The Night Swim Read online

  9

  Hannah

  I hope you’re enjoying Neapolis, Rachel. It’s a majestic coastline. Postcard pretty. Don’t let that lull you into a false sense of security. Always remember that it’s beautiful on the surface. Underneath, it’s treacherous. It should never be underestimated.

  I owe you an apology, Rachel. It was terrible manners on my part, inviting you to the jetty and then standing you up. The invitation was sincere. I truly hoped we could meet in person. In the end, I found it too overwhelming, returning to Morrison’s Point. I had a sudden flash of memory. It left me shaking and sucked the breath out of me. I couldn’t stand to be there a moment longer. I had to leave. You can’t imagine what she went through that night, Rachel.

  For me, the past is like an overexposed photograph: so blindingly bright that it can’t be looked at with the naked eye. Filled with moments too painful to recall, beyond the faint taste of a bittersweet memory lost in time.

  Being here in Neapolis for the first time since I was a child, I’ve come to the conclusion that to overcome my past, I must remember it. Every detail. From the poignant, to the trivial, to, yes, even the horrifying.

  When I return to a familiar place, or stumble across a scent that takes me back to my early childhood, or even taste a food I haven’t eaten since I was young, I glimpse a snapshot of forgotten memories. It helps me remember. Funnily enough, writing you these letters helps as well.

  It’s excruciating, this lancing of my emotional wounds. If I’m asking too much of you to share the burden then feel free to rip up my letters. I won’t judge you. But I’ll keep writing, nevertheless. I find these letters cathartic. It may take me a while to get my story out. Some of it is buried so deep that I need time to digest it before formulating it into words.

  So where were we, Rachel? I remember now. I was telling you about my mom. At first she waved off her diagnosis as a blip. Another obstacle to overcome in a lifetime of hurdles. Eight months after her diagnosis, she was sicker than ever and trying to pretend there was nothing wrong.

  On the first day of the school vacation, Mom insisted on dropping us at the beach. She stopped her beat-up sedan in the dirt parking lot, leaving the spluttering engine running while she popped the trunk. Jenny went out to retrieve our beach bag and towels.

  With Jenny temporarily distracted, Mom slipped me cash.

  “Ice-cream money,” she whispered. “Don’t tell Jenny where it came from. She’ll make you give it back.” I bunched it up in my fist.

  “Have fun,” Mom said, blowing us kisses as she jerked the car into motion. She was heading to the hospital for an appointment. “I’ll expect you both at dinnertime. Not a second before.”

  “Sure, Mom,” said Jenny. Her voice was drowned out by the rattle of the car. It badly needed a repair that it wouldn’t get unless it broke down entirely. Mom hadn’t held down a regular job since she was diagnosed. She worked when she was able, which was becoming less and less frequent. When she did get a shift, she came home ashen. It would take her days to recover.

  Jenny must have seen me slip the money secretly into the pocket of my shorts as we walked down the path toward the beach. She knew my mother better than me.

  “Give it up.” Jenny held out her hand.

  “Give what up?” I asked, feigning innocence.

  “You know what.”

  “Mom gave it to me. It’s for ice cream.”

  “We don’t need ice cream.” Jenny held out her palm for the money.

  I handed over the crumpled note. Mom’s little gambit hadn’t worked. Sometimes it felt as if Jenny were the only grown-up in our family.

  Jenny and I found a spot on the sand not far from the Morrison’s Point jetty. Her school friends arrived throughout the morning. They congregated near us in small satellite groups of teenagers, lying on towels and listening to music on boom boxes.

  The boys wrestled with each other or kicked around balls on the sand. The girls rubbed each other’s backs with coconut oil and compared tan lines while watching the boys surreptitiously through the tint of their sunglasses.

  Oblivious to the antics of teenagers, I built an elaborate sand castle with turrets, which I decorated with shells. When the heat intensified, Jenny’s friends abandoned their towels to cool down in the water.

  The jetty was high and the water was deep, so that only the bravest dived in. The boys egged on each other to jump, hooting in derision if someone chickened out. The girls mostly waded in their bikinis into the waves, where they swam and splashed each other.

