Blessed Are Those Who Mourn Read online

  Dedication

  This one’s for Supergroup

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  By Kristi Belcamino

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Saturday

  THE SETTING SUN turns my family into dark silhouettes as I step onto the warm sand. The beach is nearly deserted, except for a lone figure walking north of us along the sand where the waves are crashing in from the Pacific Ocean.

  A cool breeze makes me glad I trekked to the car to retrieve my daughter’s little lavender parka. We promised her we’d stay until the sun set.

  Donovan’s back is turned, phone held to his ear. He’s pacing in his bare feet, his jeans rolled up, a scowl on his face from what he’s hearing. A murder. Every once in a while he glances back at Grace kneeling in the sand, playing.

  Grace has dug deep channels with a small red shovel, chatting to herself, weaving tales about mermaids and sea creatures and fairies. She bounces a plastic dinosaur along the sand, a prize won in kindergarten for reading two books in one week.

  Everything I’ve ever wanted is on that beach—­Donovan and our daughter, Grace. My own little family. My life.

  I’m still far away, closer to the parking lot, when I see the figure walking along the shore growing closer. It’s a man. His shadow, with its elongated arms and legs, stretches across the beach until it seems to take on a life of its own. Something about the way he moves seems frenetic and sets off small alarms in my head. I walk faster, the sand seeming to reach up and grab at my ankles, slowing my progress.

  Donovan’s pacing takes him in the opposite direction, away from Grace. He’s not paying attention to anything besides his phone call. The man is now closer to Grace, who seems alone on the beach, although Donovan is twenty feet away. Donovan squints up into the pink and orange clouds, raking a hand through his perpetually spiky hair.

  The man’s path takes him straight toward Grace. My heart races. I can’t tell for sure, but it seems like he’s looking right at her. He walks at a determined clip, covering ground much faster than me in my flat, strappy sandals. I lean over in midstride and rip a sandal from one foot without stopping. Then I scoop up the other in one fluid motion.

  Still, each step feels like my bare feet are being sucked into quicksand. I hurry but feel like I’m moving in slow motion.

  “Grace,” I shout, but my words are carried away on the wind. I’m nearly breathless from fighting the sand tugging at my feet. The breeze, which has grown stronger in the past few minutes, whips my hair. Grace’s brown ringlets bob as she hops her plastic dinosaur around, not noticing anything else.

  Donovan isn’t far from Grace, but now the man is closer.

  At the same moment Donovan turns and sees the look on my face, the man reaches Grace. His long shadow falls over her small figure. She looks up with a smile and starts chatting. He leans down. His hand reaches toward her, his fingers millimeters from her arm. A wave of dread ripples through me. My feet feel cemented into the sand. My mind screams, but no words come out of my open mouth. Inside, I’m flailing and thrashing to get to Grace, but on the outside, I’m struck immobile.

  The man reaches down and grasps Grace’s arm, turning her toward him, and the spell is broken. I’m on wet sand, running, the scream caught in my throat coming out as a birdlike garble. I scoop Grace up onto one hip and take a step back. I gasp for air. My heart is going to explode in my chest.

  The man looks at me with surprise, and for a split second, there is something in his eyes that sends panic racing up into my throat, but then the look is gone, as if I imagined it.

  “Gosh. I’m so stupid.” His voice is nasally. He wipes his palms on the legs of his jeans, as if he is sweating even though the temperature is rapidly dipping along with the sun.

  Donovan is at my side.

  At first glance, the man seems boyish, with his bowl haircut, baggy jeans, and sneakers. Up close, a few crow’s-­feet shows he is older. Maybe even closer to my age—­thirties. He has feminine pink lips and piercing blue eyes, the color of Arctic sea ice. The collar of his black jacket is pulled up. His smile is all “gee, golly, shucks,” abashed and embarrassed, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. He paws at his jeans with his palms. He’s done that twice now. He’s nervous.

  When the man meets my eyes again, I realize that something about him seems off, something about his eyes, more than just their intense color. One eye is close to his nose, and the other is set far apart. It’s jarring and somehow unsettling.

  “I’m so sorry,” he says in that same stuffed-­up-­sounding voice. “What a knuckleheaded move. I should know better than to walk up to someone else’s kid like that.”

  Donovan grips my arm.

  “Everything okay here?” His words are clipped.

  I’m finally able to catch my breath. Still, the words will not come.

  “Your kid is so darn cute.” The man won’t meet my eyes. “She looks just like my little sister used to look. I just wanted to say hi to her and didn’t even think that was a total bonehead move to walk up to someone else’s kid when her parents weren’t around.” He gives an odd smile as he says this, looking at Donovan.

  “We were around,” Donovan says in a monotone, staring the man down.

  The man looks at the sand.

