Kate screamed and I instinctively ran as fast as I could to get to her location.
“Sorry, it just caught me by surprise,” she gasped.
“What did?” Oh. There was a body floating in the water now and, despite this being the first time I had seen a dead body, I was calm.
“Sadie, this must be awful for you,” Kate said, wrapping an arm around my back and placing her hand on my shoulder.
“You too, right?” I imagined she must be alarmed by the sight as much as I was. “You said graves can wash up in the flood.”
“Well yeah, but that’s your cousin, Sadie. She isn’t buried here. She went missing recently.”
4
I perched myself on a mound of grass a little way back up the hill that gave me a view of the lower ground. Sheriff Miller arrived not long after and there was some sort of machine that pumped water out of the cemetery through a long pipe. I briefly wondered where the water was being taken to.
Kate had tried to talk to me about ruptured flood defense systems and her desire for sandbag walls around the older graves, but the damage was already done. There had been a flood and just one grave had been disturbed. My cousin’s grave.
I was raised as an only child with a single parent. My adoptive mother gave me everything I could ever want, I was loved and cared for, nurtured and taught well by her. Now I watched as an officer zipped a corpse into a body bag, and Kate had just told me that corpse was a relative of mine. Could that be true? Could I have more family out in the world that I never knew about?
Miller wandered up the hill towards me and took a seat on the grass.
“Kate says you didn’t know your cousin very well,” he said. “It still must be a lot to process.”
“I didn’t know her at all. I didn’t know she existed. As far as I knew my family tree was a family twig,” I said.
“Let me just give you as much as I have so far, because I think you are in shock and I want to help,” he smiled. “Your cousin, Greta, was missing and presumed dead. She disappeared recently but we found her car. It was up in the mountains wrapped around a tree.
“And Greta?” I asked.
“No sign of her. To make matters worse the conditions up there are unpredictable and sometimes deadly, no one ever went up there as much as she did. When a week passed it became clear that she wasn’t coming back. No planes had flown off the island during that time and no boats had shuttled out either. She was missing on the island. Obviously now we find her all the way down here in the lower ground so that’s where I come in and try to figure out what on earth caused that to happen.”
“I just think there has been a mistake. I don’t have any other family. How can Kate possibly know that Greta is my cousin? Where is she getting that idea from?” I said. It seemed like such a bizarre lie to tell, not that I was suggesting Kate was lying on purpose. She must be in shock too; the sight of a dead body must have caused confusion.
“Greta owned the café before you did,” Miller replied, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “She said it was a family run business and that unless she had any kids any time soon, the café would go to you.”
“But I didn’t inherit this place from a relative, I bought it. I paid for the café out of my own pocket. I...” I was faltering. One of my pet peeves was when someone downplayed my achievements or dismissed the hard work that I’ve put in. My ex, Justin, used to do it all the time and it drove me crazy.
“Sadie, I’m not saying that you didn’t. What I’m saying is, well, Effie set up the ad for the café sale and made sure that you saw it. She guided you to this place,” he explained. I rolled my eyes. Miller had been so attractive when we’d first met that a small part of me thought, if I played my cards right, that we could go on a date at some point.
His weird response to the situation was casting serious doubt in my mind. Was I projecting my fantasy romance onto the first attractive guy that spoke to me? Absolutely. Now I was just imagining him sat at home with his crystals and windchimes listening to whale music as he lined up his chakras. She guided me here? Give me a break.
“Okay, well... alright then,” I stumbled. There really was nothing to say to him. “Do you need a statement or whatever? I haven’t been involved in something like this before, never gotten so much as a speeding ticket. This is the most I’ve ever spoken to a cop actually.”
“You should head home,” he said. He stood up but didn’t offer his hand to help me to my feet. Not that weird, I guess. “I’ll come find you tomorrow and get a statement then. Would you like an escort back to the café?”
I wanted to gain independence on this island as quickly as possible. I had one stranger claiming to have found a fictional relative of mine in the water, this guy talking about weird, targeted business adverts and I was still baffled by the speed at which the storm had come and gone. I needed to look out for myself. The obvious problem was that I still didn’t know my way around too well.
“I’ll take her back, at ease Miller,” Kate said as she joined us. Miller gave me a slight nod, another for Kate, then walked back down to the cemetery. “Jeez, never seen the guy flirting so
