Anahera pressed her lips together but nodded.

Contacting the people who’d been assigned the first section of clifftop as part of their search radius, he told them that he and Anahera had checked it out and that they should focus on the rest of their assigned area.

“I’m going to go down to the beach,” Anahera said after he hung up. “Can you climb down?”

Will just nodded. Golden Cove natives tended to assume he was a city slicker who didn’t know his way around this land and he hadn’t done much to disabuse them of the belief. “You should go first,” he said. “I haven’t used this path before.”

“I didn’t need your permission,” Anahera responded, but the words held no heat. It was obvious her attention was on the search for Miriama. They made the climb down in silence, ending up on the farthest side of the beach search area.

Another fifty meters and the sand disappeared under a flow of water that turned into a whirlpool surrounded by rocks as black as obsidian and as jagged as broken glass. Everyone knew to keep their distance from the -spot—-there was simply no hope for anyone who fell into that water; they’d be smashed up against the rocks and sucked out to sea long before a witness could hope to summon help.

Growing up in the area as she had, Miriama would’ve been well aware of the danger, would have never run too close to it, or ventured near enough to the edge of the cliff to fall. Still, he and Anahera had to check. They swept their flashlight beams along the sand as they walked, looking for any sign of footprints. The tide was coming in, but it hadn’t crept far up the -beach—-yet all they saw was a smooth ripple of sand.

No sign of man, no sign of anything but nature’s fury.

Waves crashed in a black maelstrom only meters away, and then they were at the edge of the whirlpool, the white froth of it angry in the beam of their flashlights and the center a brutal black maw.

Turning in silence, they made their way back up the beach with just as much care, in the hope that they’d spot something, anything, that would lead to Miriama’s whereabouts.

“I almost hope we don’t find anything here,” Anahera said into the silence stretched taut as a wire. “This is probably the most dangerous stretch of the beach.”

“From comments she’s made before when we spoke about running routes,” Will said, “Miriama prefers the route along the other side of the cliffs.” Decades of runners had created a -well--worn path through there, and it looked out over the part of the beach where locals most often lit bonfires or picnicked. No one swam in the water, not given its -ferocity—-even the extreme surfers stuck to the next beach -over—-but it was still a hauntingly beautiful area in which to linger away a day.

“Good.” Anahera didn’t say anything else for the next ten minutes, the two of them intent on the search. “She have a boyfriend?” she asked when she did speak.

“Yes, Dominic de Souza, the town doctor.” He told her what Nikau had shared about Dominic’s whereabouts. “It’s probably good he doesn’t know, especially if he’s on the road.” The last thing they needed was for the young doctor to crash his car because he was rushing to get home.

“I asked,” Anahera said, “because a lot of the men around here have resentments about how their lives have gone and they get drunk and take it out on the women.”

Will wondered what to -say—-she had to know he would’ve done a background search. But at the same time, what right did he have to bring up her mother’s death, or that it was Anahera who’d found Haeata Rawiri three days after her fatal fall?

“Let’s hope I don’t have to take the investigation in that direction,” he said at last, because if he had to ask those questions, it meant that either they hadn’t found -Miriama… or they’d found her body.

12

Anahera walked down the beach with worry heavy in her gut and the taciturn cop by her side, the world quiet around them but for the pounding of the waves and, in the distance, the shouts of fellow searchers.

She and the cop called out, too, in the hope Miriama would answer. Maybe she’d fallen and broken her leg, or hit her head, and the shouts would rouse her. But they didn’t rely only on that, both of them scrambling up and around any rocks that might hide a body. They even checked near large pieces of driftwood, on the faint chance that Miriama had fallen on the beach and the sand had brushed itself across her, camouflaging her injured body.

But they’d found nothing by the time they met up with the searchers walking toward them from the other end of the beach. “Anything?” Anahera asked before realizing who it was that she was facing. The darkness, the way his face had filled out, his thick white beard, it had all served to obscure his identity until she was nearly within touching distance.

Deliberately breaking eye contact with her father, she fixed it on the grizzled man who stood beside him: Matthew, one of the -old--timers who’d been around so long that he was part of the foundations of Golden Cove.

Eyes crinkled at the corners and heavy lines carved into skin she knew to be a dark mahogany after years out in the sun, Matthew shook his head. “No sign of her,” he said in that smoker’s voice she remembered. “But we haven’t got a signal down here, eh. Maybe one of the others found her.”