Black Rock Bay

by Brianna Labuskes

  Mia’s mind tripped, caught in the past for half a heartbeat, her nail digging into the skin at her wrist. “What?”

  “Twist.” Izzy bounced beside Mia, her voice distant and considering, seemingly oblivious of the stumble. “I mean, if it looks like a suicide, swims like a suicide, quacks like a suicide . . .”

  She waved her hand to fill in the rest. Then it was suicide.

  Dropping her hands so that she could rest her forearms on the ferry’s railing, Mia stared down at the dark water that lapped at the bow.

  They’d had this conversation already but always ended up in the same place. Still, Mia was willing to go through it again. Sometimes the repetition helped.

  “Gunshot through the soft palate’s not exactly common for homicides.”

  “Right.” Izzy touched her nose, pointed at Mia, and then cursed, shoving her hands back into her pockets. “But, the ocean.”

  The ocean. That part niggled at Mia, burrowing under her skin, an annoyance she couldn’t ignore. And, God, did she want to ignore it.

  If Twist had killed himself, as it looked like on first glance, they could easily wrap up the case, fill out the proper forms, do their due diligence—and then get the hell off St. Lucy’s before Mia had to deal with all the reasons she’d left in the first place.

  Suicide. That’s all it would take, a simple ruling. Her body leaned into it with an eagerness Mia couldn’t trust.

  But. The ocean.

  “How’d he end up there?” Mia whispered, as though if she said it quietly enough maybe the question would go away, maybe Izzy would forget that little detail, maybe Mia would.

  “In a thin undershirt and trousers,” Izzy filled in, because of course she remembered her lines to this particular conversation. It was this discrepancy that punched a hole in their beautifully constructed suicide theory.

  Maybe Twist had been drunk enough to explain the lack of proper clothing. Alcohol wasn’t called a liquor jacket by college kids everywhere for no reason. But if he had been planning on shooting himself, wouldn’t he have just stayed inside the cabin? Why would he have gone outside in the cold anyway?

  Mia didn’t have an answer yet, though she knew Izzy was getting restless. Maybe they were thinking too much like the cold-case detectives they were, making things complicated where they didn’t need to be. Maybe their leaps of logic were unsupported by the circumstances. Maybe they needed to step back. Like Izzy said, it looked like suicide, and it probably was suicide.

  For now, though, their hands were tied. They hadn’t even seen the body yet, let alone gotten a feel for any of the rest of the evidence. Until they got a better handle on it all, there was little else to debate. Murder or suicide? It was too early to make the call.

  Izzy knew it, too, Mia knew, because this was where the conversation ended. She pivoted, as she had every time they’d reached the impasse before. “So what’s the game plan, boss?”

  It was something else they’d gone over a dozen times, but Mia didn’t mind. She wondered if it was a particular tic with Izzy, or if the woman was trying to find her footing, feeling a bit untethered by the general lack of information in the case.

  “We’ll talk to the seaplane pilot,” Mia said. “This ferry only runs once a month, so the reporter probably had plans to get off the island somehow. Or he was booked to be on this one, and we’ll be able to get the records for that.”

  “If his departure was planned for anytime soon, maybe the killer was trying to stop him from leaving St. Lucy’s?” Izzy easily followed Mia’s train of thought.

  “We’ll also want to check out the cabin he was renting. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to access his computer or notes.”

  If Twist’s death had been a homicide, his notes could at least give them a place to start for a motive.

  Mia bit her lip. Knowing why Twist had come to the island, what sore spots he’d been poking, would have been helpful. Going in blind was unsettling, another handicap when they would already have enough trouble getting anyone on St. Lucy’s to talk to them.

  People on the island didn’t like outlanders, didn’t trust them, especially not someone who was snooping around and getting in their business.

  Give or take a birth or a death, there were about only two hundred people who lived on St. Lucy’s year-round, so the community was a tight one.

  In the summer, there was an influx of artists who came and took up space and were barely tolerated despite the money they poured into the town before they left at the first signs of fall. But spending a few warm months on the island didn’t make you one of them.