  Jenny lay on her towel, reading a book and listening to music on our transistor radio. Occasionally she lifted up her head to glance wistfully at the sea.

  Eventually, she asked if I was all right playing alone on the sand while she swam. I shrugged. It didn’t matter to me either way, so long as Jenny didn’t make me join her. I hated swimming. Still do. Mom and Jenny tried to teach me, but I always flapped about and swallowed seawater until I ran out of the waves in tears, vowing never to swim again.

  Jenny tossed her sunglasses onto her towel and told me not to go anywhere. I nodded without looking up as I contoured a sand castle with the edge of a shovel.

  Some boys who’d been jumping from the jetty wolf-whistled as Jenny walked down the sand in her coral bikini. I sensed her self-consciousness, though she tried to hide it by standing taller and pushing her long golden hair behind her shoulders.

  Jenny didn’t wade into the water like the other girls. She went to the jetty and climbed to the top of the wooden rails. She balanced like a flamingo before diving into the water in a low racing dive that skimmed under the surface with barely a splash. I had the impression that it was her way of telling those boys to leave her alone. She emerged a distance away among her school friends, who were chatting as they bobbed in the waves.

  I returned to working on the outer walls of my sand castle. A shadow fell across the sand. Looming over me was one of the boys who’d wolf-whistled at Jenny. He had dirty brown hair and pale gray eyes. He held a lit cigarette casually between his fingers. His friends up on the slope of the beach seemed to be watching him with rapt attention. I had a feeling that he’d been sent to talk to me on a dare.

  “Nice castle,” he said.

  “Thanks.” I pressed my last shells into the sand to decorate the turrets.

  “My friend wants to know your phone number,” he said.

  “Why? What does he want to talk to me about?”

  “He doesn’t want to call you,” he said, kicking at the sand. “It’s your sister. What’s your number?”

  “I don’t know. And even if I did, it wouldn’t matter because our phone’s not working,” I said.

  He shrugged and walked back to his friends up on the dune, leaving a trail of cigarette ash behind. When he reached his friends, he angrily slapped the money into their hands as if he’d lost a bet.

  Jenny came out of the water not long after.

  “What did he want?” she asked, wiping the salt water off her face with her beach towel.

  “Nothing,” I said, deep in concentration as I used my hands to compress sand into a moat.

  10

  Guilty or Not Guilty

  Season 3, Episode 3: The Party

  Lexi lives in a subdivision a few miles out of Neapolis. It’s called Crystal Cove. Sounds to me like the name of a beachfront community. Except when I visited Crystal Cove, the first thing I noticed was that the ocean was nowhere to be seen. The subdivision, with its cute nautical name, is cut off from the coast by a forest. There’s no crystal in the neighborhood, and definitely no cove.

  Crystal Cove was built on scrubland by a developer with little imagination. The houses look freakishly like clones. They’re all light blue-gray clapboard with white trim. They have double garages and attic windows. Even the gardens are identical. The place feels like a social-engineering experiment gone wrong.

  When I visited, there were no kids riding bikes. Nobody tending garden beds or
mowing lawns. No dogs barking.

  I rang Lexi’s doorbell. She opened it wearing jeans and a black crop top with a pink sparkly motif. She’s cheerleader pretty. Shoulder-length blond-streaked hair, bright blue eyes. She was friendly enough. We talked for a bit, but she asked me not to record her.

  Lexi has good reason for wanting to keep a low profile. You’ll learn why later. For now, let’s just stick with the idea that Lexi is the girl next door. A pretty one with lots of cool friends and a fair bit of attitude.

  When K arrived at Lexi’s house late that afternoon, they pulled the sofas out of the way and rolled up rugs to prepare for the party. They made a huge bowl of popcorn, chose a playlist, and tested out the sound system. The first ring at the door came just after eight P.M.

  By nine P.M., the party was officially out of control. They’d invited fifteen people. Four times that number turned up. Half the guests they didn’t know. Many were college aged. Some were even older.

