Stumbling on the Sand

by Jenna Rae

  “What?”

  She wanted to hear what Del was saying, but she could only hear the bird, cawing. It was coming closer and closer, its flat black eyes growing larger and shinier. Its sharp beak grew enormous and gaped hungrily open. Its talons flexed menacingly. Lola could feel the wind from its beating wings. How, she wondered, was that even possible? She tried to catch Del’s eyes but couldn’t seem to. Was this really happening? Was this crazy bird really interrupting their romantic moment?

  “Caw! Caw!” The giant black bird screamed at them, circling lower, diving toward them. Del seemed not to see or hear it. She just kept whispering. Lola tried to warn her, but her mouth wouldn’t work. Instead, it stretched into a grotesque parody of a smile, and she couldn’t stop it. She tried to hold her face together with her hands, but the bird hovered over her.

  Its wings beat the air with a fluttering thud like a sickened heartbeat, and it pried her lips open with its talons. It hurt, it ripped her skin and spread her face open and left only emptiness inside. The bird dived into the emptiness and took her voice, her face, her body. It made them disappear.

  Lola could see Del, could see that she was still whispering, that Del still thought Lola was there, holding her hand. No! She felt herself being lifted up and away. She could see Del standing there, holding nothing, smiling at nothing, whispering words no one could hear. Lola was being lifted higher and higher, and Del was getting smaller and smaller, farther and farther away.

  Del!

  Lola screamed with no voice and flailed with no limbs, trying to get back. Water sprayed up from the now-turbulent sea, drenching her, though she had no body. The bird’s claws held her firmly, and its hard, glossy feathers scratched her. The bird lifted her up, up into the cold sky, and Del was a tiny black dot on the wide surface of the coast.

  Lola woke up then, on the floor, drenched in sweat, her hair wild. She was alone, always alone—she’d let the bird take her away from the one person she loved most in the world, and she didn’t know how to get back to her.

  I’m nothing, she thought, and we’re nothing.

  Del walked away from the computer. Her hands were shaking as she changed her sheets, loaded up the dishwasher, checked the mail. There was one more email, and Del didn’t think she wanted to read it. She called Tess and wasn’t sure why she’d called. What would Tess think of her if she knew she had cheated on Lola? She recalled Tess’s coming to spell Lola after the shooting, how Tess had gently remonstrated with Del and suggested ways to show Lola how much she appreciated her round-the-clock caregiving. How nasty had she been, exactly, that Tess had felt compelled to intervene on Lola’s behalf? Shame tied Del’s tongue, and she regretted calling Tess.

  “How are you really?” Tess asked, after they had made arrangements to go to the shooting range the following weekend.

  “Fine.” Del tried not to sound like she was rushing off the phone. “You?”

  “Good.” Tess seemed to hesitate. “It was nice, seeing you and Lola together.”

  “At the book thing?” Del’s mouth tightened. “Yeah. Listen, I gotta go. See you Saturday, huh?”

  “Yeah, okay, take care.”

  “You too. Uh, say howdy to Lin for me.”

  Del fell asleep thinking about Lola’s strange bird story and dreamed. The sun was shining, and all of their friends were there to wish them well. Even her parents had come. They stood with beaming faces among Del and Lola’s friends, her father restored to his former handsomeness, only a little older. Her mother looked happier than Del had ever seen her. They held hands, and Del felt a hiccup of happiness. Lola’s mother was there too. Del had found her, and she was pretty, an older version of Lola. She smiled at them with warm hazel eyes so much like Lola’s that Del could hardly look away from them. Del gazed around at their friends, all smiling and watching her and Lola. And finally she let herself look at Lola, who gazed up at her in adoration. She was smiling so sweetly! She looked lit up with happiness.

  I did that, Del thought. I made her happy. I am making her happy. She’ll be my wife now and she will be mine forever. I’ll make her happy. And I’ll be happy.