  Mia wasn’t sure growing up there for sixteen years would hold much water anymore, either.

  It did mean that out of anyone on the squad, she was the one who stood the best chance of pulling any information from them. Really, Mia shouldn’t have been put on the investigation. She knew it, Murdoch probably knew it, and, before long, Izzy would as well. Beyond Mia’s personal history with the island, this type of death wasn’t even their forte. They worked cold cases, she and Izzy—reading people, plucking out mostly forgotten memories, navigating lies and false narratives constructed out of desperation and weak alibis. That was their expertise. Not this . . . this . . . whatever this turned out to be.

  But these people were hers. If anyone spoke their language, if anyone stood the slightest chance in getting them to talk, it was Mia.

  She and Izzy stood at the rail in silence as the small port finally came into view. Squat, colorful houses fanned out from the docks, the bright facades a welcome home for the fishers who spent the rough days at sea. Most of the island’s population lived in the little village, and the tight cluster gave the illusion that the rest of St. Lucy’s was similarly built up.

  Beyond the town’s center, though, only forest stretched until the lighthouse to the west, until the Bell mansion in the north. The trees were ashy, their trunks gnarled and weathered, and she used to pretend fairies lived in the pockets of space beneath their moss-drenched roots. She knew each path through the woods, the shortcut to the edge of the cliffs, the meadow that was nothing but dandelion fluff in the summertime. She knew the abandoned hut that stood on the southern tip, knew that no matter how many times you were dared to go into it alone, you knew you shouldn’t. She knew her name was carved on the underside of the third pew in the one-room church. She knew this place. It was hers, just like the people were.

  The ferry was close enough now to make out the individual buildings. The post office, the grocer’s on the corner of Main Street, the diner next to Mrs. Winslow’s pale peach bungalow. It had been fifteen years, and beyond a fresh coat of paint or two, nothing had changed.

  That’s how it was on the island. Time stretched and bent and became meaningless beyond how many hours could be spent on the ocean. When she’d been a teenager, it had driven Mia mad. There was a world out there that was moving forward, for good or bad, but moving nonetheless.

  Now there was an ache in her chest that she didn’t want to name. It wasn’t nostalgia, because there was nothing golden or sweet about it. It was threaded through with resentment and fear and a vicious darkness that ravaged any lingering warm emotion.

  And yet, still, that ache was familiar.

  Home. She was finally home.

  “Mia Hart, all grown up,” Sammy Bowdoin said when he spotted her and Izzy on the docks. He went in for the hug just as Mia held out her hand to shake his, and her knuckles brushed against his chest while his arms froze midair.

  The awkwardness passed as quickly as it came. Sammy grinned and clapped a hand on her shoulder, the easy warmth still in his voice, despite whatever professional distance Mia had just worked to put between them. “Big fancy police detective you are, then?”

  There was no bitter edge to Sammy’s words, not like she’d get from some people around here. For many of the locals, moving to the mainland, wanting something in life beyond the rough existence St. Lucy’s offered, was a deep betrayal.

&
nbsp; But Sammy was still smiling, so Mia decided to take the words at face value.

  “You’re one to talk, Dr. Bowdoin,” she said lightly, before turning to include Izzy in the conversation. “Sammy, this is Detective Isabel Santiago. She’ll be working the case with me.”

  “Izzy,” her partner corrected, holding out a gloved hand.

  Sammy’s smile turned tight at the corners, the warmth immediately gone. The reaction was predictable and tiresome, but it also wasn’t the complete cold shoulder Izzy would get from others. “Welcome to St. Lucy’s.”

  If Izzy noticed the new emptiness to his voice, she ignored it. “Thanks, Doc.”

  Grabbing the bags from where Mia and Izzy had dropped them, Sammy jerked his head back toward the village. “You’re staying at your mama’s, right? Do you want to stop there first or see the body?”

  “The body,” Mia answered without hesitation. She had no interest in hastening that particular reunion. If there’d been a hotel on the island, Mia would have been staying there instead. But the rental options were limited, and one of the few there were had just become a crime scene. They were stuck with Edie Hart’s hospitality.

