Heartsick

CHAPTER 14

Fred Doud smoked a bowl on the beach. He was hunkered next to a large bark-stripped log that had washed ashore the winter before. Not that his discretion mattered. He hadn’t seen anyone along the mile stretch of beach he’d just walked. He usually came out in the afternoon, but he had a court date later that day. He took one more extended drag off the small glass pipe and then put it back into its leather satchel. He tied the satchel shut, his long, bony fingers fumbling a little in the cold, and hung it back around his neck. He surveyed the skin of his arms, his thighs, belly, knees. It was bright pink, but he didn’t feel cold anymore. He liked winters on the beach. There were plenty of people the rest of the year, but during the winter, he was often the only one. He lived with some college buddies a few miles away on the island, so it was an easy drive. Per beach rules, he wore a robe from the parking area, down the path carved through the blackberry bushes. Then, once he was on the beach, he let the robe drop off his bony shoulders and stepped away from it, au naturel. He never felt freer.

The truth was that he usually turned back at that log, but sometimes, every once in a while, he decided to go farther, to the point where the beach went around a bend and he could see the lighthouse up ahead. Today, when he stood up, reveling in his stoned, naked body, Fred knew that it was one of those days.

He usually walked on the inner beach, where the sand was finer and more pleasant on bare feet, but when he went on the longer route, he often walked closer to the water on the clay beds, where he had once found an arrowhead and hoped to again. Visibility wasn’t bad. The fog had been dense when he started out, but all that was left now was a thick ridge of white that hovered over the river. The cold clay was slippery and the beach was rank, as it sometimes was. Dead fish washed up occasionally and rotted. Seaweed clumped and putrefied, infested with bugs. Birds eviscerated crabs and then left the carcasses to decompose.

Fred was walking along the clay, face pursed in absolute concentration, reddened eyes scanning the ground, studiously ignoring the mounting stench, when he found Kristy Mathers. He saw the bottom of her foot first, half-submerged in the clay, and followed the foot to her leg and torso. He would have believed it sooner if he hadn’t fantasized so many times about coming across a dead body on that beach. It just always seemed to him a probable event, somehow. Now, looking at the pale, almost unrecognizable figure at his feet, a horrible new feeling washed over him: sobriety. Fred Doud had never felt so naked.

Heart pounding, and suddenly thoroughly chilled, he turned and looked down the beach, where he had come from and then up toward the lighthouse. The isolation he had just minutes before been enjoying now filled him with terror. He had to get help. He had to get back to his truck. He started running.