  Almost everyone brought alcohol. The kitchen counter was laden with bottles of liquor and beer. Pieces of popcorn littered the floor like white confetti.

  At some point in the night, someone, nobody ever knew who, poured cheap vodka into all the half-drunk bottles of soda in the kitchen. Not any vodka, either. It was a backyard moonshine that could strip paint off a wall. K drank several cups of soda. She had no idea that it was spiked. By the time she realized it, she was already drunk.

  A lot of what I know about the party is taken from videos some of the kids posted on their social media feeds that night. In the videos that I’ve seen, K is unsteady on her feet. She pushes through the crowd in the living room, pausing to laugh and talk with friends. She looks visibly drunk. In the corner of the frame of one video, she can be seen losing her balance and stumbling into someone.

  The person she bumped into was Lou Lowe. He’s a baseball pitcher on the high school varsity team. He’s tall, with freckles and strawberry blond hair. Lexi had dated him a few times. She considered him an ex-boyfriend. She would sometimes tell her friends that she wanted to get back with him. That he was the love of her life. Her friends say that she talked that way about all her exes. It was Lexi’s way of putting up a “no trespassers” sign.

  Lou remembers that night well because of what happened afterward. Here’s what Lou Lowe said when I spoke with him earlier today.

  “I had a training session real early the next morning, so I couldn’t drink. Not even a beer. I guess I was maybe one of the only people at the party who wasn’t drunk. I remember that she knocked into me and said something like ‘my bad.’ I made some joke about how she could bump into me any time. She thought that was funny and we started talking.”

  After a while, Lou pulled the classic line. He told K that it was too noisy to talk over the music. He took her by the hand, supposedly to find somewhere quiet to talk.

  K allowed him to pull her out of the throng of partygoers down the corridor. They went to the laundry room, where a glass sliding door led to an outdoor courtyard. Several people saw them disappear together. Word spread like wildfire. The rumors reached Lexi. She stormed through the house looking for them, furious that her best friend had disappeared with the boy who she had suddenly decided was the love of her life.

  Lexi claims that she found them making out under the laundry line, between hanging bedsheets. She tore into K with a slew of accusations. Most of them were incomprehensible. Lexi was drunk and barely coherent.

  Lou walked off in the middle of Lexi’s rant. He left K to take the brunt of her friend’s drunken fury. He feels bad about that now. He wonders if things would have turned out differently if he’d stayed. By the way, he says it’s not true that they were making out. He insists that Lexi made the whole thing up to try to justify her actions afterward and to paint K in a bad light.

  When Lexi ran out of insults, she went inside, locked the glass sliding door, gave K the finger, and for added measure pulled down the blinds. K was alone in the dark in Lexi’s backyard. It was cold out. Her jacket was inside, along with her backpack and her cell phone.

  K walked around the house to the driveway, where she waited to catch a ride home with someone leaving the party. Nobody left. She stood in the cold as people gawped and laughed at her through the living room windows. Lexi moved among the onlookers, whispering her version of what had happened.

  K was too proud to beg Lexi to let her in, or to ask someone to call her parents and deal with their questions when they picked her up. She’d get home by herself. She walked down the street toward the path she’d taken that afternoon. This time, it wasn’t dusk. It was nearly midnight. More dangerous than ever.

  It’s a calculation women make all the time. Cat Girl, whom I mentioned in Episode 1, had to make the calculation, too. Should she walk home from the bar, or take a taxi? Should she cut through the park, or take the long way around? Should she speed-dial nine-one-one when she thought someone was following her? Should she …

  Well, you could go on endlessly. Women, girls, we make these decisions all the time. Convenience versus safety.

  Most of the time things work out fine.

  Occasionally something terrible happens.

  I’m Rachel Krall. This is Guilty or Not Guilty, the podcast that puts you in the jury box.

  11

  Rachel

  Neapolis’s old cemetery looked more like a secret garden than a burial ground. It was surrounded by black cast-iron fences choked by overgrown ivy. As Rachel pulled her car into the empty parking lot, she knew it wasn’t the smartest thing she’d ever done, taking the bait and turning up at the cemetery first thing in the morning. Curiosity was Rachel’s kryptonite. Always had been. Always would be.

