Chapter 1
Heather tied back her shoulder length, golden blond hair as the bus she had boarded in Seagull Cove, Massachusetts, cruised across the Sagamore Bridge. She glanced below at the dark, grey waters of the Cape Cod Canal.
They appeared as mysterious as her past.
She leaned back against the headrest, closed her eyes, and told herself that she would be okay. She had come through difficult situations before. At least, she assumed she had. She must have. Actually, she had no idea.
Heather mindlessly stared at the snow-kissed trees on the side of Route 3 for the next forty minutes, until the bus driver finally announced her stop. “Sand Dune Shores,” he said in a monotone voice as he parked in front of one of the four bus stop shelters in the terminal.
Heather scanned the platform, where a few folks who were bundled against the frigid wind stood waiting. It was the last day of February, and the sky was as grey as Heather’s mood. She searched the group for Mary Beth Nelson, who had promised to pick her up when she arrived in her new hometown. Mary Beth, the psychiatrist who treated her after her recent car accident, was also her only friend in town. She had arranged for Heather to work in the gift shop of the Sand Dune Inn in exchange for room, board, and a small salary. Without Mary Beth’s assistance, Heather had no doubt that she would be homeless.
When she didn’t see Mary Beth, she again scanned the group gathered beneath the shelter. Mary Beth definitely wasn’t there. Surely she would be along at any moment. A familiar wave of loneliness and fear swept over Heather as she quickly tried to formulate a Plan B. She didn’t have a cellphone to use a ridesharing app, but she could probably ask someone to call her a taxi. Surely any taxi driver would know where the Sand Dune Inn was located.
She exited the bus and retrieved her backpack from the luggage compartment. The backpack, along with all her possessions, had been donated to her from some kind folks at Mary Beth’s church when she left the hospital ten days before. She had no memory of anything before waking up in the Emergency Department of Cape Cod General.
She didn’t even know her real name.
The doctors had informed Heather that in rare cases, a person’s memory never returned after a trauma such as the car accident that Heather had survived. Since they had to call her something, one of the nurses suggested she use the name ‘Heather,’ because she had fallen in love with a painting at the hospital of some heather flowers growing alongside a boardwalk, which led to the beach. It seemed as good a name as any, so Heather adopted it as her own.
She hoped it was a solution to a problem that was only temporary.
Heather had spent the previous ten days gathering her thoughts and courage in the quaint seaside town of Seagull Cove, located on the North Shore of Boston. Mary Beth had taken her to Boston for a second opinion regarding her amnesia, so Heather had stayed with Anna McBride, a former colleague of Mary Beth’s. Heather had hoped in vain that her memory would return while she was there.
Now, it was time to face her new normal.
A man who appeared to be in his early forties with sandy blond hair and skeptical blue-grey eyes halfheartedly waved in her direction. “Heather?” he asked, with a forced smile.
Despite his less-than-warm greeting, she let out a sigh of relief that someone had come to pick her up.
“My name is Jake Harding. Mary Beth asked me to bring you to the inn. She was called into the hospital for an emergency, but she’ll be by as soon as she can.”
Heather did her best to express her gratitude with a smile, despite her disappointment at not finding Mary Beth at the terminal. “Thank you for coming.”
He replied with a curt nod.
Jake opened the back door to his grey Jeep Wrangler so she could toss her backpack into the backseat. Then, she sat in the passenger side of the vehicle.
“My parents own the Sand Dune Inn,” he said, as he turned onto the main road.
“I’m very grateful that they hired me to work in the gift shop.”
“They have huge hearts.” He looked straight into her eyes and held her gaze for a moment. “I live nearby. I stop by to check on them every day. Sometimes more than once.”
Great. Here was one more person who believed that she harbored sinister intentions. Not that she could blame him. After all, she had been in a car accident while riding with a recent ex-convict. She hadn’t been carrying any identification, and she had no idea what she was doing with the man, whose name, as she learned from Detective Rick Blaney, was John Seewald. She had been told they had reservations to stay at the Sand Dune Inn in two separate rooms, and that he was from Des Moines, Iowa. Unfortunately, he didn’t survive the car accident.
The sound of sirens approaching from behind pierced the awkward silence that followed. Jake glanced in the rearview mirror and pulled over to allow the paramedics to pass.
A few minutes later, Jake made a right off Route 28 onto Cranberry Avenue and entered a quaint neighborhood lined with cottages covered in weathered grey shingles. There were a few larger, more modern homes scattered among them. Then, he turned left onto Starboard Lane, which contained four cottages on the lefthand side, followed by a majestic inn just a few yards from a towering sand dune. In between the cottages on the right were glimpses of the ocean dotted with whitecaps.
For the first time since leaving Seagull Cove, a feeling of peace spread across Heather’s chest. She could have hugged Mary Beth for arranging for her to stay at such a tranquil place. Heather was so caught up with her first impressions of her new neighborhood that she almost didn’t notice the two police cars and the ambulance parked in front of the inn.
But Jake had seen them. He slammed on his brakes and parked on the street, rather than turning onto the driveway, which led to a small parking lot to the left of the inn. “My parents!” he cried, racing from his car. He slammed the door behind him and practically leapt up the walkway that led to the inn, ignoring the crime scene tape that was wrapped around the inn’s perimeter.
Heather exited the car and watched Jake climb the wooden steps of the front porch and disappear through a blue door.
Should she follow him into the inn despite the yellow tape, or stay outside in the cold?
Not sure what else to do, she grabbed her backpack from the backseat, swung it onto her shoulders, and ventured further down the street to where she could see the side yard. That was where most of the activity was taking place.
She stopped short when she spotted the cause of the commotion. On a patch of frozen ground that separated the majestic sand dune from the inn’s wraparound porch, a pale young woman lay motionless next to a small pool of blood.
Heather got as close as the tape would permit. Next to the body was a yard ornament in the form of a white, red, and navy lighthouse. On the ground next to the lighthouse was what appeared to be a necklace made of silver or white gold.
The towering sand dune to Heather’s right, which looked as if it had protected the inn from many a storm, seemed to stand in silent anger at the scene it had just witnessed.
The only silver lining Heather could see was that the ambulance wasn’t there for one of Jake’s parents.
Heather watched the flurry of activity taking place around the building as she started to walk back to the driveway. A police officer approached her. “Ma’am, did you know the victim?”
Did I know the victim? I don’t even know myself.
