Their group, they’d all been down on the beach as often as not. Josie, Anahera, Vincent, Daniel, Nikau, and Keira. Tom and Christine and Peter had floated in and out, but the six of them had been the core.
“You lot are as thick as thieves,” Anahera’s mother used to say with a laugh. They’d been close enough to venture into the water even when it wasn’t quite safe, when it was an adventure on the edge between safety and danger. Close enough to build bonfires on the beach after dark.
Close enough to make out under the stars.
Her lips curved. She’d almost forgotten playing truth or dare and being dared to kiss a blushing Vincent. She’d taken the dare, and he’d gone red to the very tips of his ears. Daniel had teased him endlessly about it, but back then, there’d been no malice to the teasing, all of the laughing words and shared memories weaving the threads of their friendship ever tighter.
There’d been no malice in any of them. They’d just been teenagers growing into adulthood, coltish and full of dreams. It felt awful to think it now, but even the discovery of the water bottle and the possibility of a lost hiker—then two—hadn’t really changed things.
Yes, they’d talked about it and those with experience in the bush had helped with the search, but it had seemed like a distant thing. Not only were the two women strangers, they were adults. In their mid to late twenties, from what Anahera remembered. She and the others hadn’t identified with either one, never worried about themselves, not seeing anything of their youth in those two adult faces.
Then Tom and Josie, sneaking into the cave to make out, had found the bracelet.
Their group had disbanded naturally and inevitably in the aftermath—Daniel and Vincent off to their private schools; Josie attached at the hip to Tom, her official boyfriend by summer’s end; Anahera so desperate to get out of Golden Cove that she’d begun to study as hard as Nikau always had, while spending every spare moment on the piano; Keira flying back to Auckland because the school terms were her mother’s, the summers her father’s; and Nikau, writing letters to Keira alongside intricate essays for school that won him awards and scholarships and pride.
Peter… Anahera frowned. She couldn’t remember what Peter had been doing. Probably because she’d kept her distance from him even then, but she had a vague memory of Christine’s fists bunching and her face going hot and hard when Peter’s name was mentioned, so it was possible the two of them had hooked up over the summer and it had come to a bad end.
Looking back, that had been the last summer they’d all been together and all been friends. After that, it had splintered piece by piece, so slowly that Anahera hadn’t truly noticed at the time.
Her phone rang in her hand.
Seeing that it was Josie, she answered it. Her friend had heard about the find out by the dump. It wasn’t surprising that she didn’t know about Miriama. People had been focused on the dump by the time the second forensic crew came in, would’ve assumed it was all connected.
No one in the Cove expected so much death in the space of a single day.
“They’re saying Shane Hennessey found a skeleton,” Josie said. “Did Will tell you anything?”
So, it had already gotten around that Will’s SUV had gone out toward her cabin last night and not returned till morning.
That was the town Anahera remembered, the town that had suffocated her, the town where there were no secrets—and far too many hidden things. “Not about that,” she said. “There’s something else, though, Josie, but you can’t share it.” She knew her best friend loved gossip, loved the very things about Golden Cove that had threatened to stifle Anahera’s spirit. She also knew that Josie would never betray her.
“You know me, Ana,” her friend said. “I never tell your secrets.”
Veiled in between those words was a secret Anahera had shared with Josie fifteen years ago. That same hazy summer. A secret only the two of them now knew because Anahera’s mother was dead, and with her, the name of the man she’d loved while a married woman.
Haeata had let it slip one night while she was drunk—such a rare thing that Anahera couldn’t remember any other time she’d seen her mother with a drink in her hand—and she’d said enough that Anahera had hoped her father wasn’t her father. Such a false dream that had been; the mirror showed her too many echoes of the brute her mother had married.
“I know,” she said to her best friend. “You’ve never let me down.”
“I’ll never forget how you held my hand when we sneaked off on the bus to buy”—her voice dropped—“you-know-what.”
Anahera felt a fleeting smile cross her face at the memory of that secret trip out of town to get condoms when Josie decided to sleep with Tom. It had always been Josie who’d set the milestones in her relationship. Tom might be big and strong, but he was putty in Josie’s hands and always had been. “Here’s the thing,” Anahera began. “The remains might have something to do with the missing hikers back when we were kids.”
“Good lord. Imagine that, she’s been lying out there all this time.”
Anahera knew what Josie wasn’t yet ready to see. She’d thought back to the map pinned up inside the fire station, realized searchers had combed through that area while looking for Miriama. And the idea of no one passing through there in more than a decade simply didn’t hold water. It was too close to the dump, too near a favorite trail used by hunters.
The remains had been placed there for an unlucky walker to find.
And how strange that all of the summer kids were back in Golden Cove when it happened. Anahera, Nikau, Vincent, Josie and Tom, Daniel and Keira. Even Christine and Peter. They’d all, but for Josie and Tom, traveled the world, seen cities that had been ancient before the first rock was broken in Golden Cove, and yet here they were, back home as the ghosts of the past began to rise.
“Do you know anyone in the Cove who looks like me?” she asked Josie. “Same height, skin tone, hair, that kind of thing.” Matilda hadn’t been able to think of anyone Anahera hadn’t already considered and warned. All probably fell outside the killer’s preferred profile for one reason or another, but Anahera had thrown a wide net. Just in case.
This time, Josie sucked in a breath. “Oh, my God, I remember now. Those women, the way they looked… you grew up to look like them.”
“You see why I’m asking. I’ve already called around to a few women.” She listed the names.
“Okay,” Josie said through shallow breaths, “let me think.” A long pause before she said, “This isn’t connected to Miriama, then, is it?” So much hope in the words. “I mean, she doesn’t look anything like you.”
It seemed a huge coincidence to Anahera that a beautiful young woman would go missing in the same small town that might’ve been a serial killer’s hunting ground, and the two not to be connected, but none of it fit. All three hikers had vanished off the face of the earth. Miriama had been found. And no one could control the ocean.
“Hold on, I’ve got to serve a customer.” Josie was gone for two minutes and when she came back, her voice shook. “It was Evelyn. She said there were police down by the beach, too, and she saw them load something on a stretcher into a big van.”