Sweet Water by Cara Reinard
CHAPTER 1
I reach for my phone inside my purse slung around my neck. It’s dangling behind my back because I had nowhere else to put it while examining the body.
“Sarah, is she breathing?” Martin asks. I turn my head to find him, but it’s too dark.
I stumble, disoriented under the canopy of trees. We’re somewhere off Fern Hollow Road, the closest turnoff to Finn’s pinned iPhone location.
“I d-don’t know,” I sputter, still shocked we found her and not Finn when we parked the car and hiked the rest of the way into Sewickley Heights Park.
“Check her—now. I need to find Finn.” Martin’s voice fades into the forest, and all I want to do is follow him, but I just spoke to my son on the phone. His speech was slurred, and his girlfriend is . . .
“Oh God.” I open my mouth and let out a strangled breath, so sick that I sway to the side.
My eyes water as I kneel beside Yazmin Veltri, a girl I’ve known for only the briefest period. The wetness soaks through the holes in my jeans, settling into my bare kneecaps, ice on bone.
“Yazmin?” I shine my phone’s light in her direction, but I’m stopped by the certain hint of marijuana.
Shit. All these years working with at-risk young women, and I couldn’t see that Finn was dating one.
“Please,” I beg the starlit sky peeking through the trees. “Let her be breathing.”
I sniffle and inhale the truth through the rotting leaves. Something terrible has happened here, and I’m too late. The autumn mist snakes in through my nose, out through my mouth, emitting tiny white puffs of air. The forest ground is slippery, a feathered blanket beneath my knees, slathering the tops of my shoes.
I hear more hurried footsteps. Martin sounds like a mouse lost in a maze. Has he found Finn? I need to go to him, but my husband told me to stay here.
The branches scratch the tops of my feet as I move closer to her, the fallen leaves collecting between my knees. Yazmin could still be alive. A bitter taste rises in my mouth as I bite my tongue, and I’m close enough to touch her now.
My arm trembles as I place two fingers on the cold flesh of her neck. Not only cold—wet. I can’t see what I’m touching, but I can feel her absence. Right below her jawline, in the space beside her trachea where I know a steady drumbeat should exist, there’s nothing.
No pulse. My heartbeat quickens and plummets. Oh God.
My blood is rushing. Pounding. I’m sweating despite the near-thirty-degree temperature. I dip my head closer to Yazmin’s chest, careful not to tangle my hair with hers. I’ve checked on my kids enough times in the middle of the night to know this girl’s not breathing. I shut my eyes and listen anyway.
Sure enough, the steady whoosh of Yazmin’s breath is absent along with her pulse.
“She’s dead. We have to call the police,” I announce, loud enough for Martin to hear, but not nearly as loud as the screaming in my head.
Call somebody! Help!
I hear Martin crunch closer, and I turn my back on the girl.
I scoot up on my legs and use my hands to push myself into a crouching position. My breath is heavy, and everything on my body—my hands, my knees—rattles with fear. I hear a cry in the distance.
My son’s cry. And then Martin’s rustling footsteps. Beside me again.
“Where is he?” I ask.
“He’s okay, but . . .” Martin nods to the right. “He’s injured. We need to get him out of here, Sarah.”
“Okay,” I say, but I close my eyes because my head is a ringing bell of stress even though this wooded area is one of the things that drew me to this town. The park is near the country club where we’re members, where Martin’s family have been members for years, and things like this just don’t happen here.
“Let’s go, Sarah!” Martin urges.
My eyes snap open, and I hold up my phone. “Wait. I’m calling 911. For her.”
“No.” Martin swats my hand away with the flick of his strong knuckles. The blood on my palms makes everything slick, and my cell phone goes flying across the forest like a bar of soap in the shower. I slip sideways into a bramble of branches and land on my left hip, staring at my husband’s garish face in the moonlight. He looks unfamiliar, that expression one reserved for when he loses business at work, a rare occurrence. Martin is an innovator, his causes noble. Sometimes I don’t approve of how he does things, but I usually approve of why.
“Damn it.” Martin scrambles to find my phone. Right now, I don’t approve at all.
“Why did you do that?” I ask, but I’m more surprised that he’s hit me than I am by the fact that he doesn’t agree with my decision to call the police.
“It will get reported tomorrow. We need to leave with Finn. Now.”
“What? That makes no sense.”
Martin retrieves my phone, and I’m trying to get his attention, but he’s looking right past me at the gas pipeline in the distance, a clear-cut, inclined path free of foliage about a thousand yards long in the mountainous terrain. Martin and I messed around with sleds one winter on a protected slope of land just like it, and I think maybe Finn and Yazmin planned their own adventure out here tonight and something went terribly wrong.
“Martin.” I try to get up, but my foot slips on a mossy rock.