  Grace is kicking and trying to get down. My knuckles are white gripping her.

  “Ow, Mama, you’re hurting me,” she says and tosses her curls in irritation.

  Donovan shoots a glance our way before turning his attention back to the man.

  “You live around here?” Donovan asks, seemingly casual, but the muscle in his jaw is working hard. His dark eyes under thick eyebrows have narrowed and hold a glint of menace. In a second, it alters him from the man on the cover of the Sexiest Bay Area Cops calendar into something feral and dangerous.

  The man meets Donovan’s eyes, and for a second it looks like he is challenging Donovan to dispute his story, but then he looks down again and digs a sneakered toe into the sand.

  “Marin. Meeting some friends here in the city for dinner. Was early, so I came here to kill some time. I didn’t mean to cause any problems. I just wanted to say hi to her. Maybe you’re overreacting a bit.”

  Donovan runs a hand through his hair. His posture relaxe
s. Instinctively—­or luckily—­this man has honed in on Donovan’s Achilles’ heel. We’ve talked at length about our tendency to be overprotective parents because of our jobs, me as a crime reporter, and him as a detective. Donovan has argued we can’t let this affect Grace’s childhood. We need to protect her but let her grow up carefree. I agree. But it’s easier said than done.

  We’ve also talked about my irrational fear that something will happen to Grace.

  This man, whoever he is, may not realize it, but he’s instantly off the hook with this one simple word—­“overreacting.”

  “Why don’t you continue on your way, buddy,” Donovan says, dismissing him.

  “My bad, really. Wasn’t using my head. Have a nice night,” the man says and turns to leave.

  I set Grace down, and Donovan wraps his arm around me.

  “You okay?”

  “I don’t know.” I don’t tell him that it felt like I was having a heart attack, that I couldn’t breathe or move. A stranger walked up to my daughter and I stood there, weak, helpless, frozen.

  Donovan gives me a look before we both turn and watch the man’s figure growing smaller. We watch without saying a word. We stand there until the man turns and heads toward the wooden boardwalk bordering the road. He never looks back.

  Chapter 2

  “WASN’T THERE SOMETHING you wanted to talk about before your phone rang?” I ask after the man leaves.

  “Another time,” Donovan says, looking away.

  Earlier, he was acting odd: pulling me away from Grace, swallowing, shoving his hands in his jacket pockets, and not meeting my eyes. Then his partner Finn called. Nine times out of ten, that call meant they were up for a murder. As Donovan talked to Finn, I spotted goose bumps on Grace’s bare arms. We’d promised her we wouldn’t leave until the sun set, so I went to grab her jacket out of the car.

  Now, with her wrapped in the jacket and snuggling close to me, my heart has returned to normal. I’m appalled at how my own body betrayed me by freezing when I needed to act. The man’s “gee shucks” act didn’t fool me. There was something about him that struck terror in my heart.

  “Look, Mama,” Grace says. The three of us turn toward the horizon as the last orange sliver of the sun slips into the dark water.

  “No, green.” The corners of Grace’s little pink lips turn down in disappointment.

  “Maybe next time,” Donovan says, ruffling her curls with his hand. “If it happened every time the sun set, it wouldn’t be magical, would it?”

  Her face scrunches as she thinks about this. She takes his hand as we walk to the car.

  We talked about the green flash on the drive here. How a vivid and intense green light could appear right as the sun disappears. How she had to keep her eyes open as the sun set, since the flash only lasted a second. Sitting in her little car seat on the drive to the beach, she practiced not blinking so she wouldn’t miss it.

  It’s not until we are in the car and Grace has dozed off in her car seat that Donovan brings up what happened at the beach.

  “Dude probably didn’t mean anything. Unless you’re a parent, you don’t think of things like that, that coming up to someone else’s kid is not cool.”

  It sounds like he’s trying to convince himself.

  “He grabbed her arm.”

  “Come on, Ella. You know you and me got some baggage around strangers coming up to kids.” He says this staring straight ahead out the windshield. When I don’t answer he darts a glance my way, but I quickly turn my head and look out the window.

  My sister’s murder isn’t baggage. But deep down inside I know what he means. We both have a tendency to be overprotective and sometimes over react.

  Like last year when a man came up to Grace while she was playing in Washington Square Park. I was sitting nearby on a bench, drinking a cappuccino. My phone was ringing, and I was digging around in my big purse to find it. When I looked up, I couldn’t see Grace. When I spotted her near the edge of the park, a man in a hat was leading her by the hand. I took off at a run. When I reached them, I barked, “Let go of my daughter,” and yanked the man’s arm so hard he fell on his butt. To my horror, it was my grandfather’s old friend Gino. I hadn’t recognized him with a hat on.