  “Course.” Sammy started up the hill.

  None of them tried to speak further above the wind, as they ducked their heads to fight through the gusts. Sammy took a left off Main Street, and they followed him to a mint-green one-story house that sat at the end of the side road.

  They unbundled in the mudroom, stripping layers down until their bodies had shapes beyond vague lumps of fabric.

  It was then Mia got her first good look at Sammy. Time had left him alone, for the most part, just like the rest of the island. Except for a few laugh lines, he looked nearly the same as he had in high school, his light brown hair just starting to go silver at the temples, his mouth too wide for his face, his nostrils a bit too flared.

  When they’d been younger, he’d been the kind of kid who didn’t have close friends but was welcome into any group when he showed up. Partially because he’d always been generous with his joints, sloppy and questionable though they were. Mia hadn’t indulged, but sometimes Asher and Cash had, as they spread out on the rocks by the lighthouse, watching stars, their normally clipped cadence turning to molasses as they laughed at nothing.

  Sammy’s lips twitched beneath her appraisal, and then he was moving on like he always had, never really standing still long enough to be known.

  “Back here,” Sammy said with a nod toward the hallway. “Welcome to my jack-of-all-trades office.”

  She fell in behind him, with Izzy trailing. “Do you live here, too?”

  “Nah, I took the floor-through apartment above the diner.” He pointed toward the wall of the house that was in the direction they’d just come. “Frankly, I don’t get a lot of dead bodies in here, but when I do, I don’t quite fancy spending more time with them than necessary.”

  “Hasn’t been a murder on St. Lucy’s in how long?” Mia asked. Murder wasn’t the only way dead bodies turned up on the medical examiner’s table, but they both decided to ignore that particular elephant in the room. She couldn’t stop her thumb from rubbing over her scar, though.

  “Sixty years,” Sammy said. “I think it was a domestic. Wife shot the husband after she found another woman in the bed.”

  “A bit cliché,” Izzy called out from behind them.

  Sammy glanced back, his eyes hooded. “You need your murders to be original, then?” In a different tone, the words might have been a joke. But it was clear he wasn’t teasing her.

  Mia pressed her lips together, knowing she should have warned Izzy this was how it would be. They’d twist anything Izzy said to find fault with it just because she was an outsider.

  Izzy’s footsteps faltered behind Mia, but there was nothing much to say to that. The uncomfortable silence stretched until they got to what was clearly the makeshift morgue.

  The sterile equipment, metal examination table, and two side-by-side cold chambers to house bodies were all incongruous with the cozy, floral-printed wallpaper and the lace curtains on the window. For some reason, the contrast of it all fit the Sammy she remembered.

  “My predecessor had these custom built a while ago,” Sammy said as he gripped one of the thick handles of the cold chambers and pulled. Mia got a quick glimpse of brown hair before the whole tray slid out.

  Robert Twist.

  Mia tried to cover her rough inhale, but Sammy’s eyes were immediately on her face. “Not a pretty sight, huh? Think he was in the water for a few days.”

  The words slipped out, unchecked. “It’s not that.”

  Izzy shifted beside her. “What’s up?”

  The slope of the forehead, the nose that had clearly been broken one too many times. The line of his jaw. They tugged at a memory she barely realized had formed.

  She looked up, meeting Izzy’s narrowed gaze.

  “I didn’t expect to recognize him.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  IZZY

  Detective Isabel Santiago looked between the dead man’s face and Mia’s. The color had seeped out of both.

  The sea had not been kind to Robert Twist. Though she didn’t have a good idea of what he’d looked like before spending time in the ocean, Izzy guessed he’d never been particularly attractive.

  He was on the shorter side, with the type of chin that slid off into his neck. His face was concave, the sunken cheeks even more pronounced because of the toll the water and its inhabitants had taken on him. A sharp widow’s peak was emphasized by the way his hair was plastered back, caked with sediment.

