Chapter 1 #2
“Cam,” she calls out.
The detective’s head turns in the direction of her voice. When he sees her, he grimaces and looks away.
“Cameron,” she says again, louder as she approaches. “Detective Wallace.”
With a sigh, Cameron Wallace finally turns all the way around.
He’s dressed in plain clothes—mirrored aviator sunglasses, navy golf shirt, gray slacks, his gold shield hanging from a lanyard around his neck.
It was clear why she agreed to go out with him in the first place; he’s a single, good-looking dude, and there aren’t exactly a lot of those in Seaside who also have decent jobs.
But physical attractiveness only goes so far.
In their case, that was six dates in as many weeks, and then a couple of hours in his bed before she faked a work call and left in a hurry.
It wasn’t that the sex was bad; it was actually great.
It was because he’d just made detective, and his sister was throwing him a party to celebrate the promotion.
“I’ll, uh, check my schedule and let you know,” Barb had said to him as she scrambled around his bedroom half naked, plucking her clothes off the floor. Realizing she’d accidentally thrown his old Nirvana T-shirt over her head in her rush to leave, she moved to take it back off.
“Nah, wear it,” he’d said with a relaxed grin, watching her from the bed. “You look sexy as hell.”
They hadn’t seen each other since.
“Barb.” Cameron’s smile looks forced. “Been a while.”
By her calculation, about two months, which included four unanswered texts and one long-winded voicemail asking what he’d done to upset her. The last one was a drunk dial he may not even remember making. “How’ve you been, Cam?”
“Good, Barb, I’ve been good. Work’s been busy, you know how that goes . . .” His voice trails off and he looks around, but there’s nobody nearby to rescue him. He finally looks down at her and sighs. “So what can I do for you, Barb?”
The way he’s saying her name is a little disconcerting, considering that the last time they were together, they were naked and he’d said it very differently.
In the reflection of his sunglasses, she can see her own face staring back at her, small and moon-shaped under her casual topknot.
She finds herself wishing she was at least wearing lip gloss.
Tapping her voice memo app, she holds her phone toward him.
“Wondering if you can share any details about the body that was found?”
“It’s too early to comment on that.”
“Any idea how the woman died?”
“Who said it was a woman?”
Actually, nobody, but she had to take a shot. “Can I take a quick look at the body?”
“Hell no.” The detective grunts. “They’re prepping her for the morgue.”
So it was a woman. Barb looks over to where an ambulance has reverse parked onto the beach.
The back doors are open, and the tarp-covered body is being lifted onto it by three EMTs.
The front of the gurney hits something, and the jostle causes a lock of stringy black hair to spill out from under the tarp. Barb’s breath catches in her throat.
Kylie?
Kylie Kahl has been missing for six years.
The reality star was known for her long black hair, though it wasn’t her natural color.
Barb never knew her personally. The TikTok sensation who’d starred on a reality show called Trophy Wives had vanished on a hiking trail in Seaside a couple of months after the first season premiered.
Despite a massive manhunt funded by her billionaire husband, she has never been found.
She was twenty-six when she went missing; she’d be thirty-two now.
The conspiracy theorists Barb interacted with on Reddit had differing opinions about what might have happened to her.
Seaside: the Bermuda Triangle for pretty young women.
“So as soon as we know something, we’ll put out a statement,” Cameron Wallace says. His jaw is tight. “That’s all I can tell you.”
“But what about her approximate age?” Barb asks, her mind working. “Was she young? Old?”
“I can’t comment on any of that, Barb.”
“Any distinguishing characteristics? Tattoos? Birthmarks?” Kylie had one tattoo, a finely inked word that ran vertically down her neck from her earlobe to her collarbone like a dangly earring. Serenity, in cursive. She’d made a whole TikTok about it a month before she was never seen again.
“Barb.” The detective pulls her over to a quiet spot.
She’s never disliked hearing her name so much.
“We’re doing our best to keep this out of the press; that’s an order directly from the chief.
It’s bad enough there’s a crowd of people with their cell phones out, because the timing is fucking terrible. Work with us on this, okay?”
With Wonderland’s soft opening tomorrow and the official grand reopening to the public happening this weekend, the last thing the amusement park needs is to give the public any reason to stay away.
What hurts the park hurts the town. Seaside PD is probably going to refrain from commenting on today’s discovery until next week, and even then, this is a fire they’ll want to put out quickly.
“Got it,” Barb says. “But you have to give me something I can write up, Cam. Otherwise the public speculation will be much worse.”
Sighing again, the detective glances around. He takes off his sunglasses and looks down at her. She forgot how blue his eyes are. “Okay, fine, I can tell you this.”
Instinctively Barb leans in, catching a whiff of Cameron’s aftershave. It’s the same stuff he wore during the brief time they were together: spicy, clean. She inhales, wondering now how she could have written him off so quickly.
“A little closer,” he says.
She leans in closer. The detective bends down slightly, his lips brushing the hair near her ear as he lowers his voice. A shiver runs through her.
“I want my fucking T-shirt back.” Detective Wallace takes a step back and puts his aviators back on, his volume returning to a normal level. “Feel free to quote me on that. Barb.”