  Gino blinked up at me with a confused look. I apologized profusely and helped him up, feeling awful, especially when I saw his wife, Carmela, on a bench at the edge of the park. She watched us, horrified.

  “I was just taking Grace over to say hello to Carmela,” Gino said. “Carmela’s knee is so bad, she can’t walk on this uneven grass.”

  It was mortifying.

  When I told Donovan about it, I cried, saying I would never be a normal mother. I would always be looking for danger around every corner.

  But today is different.

  I know what I saw on the beach. I know what I saw in that man’s eyes. Stay the fuck away from my kid.

  Donovan changes the subject.

  “Finn says we caught a body in Suisun Bay,” he says, looking in the rearview mirror at Grace. She’s in a deep sleep, her mouth hanging open, softly snoring. It’s past her bedtime.

  “Floater?” I ask.

  “You’re going to want to be there.”

  Instead of taking the exit for Oakland, he keeps going. Without saying a word, it’s agreed—­we’re dropping Grace at my mom’s house in the East Bay.

  Chapter 3

  THE WAVES ARE gently lapping against the body lying on the banks of Roe Island in Suisun Bay. It’s not the first time a dead body has been found near the entrance to the Delta, a waterway that stretches inland near Sacramento. Giant spotlights shine down on the sandy bank, covered in driftwood and seaweed. As darkness falls, shadows grow longer and anyone outside the circle of light is hard to see. I stand in the dark with a cluster of other reporters gathered on this tiny island, watching and waiting, shifting from foot to foot.

  My stomach growls as I think about the leftover linguine with lobster sauce dinner waiting for me at home. I’m still uneasy about how I reacted at Ocean Beach. Aren’t mothers supposed to have superhuman strength when their kids are in danger? My greatest fear is something bad happening to my daughter. But today, when I thought she was in danger, instead of springing to her rescue, I was frozen with fear. Another thing to bring up with my therapist next week. I’ve been seeing Marsha for seven years. I’ve made progress, but I’m still dealing with my sister’s death and the knowledge that I’ve killed two men. The deaths were ruled self-­defense. But in the darkest of night, my conscience whispers that no matter how it’s dressed up, I’m a killer.

  Now that I’m a mom, I wonder what this means for my daughter. How am I supposed to teach her right and wrong without sounding like a Class A hypocrite? What happens when she is old enough to find out what I have done?

  Tonight, on this tiny island, I push down those worries and shift from Italian Mama into crime reporter mode. I’m peering through binoculars as I stand way back from the crime-­scene tape. The dead woman has long blond hair. She seems thin in soggy jeans and a dirty white fisherman’s sweater. One shoe is still on, a white Converse tennis shoe. She’s sopping wet, but she’s not bloated and discolored like a floater. If she’d been in the water, it hadn’t been for long.

  Donovan is crouched beside her, eyes narrowed.

  “Wish they’d turn her over so I could see her face,” the cameraman from Channel 5 says beside me. He hoists his heavy camera onto his shoulder for a second and then decides to put it back on its heavy-­duty tripod.

  “Not me,” I say.

  I ended up hitching a ride to the island with the Channel 5 news crew in a boat they rented. Donovan was escorted front and center in the sheriff’s launch that ferried all the cops to the island, a half mile offshore. He waved and winked as I sat on the dock with the rest of the media. I was not amused.

 
I called my close friend and favorite photographer at our paper, Chris Lopez, on the drive in, but he was shooting a Giants game and said not to wait for him. He’d figure out his own ride onto the island.

  Now, all the reporters huddle behind the crime-­scene tape, trying to warm our cold hands while we wait for some official to come talk to us. All the TV camera guys have jockeyed for pole position and are lined up in a row facing the sandy bank.

  I absentmindedly adjust my press pass, on a lanyard around my neck, identifies me as a reporter with the Bay Herald. In the distance, the fog parts, revealing the massive shapes of several dozen ships anchored in the middle of the water. They stand sentry against the remaining traces of light on the horizon. I point my binoculars toward the fleet.

  Nicknamed both the “Phantom Fleet” and the “Mothball Fleet,” the Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet is a ship graveyard that is home to dozens of U.S. Navy warships that are decommissioned or inactive and some old merchant ships, probably about seventy-­five altogether.

  A shiver trips down my spine as I look at the looming carcasses of once-­great warships. I’m sure they must all be haunted by the souls of all the dead sailors who once lived there.

  “Ever gone out there, Giovanni?” the cameraman asks, seeing where I’m looking.

  “What? How?”

  “They did a media tour back in 1990 for some big anniversary of one of the ships. Got to see inside. Trippy. Some of the cabins still have books and beds, perfectly preserved from the 1970s. It was like a ghost ship. I could almost hear eerie music filtering around and the cannons blasting.”