The first time Emily’s phone rings, she sits up and looks at it. Sand falls off her cheek as she watches it light up. She watches it ring until Aaron hangs up. The second time it starts to vibrate, she doesn’t bother to look at the screen. She gets up from her place on the sand and holds it, walking down the gentle slope of sand, down to where the tide has gone all the way out from the land and left gleaming gold flats of water-smoothed sand. She walks into the water, still wearing her rubber flip-flops, soaking the legs of her jeans up past the knee. White-crested waves roll up onto the long flat bottom and break around her thighs. The third time it rings, she flings it out into the water. She watches it fly, blinking metallic in the sun, turning over and over in an arc, out past the breakers.
The sight of it pulls something out of her. In the hollow place left behind, she feels clean.
And when you come out, you’re never the same again.
Emily turns her back on the sea. She walks out of the water, cutting into it with her ankles, splashing foam into her face. She climbs up the beach to her little depression in the sand, a curled bowl made by her shoulders and her churning feet. She takes her purse off her shoulder. She squats down and drops it on the sand, pulls it open, moves her hand around inside. She weighs its contents in her palm, feels the shape of each thing before she pushes it aside. At the bottom, her fingertips brush smooth leather.
Emily pulls out her credentials. She looks at them for a moment and drops them on the sand. Leaning forward, she curls her hand into a cup and pushes a small hill of the fine Nantucket sand over the blue letters. The grains strike the laminate and makes her think of the sound maple candy makes when she crunches it between her teeth. The sand is full of the day’s heat. It feels pleasant on her skin, safe and peaceful, the heat soaking into her knuckles and making them loose. It’s a calming sensation, woven of a thousand childhood memories.
She kneels and looks at the sand, the sunlight glittering off it, and thinks about Padre Island: I know you can get in your car and drive the whole length of the beach, dodging rattlesnakes and tarantulas, and the seagulls are wild enough to swoop down and bite the French fry out of your mouth. I know you can go down there on Spring Break and tie on a little wildness, do some drinking, make some bad decisions. Wind tousles her hair. She stands, brushing caked sand off her knees. She bends to pick up her purse. But most of the time, they don’t follow you all the way home. She thinks about crying, folds her hands around each other and wishes for a tear or two. She wants them sliding across her skin, falling off her nose, dripping onto the sand; all of her sorrow riding them back to Mother Ocean.
No, says a voice deep in her mind. Crying’s done.
Her stomach rumbles. She turns and looks down into her purse, puts her hand inside. She wants to check the time but remembers that her phone is shifting around on the sandy bottom of the Atlantic. She sighs and looks around, trying to remember where the snack bar is.
She sets off, heading back toward the bus stop, veering through the brisk wind and down close to the water. She takes off her flip-flops, carrying them hooked over her fingers. The firm wet sand chills the bones in her feet. She looks ahead and sees a family’s territory staked out in blankets, a pair of kids running pell-mell for the water, their father striding behind. An umbrella shades the mother as she wrestles with a coffin-sized cooler.
The sight blows into her hunger, freshens it. She closes her eyes for a moment, and stands still and thinks about fried shrimp in a red and white paper basket: crinkle cut fries, Coke on ice, pale spots of grease glimmering in waxed paper.
How long a walk to Siasconset?
She buys a slice of pizza at the snack bar and sits down on a bench to eat it. When she’s done she wipes off her fingers and goes up to the window, asking for another one, her stomach growling and oblivious to everything but its own desire for a steady stream of food. The bus pulls up, idles as a handful of people climb down the stairs and step onto the sandy sidewalk. She pays for the pizza and folds the slice before taking a big bite, grease sizzling hot on the roof of her mouth. She buys a Coke and carries her food up the road and away from the beach. She starts to cry and ignores the tears, letting them run down her face. The street and the dunes and the cars turn blurry, dividing into ghost images.
