I pick Luz up behind the station so no one sees her get into my car.
The building’s rear lot smells like oil and wet asphalt, the sodium-vapor lights turning everything this sickly yellow. Luz leans against her unmarked sedan with her arms folded, hair pulled back, badge chain tucked inside her sweatshirt. My windshield wipers squeak once across mostly dry glass, protesting the thin mist that’s started to crawl in from the bay.
I roll down the window. “Last chance to back out,” I say. “I can go narrate to a seagull.”
She snorts and walks around to the passenger side. “I still don’t know why you need cliff ambiance at midnight instead of, I don’t know, stock ocean sounds.”
“Because stock ocean sounds didn’t watch Juliet die,” I say. “Because this town only believes things when they come with B-roll.”
Luz opens the door but doesn’t get in yet. “Ground rules,” she says. “You promised on the phone, but I want it on record. No climbing fences. No going under ropes. No dangling your mic hand over the edge to get ‘better reverb.’”
I hold up three fingers. “Scout’s honor. I stay behind the safety fence the whole time. You keep the keys. I don’t livestream, I only record. If anything feels off, we bail.”
She studies my face, the way moms in the drop-off lane look at each other before deciding whether to share the good gossip. “And you’ll cut anything I say that could screw an active case.”
“I always do,” I say. “I don’t want to make your life harder. I just want… the sound of it. The air. So when people listen, they know this isn’t a generic cliff. It’s that cliff.”
Luz exhales through her nose, then slides into the seat, bringing a gust of cold air and station coffee with her. “Fine,” she says. “But if you break any of those rules, I put you in the report as ‘uncooperative civilian.’”
“You’d spell my podcast name right in the report at least?” I ask.
The corner of her mouth twitches. “I’d even use italics.”
I pull out of the lot, my little car humming like it’s nervous too.
The road up to the overlook winds along the waterline before climbing. On our right, dark mansions perch above the shore, their decks glowing with string lights. I catch flashes of satin and suit jackets on one balcony, an off-season party where the bass floats out over the bay in a muffled throb, blending with the crash of waves and the faint chemical tang of hair spray. Somewhere there, a glass rose probably sits in a display case, frozen in a moment none of them earned.
“You know they’re already planning this year’s Prom Throwback,” Luz says, watching the houses. “Nineties again. It tested well with donors.”
“Of course it did,” I mutter. “Nothing sells tickets like nostalgia for the year a girl died.”
“You going to crash it with a mic?” she asks.
“I was more thinking of hiding under the buffet table with a shotgun mic,” I say, then add, “That was a joke, in case Internal Affairs is listening.”
“Internal Affairs doesn’t have the budget to tail podcasters,” Luz says. “Yet.”
The town falls away behind us. Trees close in on the road, branches knitting overhead. The air sharpens, cool and damp, smelling mostly of salt now, with a faint underlying rot from leaves trapped in the ditches. I flip my headlights to high beam, and the reflectors along the guardrail wink on, leading us toward the dark line where the land just stops.
When we pull into the overlook turnout, my stomach tightens. The parking area is empty, just two faded spaces and a knock-kneed trash can. Beyond the low split-rail fence, the cliff drops off into black.
I kill the engine. The silence presses in, broken only by the roar of water grinding itself to foam on the rocks below.
Luz clicks on a small tactical flashlight and sweeps it once around the lot. “No other cars,” she says. “That’s good.”
“Unless they walked from the trailhead,” I say before I can stop myself.
She cuts me a look. “You can either feed your anxiety or turn on your recorder. Pick one.”
I unclip my portable recorder from its padded case and fit my headphones over my ears. The little screen glows, casting my hands in a ghostly blue. I plug in the external mic, a slender black wand I’ve wrapped with a bit of foam to cut the wind.
“Ready?” I ask.
Luz angles the beam downward so she doesn’t blind me. “Let’s get this over with before my supervisors decide to drive by.”
I step up to the wooden safety fence. The slats are rough under my palm, worn smooth in places where teenagers’ hands have probably climbed where they weren’t supposed to. A “DANGER – UNSTABLE CLIFF” sign hangs crooked, its red letters faded by years of salt and sun.
I hit record.
“This is Mara,” I say quietly, letting the wind brush my words. “I’m standing at the edge of Crescent Bay, at the overlook where, according to official reports, Juliet Reeves spent her last minutes alive.”
