I walked down to the beach and waited for Malley, but she didn't show up.
The moon was full and the ocean breeze felt warm. Two hours I sat there on the sand—no Malley. In the beginning it was just annoying, but after a while I began to worry that something was wrong.
My cousin, in spite of her issues, is a punctual person.
I kept calling her cell phone but it went straight to her voice mail, which was Malley chortling in a British accent: "I'm in the loo. Ring you back later!" I didn't leave a message, and I didn't text, either.
In case somebody else had her phone.
Somebody like her dad, who’s my uncle. He takes away Malley’s cell like twice a week as punishment for acting up, acting out, whatever. Still, even when she’s in trouble at home, she always finds a way to sneak out to the beach.
A few turtle people were scouting the shoreline, waggling their flashlights. I walked north, as Malley and I usually did. We’d never seen a turtle actually laying her eggs, but we’d found several nests. The first thing you notice is the flipper tracks leading up from the water’s edge. Loggerheads, hawksbills and green turtles leave trenches like a mini–dune buggy when they drag their heavy shells across the sand.
After the mother turtle finishes depositing her eggs, she covers them with a loose, churned mound. Every time that Malley and I came across one, we’d call the state wildlife office and they would send an officer to mark it. First, wooden stakes are tapped into the sand to create a rectangular perimeter outside the mound; then hot-pink ribbons are strung from one stake to the next. You can go to jail for messing with a turtle nest, so the officers put up a warning sign. Still, every so often some random idiot gets caught stealing the eggs, which are sold as a romantic ingredient in certain places.
Pathetic but true.
The phone chirped, but it wasn’t a text from Malley; it was my mom asking where the heck I was. I texted her that I was still down by the water, and that no savage criminals had tried to snatch me. Afterwards I tried Malley’s number once more, but she didn’t pick up.
So I walked on alone until I came to a marked nest that I didn’t remember seeing the last time Malley and I were there. The dig was new and soft. I picked a spot outside the warning ribbon and sat down holding my baseball bat, which Mom makes me carry for protection whenever I go to the beach after dark. It’s an Easton aluminum model left over from when I played Little League. I feel dorky carrying it, but Mom won’t let me out of the house if I don’t. Too many creeps in the world, she says.
The slanted moonlight made the waves look like curls of pink gold. I lay back, folded my arms behind my head and closed my eyes. The wind was easing, and I heard a train blow its horn to the west, on the mainland.
That wasn’t all. I heard the sound of breathing, too, and it wasn’t my own.
At first I thought: Turtle. The breaths were damp and shallow, like air being forced through a broken whistle.
I sat up and looked around: No sign of tracks. Maybe it was an old bobcat, watching me from the dunes. Or a raccoon—they like to dig up loggerhead nests and chow down the eggs. I slapped the Easton in the palm of my left hand, which stung. The noise was sharp enough to scare off most critters, but it didn’t frighten whatever was breathing nearby.
Leaving seemed like a smart idea, but I got only fifty yards before I turned and went back. Whatever I’d heard couldn’t be very large because otherwise I would have spotted it; there was really no place to hide on an empty beach under a full moon.