Then she tugged on the entire mess and lifted the stick. Some of the seaweed fell away, revealing a mass that looked almost like a bone; it curved the way a face curved along a jawline. That’s when Annie realized that her stick was stuck in what might have been the socket of an eye.

She screamed. Jumped back. Dropped the stick. She slipped and fell hard on her butt onto the sand, her heart racing the way it hadn’t raced since she’d thought someone or something had been trying to break into her cottage in the middle of the night in the dead of winter.

She put a hand up to her chest. “Lucy!” She must have shouted loudly enough for the long-dead Praying Indians in West Tisbury to hear.

But Lucy didn’t answer; she probably was too far down the beach to be in range. Or she’d gone back to the Inn to flirt with Jonas.

Yanking her phone out of her pocket, her hands shaking, her lips quivering, and her eyes fixed on the bone, Annie tapped the link to Lucy’s number.

“Call your father!” she shouted when Lucy answered. “There’s a body on the beach!”

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Later, when the beach was clogged with EMTs, local and state police, and the Inn’s construction crew of half a dozen, plus Earl and Kevin, too, Annie wondered why she hadn’t called John instead of alerting Lucy first. She also wondered why she’d said it was a body when, in fact, it simply looked like a part of someone’s head. Half a skull. White bone, bleached by seawater, yellowed in some places from being wrapped up in the seaweed and God only knew what else for God only knew how long.

She must have been in shock.

But now, because Annie had said it was a body, the entire cast of first-responder characters was there. They’d brought the rescue boat from the Chappy fire station because Annie had said the body was on the beach, but she hadn’t specified whether or not it had been close to the water. Taylor was hanging out with the EMTs because she was one, too, though that day she was technically working at the Inn. As, of course, was her son, Jonas, who stood alone about a dozen feet behind Annie and Lucy, leaning against a dune.

The state police were there because the local ones (i.e. John, et al) had notified them right away because it was an unattended death.

“Skeletal remains,” John told Annie, who was barely listening, “are considered unattended. Then it’s up to the Staties to work in conjunction with the district attorney’s office on Cape Cod.” He added something about Boston that Annie didn’t follow, and then he wandered back to his fellow civil servants before she could ask him to repeat it.