In my headphones, my voice carries a thin tremor I hope no one else hears.
I hold the mic level, pointing it toward the abyss. The ocean answers, a layered rush of water slamming into rock. Every few seconds, there’s a deeper, booming impact from somewhere down on the rock shelf kids used to sneak out to after dances, the one you can’t quite see unless you lean too far.
“On paper,” I continue, “the story is simple. A prom queen, upset after an argument with her boyfriend, leaves the old gym. Witnesses say she’s been drinking. She ignores a teacher’s shout and heads for the cliffs. Sometime between 11:30 and 11:45 p.m., she slips. Authorities say she falls from up here.”
I tap the top of the fence lightly so my listeners know exactly where I mean. The wood gives a dull thud.
“Her body is found later on the rock shelf below,” I say. “The shelf locals call the ‘table,’ like the ocean set it for offerings.”
Luz steps closer to the fence, watching the dark. Under her jacket, her shoulders sit rigid.
I lower my voice further. “That’s the version engraved in this town’s memory. It’s the one that played under the slideshow at the regatta fundraiser, the one whispered at the first Prom Throwback when the glass rose centerpieces matched Juliet’s theme. It’s the version that let everyone keep dancing.”
The wind stings my eyes and tastes bitter on my tongue, salted and metallic.
“But there are problems,” I say. “For one, we have a timestamped photo of Juliet at the gym doors after she’s supposed to have already fallen. And then there’s the anonymous caller, Oracle, who says I’m looking in the wrong place entirely. They referenced a song lyric about ‘velvet water’ and a different kind of drop.”
I angle the mic toward Luz. She shakes her head once, but then she speaks, her voice low and clipped.
“And there’s the scene itself,” she says. “I’ve reviewed the original cliff photos. No clear impact spatter. No debris pattern you’d expect from someone tumbling off this height. Her injuries read more like lateral impact and submersion than a straight vertical fall.”
I blink. She hadn’t said it that bluntly before.
“You never put that in your official notes?” I ask.
“I put everything in my notes,” she says. “Doesn’t mean anyone read them. Doesn’t mean they weren’t buried long before they landed on my desk.”
A wave slams the shelf below with a crack that vibrates through the wood under my hands. For a second, I picture Juliet’s body hitting those rocks, then the water, limbs totalled, the prom dress soaked and heavy. My throat closes.
I let the sound run: the ocean, the wind, the occasional rattle of dry grass behind us.
“Twenty-five years later,” I say into the mic, “we’re back at the same fence, with the same warning sign and the same drop. The question is whether this cliff ever held the full truth, or if it’s just a scenic prop built to frame a story someone needed to sell.”
A fine trickle of dirt skitters down the slope behind us.
I turn my head, but Luz is already angling her flashlight toward the ground near the fence posts. The beam cuts across tall grass and patches of bare dirt, then freezes.
“Stay there,” she says quietly.
“That’s my favorite sentence,” I say, but my voice comes out thin.
She steps forward, keeping one foot firmly on the asphalt of the turnout, the other shifting to the packed earth right up against the fence. The flashlight beam tightens. I follow it with my eyes.
On the ground, just inside the fence line, something glints.
Luz crouches, her jacket rustling. “Well, that’s not municipal decor,” she says.
“What is it?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer right away. The beam trembles, just a fraction.
“Glass,” she says finally. “A lot of it.”
I swallow and inch closer to the fence, careful to keep my shoes on the pavement. From here, I can make out the shapes: curved shards, translucent, catching the light in pale pink and faint blue. Whoever left them arranged them in a loose circle with pointed slivers flaring outward, like petals blown apart mid-bloom.
My throat goes dry. “Tell me that doesn’t look like—”
“Don’t say it,” Luz cuts in.
I say it anyway, because the mic is in my hand and denial has never solved a murder. “It looks like a smashed glass rose.”
The words hang there between us, carried off and shredded by the wind.
I crouch to get a better look without crossing the line, the fence rail pressing into my ribs. The shards aren’t dulled at the edges, not the way glass gets after years of weather and sand. They look new. Hungry.
“This wasn’t here in the old photos,” Luz says. “No glass. No flower shape. Just rope, chalk marks, and too much water.”
“This matches Katie’s description,” I murmur. “The anniversary roses on her porch. Clear, pinkish. Delicate. She kept them all in a box.”
