4th of July

Chapter 30

THE WATER WAS TOO cold for swimming, but I sat cross-legged near the surf’s edge and stared out at the horizon where the aqua blue bay met the great rolling Pacific.

Martha was running along the curve of the beach, the sand spraying out behind her feet, and I was enjoying the warmth of the sun on my face when I felt something hard jab the back of my neck.

I froze.

I didn’t even take a breath.

“You shot that girl,” a voice said. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

At first I didn’t recognize the voice. My mind spun, searching for a name, an explanation, the right words to say. I reached my arm behind me so that I could grab the gun and I saw his face for a split second.

I saw the hatred in his eyes. I saw his fear.

“Don’t you move,” the boy shouted, jabbing the gun muzzle hard against my vertebrae. Sweat trickled down my sides. “You killed my sister. You killed her for nothing!”

I remembered the empty look on Sara Cabot’s face when she fell.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“No, you’re not, but you will be. And guess what? Nobody cares.”

You’re not supposed to hear the bullet that gets you, but that must be a myth. The booming report of the shot that drilled through my spine sounded like a bomb.

I slumped over, paralyzed. I couldn’t speak and I couldn’t stop the flow of blood pulsing out of my body, ebbing into the cold water of the bay.

But how had it come to this? There was a reason that just eluded my grasp. Something I should have done.

Slap the cuffs on them. I should have done that.

That’s what I was thinking when my eyes flew open.

I was lying on my side, my fists full of sand. Martha was looking down at me, breathing on my face.

Somebody cared.

I sat up and reached my arms around her, buried my face in her neck.

The dream’s sticky sense clung to me. I didn’t need a PhD in psychology to know what it meant. I was churning in the violence of last month.

Stuck in it up to my eyeballs.

“Everything’s fine,” I told Martha.

Lying my face off to my little dog.