Soon, in bed, I gaze up through the skylights to make out faraway pinpricks of stars through the closer and more menacing claws of swaying tree branches. I imagine myself in one of Maura’s books, my sleep-adjacent brain chasing a series of morbid images: Trapped in my attic room with a killer. A hand shooting out from the dark maw of the dumbwaiter. An ax bursting around the corner of a locker-lined hallway. Pushed, bloody and flailing, into the deep blue of a pool.

Then, lost to sleep, I dream of beautiful sixteen-year-old girls, long dead and gone, and a vivacious, sharp forty-two-year-old mom, gone yesterday.

CHAPTER TWO

Though I am a born-and-bred Californian, it’s like I have stepped onto another planet, rather than simply been transplanted five hundred miles up the coast. To me, California has always meant the urban sprawl of Los Angeles County or the sun-dappled beach communities of San Diego. Glass and steel and row houses crowding San Francisco. Silicon Valley mansions nestled in the mountains. Farmland, even, making us the nation’s food basket.

But this? This is Americana with a coastal twist. Quaint Main Street cluttered with mom-and-pop businesses. Clapboard houses that could equally be a bar, a hotel, or a sea-glass museum. Or all three in one. It’s small-town charm. Friday Night Lights. It could be Kentucky, if not for the ocean view. Not that you can see it from here.

“Don’t you want to live at the beach?” I ask Maura on the drive to school—which is not even an eight-minute walk from home, but my grandmother insisted on a driving tour of Seaview before registering me.

I roll down my window, suck in salty air. We’re still inland, but the cerulean line of the ocean winks in the distance. Refined California Cape Cods line the street, broken up by the very occasional sixties-style apartment complex or nineties duplex. We zoom around a bend, and a house on the horizon takes my breath away. Straight from the pages of an architecture magazine, it’s all angles and modernity: Concrete and deep-red wood. Glass everywhere. As many windows as can fit into a contemporary piece of art.

“That’s the mayor’s place,” Maura says, barely paying a glance. Her eyes remain on the road, which turns increasingly faded and cracked as we drive on. “He keeps a property in town, too. I do visit my beach cottage occasionally—we passed it back there—but I prefer the Victorian for every day.”

Running at breakneck speed across the road to the warm sand. Building a lopsided sandcastle soon reclaimed by the sea. Maura ensconced in the front room, typing away.

“We used to spend summers there,” I say. Ask, really. “Right?”