  She felt her own face—she was smiling too. The sea was a mild blue, and a gentle breeze made their hair dance around their faces like halos. The moment was enchanted. Del was afraid to do anything to ruin it. She just stood still and looked around. Lola’s eyes were fixed on her face, and Del reached out to touch her. But Lola didn’t move. Her skin was rubbery and too smooth.

  Del shook her head. She looked down to see she held a pin in her hand, an old-fashioned hatpin, like Nana kept in her purse as a tiny weapon against what she called mashers. Del stuck Lola with the pin, doing it before she’d thought about it, immediately horrified by her act. But Lola didn’t react.

  She wasn’t real! Del stepped back. She tried again, but Lola didn’t even blink.

  “Lola? Lola!” She screamed at her, but Lola’s fixed gaze was that of a mannequin, a robot. A thing. Del tried to take her hand, but it wasn’t real either. She could make the hand rest in hers, she could force the fingers to curl around hers, but they didn’t move easily on their own. Lola, please! Wake up! But Lola wasn’t in there. No one was.

  Sickened, Del tried to pull her hand away from the Lola-thing, but she was stuck. She yanked her hand and pulled the thing over and watched it fall stiffly to the ground. It lay still for several minutes before it slowly and clumsily struggled to regain its feet. Del backed away from it in disgust.

  She looked around. The others were all still watching her, their hair blown by the wind. They blinked, they shifted their feet. One of them even coughed, but they weren’t real. They were things too. Horrified, Del stepped back.

  “No! No!” Again she looked down at her own hands. They were smooth, like Lola’s. There were no pores, no lines, no scar from that time her mother burned her. No little hairs, no shiny fingernails. The hands were dummy hands. She felt her face.

  I’m a thing? I’m a thing, like the rest of them? She screamed then, a guttural cry of fear and rage and grief, and the scream woke her up.

  She was tangled in the sheet, and she flailed desperately, trying to get free. She staggered from the bed and caught herself on the dresser.

  “What the hell?” She was shaking, her body covered in sweat. She felt her stomach flip, and raced to the bathroom to vomit. Several minutes later, she flipped on the light. The vomit was bloody. Oh, crap. She’d forgotten to take her ulcer medicine the last few days, and her stomach was burning with acid. Her throat, her mouth, her lips were on fire. She shook with pain and shock.

  It’s fine, she told herself. It’s nothing. It’s just an ulcer. People don’t die from ulcers. But she wasn’t at all sure dying would be such a bad thing. She flushed away the blood and scrubbed at her mouth and rinsed and rinsed it. She drank water, popped a handful of antacids, and went to take her medicine. Her whole body ached. She was freezing.

  The phone rang. She answered with a hoarse hello. There’d been an attack, Phan told her. It might be their guy, and Bradley wanted them to beat the Feds to the initial victim interview. Phan offered to pick her up.

  “My turn to drive,” he asserted. Del wasn’t sure that was true, but she was shaky and glad, for once, not to have to drive. They’d meet the victim at the hospital.

  By the time Phan showed up, Del was ready. She’d tried to clean up, but she knew she still looked rough. Phan gave her a long look when she stepped through a white wall of damp, heavy fog into the car but said nothing.

  “Anything?”

  “Nothing good,” Phan muttered. He offered her a cup of coffee.

  “Teager?” She asked hopefully about her best suspect. She accepted the cup, wondering how her stomach would respond.

  “He’s not our guy.” Phan shook his head. “World’s best alibi. He was in the station.”

  “Arrested for what?”

  “Nope. Filing a nuisance complaint. Somebody threw a rock through his window.”
<
br />   “You’re shitting me.”

  “I wish. I called, I knew you’d ask about your pet weirdo. Phil Sutter was on the desk, said Teager wouldn’t shut up about the neighborhood going downhill. Brought up the sex criminal, the vandalism, the prostitution, the gangs. Stayed almost an hour.”

  “So Teager just happens to have an alibi for the exact right time? How solid is the timing on the attack?”

  “Fuck if I know.”

