7 -The body (ii)
CLAIRE
Blue and red lights began to stutter across the rocks, bouncing weirdly off the cliff face. The whine of engines carried on the wind, then suddenly doors slammed.
For a moment, I just stood there.
It didn’t feel real—to me it felt weird how quickly the silence had been broken and how the sea’s voice drowned out by chatter, radios and footsteps.
By the time I scrambled back up the wet cut in the rock, a small crowd had gathered at the cliff’s edge. Locals.
Faces I half-recognized from the harbor, from the diner, from the docks. They spoke in low voices, but the kind that carried anyway.
“Who is it?”
“Looks like one of the boys.”
“God help them.”
“Or maybe not.”
They didn’t look grief-stricken. They looked… curious. Hungry, even. Like gossip mattered more than the broken body below.
I pushed through, feeling their stares on me. Outsider. Stranger. The woman who had come to town asking questions. Their whispers folded inward now, about me.
Still it finally hit me,The county had arrived.
Except—“county” was a generous word. What I saw crawling down the path looked more like a pair of rust-bucket pickups than official vehicles.
Rust along the doors and one with its bumper tied on by rope. Someone had slapped magnetic badges to the sides, but they were crooked even peeling at the corners.
Three uniformed men piled out. Two men moving with the sluggishness of people who’d rather be anywhere else, and a woman who walked ahead like she was already in charge.
She wore the badge on her belt crooked, the top button of her shirt undone, her hair tied back in a messy bun with strands falling loose.
She didn’t look like someone who belonged at a crime scene. She looked like she’d wandered in off the porch of a bar.
“Evenin’,” she said, her voice was too casual, almost bored. “Well now. That’s somethin’, isn’t it?”
She didn’t crouch. She didn’t even glance at the boy properly, just gave him a sideways look as if he was a mess someone had spilled on the floor.
“Likely a fall,” she muttered, she was already shaping the report in her head. “Cliffs’ll do that. Seen it before.”
I stiffened. “That wasn’t a fall.”
She looked at me finally, her eyes were dark and assessing. And then—she smirked. “So you’re the nosy city girl.”
Her voice had the tone of someone testing me, rolling the words around like she was deciding how sharp to make them.
I drew in a slow breath. “Claire Monroe.” My hand went to my coat, pulling out my card. “Private detective.”
Her eyebrows arched, but she didn’t take the card. She just let her gaze drop to it and back to me, looking unimpressed.
“Well, private detective Claire Monroe,” she said,“around here we don’t need outside opinions clutterin’ things up.”
“Outside opinions?” I snapped. “This boy obviously didn’t trip. Look at his face. The bruises, the eye—someone did that to him.”
Her smirk didn’t fade. “Mm. Or he hit every jagged rock on the way down.” She lifted her chin, called over her shoulder, “Murphy! Taylor! Bag him before the tide takes him.”
The two men came forward, carrying a stretcher that looked older than both of them. Their gloves didn’t fit right after their movements were careless. One bent too far and nearly dropped the corner.
Unprofessional didn’t even begin to cover it.
My hands clenched. Every instinct screamed at me to stop them, to take control, but I could feel her eyes on me, waiting for me to step out of line.
“Acting Sheriff Nora Quinn,” she finally said like she’d just remembered to introduce herself. “Since you’re new, I’ll spell it out. You don’t run things here.”
“I’m not trying to run anything,” I said “I’m telling you this isn’t an accident. You’d see it too if you bothered to look.”
“Thing is,” she said, leaning in just slightly,her voice syrupy, “you talk a lot for someone who hasn’t lived here more than a few days”
Behind her, the two officers hauled the body up like it was a sack of wet sand. His head snapped forward, then flopped sideways, the neck was offering no resistance.
One of them grunted, muttering something under his breath, and the other smirked as if it were just another chore.
No stretcher, no care—just rough hands on him.I felt bile rise in my throat. They weren’t treating him like a human at all, just cargo to be cleared away.
The murmurs of the people rose, like the sea itself was muttering. I couldn’t make out faces, but I could feel eyes watching.
I turned back to Quinn. “You hear the locals? They already know. This isn’t an accident, and they know it.”
Quinn gave me a smile that never touched her eyes. “What I hear is a bunch of scared folks who’ll go home and sleep easier if I write this up clean. What I don’t hear is any reason to complicate my night.”
I stepped forward. “If you’d let me help, I could—”
Quinn cut me off with a raised hand, still chewing. “You can help by not getting in the way. Statement, that’s all we need from you.”
Her words were final, filled with a warning.
I looked at the boy again, his battered face were already half-covered by the sheet the deputies had thrown over him.
I wanted to to take in every last detail before they erased it, but Quinn’s hand came down on my arm— just enough to direct me.
“Let’s not make this messy,” she said softly
-------
The annex was worse.
it was a squat brick building that might have been a post office once. A clerk sat behind a desk, her hair was in rollers, with her cigarette smoldering in an ashtray.
She didn’t look up as we entered, just grabbed a form from a stack and slapped it onto the counter. “Statement,” she said, like it was a curse.
I sat. The chair wobbled under me. My head still throbbed from the fall against the rocks, but I pushed through it.
“Claire Monroe. Private investigator. At approximately nineteen-hundred hours. I discovered a body on the rocks below Grayhaven cliffs. Male, early twenties. Facial trauma, bruising to forearms, fractured wrist. Circumstances suggest foul play.”
The clerk typed without looking at me,her nails clacking against the keys. Halfway through my words, she slid a manila folder into a drawer, like she was already done, like nothing I said mattered.
I felt heat rise in my chest. “Are you even writing this down?”
“Mhm,” she said around her cigarette. Smoke curled upward, stinging my eyes.
I turned to Quinn, who had leaned against the wall, arms crossed with her gum popping loud in the silence. She looked amused.
“You called us, Monroe,” she said. “We’re here. That’s enough.”
“It’s not enough.” My voice cut sharp through the room. “That boy was murdered. And you’re treating this like a fisherman who slipped on a dock.”
Her expression didn’t change. “Maybe that’s all it is. Maybe that’s all it ever will be.”
I stared at her, at the clerk, at the buzzing lights that flickered overhead. And, I thought of the boy’s face, battered and young.
This town was wrong. Rotting from the inside. And I was standing in the middle of it, the outsider with a voice nobody wanted to hear.
But I wasn’t going to stop.Not now. Especially not after what I had seen.