Dark Water (Cooper M. Reid Book 1) Read online

  1

  It was the third time in a month that Jenny had woken up to the sound of a child’s laughter. Had her own child been alive, this would have made sense. There were times when she heard the noise and dared to imagine that the last four years had only been a dream—that Henry was still alive. But Henry was dead. He had drowned less than ten feet away from the beach and they’d had a funeral and memorial service without a body two weeks later.

  By the time Jenny sat up in bed and her sleep-fogged mind came around, she understood that a laughing child in her house made no sense. Hearing it in the dead of the night and then remembering that Henry was dead created a sharp fear within her that took her breath away.

  She’d heard the noise more than a dozen times in the last year and had tried her best to ignore it. But this was the third time within a week. It was becoming far too much to take.

  “Sam,” she said, nudging her husband. “You awake?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you hear it?”

  “I was trying to pretend I didn’t.”

  That said, Sam sat up in bed next to her and cut on his bedside lamp. His hair was in disarray and he squinted against the light. It hurt Jenny to be reminded just how much Henry had taken after his father. Sometimes the resemblance was so uncanny that she felt like Henry might have actually taken up residence in Sam when he had left this world.

  “It sounded like a girl this time,” Jenny said.

  “Yeah,” Sam said, still trying to drag himself out of sleep.

  Jenny didn’t know how Sam could remotely think of sleeping after hearing what she had heard. A child’s laughter, of course, was always cheerful and melodic. But when heard at two in the morning in a house that had not harbored a child in almost five years, it was an entirely different sound.

  It was menacing and creepy.

  “Come on, then,” Sam said. “Let’s go take a look.”

  “Aren’t you scared?” she asked.

  “Of course I am. That’s why I want you to come with me.”

  Sam slid out of bed, dressed only in a pair of boxer briefs. He shoved his feet into his slippers and walked to the bedroom door.

  He turned back to Jenny and she saw that he was doing his best to stay calm. Underneath his façade of aloofness and tired annoyance, he was just as scared as she was. She assumed this was his way of trying to assume the role of protector.

  “You can stay here if you want,” he said.

  She shook her head as she got out of bed and joined him. They stood by the bedroom door for a moment, trying to find the courage to go out. They had never seen anything or found anything disturbed after hearing the laughter, so Jenny wasn’t too scared. But the fact that they were actually looking for what she was beginning to think was an actual ghost or disembodied voice was frightening enough.

  Sam took the lead and walked out into the hallway, cutting on the light. Jenny reached out and took his hand as they made their way down the hall. The house was quiet, the only sound coming from the murmur of waves crashing on the beach four hundred yards away. It was a sound they had long ago gotten used to and one that Jenny only ever heard distinctly when she was having trouble going to sleep.

  “Any idea where it came from?” Sam asked her.

  “Not sure. Maybe the dining room.”

  They walked down the hall, passing Jenny’s study and the room that they were now calling the guest room but, at one time, had been Henry’s room. The door was closed and Jenny reached out to touch it. It was a habit she had started the day after Henry’s death. She did it almost habitually whenever she walked down the hall.

  The hallway led them to the large open living room and the adjoined kitchen, separated by a bar containing a wine rack, the day’s mail, and a clear vase filled with seashells. When Sam cut on the lights, there was a harrowing moment when Jenny saw the darkened shape of a small person. But as her eyes adjusted, she saw the shape of the vase for what it was and allowed herself a moment to fill embarrassed.

  She’d nearly screamed there for a moment.

  The dining room sat off to the right of the kitchen and couldn’t be fully seen until they were halfway across the living room. They walked through the living room, through the kitchen, and into the dining room. Jenny noticed that Sam was a bit quicker to cut these lights on now, slapping at the switch on the wall in a minor panic.

  The dining room was just as empty as the rest of the house. The blinds on the sliding glass door leading outside were partially open, showing only the darkness outside. Jenny peeked out of them and saw only the night-shrouded back porch and the beach beyond. She could barely see the ocean through the darkness, the white tips of waves meandering in the night.

  She cut the porch light on and drew the blinds fully open. The porch was empty, as was the beach and the thin concrete walkway that from the back porch to the edge of their yard.

  She slowly closed the blinds and turned to Sam. He was looking back into the kitchen, slowly turning in a semi-circle. He was rubbing at his messy hair as a frustrated look passed over his face.

  “You okay?” Jenny asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “This is just getting old. We need to get some answers for this. If it’s pranksters, we need to have them stopped. If it’s…well, ghosts, then we need to find out if there is anything we can do.”

  “We had those guys come in,” Jenny reminded him shyly, knowing it was a sore point.

  “Ah yes, the ghost hunters. And they didn’t find anything. Remember?”

  “I know. But still, I—,”

  Something shattered behind them.

  Jenny let out a shriek of surprise and looked to the right. In the kitchen, the vase with the seashells had fallen from the bar and smashed on the floor. Glass shards and seashells were strewn cross the kitchen, the fragments of the vase twinkling in the glow of the overhead lights.