Emily wolfs down the pizza. She takes a swig of Coke and wipes her eyes and runs back to catch the bus. She climbs on, into air-conditioning and the crosswinds from open windows. The inside it smells like suntan lotion and ice cream and diesel fumes. She takes a seat beside the door, watching the dune grass as it ripples in the wind, bending in bright green waves toward Nantucket Town. The sheen on the undersides of the blades shines bright gold in the sun. She turns around and watches the retreat of the sea through the back windshield, harsh and dark and too bright to look at, stretching rugged blue from horizon to horizon.
In town, she finds a payphone near the bus stop. She picks up the handset, puts her drink on the ground, and dials Aaron’s number. The bus rumbles to life. Sun warms her back as she puts the phone to her ear and glances around at the cobbled street with its brick sidewalks and the day trippers walking in their sandals and Bermuda shorts, the plastic bags with bright logos swinging from their wrists. There is music made indistinct by a cacophony of engines and human voices. Lacy shade cast by overhead branches moves across the cobblestones with the wind.
“Hotchner.”
“Aaron.” Her stomach quails. Emily takes a deep breath. “Do you love me?”
“Emily?” She hears him sitting up straight, all of his attention funneling into the receiver. He turns gruff. “Where are you? I’ve been trying to reach”“
Her eyes close. “Can you just answer the question?”
He pauses. “Where are you?”
“You know I’m still on Nantucket, you can read the area code.” She turns around, puts her back against the keypad and scans the faces. Tourists crisscross a street full of crawling cars. Layers of noise slide and bump into one another, the evidence of human occupation. The wind changes direction and brings with it an odor of fried seafood. “Now for fuck’s sake can you answer the question? Do you love me or not?”
He clears his throat. “Yes.”
“Can you listen? Can you sit still and listen to me without having Garcia trace the number?” She huddles close to the wall. Her eyes crawl the crowds. “Without sending the cavalry out here after me?”
“I can do that.”
“Yeah, you can…but will you? Where are you? What are you doing right now? Are you lying to me?”
“I was looking for you.”
“I’m fine,” she says. “I’m fine.”
“You gave your nurses quite the scare. Your doctors are very concerned.” He keeps his voice calm. “How are you feeling?”
“You think I’m crazy. You think I’ve lost my mind.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I’m fine. Look, I know you don’t understand and don’t try and give me some line about how you do because you don’t. You don’t. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I hear you, Emily.”
She starts to cry. “There’s no Stockholm here. I hear you thinking it and I even hear you dismissing me and that’s fine, you know, that’s your right and your inclination as a professional. I’m sure you want to believe it, too.” She sniffs. “You don’t know me.”
“And Foyet does.”
Her jaws get tight. “I hate that tone, I fucking hate it, that’s the my-ears-are-working-fine-but-my-brain-is-closed-for-business tone of voice, and there’s no room for that here.” She wipes her nose. “There’s no room for that in this discussion. You’re either going to listen to me, truly listen, or I’m going to hang up.”
“All right.”
Emily wipes her cheeks with the clean end of her dirty pizza napkin. “You don’t know me. You don’t know about my mind, the things I think about. I have secrets, Aaron. Dark ones.”
His voice softens. “I’m listening.”
“I-I…” She swallows and clutches the phone. “I think about dead girls. Dead women. I think about having sex with them. I’ve never done it, I don’t know if I would ever do it, but I like thinking about it. It turns me on. It’s been like this since I was a kid, and there was…there was…” She exhales. “I’ve never told anybody like this, the way I’m telling you now.”
Silence.
“George knows. He read my journals.” She holds wisps of hair against the side of her face. “I don’t know why, I think he was researching all of us, you know, looking for a way in, but he found that and…”
“Used it?”
“That part of it doesn’t really matter.” She blows her nose. “The rest doesn’t matter.” She laughs and it’s a bitter sound. “How do you feel about me now?”
“I don’t have the words for how this information makes me feel.”
She snorts. “It’s okay, Aaron. You can say it.”
“What’s that?”
“That you can’t love a necrophile. That you can’t love a woman who fucks a serial killer.”