My fingers tighten on the recorder until the plastic case creaks.
“Whoever’s been visiting her house has been visiting here too,” I say. “They’re keeping the story consistent.”
Luz shifts, scanning the area with the flashlight again. “The edges are clean,” she says. “No sand grind. No mineral staining. Someone did this recently.”
The skin on the back of my neck lifts.
A gust slams into us, colder than the ones before, carrying the raw, fishy stink of the tide turning. Under it, for a heartbeat, I catch something else: cigarette smoke, faint and stale, the kind that clings to someone’s jacket long after the ember dies.
I straighten slowly. “Do you smell that?” I whisper.
Luz turns the beam away from the ground and sweeps it over the scrub behind us, the low bushes and gnarled shrubs that cling to the cliff edge. The leaves shiver.
“Probably kids,” she says, but her free hand has drifted toward where her gun would be if she were on duty. Tonight, she’s just in jeans and a jacket, unarmed except for the flashlight and the weight of her presence.
Gravel crunches somewhere in the dark, a single small shift, like a shoe pivoting or a rock dislodging.
I swing the mic around without meaning to, pointing it toward the sound. In my headphones, the noise is amplified: a faint scrape, the hiss of displaced pebbles, then nothing.
“Hello?” I call before Luz can stop me. The word comes out too high, too bright.
Luz steps closer, shoulder touching mine. “Great,” she mutters. “Announce yourself to the murderer.”
“You don’t know they’re a murderer,” I say.
“I know we’re on a dead girl’s cliff at night, and somebody left her calling card at our feet,” she says. “Nobody with healthy hobbies chooses that Venn diagram.”
I raise the recorder to my mouth, my hand visibly shaking now. “If you’re out there,” I say, “this is Mara Lane. You already know that. I’m recording. You’ve been leaving glass roses around Crescent Bay. You stood where we’re standing. You looked down at the same rocks. I’m not here to out you in real time. I just want to know why you keep coming back.”
Luz exhales sharply. “What did we say about feeding your anxiety?”
“I’m feeding theirs,” I say. “Different diet.”
The wind answers. No voice calls back, no shadow detaches from the brush. Still, every hair on my arms stands up under my jacket. The dark feels thick, textured, full of potential hands and cameras and eyes.
A faint click echoes from beyond the arc of the flashlight, thin and electronic. It could be a branch snapping. It could be a phone button. It could be the tiny shutter sound of someone’s camera app.
Luz spins toward it, the beam knifing through the air. The light catches nothing but leaves and a flash of something low and reflective—a bottle, maybe, or another shard of glass—before landing on empty brush.
“We’re done,” she says. Her voice has dropped into the tone that brooks zero argument. “Pack your gear.”
My instincts agree for once. I hit stop on the recorder, the waveform freezing mid-breath, and hustle it back into its case, fingers clumsy on the zipper.
As we walk back to the car, the gravel crunches under our boots in a too-loud rhythm. I keep expecting a second set of steps to fall in behind us, just out of sync. I don’t hear it, but I feel the shape of that possibility pacing us all the way to the curb.
Luz unlocks the doors with a chirp that makes me flinch. We climb in, slam the doors, and for a second just sit there with the engine off, listening to our own breathing.
“You okay?” she asks finally, eyes on the windshield instead of me.
“I was performing bravery for the mic,” I say. “The audience likes it when I sound fearless.”
“And now?” she asks.
I swallow, tasting salt that might just be from the air. “Now I’m thinking about how whoever left those glass petals knew exactly where the police said Juliet fell,” I say. “And I’m thinking about how your photos don’t match that fall. So either the town has been worshipping the wrong stage for twenty-five years, or we’re sharing it with someone who’s rewriting the script in real time.”
Luz starts the car. The headlights flare to life, sweeping over the overlook one last time. For a second, in the beam, I swear I catch a darker patch among the shrubs, a suggestion of a taller shape. Then it’s gone, swallowed by distance and my own overworked imagination.
“Pick one,” she says. “Wrong stage, or someone in the wings.”
“Both,” I say quietly, fastening my seat belt with stiff fingers. “And I think they’ve been watching the show longer than I’ve been recording it.”
As we pull away, the cliff disappears behind us, but the image of the broken glass rose stays, lodged in my mind with the steady click of that distant, invisible shutter, waiting to see what I do with the tape.