AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Rachel walked to the end of the jetty and leaned against the rails as she watched a sailboat maneuver in the distance as sunlight hit the water.
“Have you caught anything today?” Rachel asked a nearby fisherman whose face was creased in concentration as he hunched over his rod. In answer, he kicked open the lid of a white bucket next to his stool. Rachel peered inside. Two silver fish sloshed around in circles.
“Pulled in a flounder earlier. Threw it back. Too small,” he said, indicating the size of the fish with his hands.
“Seems big to me,” said Rachel.
“Nah, that’s nothing,” he said. “When I was a kid, we’d get fish three times the size without even trying. Best place to fishfor miles. No rocks here. It’s all sand. On a windless day when the water is clear, you can actually see the fish through the water. They’ve got nowhere to hide.”
“Sounds like you’ve been fishing here for a long time?”
“Used to come with my great-granddaddy. This jetty has been here for over a hundred and twenty years. It’s survived more hurricanes than you can poke a stick at. We thought it would get blown away when Sandy hit. But it held up good.”
Rachel turned around to look for Hannah. She’d made it to the jetty by the deadline. But there was nobody around other than the fishermen and a man with a shaved head jogging along the beach. His dog trailed behind, yapping at the waves.
Rachel examined a brass plaque inset into a timber rail on the jetty. It was engraved with a brief dedication to the crew of a trawler who’d died in a storm in 1927. There were other plaques, too, in memory of sailors whose boats had gone down in storms over the years. The most prominent was a plaque dedicated to a merchant ship torpedoed in nearby Atlantic waters by a German U-boat during World War Two.
“The coast around here is a graveyard. My daddy used to say it was haunted. At night the ghosts of—” The fisherman’s rod jerked and he abruptly stopped talking as he quickly reeled in the line until an empty hook emerged from the water. “Got away,” he muttered, rehooking his line with fresh bait and shuffling to his feet to recast it into the water.
“Did you see anyone waiting?” Rachel asked once his line was set. “I’m supposed to meet someone here. A friend,” she added, looking around again. “I don’t see her anywhere.”
“Can’t say that I’ve seen anyone standing around. Except you. But that’s not to say that nobody’s been here. I keep my eyes on my line,” he said. “Got to be quick or you lose ’em.”
Rachel could feel her skin starting to burn as she waited. The sun was strong. She regretted not putting on sun lotion. She hadn’t expected to be out that long and certainly never planned to wait at the jetty for Hannah to turn up. Rachel didn’t even know why she’d come. She was in Neapolis to cover the trial for the podcast. She couldn’t help Hannah. She didn’t have the time. The trial would take up all her focus and energy.
Still, she didn’t leave. She looked across the beach. There was nobody heading toward the jetty. The beach was deserted now that the man and his dog had disappeared. The old couple who’d given her directions earlier were right. Nobody came there except for fishermen.
A gull squawked. Rachel swiveled around to watch it swoop down toward a school of silver perch. The fish darted under the jetty to take cover. Other gulls swept in and hovered over the water, but the perch remained stubbornly under the jetty.
This is ridiculous, Rachel thought. She’d wasted a good part of the afternoon and she wasn’t going to waste another second. She was done waiting.
As she walked back down the jetty, she noticed a gleam of metal. It was a pocketknife, stuck into the post of a timber rail. Rachel squatted down to take a closer look. The pocketknife was skewering an envelope into the timber. The knife’s blade was pushed into the wood so deeply that Rachel had to use all her strength to tug it free, grabbing the paper before it fell between the slats of jetty. It was an envelope. Her name was written on it in what was becoming familiar handwriting.
Rachel closed the knife and put it in her pocket. She took a closer look at the timber post. Someone had carved a heart into the timber exactly where the envelope had been pinned. An inscription had been painstakingly pried into the wood with the sharptip of a knife:In loving memory of Jenny Stills, who was viciously murdered here when she was just 16. Justice will be done.
Rachel remembered seeing a fisherman slouched on a red cooler box in the same spot earlier. The fisherman was gone.
She sat down on the timber decking. Her legs hung over the side of the jetty as she opened the envelope. It had a big hole through it from being pierced by the knife.
Rachel heard the faint ring of her phone. She retrieved it from her bag. It was Pete, but he had already hung up by the time she answered it. He’d left her a voice mail message. She pressed her phone hard against her ear to listen to his message above the wind.
“Rach, I called Tina, the student who interned for us in the spring. She remembers getting emails asking you to investigate the death of a girl called Jenny. She sent back the usual form letter. The writer wasn’t happy. She wrote back. Begged us to help her. Tina sent another ‘rejection’ note. Then the writer stopped emailing us—”
The last part of Pete’s message was drowned out by a sudden peal of laughter. Teenagers were running onto the jetty, making it sway as they climbed over the handrail and jumped into the waves with loud whoops. One splash followed another until they were all in the water except for a girl with long blond hair, who stood uncertainly on the narrow ledge, her back to the rails. The others treaded water, waiting for her to jump.
“Come on,” someone shouted.
The girl hesitated.
“Jump already!”
The girl took a deep breath and jumped into the water, splashing Rachel and the note. The paper was damp and the ink was bleeding as Rachel began to read.
6
Hannah
Rachel, I wrote to you about my sister Jenny five months ago. I received a response from your office. It was signed by you, but I got the impression that you didn’t write it. In the letter, you said that you were deeply sorry to hear about my tragedy but that you weren’t able to help. You wished me the best of luck and said that you hoped that I’d get justice for my sister.
