were first on scene. Secured a perimeter and waited for us.”

  “So it’s definitely one of ours?”

  “Yeah. Confirmed once the Magical Death Examiner’s crew dug her up.”

  “Dug her up?” Corey repeated, wondering why the MDE would need to dig.

  “Yeah. Get this—they found her half buried in the sand.” Halloran frowned. “Come on.” He gestured for Corey to follow him.

  They walked over to where the body lay in an open body bag under a yellow tarp. A petite woman with bright purple hair knelt next to the body, packing tools into a large black case. She saw them approach and stood, pulling latex gloves off her hands. She wore yellow capri slacks and an electric blue tunic shirt. Her silver glitter eyeshadow and hot pink nails made her seem younger than she was.

  Corey extended her hand to the small woman. She didn’t recognize her from the MDE’s office. “Inspector Corey Proctor. I don’t think we’ve met.”

  “Dr. Polly Harwing. I usually cover the Northwest Region. But I’m on call while Dr. Albarexi is away.” She clasped her hands together and looked around the beach. “I’ve always wanted to visit here! I mean, being able to work on Witch Island? It’s a dream come true! When they called and asked if I could come, I dropped everything and just said yes! Nice to meet you.” The doctor’s words rambled like one long thought. She took Corey’s hand and pumped it several times.

  The energy coming off the doctor was unreal. She practically buzzed. Corey took a deep breath, wishing she’d had time to go for a run this morning. The call for this case came in just as she was about to grab Kojak’s leash and head out for a jog along the Forest River behind her cottage. She’d traded her running clothes for jeans and a tee-shirt, feeling guilty as Kojak waited by the door. Her poor dog always got the short end of the deal.

  Corey envied the doctor her cheerfulness and zest, and tried to balance that with the image of someone who worked with corpses all day. “What can you tell us about the body?” She pulled her notepad from her back pocket and clicked her pen.

  Dr. Harwing blinked and her eye makeup twinkled in the morning sunlight. “Well, let’s see. Female, approximately twenty years old. Brunette. We haven’t ID’d the body yet, and we can’t run a magical scan on her out here.” She eyed the small group of people gathered near the crime scene tape. “But we’ve got good prints and photos.” She knelt and pulled the tarp back to reveal the woman’s naked upper body. Her right arm was frozen in an arc over her head, like she was a ballerina. The body bag had to be stretched to its full length to fit her arm inside. The victim’s hands had already been bagged to preserve any trace evidence under the fingernails and prevent contamination during transport.

  Thin, red fishing net entangled the victim’s left arm. Twisted coils of seaweed caught in the dead girl’s thick, dark hair. Her skin, which probably had been warm and olive-toned in life, seemed pale and cold. She had dark gray eyes that turned down at the outside, high cheekbones, and a spray of soft brown freckles across her nose. Her full lips were opened slightly, as if getting ready for a kiss.

  Corey’s chest grew tight, a feeling of unreality washing over her. She looks like me. We could be sisters. Heat bloomed in her abdomen; the sign of an oncoming panic attack. She took a deep breath and pumped her fists, willing the heat away, and forcing herself to focus. She turned her attention back to the body.

  Thousands of tiny dimples peppered the lower half of the dead girl’s torso, forming a line across her belly on a diagonal.

  Dr. Harwing waved her finger over the line, indicating the pattern of indentations. “You can see where the sand pressed in on the portions of her body that were buried.” Hundreds of tiny bloodless cuts and scrapes covered the girl’s skin. “My guess is she washed up during the storm last night and the sand settled around her. Don’t see much of that where I’m from, that’s for sure.”

  “Don’t see it much here, either,” Corey said. She eyed the long ditch in the sand where the body had been.

  Thick tufts of beach grass sprawled across the dune, the long, sharp-edged spikes creating a canopy over the burial site. She had the urge to lay her hands down in that hole, to touch that sand that had held this girl and see if she could learn something. In another life she’d been able to touch things to get a read on the memory of a place. But that ability was long gone.

