Page 18 of By the Time You Read This

“No one believes me.” Helen sank down onto her couch, her eyes still locked on the photo as she brought a tissue up to swipe at the escaping tears. “Everyone keeps saying it was a tragic accident.”

That sounded all too familiar to how Isabel liked to kill. Plenty of other family members had been told they were crazy for suspecting foul play. “What happened to Lindsey, Helen?”

“She drowned,” Helen said, her lip wobbling. “They say she drowned.”

There were so many pictures of Lindsey on a boat all around the room. It would certainly be an easy way to kill her without anyone—except her mother, apparently—thinking it was anything but what it looked like.

“What do you think happened?” Kilkenny asked.

Helen looked up at him, distraught. It was as if she’d just heard the news that morning instead of two months earlier. Maybe her grief had been frozen in time until someone listened to, and believed, her suspicions.

“There was a storm coming in, and Lindsey ... she was so smart, she never went out when a storm was brewing,” Helen said. “Everyone says she didn’t know it was coming, but she knew it was coming. We’d talked just that morning.”

“Did she mention going out on the boat?” Kilkenny asked.

“That’s exactly what happened. And I said,‘Check the weather, girlie.’It had changed overnight,” Helen said. “And Lindsey said she’d better wait until the next day she had off.”

“Where did she work?” Raisa asked.

“She was a crew member on one of those tourist sailboats,” Helen said. “They always only took out a handful of people. But on her off days, she borrowed her friend’s boat and took it out whenever she could.”

“So she was an expert sailor,” Kilkenny commented, even though that was obvious from the pictures.

“A natural—she spent more of her life on the water than she did on land,” Helen said, her mouth trembling once more. She made a valiant effort to hold back her tears, but was only half-successful. “She wanted to sail around the world solo one day.”

Raisa chewed on her lower lip, debating the right way to ask what she needed to know. Sometimes she marveled at the fact that she was considered an expert at language, but could be clumsy when it came to spoken words. She retreated to the safety of Kilkenny’s previous open-ended question. “What do you think happened to Lindsey?”

Helen sniffed. “I think she was murdered.”

“Why do you believe that?” Raisa pressed.

“She wasn’t wearing a life vest,” Helen said.

Raisa waited for more, but it didn’t come. “And she usually wore a life vest?”

“Always,” Helen corrected. She waved to the photographs. “Just look.”

Now that Raisa knew what to search for, she saw it. In every single picture taken on a boat, Lindsey wore some kind of flotation device.

“My husband, her father, he drowned,” Helen said, and Raisa’s eyes flew to her. Helen had gone to sit by the window. What must that be like, to have lost both a husband and daughter to the water? And yet still live so close to it. “She was with him.”

“Oh,” Raisa murmured softly. How horrifying that must have been. “How old was she?”

“Ten,” Helen said, the grief clearly faded, less jagged. But how could this not all bring everything back up? “They were swimming off the boat, some kind of current must have grabbed them. He used his last bit of effort to shove her on board. The coast guard found her hours later, just sitting in the boat by herself.”

“My god,” Kilkenny said. “Yet she wasn’t scared of the water after that?”

Helen glanced over her shoulder, looking thoughtful. “No. Not for a minute.”

Kilkenny’s mouth did something interesting, obviously hiding a reaction he didn’t want to reveal.

“But she always wore a life vest from then on. Religiously,” Helen continued, oblivious. “Why wouldn’t she have been wearing her life jacket?”

There were all kinds of reasons, ones that Helen wouldn’t want to hear. Maybe a bird pooped on it; maybe she always made sure to wear one when Helen could see her, not for herself but for her mother. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

A lack of a life vest and a knowledgeable sailor did not a murder case make.

But they were here for a reason. Isabel’s bread and butter had been accidental deaths, made to look so real no one questioned them.

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