  “Shit.” Del sipped her coffee, wincing as it burned its way down her tender esophagus. “Press’ll have a fucking field day. Bradley’s gonna shit a brick.”

  “All over our fucking heads.”

  “Glad the Feds took over.” Del pushed her hair back.

  “’Cause they’re doing such a great job.”

  “Which is why Bradley wants us to get there first.”

  “Right.” Phan shrugged. “If they’re already there, we’ll have to wait.”

  “Funny.”

  “What?” Phan rubbed his jaw.

  “I liked White and he has an alibi. I liked Teager and he has an alibi.”

  “You’re losing your touch.”

  “Apparently.”

  By the time they reached the hospital mere minutes after the phone call, the victim had been pronounced dead. Del and Phan stayed in a waiting room and wondered where the Feds were. The body would now go through the series of photographs and the lengthy forensic exam and the autopsy. They could maybe get an initial lead, though, if they hung around for a bit. Besides, Bradley would be pissed about the victim’s death, and it was better to wait for that dust to settle. As daylight approached, more officers would show up at the station to take the captain’s wrath.

  The victim’s body would be processed in stages. The hair had to be combed through, the nails cut, every inch of skin examined. The woman was now just a body, a field of evidence that belonged to doctors and police and forensic scientists. The victim had been young, healthy. Twenty-two, according to her driver’s license. Leslie Thorne, a student at Stanford University in Palo Alto. Five-two, one-oh-nine. Tiny. Pretty, her photo indicated. Long, straight brown hair. Big brown eyes. She looked like everybody’s daughter or niece or neighbor, a nice young woman who would have lived a productive life and been a decent human being and done who-knew-what with her time on the planet but would never have that chance because somebody wanted to get off on using her body and defiling her personhood.

  Del had hated working sex crimes, hated dealing with victims. They needed kindness, compassion, reassurance. What she wanted to do was go bust the head of the bad guy, not hold hands with the victim. A body was much better, a thing she could work with. A thing she could look at as a resource for evidence. But that didn’t mean she could accept a victim’s death as a lucky break. She’d sit through a million lousy interviews before she’d comfortably accept a victim’s death. She hated that Leslie Thorne—this nice kid, this bright young college student, somebody’s precious daughter—was dead.

  A young doctor, male, Indian, maybe thirty at the outside, came out and met with them. Leslie Thorne had died in the ambulance. Cardiac arrhythmia. Probably caused by something the doctor referred to as an “external agent” and which Del inferred was a drug or chemical reaction. She squinted at the tall, skinny medic who didn’t look much older than Mikey Ocampo.

  “Special K? Roofie? GHB?”

  “Possibly. No jaundice, though. No foaming.” The doctor shook his head. “Your forensic people will be able to tell you more. No obvious markers for the usual things.”

  Del considered this. No jaundice probably meant it wasn’t a ketamine overdose. No foaming probably meant no seizure, so it likely wasn’t a rohypnol overdose. “Chloroform?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Hard to tell for sure,” the young doctor said, his smooth forehead creased by a frown. “Chloroform disappears rather quickly and can be tricky to administer. It’s easy to kill someone by accident with it.”

  “Takes a while though, right? To dose somebody? Would it be easy to just miscalculate how long?”

  The doctor again frowned. “Not my area of expertise, I’m afraid.”

  Del nodded, exchanged a glance with Phan.

  The rape kit was negative. No semen or hair left behind. No statement from the victim, the doctor said, but Del and Phan would follow up with the EMT to make sure.

  The doctor seemed tired. Caring, Del thought, but tired. She thanked him and watched him approach a family. Del looked away. She could tell by the doctor’s shoulders that he had bad news to deliver, and she didn’t need to see that.

  He wasn’t doing the notification to Leslie Thorne’s family. That would be a police matter, a Fed probably, given the high profile of the case. So the doctor had to talk to police about a dead girl he’d already turned over to the medical examiner, and then he had to talk to a family about another dead person. Had this day been what the guy had pictured, slogging through medical school? Almost certainly not. Del tried to console herself with the thought that she wasn’t the only one with a shitty job. She remembered the nurse, Sofia Gonzalez, talking about the difficulties of putting her job aside at the end of the day. They all struggled with the same thing, didn’t they?