  “You recognize him?” Izzy asked Mia, her mouth suddenly dry. She might have been new to the murder beat, but it didn’t exactly seem like a good thing for the lead detective on the case to know the victim. Wishing they were having this conversation in private, Izzy took a step closer so that she was blocking the rude doctor and his eyes that saw too much.

  Mia blinked a few times, her mouth twitching as if trying to remember how to form words. Then she took a deep breath, shook her head once, a tiny jerk to the side, and looked up from the dead man sprawled out before them. “I’ve seen him before. I didn’t know him, though.”

  That, at least, was something. The hollow feeling that had taken up residence beneath her rib cage faded slightly. “Where’d you see him?”

  “Outside the station.” Mia’s composure was completely back, professionalism hiding the confusion. Seeing Mia shaken was odd, but witnessing her ability to slip her mask into place so effortlessly wasn’t exactly reassuring, either.

  The problem was, Izzy didn’t know Mia that well. She was still learning her quirks, her tells, when she wanted to be left the hell alone, and when she wanted to be needled into talking. And Izzy wanted to get it right, because it had been a long time since she’d had a partner she thought was going to last.

  She’d been unsure about Mia at first. The woman was tiny, for one. A hundred pounds soaking wet. Izzy had met some women who were short but dense, all muscle, but Mia wasn’t like that. Everything about her was delicately built.

  The woman was too pretty, on top of it, her dirty-blonde hair cut short, framing a pale, heart-shaped face that was all sleek, straight lines.

  She spoke only when the occasion called for it and never went out for beers after work.

  The partnership had seemed destined to be chalked up as one more failure in a long list for Izzy. But as they’d worked together, her wariness had evolved quickly into respect, because it soon became painfully clear that Detective Mia Hart was a badass. A classy one. But a badass nonetheless.

  That didn’t mean Izzy understood her, though. Even now, she looked for any sign of distress or anxiety or fear beneath the smooth exterior and found none.

  “You saw him outside the station?” Izzy finally prodded as Mia remained quiet.

  “Twice.” Mia was quick to answer. “Both times at night. It was like he’d been waiting for me. But he didn’t . . . He never approache
d me.”

  The last bit was said almost beneath her breath, to herself. Izzy waited.

  “I noticed him because he was standing under that busted streetlight like he didn’t want to be seen clearly,” Mia continued, her chin dipping down so that her hair shielded her expression from Izzy’s view. “I could, though. See him.”

  “Well, shit, Mia,” Sammy cut in. “That’s weird.”

  Mia looked up at that, the corners of her mouth tilting up in a weak smile. There was no trace of real humor in it. “Yeah.”

  Izzy nudged the doc. “Did you ever talk to him while he was here?”

  “No.” The answer was curt, clearly meant to discourage any further questioning, and Izzy wondered if it was because she was a cop, because she wasn’t an islander, or because it was just habit. Whatever it was, Izzy suddenly had insight into Murdoch’s decision to make Mia the lead on the case.

  “He must have stuck out like a sore thumb, huh?” Izzy wasn’t deterred. Maybe she didn’t have a ton of experience working a murder, but she’d met enough assholes in her life not to be put off by one.

  The doc’s hackles went up, and Mia shifted beside her. Clearly it had been the wrong thing to say, but Izzy didn’t know why. That not knowing made her too itchy and too hot. Most everything about her job came down to being able to figure out why people were reacting the way they were, and when she couldn’t do that, the world always seemed just slightly tipped to the side.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” The doc’s chest had gone all big and broad, and his eyes narrowed, the skin crinkling into crow’s-feet at the corners. “Just because he was a big-shot mainland reporter?”

  Izzy scratched at the crook of her elbow and studied him before deciding brash was the way to go. It’s not like she had a lot of weapons in her personality arsenal, to be fair. Bold and unapologetic was pretty much it. “Um, your island is a tiny blip of land in the middle of Bumblefuck Bay, it’s so cold everyone’s balls have probably set up permanent residence in their bodies, and, oh yeah, even if anyone was crazy enough to actually want to visit, you can’t even get here because the ferry only runs once a month.”