“I am,” he said. “I always have been. I’ve felt it forever, that you’re my best friend. And more.”
“We’ve hardly ever talked,” I said.
“Not with words,” he said, and he leaned back on one elbow.
He pulled me down on the blanket. This time when he looked at me, the question was gone from his eyes. I heard waves hitting the rocks, splashing against the sand. He rolled toward me, slid his arms around me. He pressed his body against mine and kissed me. Our first kiss: tender, then rough. I could practically feel the waves beneath us, lifting us, as if the sand had turned into the sea.
I touched his face, ran my fingers down his neck; his pulse was seismic under my fingertips, just like mine. There was a strange abrasive sound coming from the water, but I was too excited to pay attention.
“Do you hear that?” he asked.
The sound was crisp: scritch-scritch, like rough sandpaper on wood.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But then again, who cares?” he asked.
He pulled my body back toward his, hard, kissed me again, his hand running down my side. He hooked his thumb into the waistband of my jeans. I wanted him to keep going, but now I couldn’t stop hearing the noise.
Now it sounded more like clicking and seemed to be coming from the tidal pools. With a new moon, tides were extreme, and this was dead low, with rocks and ledges that would normally be underwater exposed. I pushed myself off the blanket and walked toward the rocks.
“Claire,” Griffin called. “Be careful.”
Starlight caught the white edges of the small waves, the glossy black tendrils of kelp, and illuminated a swarm of rock crabs completely covering a lumpy object in the shallow tidal pool. The crabs moved as if they were one entity instead of thousands of individuals, summoned from rock crevices by whatever was rotting beneath them. Their claws click-click-clicked.
I thought it must be a dead fish, a big one, maybe a striper. Or even a seal—they lived here over the winter, into the spring. Please don’t let it be a seal, I thought. Or any other marine mammal. Not a dolphin, not a baby whale. The smell of decay was overpowering.
I stomped my feet on the wet rocks as I approached, to scare the crabs away, and I saw what was underneath. Bones gleamed white. Long brown hair was matted like seaweed. A glint of gold shone from the half-devoured left wrist. There were still shreds of flesh on the upper arms, but the wrists and hands had been stripped bare. They were skeleton hands; the finger bones were long, skinny, and curved.
I screamed. It was Ellen Fielding.
I lunged toward those crabs, brushing and kicking them away, to get them off Ellen’s body. They scattered, then covered her again.
“Claire,” Griffin said, yanking me away from Ellen’s corpse. I sobbed, staring at the gold bracelet around that horror of a wrist, the ancient gold coin dangling from thick links, given to Ellen by her grandmother.
Griffin wanted us both to go to his house and call the police from there, but I refused to leave. I didn’t want her to be alone. The tide could come in and sweep everything away, take what was left of her body out to sea. I sat in the wet sand guarding her. Starlight glinted on the crabs’ black-green shells, their pincers tearing her apart.
Eventually Griffin arrived with a Black Hall police officer. The cop crouched beside the body, then called for a forensic team and the police boat. Soon the boat came around the point, searchlights sweeping the cove.
“What’s that for?” Griffin asked.
“She might have been on a boat,” the cop said. “It could have sunk, and there could be someone else out there, needing help.”
“This didn’t happen tonight,” I heard myself say. “The crabs have already ripped her apart!”
The policeman was young, not much older than us. I’d seen him around town—directing traffic during the Midsummer’s Festival, after the concerts on the church lawn, writing speeding tickets on Route 156.
“I’m Officer Markham,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Claire Beaudry,” I said.
Griffin stood beside me, put his arm around my shoulders. I’d gotten cold sitting there on the damp beach, and I shivered against his warm body.
“Why are you two here tonight?” Officer Markham asked. “Kind of dark, late for beach time.”
“We wanted to see the meteor shower,” Griffin said.
“How did you come to find the body?”
“Claire did,” Griffin said.
“I heard the crabs,” I said.
“Well,” the officer said. “We’re going to have to identify the victim. Give me your phone numbers in case we need to talk to you some more.”
My heart was racing hard. My lips tingled and my hands felt numb. I waited for Griffin to tell him it was Ellen, but he was silent. Was it possible he hadn’t recognized the bracelet?
“I know who it is,” I said finally, because Griffin didn’t speak.
“Who?” Officer Markham asked.
“Ellen Fielding,” I said.
Griffin drew a sharp breath, as if he were shocked.
“Oh God, oh God,” Griffin said, his head in his hands, pacing in a circle. “She did it.”
“Did what?” the cop asked.
“Suicide,” he said. “She was so depressed.”
“You knew her?” the cop asked.
“We both did,” Griffin said. I waited for him to add that he had dated her, but Officer Markham just asked for our numbers and said we could go, that a detective might get in touch with further questions.
After that, Griffin walked me home through the dark woods. I shivered the whole way. Right by the overgrown trail to my cabin, there was a break in the canopy of branches overhead, and suddenly it filled with shooting stars.
“Look,” Griffin said, pointing up. We stared for a few seconds. “Finally—what we came here for. The Perseids.”
“They’re for . . .” I began to say for Ellen.
“They’re for us, so we’ll never forget this night,” he said, his voice catching.
“Something beautiful,” I whispered. “After something so terrible.”
Over the next few days, the police investigated. As Officer Markham had said, a detective questioned me about finding Ellen’s body, about whether we had noticed any changes in her mood or knew of anyone who might want to harm her. Tucker Morgan, the state police commissioner, was a friend of Wade Lockwood—Griffin’s Catamount Bluff neighbor and surrogate father—and did the questioning himself. With Wade present. Over lunch at the yacht club.
After the coroner made his examination, there was an inquest. The toxicology tests came back negative—so Ellen hadn’t overdosed. She had a fractured skull. Had it happened in a fall? Or had someone attacked her?
Rumors began right away: whatever had happened in Cancún had pushed her to the brink, and she had drowned herself. Or she had gotten involved with something illegal, dangerous enough to get her killed. But Commissioner Morgan chose not to pursue those leads. Wade convinced him that the idea that someone had followed Ellen north, murdered her, and left her body on the beach was too far fetched. She had slipped on the rocks, that was that.
My interlude with Griffin lasted all that August: fire, passion, and wild fascination with each other. The reality of finding Ellen’s body was traumatic; at first it pulled us together, but eventually it drove us apart. We both wanted to stop thinking about that night.