  Del and Phan rode back to the station to compare notes with the responding officers. Del tuned in to catch the details but felt removed from the discussion, as if there was a veil between her and the others, even Phan. Why was that? She’d been connecting well with Phan for months. She’d even managed to regain some of the rapport she’d worked so hard to develop with the other officers after the mess with Janet. These men were the closest facsimile she had to a band of brothers.

  Still she felt apart from them. Was it because she was the only woman? Of all of them, was she the only one who’d ever had to walk down the street with one eye open for rapists? Was she the only one who’d had to monitor the respect, the attentiveness of her fellow officers, her superiors, her trainers and trainees, her witnesses, her suspects, everyone?

  What did it cost a woman, holding that lifelong need to assess every man around her as a potential attacker? Men were not, she knew, free from fears. They could be mugged, carjacked, murdered, and also raped. But in most circumstances, men were relatively free from such concerns. And a man who was assaulted was unlikely to be shamed and humiliated by not only his attackers but also the police and his own family, told he must have done something wicked or dirty or immoral to deserve being attacked.

  Leslie Thorne was dead. That the other victims had survived was obviously a good thing, but now what were they facing, what would they face for the rest of their lives? They had been slandered in social media in a wide variety of ways: as hapless children who should have been supervised by real adults, as promiscuous slatterns who therefore deserved sexual predation, as careless idiots whose victimization was their own fault, as fakers who’d made up their attacks. They would have to live with the devastation and confusion and loss of privacy their attacks had engendered, and there was nothing they could do to change this. They didn’t even remember what had happened. And the peeping victims—what were they going to feel when news broke of the death caused by the man everyone seemed to assume, because of a similarity in appearance, was culpable in both sets of crimes?

  Del looked around at her brother officers and wondered how much any of them could comprehend of what the victims had experienced, were experiencing. Phan was a devoted dad to Kaylee, and he seemed to run his perception of every female victim through the filter of how he would feel if she were his daughter. Still, Del wondered, how much could he really empathize? Had societal disdain for women permeated even his consciousness? It sometimes seemed that the other officers had to fight at least some ingrained misogyny during at least one stage of nearly every investigation.

  Del pushed her hair off her forehead and at the same time pushed away her dark thoughts. It was time to focus on Leslie Thorne.

  A group of students out for pizza had been walking back home
together Thursday night and had stumbled over Leslie Thorne on a section of Frederick Street sidewalk that bordered Golden Gate Park. She’d been naked and unconscious. They’d called nine-one-one, but they hadn’t seen anyone else around. Not, they asserted, that they would have. They’d almost stepped on the victim, unable to see her in the fog. An ambulance had picked her up, and the students who’d found her had been taken to the station for statements. That was all. It was remarkably little to go on, and Del fought despair as the team spent endless hours canvassing the park environs and chasing down every possible lead. The guy would only get more confident and more skillful. There was no time to waste and yet every investigative lead felt like a waste of time and energy.

  Lola’s words came to Del’s mind. This was another case that would take all her time and attention until it was solved, or until another, worse one came along. Mikey’s murder had occupied her mind and her time until Leslie Thorne’s death. Now she was prepared to put it aside entirely because the case had gone nowhere and she felt nearly as guilty as she felt about letting the kid down way back when.

  The murder—conveniently reported in time for Friday news deadlines—made the oft-frothing media mad with gleeful outrage. Leslie Thorne’s killer had been dubbed The Grabber, the nomenclature struck Del as disrespectfully glib. The community churned with chaos and fear. Captain Bradley again second-guessed their every move. Officers recanvassed the neighborhood, scouring the community for clues. Feds were tripping all over themselves, trying to regain control of the investigation and fighting public perception that they were just as ineffectual as the lowly local cops.