The Night Swim(8)
She reluctantly climbed off the bed and finished hanging her clothes in the wardrobe before arranging her files on the desk along with her laptop and power chargers. When she was done, she changed into shorts and a T-shirt and went downstairs for a brief walk to loosen up her body, stiff from hours sitting behind the steering wheel.
It was a relief when she was finally outside the hotel, strolling in the sunshine along the boardwalk. After a while, Rachel sat on a bench and soaked up the almost blinding explosion of color from neon-clad swimmers in the blue water and rows of striped beach umbrellas across the strip of golden sand. She felt so relaxed that she briefly wondered how she’d get any work done She had to remind herself that Neapolis might be a vacation town, but she was there for business.
A white-haired couple walking arm in arm smiled at Rachel as they went past. She smiled back and then surprised herself by calling out to ask them where she could find the Morrison’s Point jetty. She regretted each word as she said it.
“Morrison’s Point,” repeated the man. “Haven’t heard it called that for a long time. It’s past the headland over there.” He pointed to the south. “Nobody goes there much. Not since they built the marina and fixed up the beaches around here.”
“Except for fishermen,” his wife corrected. “Always plenty of fishermen. Just like the old days.”
“Yup,” her husband said. “Fishing’s still good down there.”
“Is it far? Can I walk?”
“Sure can. Keep walking till you can’t walk anymore. You’ll see it across the beach. Can’t miss it.”
As Rachel walked, she told herself that she was breaking a cardinal rule for true-crime podcasters: Never rendezvous with fans who leave notes on your car windshield. Never.
Rachel had a tendency to break cardinal rules, so she kept walking. Her feet hit the concrete of the boardwalk faster and faster in her determination to get there on time. The boardwalk ended and Rachel jumped down onto the sand. She took off her shoes and jogged by the shoreline, jumping over seaweed while trying to keep out of reach of the lapping waves.
She had a clear view of the Morrison’s Point jetty from the next headland. It looked old and decrepit from a distance, but when Rachel came closer she saw that it was solidly built from aged timber.
A handful of fishermen were scattered across the jetty, their eyes fixed on the tension of their nylon lines. One fisherman sitting on a red cooler box gripping a fishing rod looked half-asleep, with a canvas hat slouched over his head.
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 fish for 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.