  Her mother used to warn her that her curious streak would get her into trouble one day. She was wrong about only one thing: it had done so not once but many times over the years. It was also the secret of Rachel’s success.

  It was Rachel’s inquisitive nature that drew her to journalism, and it was her indefatigable curiosity that pushed her to investigate the case of a teacher jailed for murdering his wife on their second honeymoon. Rachel found new witnesses who were never contacted by police, and other evidence that strongly indicated the husband, a well-loved high school coach, had been wrongly convicted.

  She turned it into the first season of her podcast. It brought her to national prominence and revived her flagging career just as she was contemplating quitting journalism and finding what she jokingly called a real job. It also caused a torrent of hate mail from people convinced she had helped a murderer go free when his conviction was vacated and he was allowed home pending a retrial.

  That was why Pete was so concerned for her safety. He would have had a fit if he’d known she was at the graveyard alone. Going there was potentially reckless, Rachel granted as she turned the handle of the gate to enter the cemetery. But she couldn’t bring herself to stay away.

  The gate creaked as Rachel pushed it open. She paused, still holding on to the handle as she surveyed shadowy tombstones covered with creepers. They gave the impression the cemetery was more alive than dead.

  A sudden rustle of leaves startled her. The gate slipped out of her grasp, slamming shut behind her with a clang that sent birds flying into the overcast sky. Their panicked wings mimicked Rachel’s quickening heartbeat as she moved deeper into the cemetery. Tree branches interlocked into thick canopies, giving the place a dark soulfulness that might have been quaint under different circumstances.

  The map flapped in her hands from the wind as Rachel walked along the cracked, cobbled path, trying to get her bearings. The crumbling ivy-covered gravestones were arranged in no particular order. The plots had been dug randomly in past centuries, before the practice of arranging the dead in neat, parallel rows. In the old days, the dead were buried in whatever patches of soil were softest and easiest to dig out. As a result, the cobbled path meandered unpredictably into a series of dead ends. Rachel had to retrace her footsteps more than onc
e.

  The map listed a trail of notable graves, all marked with numbers that corresponded to a short historical description. Among them was the grave of an eighteenth-century cabin boy who served on the pirate Blackbeard’s ship and was captured and executed for piracy. He was buried in a rum barrel in lieu of a coffin.

  Farther along were graves of local figures, a senator, a nineteenth-century industrialist, and a cousin of the Wright brothers who’d invested in the aviators’ early aeronautical adventures. There was also a section from the Civil War that included the graves of eleven members of an all-black battalion of Union soldiers.

  Rachel found a path that took her through a row of sycamore trees into the new section of the cemetery. It was a bleak stretch of identical rows of headstones, vastly different from the historic graveyard. The lawn was neatly mowed. The headstones were machine carved. There were no creepers, or overhanging oaks. It was orderly and sterile.

  Wilting wreaths and flower arrangements lying on graves reminded Rachel that these deaths were still mourned by loved ones. A weathered teddy bear was propped on the grave of a stillborn child. A rusty train engine was perched on the tombstone of a young boy, its red paint peeling. The sky rumbled. Rachel looked up. Dark clouds were rolling in like waves about to crash.

  Rachel hadn’t brought an umbrella. She hoped the rain would hold off until she left. She hastily followed the map until she found the row where Jenny Stills’s grave had been marked at the far end. She walked down the row until she reached two connected tombstones carved from a simple gray granite.

  The dedications inscribed in the headstones confirmed at least some basic facts. Jenny, beloved daughter of Hope and sister of Hannah. Hope, beloved mother of Jenny and Hannah. One grave alongside the other. A mother and a daughter who died within three weeks of each other.

  Fresh wild yellow daisies were scattered across both graves. Someone had been there recently. It must have been Hannah, thought Rachel. She squatted down to take a closer look and immediately noticed fading graffiti on the bottom of the headstone. She wiped off a thin coating of dirt until she was able to make out the faint outline of a word on Jenny’s tombstone: WHORE.