It’s the same thought I had while I was sitting in jail. Wait for high tide, throw myself in the ocean.
“We can find her,” I say. Too bad there are about a million beaches around here, depending on how far she went. What if she’s all the way in Cape Cod? “We need to split up. How far do you think she could’ve gone from here?”
“She took all the cash in my wallet,” Caleb says. “But there wasn’t a lot. Maybe a hundred bucks. So she couldn’t have gotten very far.”
“We’re going to find her,” I say with more authority than I feel. “We’ll stop her before she does anything stupid.”
I hope I’m right. I need to stop Dawn from killing herself. I need to make this right.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
The three of us split up.
I take Wollaston Beach, where I disposed of the pieces of the ceramic turtle the other night. It’s the beach I know best. Seth grumbled about me wandering around the beach by myself at night, but I’ll be fine. I bought a new can of mace for my purse after getting freaked out on Monday night when I arrived at my unlocked house.
Unfortunately, the beach is very large, stretching all the way down the coast. And it’s very, very dark out. I don’t know why it always seems so dark after daylight savings time. I put my high beams on whenever I dare, but I can’t see anything.
Dawn could be anywhere.
For all I know, she’s already drowned herself and we’re too late.
I pull over for a moment to think. I have to be strategic about this, or else it’s like trying to find a grain of sand on this gigantic beach. Dawn isn’t just going to jump into the water and drown. It doesn’t make sense. Her natural instinct will be to kick and flap her arms to save herself. Moreover, her body would quickly be found and if they knew she was alive for a week after her disappearance, it could eliminate me as a suspect. When I had contemplated jumping into the water, I knew there was another element I needed.
Something to weigh me down.
I start driving again, but this time I’m looking for something different. I’m looking for places where they’re doing construction.
After another ten minutes of slowly driving along the coast, I spot it. A construction site, abandoned for the night. Full of bricks and mortar and wooden planks and one other thing.
Cinderblocks.
I park my car and get out. If Dawn raided this construction site for a cinderblock, she couldn’t have gone far from here. Those things are heavy. If my instincts are right, she’s probably somewhere around here. Of course, I’m just guessing. She might not even be at the beach. But I also think she would stay close to where I live, in keeping with her strategy of pinning this whole thing on me.
It’s dark when I get out of my car. There are street lights, but they only illuminate the street. The beach is pitch black.
I turn on the flashlight function on my phone. There’s a pier right around here, and that would be the most logical place for Dawn to jump. That’s what I would’ve done.
The pier is to my left. I took my shoes off the other day, but I leave them on now. I need to be able to make a quick exit. I step into the sand, squinting into the distance, directing my phone at the pier. And then I see it.
A figure hunched over at the very end of the pier.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
DAWN
The average human lifespan is under 80 years. But a lot of turtles live longer than that. Sea turtles especially can live to be 150 years older. Some large turtles can live over 400 years, in theory.
I can’t imagine anyone wanting to live 400 years. I’ve lived thirty years, and it has been utterly exhausting. I’m done. I have experienced everything I need or want to experience. I have had true friendship, even though it didn’t last as long as I would’ve liked. I have had an enjoyable career. I have been in love, until the man I loved betrayed me with another woman. Although to be fair, I did ask him to do it.
Mia once told me she thought she was going to live to be eighty-seven years old. I don’t know how she came up with that number, but she liked to be very specific about things. She told me she was going to move to the Pacific coast and have three children and eight grandchildren. She also had a list of places she wanted to visit before she died. It was a long list.
We’ll go together, Dawn, she used to say. We’ll travel the world, just the two of us. Okay?
The idea of traveling the world was terrifying to me—all those new places and things. I don’t do well with novel experiences. What if you go to a new country, and they can’t serve you food that’s all one color? What if I went into a restaurant and ordered a dish without knowing what it was because I didn’t speak the language, and then it turned out I was eating a turtle?
Yet the idea of traveling with Mia was exciting. I wouldn’t have been scared to be in a new place if she was with me. She would make sure we would have a good time and that I would feel safe. She always did.
Now that she’s gone, the world seems terrifying. I don’t want to leave Massachusetts. The idea of being pregnant and having a baby growing inside me is frightening to me. I don’t like to travel either. If I can’t experience these things with Mia, I don’t want to experience them at all. I thought there was a chance I could do those things with Caleb someday, but unfortunately, that didn’t work out like I thought it would.
I have experienced everything I care to experience. The best parts of my life are over. So there’s no reason to keep going.
And I’m going to make sure my death counts.
I borrowed a small cinderblock from a construction site nearby. I took the smallest one I could find, which should be more than heavy enough to hold me underwater. It weighs around thirty pounds. I bought some cord at a drugstore with the cash I took from Caleb’s wallet. I’ve tied one end to my ankle and the other to the cinderblock.
I’ve been watching the tide come in for the last hour. When the water gets high enough, I’m going to jump with the cinderblock. Nobody is in the water in the middle of November, so there’s an excellent chance I won’t be found for at least a few weeks. The appearance of my corpse will be the final nail in Natalie’s coffin. She will spend the rest of her life in prison.
We did it, Mia. We’re finally going to make her pay.
I wonder if she would have done the same for me. Mia and I defended each other, but I always defended her more vehemently than she defended me. Like that time in third grade when I pushed that boy Jared Kelahan off the top of the monkey bars because he wouldn’t quit teasing her. I remember sitting at the top of the monkey bars, staring at Jared on the ground, watching the pool of blood forming around his head as one of the teachers at the playground started screaming. Mia told me I went too far that time—she sounded a lot like Caleb does sometimes now. But the fact is, Jared never made fun of her again. Actually, he never made fun of anyone ever again.
As the water levels rise, I wonder what Caleb is doing right now. I left him a message, mostly to make sure he knew how to take care of Junior, but he’s smart. He may have figured out from the message what I was planning to do to myself—he’s probably panicked right now. But he’ll come to realize this was for the best. If not now, someday.