  Dr. Harwing’s crime scene techs scooped sand into bags and took photos of the empty space.

  “She drowned?” Corey asked, fighting the compulsion rising in her to get down in the hole. Get a hold of yourself, Proctor, she thought.

  Dr. Harwing shrugged. “Could be. Won’t know for a while yet. But if so, someone helped her. Look.” She lifted the edge of the paper bag that had been taped over the victim’s hands and pointed out dark bruising that mottled the girl’s delicate wrists. A thin twinkle of light floated over the bruises like an aura. “Definitely not a mundane death, but sticking to just the physical evidence, we have ligature marks here and on both ankles. She also has petechial hemorrhaging in the eyes, which is an indication of asphyxia. Those are clearly pre-mortem. Scrape and impact abrasions on the skin appear to be postmortem. Maybe she was bounced around the rocks, dragged over sand… You do have rocks in the water here, right?”

  Corey suspected Dr. Harwing didn’t get out much. But then again, maybe where she was from was landlocked. “Yeah, we have shoals and rocky shoreline, in addition to sandy beaches.”

  The doctor smiled. “Oh, good. I thought so…” Her words trailed off. She turned her gaze toward the water in the harbor which led out to sea. The Atlantic looked relatively smooth today after last night’s storm. The doctor seemed distracted. “What happened to you, young lady? Where did you come from?” she whispered, and the air around the doctor rippled momentarily.

  Corey cleared her throat. “Doctor Harwing? This is an open crime scene.”

  The doctor’s eyes grew wide as she glanced at all the humans lining the beach beyond the perimeter. “Goodness, I keep forgetting. Old habits, right?” She blinked and it was gone like it was a trick of the light.

  Halloran arched an eyebrow at Corey. “The tail end of the storm blew through here last night. Waves would have been rough.” The storm had been downgraded before she made landfall, but that didn’t mean the ocean had been calm.

  Dr. Harwing turned toward Halloran but her gaze stayed on the water. “Storm. Rough. Exactly.” She spoke as if in a trance. The air shimmered around her again. Then she flinched, blinked once, and turned her eyes to meet Corey’s, all business. “I’ll know more later today. Once I get the poor thing on my table.”

  “Okay. Thank you, Dr. Harwing,” Corey said, handing the doctor one of her business cards.

  “Call me Polly, please.” She handed Corey a card as well. “This is me. Let’s talk later. Maybe you’d like to stop by once I have something for you?” Dr. Harwing zipped the body bag closed and waved for her crew to load it in the van. She turned and followed the body, speaking to it as it was lifted and taken away. “You have a story to tell. I’m going to let you tell it. To me.”

  Halloran glanced at Corey, eyebrows arched. “You think she talks like that all through the examination?”

  Corey felt oddly protective of the doctor. “Hey, whatever it takes, right? She’s definitely into her job.”

  They stepped back and watched the MDE’s crew load the body into the van, clearly frustrated by the need to do
their job without using any magic. Once everything was loaded, the van pulled onto the two-lane road and drove back toward town. Despite the insignia on the panels of the van, it wasn’t going to the Essex County Coroner’s morgue, but instead, once they reached the opening of the tunnel that led to the causeway, the van would disappear through a portal and arrive in the basement garage of the Prestigium’s Magical Death Investigations facility in town.

  “What do you think?” Corey asked her boss.

  Halloran shrugged. “Guess we wait and see.”

  Corey glanced over Halloran’s shoulder at an older couple standing just outside the yellow perimeter. They leaned toward one another like twin trees, their hands clutched together in a knot between them. Something about their closeness tugged at Corey. She glanced down at her own hands, at her bare ring finger and wondered if she’d ever have that kind of closeness with another person, then shook off the thought.

  She wasn’t made for that. Not anymore.

  Unworthy Trash.

  The nickname she’d been given all those years ago echoed through her memory. She might have been suited for marriage—even a family, once upon a time—but whenever she tried to connect with anyone romantically, it became clear early on that she was not the relationship type.

  Unworthy Trash.