Dark Water (Cooper M. Reid Book 1) (4 page)

But his return visit to the porch turned up nothing of the sort. He looked at the sand dollar ornament on the door as if it might bite him, but the vision never came back to him. He
did
sense it though. He felt that if he wanted, he could close his eyes and focus, and he’d be able to pluck the vision right out of the air as if it were a passing insect.

The Blackstocks led him back inside, showing him every room of the house. Sam led them through while Jenny did most of the talking. The house was built like most every other beach house in the area. Downstairs consisted of a small foyer that instantly led to more stairs. To the right, there was a modest-sized office and another door that led out onto a small patio. Sam led them through the office and into a smaller room that sat off of the back of the office.

“This was supposed to be a guest bedroom,” Jenny said. “But we really don’t get much company. My mom stayed a few times after Henry died, but that’s about it. On one of the nights we heard the laughing—one of the very first times, I think that was—we were pretty sure it came from here.”

She stepped aside as Cooper checked out the room. A twin bed rested in the corner and a small table sat next to it, decorated with a lamp and a large conk shell.

“Nothing was out of place when you checked it out following the laughter?” he asked.

“Not a thing.”

Sam led them upstairs, back into the living room. As Cooper looked around, it occurred to him that he had, less than ten minutes ago, told the Blackstocks about his peculiar disappearance. While he had told one other person about it since his return, he had not spoken about it at such length with anyone. The Blackstocks had been the first.

“Down the hall,” Jenny said, “there’s just the bathroom, the master bedroom and Henry’s room. We haven’t changed a thing since the day he died.”

Cooper’s old instincts wanted to ask if he could have a look. But he knew that he had already dealt these grieving parents a huge load this afternoon. He wouldn’t dare tread on such sacred ground without first being invited. Besides, he didn’t think that’s where he needed to go. Snooping around their dead son’s room wasn’t why he had come here.

“And nothing out of the ordinary has ever happened in any of those rooms?” Cooper asked.

“No. It’s always just…
laughing,
” Sam said.

“Sometimes it sounds like it’s coming from outside,” Jenny said. “But usually it’s in the living room. Once on the stairs, once downstairs, but from the living room most of the time.”

“And then there’s the last time we heard it,” Sam said.  “It was moving around. Sort of playing with us. It knocked a bowl off of the bar over there and then there were—,”

“Footsteps,” Cooper said, the word simply springing from his mouth. He glanced around the room, his eyes narrowed. “But not in
here.
Not in the living room. They were….,”

He was barely aware that Sam and Jenny Blackstock both looked terrified. He understood that he had just revealed something that had not been in the article. Again, it was another detail that only they knew. And he had no idea where it had come from.

“There?” Cooper asked, pointing into the dining area.

Jenny nodded. “Yeah.”

Cooper walked into the dining room and, not sure why, knelt down to the carpet. He ran his hand along it and after a few seconds, shook his head.

“I’m not getting much else. What can you tell me about the footsteps?”

“They were small,” Sam said, his voice distant. He was looking at Cooper like a man might glance at an unfamiliar dog, not yet certain if it was friendly or if it intended to bite.

“They were bare, too,” Jenny said. “You could clearly see the toes on a few of them. They were unmistakably a child’s footprints. The prints were wet, like a child had just gotten out of the tub.”

“Or the ocean,” Sam said.

At the mention of the ocean, Cooper looked up to the sliding glass door. The blinds were open, giving him a stellar view of the beach. He watched a wave crest, break, and then crash gently onto the sand. From where he knelt in the Blackstock’s dining room, it sounded like soft static.

“Forgive me for asking,” Cooper said. “But do you think it was Henry?”

“No,” Jenny said. “The laughter we heard that night was of a little girl.”

Cooper got back to his feet, again looking back out to the beach. He walked to the sliding glass door and observed their back porch.

“The prints led out here, right?”

“Yes. I saw them on the back porch, leading towards the beach.”

“Do you mind if I go out and look around?” Cooper asked.