  Neither of them said anything. They simply shared a look that communicated a single thought in that almost telepathic way that most married couples are able to do. The thought they shared was: the vase was sitting in the middle of the bar and didn’t just fall off. It was pushed or thrown.

  Jenny crept closer towards Sam and took his arm. She was beginning to tremble as she looked at the mess. She felt tears coming on and wasn’t quite sure why. When they had heard the laughter on other nights, it had often been a boy. She had always wondered if it was Henry, coming back to visit them just to make sure they were doing okay and hadn’t left the beach just because he’d died there. She wondered if her urge to cry was based on that—on wondering if Henry had been here at some point.

  But the laughter had been distinctly girlish tonight. And apparently, the little girl had not been a fan of their vase of seashells.

  “Go back to bed,” Sam said, his voice shaky. “I’ll clean this up.”

  His eyes were distant and his face looked flushed.

  “Not right now,” Jenny said. “Sam…let’s get out of here. We can grab a room at one of the hotels or something. I just can’t—,”

  A high pitched laugh filled with pure joy filled the kitchen.

  Jenny screamed and put her hands to her mouth. She started to cry, realizing that the laughter had come from directly beside her. As she took a series of hitching breaths, another noise filled the kitchen and then the dining room. It sounded like the shuffling of running footsteps.

  “Oh my God,” Sam said, looking into the dining room and placing his arm tightly around Jenny’s shoulder.

  Jenny didn’t want to turn around. She didn’t want to see whatever it was that Sam was seeing. But she couldn’t resist. Morbid human curiosity forced her to turn back towards the dining room.
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  She began to whimper when she saw the small wet footprints on the carpet.

  They led to the sliding glass door and out onto the back porch. Crying now, Jenny went to the door and looked out. The footprints were on their porch, too. They led down the stairs and into the yard where they faded out to nothing, headed towards the dark and endless sea beyond.

  2

  Of all the places he had expected to end up after everything that had happened to him, the beach was certainly not one of them.

  When Cooper placed his bare feet into the sand, it felt like he had stepped into another world. While he wasn’t necessarily trying to escape his past, he was definitely trying to hide from it for a while. Feeling the sand beneath his toes as he stared out to the ocean, he was pretty sure he was succeeding.

  Cooper M. Reid had come to the beach quite a lot as a child. Until the age of fourteen, his family’s traditional summer vacation had been a trip to Orlando where they spent two days at the beach and two days at whichever Disney parks he and his brother could agree on. And while that part of his life seemed like nothing more than a series of pleasant dreams during a deep and reviving sleep, he tried to focus on them as he watched the ocean.

  But his mind wanted to go elsewhere. It wanted to remind him for the hundredth time that his more recent past was bound to catch up with him sooner or later. He’d have people to answer to and could potentially be in a hell of a lot of trouble.

  He walked out to the edge of the water and let it slip over his toes. It was only the beginning of May and the water still had a cold bite to it. He watched a few gulls circling overhead and then peered down the beach where a couple was walking hand in hand. This stretch of Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina would be packed in two weeks or so according to the bit of research he had done before visiting. But for now, it was mostly empty.

  Cooper checked his watch and smiled. He had a meeting in half an hour, one that he had been waiting quite some time to have. How long he had been waiting, he wasn’t quite sure. Time had become a very tenuous and perplexing concept to him over the last few months.

  All he knew was that he hadn’t spoken to anyone about the task he had in mind or, for that matter, why he had decided to run away from his very specific troubles. Knowing that he could verbally remove that weight with the aid of a simple conversation was incredible, but also terrifying.

  Giving the ocean another look, Cooper walked back up the beach to the tiny dunes and the wooden stairs that led back to the parking lot of the motel in which he was staying. He put his shoes back on when he reached the wooden walkway and headed to his car.

  He felt like there were eyes on him as he started the engine and pulled out into the thin flow of pre-summer beach traffic. He knew it was silly, but he also knew that in trying to escape the people that were no doubt looking for him, it was a feeling that he was going to have to get used to.

  ***

  She was sitting at a table that was positioned by the edge of the pier, looking out onto a curved portion of beach filled with hotels. A small basket of what appeared to be popcorn shrimp sat in front of her. She was popping one into her mouth just as Cooper spotted her. She was wearing a basic halter top with jeans and a pair of cheap flip flops. Her eyes were hidden by her gold-tinted Aviators and her blonde hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail.

  When she saw Cooper approaching her, she smiled and took off her sunglasses off. Her eyes grew brighter as her smile expanded. Cooper had forgotten how gorgeous she was, how radiant her smile could be, and how her eyes sparkled.

  He was just glad to see her smiling as she stood up from the table and opened her arms for a hug. Cooper had worried that she might slap him hard across the face when they met. She’d have every right to do so…that was for sure.

  Cooper met her quickly, filling her arms and returning the embrace. She smelled like suntan lotion and strawberries. The simple feel of her bobbing ponytail on his hand made Cooper feel like he was floating. It wasn’t just that it was her; it was the fact that it was the first physical contact he’d had with anyone in almost nine months.

