When I leave for home, there’s someone waiting at my car.
I squint in the dark at the silent figure leaning against the bonnet. I reach for Jessie’s collar, and she surprises me. She steps in front and growls at the figure. Heath is still in the water, his back to me. Even if I called out, my voice would be lost in the crashing waves.
“Minnow?”
I peer through the dark. “Colleen?”
She takes a small step forward, bundles her hands deep into her coat like she’s trying to disappear inside herself. “Can you call her off?”
Colleen nods nervously at Jessie, and I realize that she hasn’t stopped growling. Dazed, I reach for Jess, tucking my fingers under her white collar. “It’s okay,” I tell her. “It’s all right.”
I think.
I hang on to her collar, and the cold burns my knuckles. There are no other cars in the parking lot. No people. Just us. Colleen stands nervously in front of my car, silvery hair tucked into a black beanie, the wind brushing wisps of loose hair into her face. Jessie’s hot breath steams in the darkness.
“Cold night for a walk,” I say flatly.
“I heard the news…” she finally says. “About your poor mum. I’m so sorry, Min.”
My poor mum. God, is that what she’s reduced to now? My poor dead, murdered mum.
“I worked with her, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
She continues as if I hadn’t spoken. “At the general store, on the weekends,” she says more to herself. “I was the one reported hermissing. It’s funny but…” She tilts her head up, a faraway look in her eyes. “For years after, I thought she’d come walking back in.”
“So did I.”
“I’m so sorry, love.”
I don’t know what to say. Instinctively I look over my shoulder to where my brother stands knee-deep in the waves.
“Were you the one who found her?” Colleen’s voice pulls me back to the present.
“What makes you ask that?”
“Just strange that the week you’re back in town is the week she’s finally found.”
The article did not mention who discovered the body. Chris wasn’t happy about it, but then, it wasn’thismother.
The storm’s coming again. I’m so glad Mum doesn’t have to spend another night outside in the cold.
Colleen shuffles closer. “They said it was blunt-force trauma to the…skull?”
I wince.Blunt-force trauma.Such a clinical way to say that someone out there struck my mum with enough force to cave in the left side of her head. My mum with her soft hands and smiles who never hurt anybody.
“Did they find the…” She hesitates. “The murder weapon?”
I wince again, holding a palm up as if to fend her off. “The police said they didn’t.”
And it’s true, because we looked for it. Found nothing.
“I didn’t know she was…dead. Didn’t wanna believe that. She’d left before…” She lowers her head. “Lots of women ’round here do.”
I see my young self, snot-nosed at the door. Waiting for Mum to come home again. “Yeah,” I mutter. “I remember.”
“She was with me,” Colleen says. “You know that, right?”