It was the first time he had asked their permission for anything and he knew just how pivotal a moment it was. He was relieved when they both nod their heads. Sam stepped forward and slid the door open for him.

Cooper stepped out onto the back porch and looked around. A patio table and two chairs sat to the far right side. A very expensive-looking grill sat to the left. Other than that, there really wasn’t much to see. Still, the porch itself was very nicely made, just like the rest of the Blackstock’s house. It then occurred to him that while the Blackstocks might not necessarily be wealthy, they certainly lived very comfortably; the beachfront house said as much. In Cooper’s experience, the cases of fraudulent paranormal claims came from people seeking attention, hoping that some reporter or television network would come to their doorstep with a check.

But the Blackstocks were not those sort of people. Besides…there was the terribly accurate vision he’d had on the front porch and seeing a series of footprints on the carpet for just a split second—that had been
more
than enough to convince Cooper that the Blackstocks were legitimately experiencing something.

Cooper walked to the porch steps and looked out towards the back of the Blackstock’s property and the beach beyond. The back porch stairs led down onto a small and scraggly stretch of lawn. A few decorative flat stones ran along the center of the grass, ending at the same crafty combination of driftwood and crossties that he had seen out front.  Directly after these, the beach began. Cooper looked out to the ocean and thought he could understand how people could fall so in love with it.

“Did you see any sort of disturbance in the yard?” Cooper asked.

“No,” Jenny said. “From what I could tell, the prints stopped at the porch. It was dark, though. The porch lights don’t really reach far beyond the stairs.”

Cooper walked down the steps, not sure what he was looking for. If he was being honest with himself (something he was usually not very good about doing), he was waiting for one of those flashes, or visions or whatever the hell they were, to hit him. But so far, he was getting nothing.

“I have some more questions,” he said. “But if I cross any sort of line, just let me know.”

Sam let out a nervous laugh. “You somehow knew things that no one but Jenny and I knew. If there’s a line to be crossed, I think it’s already been obliterated. Just ask.”

Copper nodded towards the beach that lay on the other side of their yard. “Was that the stretch of beach where your son died?”

“No,” Jenny said. “It was about a quarter mile down that way.”

When she pointed to the left, Cooper thought he saw her hand trembling.

“We go there sometimes,” Sam said. “To remember him, you know? It hurts like hell, but it also seems sort of fitting.”

“Seems crazy right?” Jenny asked.

“I wouldn’t know,” Cooper said.

Secretly, though, he was wondering why the parents of a boy that had drowned so close to the beach would elect to remain in a house that was only a quarter of a mile away from where he drowned. Sentimentality, perhaps. Cooper had never had kids and, if his life continued on the course it was currently on, he likely never would. He didn’t want to assume anything about parents that had lost a child. He already felt like a monumental jerk for making them go digging in the memories of their son’s death.

“Did either of you know about Kevin Owens?” Cooper asked.

“We heard about it on the news,” Sam said. “I saw the headline in the paper but skipped it. I can’t read about things like that without automatically picturing Henry.”

“Do you know
where
Kevin Owens drowned?” Cooper asked, although he already knew. He simply didn’t want to be the one to deliver the news.

When Jenny nodded, he let out a sigh of relief.

“Pretty damn close to where Henry drowned,” Jenny said.

Cooper let a moment of silence hang among them before he asked the next question.

“Would it be okay if I walked down there?” he asked. “To where Henry died?”

Neither of the Blackstocks said anything. Cooper kept his gaze out to sea, letting them have their silence without feeling pressured. He could feel the tension coming off of them. He felt like he was at the funeral of someone he barely knew, feeling the eyes of most of those in attendance staring at him as they tried to figure out who he was and why he was there.

“Come on,” Sam said, walking directly past him and out into the yard. He didn’t so much as look at Cooper while he walked along the flat stones towards the beach.

Cooper gave Jenny Blackstock a glance which she avoided by looking down to the stairs as she joined him in the yard. She followed after Sam, giving Cooper a cursory little wave to follow.

