Inside Sheni Again

"Stay away to give her a chance to get better. If that's possible."

When Nakam had remained quiet for a few weeks, the chaperones let watchfulness slide. By the time Nakam's birthday approached, the watchdogs left him to get the mail. One day he received a battered card. Sheni had written "I am ready to go" with a time-date-place underneath.

On a trip to the bank, Nakam pulled an activated but never used credit card from his safe deposit box. Later, he used it to arrange a car that he wheeled onto the interstate before the day's chaperone noticed he was gone.

At a rest stop, Nakam added his phone to the junk piled in the bed of an old pickup. With any luck, the pursuit would track his cell as the truck rolled toward the town where Sheni lived.

Nakam hurried past the empty beach warning sign, descended to the sand, and turned toward the house. At the sound of his name, he turned to see Sheni in the water up to the waist. She waved her arms. He followed the wooden beach path to the waterside. For a moment Nakam wondered at the empty shore. People walked here and there in the distance, but no swimmers. He guessed the water was too cold.

Yet an instinct stopped his bare feet at the water's edge. He struggled to clear his mind. Until Sheni hooked her thumbs under the shoulder straps of her swimsuit and bared her breasts. Nakam undressed and waded toward her with absurd giant steps.

A narrow channel split the surf into two wings. Sheni stood beyond the ribbon of flat water. Her pale skin looked bled white. She seemed nervous, and shivering shook her body.

As Nakam neared he felt a strong pull around his legs. Momentum carried him into the full flow of the current. He gave a cry as he tumbled head over heels. Water filled his nose and mouth. Panic rose, then drained away from the final thought that nothing remained for him on shore.

* * * *

The local sheriff led him not to the body--Kohl had already identified Nakam at the morgue--but to a square marked out by yellow police tape. Blown sand half-covered Nakam's discarded clothes.

"If it's a bad time," the sheriff began.

"He had some problems."

"We saw the stories about the lottery."

"Not money," Khol said. "Personal."

"Bad enough to do this sort of thing?"

"Not in my opinion. But we're always surprised after it happens, aren't we?" He turned toward the water. "There's one detail I can get my arms around. It's impossible to believe he'd choose this method. Nake was phobic about going in more than ankle deep."

"Rip currents come right up to the shore," the sheriff said. "Folks've waded into one in shallow water time and again. It's why we post warnings."

"The warning was up?"

"Hanging on the board, according to the Park District."

Khol motioned to the sand. "No clothes besides his?"

"You think he met someone?"

Kohl rolled over the honest response in his mind. He could not imagine anything or anyone else had the power to tempt Nakam into moving water.

The cop in him needed to know the facts. But a memory of Sheni at Thanksgiving years earlier--overeducated for the crowd, clearly in love, uncomfortable but friendly, a big galoot of a girl with enough small-town manners to help Mom clean the dishes--opened the valve on his sympathy.

And whatever happened in the water might've been self-defense, anyway.

"Just wondering," Khol said.