“How long has…how long have you and…” He lets out a rough breath and pauses. “How long?”
“Does it matter?” Fresh tears spill over. “Does it really?”
“No,” he sighs. For a short moment there is silence. “Are you going to be safe? Do I need to worry about you, Emily?”
She peels the napkin into shreds. “I’m not going to pull a Virginia Woolf, if that’s what you mean.”
“You don’t sound very safe right now.”
“I’m all right.” Her face screws up in an effort to hold back the sobs. “I’m all right. I’m okay.” She leans a hand into the wall and looks at her feet. “I am,” she whispers.
“Tell me where you are. I’ll come get you. We’ll talk.”
She laughs through the tears. “No. I’m sorry, Aaron.”
He draws in breath.
Emily hangs up.
She wipes her nose and turns around. She smells ice cream wrappers and ketchup cooking into the cobbles. The day’s heat rises up and wraps around her, dampening her hairline with sweat. She looks into the crowd. Gulls turn and swoop in circles through the trees. She picks up her drink and steps down off the sidewalk. The tide of busy people sweeps her across the street. She steps up on the opposite curb and the phone starts to ring. Emily glances over her shoulder. She walks to a storefront and pulls open the glass door. A bell jingles overhead.
It’s cool inside. Emily wanders to the picture window and pretends to look at postcards. She picks one up, flips it over and reads the back. “I knew I could count on you to lie,” she murmurs.
“I didn’t misrepresent my location. You assumed, and you really don’t want to be the person lecturing anyone about lying. Whether by omission or otherwise. Wouldn’t you say it’s a little late in the day for that kind of hypocrisy?”
“And I knew I could count on you to be both cold and rude.” She tucks the postcard back into its slot. “You don’t disappoint.”
“I don’t know what else you expected.” Aaron moves past her and pushes the door open.
“A little empathy.” Emily follows him onto the street. “I expected that you’d fake it, at least.”
“One can have too much of a good thing.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
He looks at her. “How did this happen?”
“There’s no way for me to answer you that you won’t take apart, or cut into, or string up so you can mock me with it.”
He lowers his voice. “Do you really think so little of me?”
“Right now?” Emily walks alongside him. “Seriously?” She laughs. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“This is still between us.” Aaron sighs through his nose and looks into her eyes. “You and I and Foyet. For now, it’s my intention to keep it that way.”
“Until when? You have your answers?”
“Yes.”
“Why should I talk to you, Aaron? What possible motivation could that statement give me?” She pauses beneath the shade of a tree. “So…you’ll reserve judgment until I tell you what you need to know in order to judge me.” She lets loose a bitter laugh. “That’s big of you.”
“There’s no need to be so defensive.”
“No need! Oh, you’re a real piece of work.” She folds her arms tight across her breasts. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t walk away from you right now.”
He shrugs. “I don’t have one.”
“Try.” She lifts her eyebrows. “I know you can do better than that.”
He locks eyes with her. “If you walk away from me, you won’t get far.”
“So now you’re going to threaten me. That’s nice.”
“If that’s the way you want to see it.”
She glances around and up to his eyes. “If you want to talk, fine. But I’m not doing it out here.”
“We can go somewhere private.”
She looks up at him. “What did you have in mind?”
“A hotel room. Is that private enough for you?”
“I hope so.” She snorts, her gaze skipping over the surface of the crowd. “Good luck getting one if you don’t have one.”
“I have one.”
“At the Nantucket Inn?”
“Yes.” He pauses. “The others flew out this morning. There were a lot of protests but I think it’s really for the best.”
She brushes hair out of her eyes. “What?”
“This investigation has been shifted to another team.”
“So we’re here alone? The rest of the team is gone?”
He nods. “They didn’t want to go without seeing you but I insisted.”
“All right.” She sighs. “We’ll go to your room and I’ll tell you what happened.”
“And then what?”
Emily laughs. “We’ll see what you have to say when story time’s over.”