Seven
The blue house on Maple Street looked exactly like every other house in Windemere Bay. White picket fence, flower boxes under the windows, a porch swing that creaked in the salt breeze. Normal. Peaceful. The kind of place where mothers baked cookies and helped with homework.
Not the kind of place where dead women lived.
I sat in my truck for twenty minutes, engine off, hands gripping the steering wheel until my knuckles went white. Through the front window, I could see movement. A shadow passing back and forth, too distant to make out clearly.
My mother.
The woman who'd tucked me into bed every night until I was thirteen. Who'd taught me to braid my hair and tie my shoes. Who'd died in a car accident on a rainy Tuesday while I was at school, leaving me with nothing but a casket I wasn't allowed to see inside and a father who drank himself to death within two years.
Except she hadn't died. She'd been here. In this tiny fishing town, watching me from a distance while I grew up thinking I was an orphan.
The rage came in waves, hot and sharp enough to cut glass.
I forced myself out of the truck before I could change my mind. Each step up the walkway felt like walking toward a cliff edge. The wooden steps groaned under my feet, and I wondered if she could hear me coming. If she'd been expecting this moment for fifteen years.
I raised my hand to knock, then hesitated. What do you say to a ghost? What do you say to the woman who taught you that everyone you love will leave?
The door opened before I could decide.
She was older. Gray streaked through hair that had once been the same dark brown as mine. Lines around her eyes that hadn't been there when I was thirteen. But it was her. Unmistakably, heartbreakingly her.
"Elise." Her voice cracked on my name. "Oh, honey."
The endearment hit me like a physical blow. I took a step back, shaking my head. "No. You don't get to call me that."
Her face crumpled, but she didn't argue. She stepped aside, gesturing for me to come in. "Please. Let me explain."
The living room was small, cluttered with photographs. I recognized some of them, pictures from my childhood that should have been destroyed in the fire that supposedly claimed all our belongings. Me at six, missing my front teeth. Me at ten, holding a trophy from a science fair. Me at twelve, the last school picture before the world ended.
"You kept them." The words came out strangled.
"I kept everything I could." She sat down heavily in an armchair, suddenly looking every one of her sixty-odd years. "I know you hate me. You should. But please, just listen."
I remained standing, arms crossed. "You have five minutes."
She nodded, wiping her eyes with a tissue that looked like it had been used a dozen times already. "Your Aunt Sarah was my younger sister. She was twenty-two when she came to Windemere Bay for a summer job at the marina. Bright, beautiful, full of life. She was going to be a teacher."
I'd never heard of Aunt Sarah. Another lie.
"She started asking questions about the other girls who'd gone missing. Young women who came for summer work and never left. The local police said they'd just moved on, found better jobs elsewhere. But Sarah found their belongings in a storage unit. Personal things they never would have left behind."
My mother's hands shook as she reached for another tissue. "She called me the night before she disappeared. Scared. She said she'd found proof that powerful men in town were involved. She was going to the state police the next morning."
"The Tides Club," I said.
Her eyes widened. "You know about them?"
"I'm learning. What happened to Sarah?"
"They found her body three days later. Supposed drowning, just like all the others. But Sarah was a competitive swimmer. She could have made it to shore blindfolded." Her voice broke. "I knew they killed her. But I was twenty-five with a baby daughter and no proof."
The baby daughter. Me.
"So you ran."
"I tried to fight at first. Went to the FBI, the state police, anyone who would listen. But the Tides Club had connections everywhere. Money, influence, threats. When they burned down our apartment with us inside..." She shuddered. "We barely got out alive."
I remembered that fire. Sort of. Vague impressions of smoke and my mother's hands lifting me from my bed, carrying me into the night. I'd been four. Young enough that the memories felt more like dreams.
"The social worker who helped us relocate said the only way to keep you safe was to disappear completely. New names, new lives. She helped fake my death, helped place you with distant relatives who would love you."
"The Hartmans weren't relatives." My foster parents had been kind but distant. I'd always felt like a guest in their house, never quite belonging.
"I know. I'm sorry. But they were good people, and they were far enough away to keep you safe. I thought... I thought if I came back here, if I watched and waited, eventually I'd find enough evidence to bring the Tides Club down. Then I could come for you."
"Fifteen years." The number tasted bitter. "You waited fifteen years."
"I tried so many times to contact you. But every time I got close, something would happen. A break-in at my apartment, a threatening note, a car that followed me too closely. They were always watching." She stood, moving to a bookshelf, and pulled out a thick manila folder. "I've been collecting evidence all this time. Financial records, photographs, testimony from families of the missing girls. Everything I could find."
She held it out to me, but I didn't take it.
Why now?" I asked. "Why reveal yourself now?"
"Because you found Sadie Cooper. Because you're asking the same questions Sarah asked thirty years ago. And because..." She looked at me with eyes so much like my own it hurt. "Because you're not running away."
The truth of that settled in my chest. I wasn't running. Despite the threats, despite the danger, despite every instinct that told me to disappear back into my quiet cottage life, I was staying.
"You could have warned me," I said. "When I first came to town, you could have told me what this place really was."
"Would you have listened? You came here to hide, Elise. You came here broken and trying to disappear. If I'd told you the truth, you would have run again."
She wasn't wrong. Two years ago, I would have been back on the road within hours.
"Besides," she continued, "I didn't know you were investigating until it was too late. By the time I realized what you were doing, you were already in too deep to pull back safely."
I sank into the couch, suddenly exhausted. The anger was still there, burning in my chest, but it was complicated now by understanding. She'd been protecting me the only way she knew how.
my phone buzzed. Text message from an unknown number.
Your mother's house is very pretty. Blue really suits her. Be at the pier in one hour or we'll redecorate it with something red.
My blood turned to ice water. I showed her the message.
Her face went pale. "They know."
"Pack a bag," I said, standing. "Now. We're leaving."