  “I’ve missed you, Steph,” Cooper said.

  “You too,” she said.

  Cooper could tell that she was close to tears and he didn’t want to see her cry. He broke the hug as gingerly as he could and held her at arm’s length. He looked into her face and wanted to kiss her very badly. But they were different people now and time had done some strange things to both of them.

  “Sit down, sit down,” she said. “I’m not even trying to get sentimental today.”

  “Probably for the best,” Cooper said.

  He took his seat and looked out to the sea again. With Stephanie Pagent sitting across from him and the beach behind them, Cooper felt like this might be what people meant when they referred to Paradise. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt this happy—this free.

  Of course, the conversation they needed to have would derail all of that. They sat in silence for a moment, taking each other in. A waiter came by, sneaking up on them from the bar that sat on the backside of the pier. Cooper ordered a beer and fish tacos and then he and Stephanie returned to their silence.

  As had always been the case, it was Stephanie that broke it. And when she did, she did so with her usual intense focus, looking him in the eyes with the rapt attention that he had never been able to give her.

  “It’s been twenty months, Cooper,” she said. “Almost two years. That’s a long time.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you?” she asked.

  “I do. Believe me. And one of these days, I’ll tell you why it’s been so long. I’ll tell you everything. But I can’t do that right now.”

  She nodded, as if this was exactly what she had expected.

  “You know,” she said, “I thought you were dead for a while. When three months passed and I hadn’t heard from you, I called your parents. They told me that they were assuming the same thing. They said the people you worked for had no answers. So me, your parents, and God knows who else…we all just assumed you were dead. I spent over a year thinking you had died. Do you know what it feels like to get a phone call from someone you had assumed was dead?”

  “I can’t say that I do.”

  “And now you want me keeping secrets, is that right? I’m not clear on why you aren’t telling your parents that you’re alive. Do you know how messed up that is?”

  “I’m sorry, Steph. But it has to be this way for now. You were the only one I thought would be able to help me and keep some secrets for a while.”

  “How long is a while?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “Oh,” she said with a sarcastic smile. “I almost forgot.”

  She reached down beneath her seat and put her purse on the table. She pulled a trade paperback out and placed it on the opposite side of her basket of shrimp.

  “Because most of the world assumes you’re dead, do you have any idea what this goes for these days?”

  Cooper looked at the book and felt his heart deflate in his chest. The title was very familiar. Grasping the Fringes. The name of the author was even more familiar: Cooper M. Reid.

  “How much?” he asked.

  “About five hundred. Autographed copies fetch around three grand. I’m not going to lie to you…I sold mine.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Cooper said.

  “The History Channel even did a special on you. Spooky Smarts, they called it.”

  “Seriously?”

  She nodded, selecting another shrimp and tossing it into her mouth.

  Cooper wasn’t sure how to feel about that. A year or so ago, he would have probably been elated. But now it felt like he was dead and buried yet alive at the same time, fully aware people egging his tombstone six feet overhead.

  He looked back down to the book and frowned.

  When he’d had the book published, it had been one of the happiest days of his life. But now it was a reminder of
a life that he had not used to its full potential. Of course, that had been before he had gone missing for three months. The things that had happened to him and the things he had seen—they all made the former Cooper, the one with the huge ambition and drive, seem like a careless fool.

  Oddly enough, he couldn’t remember the things he had seen or what had happened to him.

  “Cooper…it is nice to see you,” Stephanie said. “I can’t even begin to explain how nice it is. And I want to help you in any way that I can. But I don’t know that I’m going to be able to do anything illegal just to keep you a secret. If you have people in powerful places looking for you like you say, then how do you know they aren’t watching us right now.”

  “I’ve been extremely careful,” Cooper said. “Before I made the decision to come here, I reached out to the only other friend I ever had. It’s a guy I used to work with...someone I knew I could trust. He’s kind of like you. He’s a whiz with computers and spent some of his youth with hacker groups. Much like you, he’s revered in paranoid online circles. He and I spent about three weeks making sure that the people that I used to work with have no idea that I am back.”

  “How long have you been back?”

  “Nine months,” Cooper said.

  “All of the news reports said you disappeared while doing research for some weird case in Kansas. Is that right?”

  “Close enough,” Cooper said. “But like I said…I’ll tell you everything some other time. I just don’t know that I can get through it all right now.”

  She gave him a look that was partly playful but mostly hurt. “So for right now, you just need me to do some pretty sketchy favors for you, is that it?”

  “Yeah,” he said softly.

  “And will you expect me to just come running whenever you ask?”

  “Steph…it’s not like that. Really.”

  Stephanie put her sunglasses back on. Cooper wasn’t sure if this was some sort of defense mechanism or what. He had never been particularly good at reading women.

  The waiter came back with Cooper’s beer and tacos. Stephanie watched the waiter go, waiting for him to be out of earshot before she spoke.