“Maybe.”
Her shoes still sank into the sand. “You might have warned me what we would be doing,” she called to him. He was pulling the little dinghy higher up on the beach, and as soon as he finished, he started moving purposefully along the shore.
The island seemed strange and stark, she thought as she followed. There were scattered trees, but they bore no leaves. It was winter, she reminded herself. There was some greenish-brown scrub grass, and seaweed teased at the shoreline.
A gull cried forlornly overhead.
Zach walked along the beach, then back, and looked out at the boat. After a moment he turned and retraced his steps, moving further away this time. Hugging her arms around her chest to keep warm, she followed him.
About a hundred feet along the increasingly craggy shoreline, he came to a dead stop.
“What does that look like to you?” he asked her.
She looked down at the ground. It didn’t look like anything. Then she studied the area more closely.
“Um, it looks like…something was dragged over the sand for a foot or two,” she said.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Then what?”
“A footprint.”
“A footprint? That would be one big foot.”
“A footprint from a flipper, to be exact,” he told her. He started to move again, slowly backing inland half a step at a time, looking for a trail to follow. Instinctively, she moved away from the area where he was searching.
He came to a halt again, shaking his head. “We won’t get anything from it—too much time has passed. I think it proves I’m right, but…” He stared at her for a moment, then pointed. “Walk in that direction. Look for anything, anything at all, that doesn’t belong here.”
“What doesn’t belong here?” she asked him.
“Anything. It’s posted no picnicking in winter. The water can get too rough, so they don’t want to encourage people to come out here. The park crew goes through at the end of the summer season and cleans, so there shouldn’t be anything left to indicate anyone’s been here.”
Ten minutes later, she decided that the park department did a good job. She couldn’t find anything at all.
But when she moved back toward Zach, he was down on his knees in the damp sand and scrub grass. He had taken a small plastic bag from his pocket, and was carefully placing a few blades of grass in it.
“Grass doesn’t belong?” she asked.
“There’s something on it. Okay,” he said, rising, “we’re done. We can go.”
“No,” she said firmly. “We’re not done.”
“Yes we are.”
“Not until you tell me what the hell we were doing,” she told him stubbornly.
He glanced at her with annoyance.
“Hey, you’re the one who brought me here. If you didn’t want me asking questions, you should have left me on shore,” she said in exasperation. “I know you’re investigating Eddie’s disappearance, but—”
“Talc,” he told her quietly.
“Talc?” she repeated, confused.
“I don’t want you to say anything to anyone, but I think I know how Eddie’s killer managed to make him disappear, then disappeared himself.” And why on earth was he telling her this? he asked himself.
“With…talc?”
“He killed Eddie, dived off the boat and came here. I don’t think the killer was working with an accomplice. I think he stashed a boat here earlier.”
“Wouldn’t that have taken an accomplice?”
He shrugged, granting her point. The killer wouldn’t have needed an accomplice to get back once he had a boat, but stashing the boat would have taken help. There was no other way back to Newport from here. Unless he’d towed it out here, left it, then gone back, hoping no one would wonder why he had started out with two boats and come back with only one.
“Maybe. I keep thinking, though, that the killer was working alone. The thing is, how? And does any of this mean that Sean is in danger, as well? Maybe Kat isn’t so crazy after all.”
Caer exhaled slowly. “Someone would really…jump off a boat into that water on purpose?”
“I think so.”
“But…”
“He wore a wet suit, and he used talc to get into the wet suit. There was a tiny trail of talc on the Sea Maiden. And I think I just found a few traces of it on the underside of this grass.” He started walking toward the dinghy, then stopped short when he got there. She’d been following closely and crashed into his back.
He turned around, steadying her. The way he looked into her eyes made her nervous.
“I don’t know who or what you really are, but I do believe that you really mean to help Sean.”
Her eyes widened. “I swear, I am—”
“Don’t lie to me. Just swear that you really mean to help Sean.”
“I really mean to help Sean. I swear.”