Cooper followed them across the yard and through a break in the decorative crossties and driftwood. He stepped onto the beach for the second time that day.

This time, it did not feel comforting and warm at all.

6

He had been following Sam and Jenny along the beach for less than thirty seconds when Cooper realized that he was going to have to take his shoes off to keep up. The sand was softer here than it had been four miles down the beach where he had first glanced out at the sea earlier in the day. Both Sam and Jenny were already barefoot, as they had been at their home. He wondered if that was just something that eventually came natural to you if you lived at the beach long enough.

They walked almost directly in the center of the beach, the sea lapping at the land about twenty feet below them and the small but gradually rising dunes climbing slowly upwards the same distance above them. Cooper looked up towards the tiny hills of sand, seeing the weeds that managed to look cozy and beautiful in the sand. A small fragment of dried fence lay partially collapsed in the sand and weeds. The entire scene looked like it belonged in one of any millions of seaside paintings adorning doctor’s offices and starving artist’s sales.

Cooper also noticed that after the Blackstock’s house, there were only five other homes along this stretch. After the fifth and final house, the land above the beach grew rocky and uneven. Bits of sand that looked like dunes that had tried to thrive only to die peeked out through the rocky ground here and there, but the majority of the land was sand, rock, and thick vegetation. He couldn’t see the highway through the vegetation but could catch glimpses of the tops of vehicles as they passed.

“Is that why the houses out this way aren’t typically big rental attractions?” Cooper asked, pointing to the overgrown land.

“Mostly,” Jenny said. “We’ve had a few friends suggest that we rent the house out for the summer, though. Out here, where it’s quiet and the business of the main stretch comes to an end, there really isn’t much demand. But elderly couples and big families apparently prefer these sorts of areas.”

“How much further does it go on like this?”

“About two miles,” Sam said. “All of this comes to an end almost out of nowhere. There’s quiet beach and some pretty stunning scenery and then, all of a sudden, there’s a pier for fishing and a bunch of tee shirt shops.”

“And on the day your son died, were you just out for a walk?”

“Yeah,” Jenny said. “Up ahead, you can just barely see where there are some pretty big rocks sticking up out of the ocean. See them?”

Cooper looked ahead and did in fact see two rather large black objects sticking out of the sea. They looked to be about the same color and texture of the rocky terrain to his left.

“Yes, I see them.”

“Well, there’s a few sandbars out there, too,” Jenny went on. “You can go out to where the water comes up to your waist and then all of a sudden, you start walking back
up
. You can go about twenty feet out on a few of those sandbars and the water never gets any higher than your knees. We used to take Henry out there. He loved it. He really liked it during the evening when the sun was going down. It’s quite beautiful.”

Cooper noticed that as she said this, she reached out and took Sam’s hand. Sam gave his wife’s hand a squeeze and they shared a smile. In that moment, Cooper decided that he liked Sam and Jenny Blackstock a great deal. And he felt like a bigger ass than ever for having dragged up these painful memories for them.

After another three minutes or so, Sam and Jenny suddenly came to a stop. They were still hand in hand, looking out to the ocean together. They were roughly a hundred yards or so away from the large black rocks that Jenny had pointed out moments ago.

“This is where it happened,” Jenny said. “And to this day, I’m still not sure
how
it happened. It was so damned fast.”

“I’m sorry to put you through this,” Cooper said. “Really, I am. I honestly don’t even know why I came. I don’t know why—,”

“It’s okay,” Sam said. “I don’t know what your deal is—if you’re some kind of psychic or something—but if you know the things you know and claim to know what happened to Henry, we can wrestle with all of this one more time.”

“I’m not a psychic,” Cooper said. “I’m not sure what to call this, actually.”

That much was true. Ever since he had reappeared, he’d been getting those hunches and brief little visions from time to time. He was no psychic; that was for sure. Whatever this thing was that had been itching at him was far beyond the reaches of any psychics he had ever met…and he had met quite a few in his time.