The beachgoers in Lake Farley knew they’d do well to avoid Earline. By now she was a familiar, if unfortunate, staple of the town. Wild-eyed and manic, her prematurely graying hair flying frizzy around her gaunt face, she could be found each day prowling the sand with bloody ankles and a beat-up metal detector. They knew her at the pawn shop just as well. Every afternoon just before closing, she’d come on in and empty a raggedy old Crown Royal bag onto the glass display case with that day’s findings. Mostly that metal detector of hers picked up bottle caps, broken bits of old belt buckles, pull tabs from cans of pop, and other bits and bobs of uselessness. Earline would pitch every last one of them as priceless treasure. The old pawn shop owner, who’d been there since he was a little kid working under his daddy, had a bit of a soft spot and humored her whenever he could. Every now and then there would be a bracelet or a silver coin mixed in among the garbage, and he’d take it off her hands and give her some cash.

            Earline’s ankles were already giving her grief when she arrived at the beach that morning. She didn’t remember when the rashes had started, but by now they were a fact of life. Most nights she’d wake up under her tarp beneath the freeway overpass and find herself scratching those poor, abused ankles of hers. Chronic sand rash, she’d decided it was called. Nothing to be done about it. She switched on the metal detector and got going along her usual route down the lakeshore.      

            It was barely ten in the morning and already sweltering. Earline moved slowly down the beach, her eyes fixed on the sand, her restless mind steadied by the beep, beep, beep of the detector. There were some locals laid out on towels a few yards away, and they eyed her warily as she approached, like a bite-prone dog they mostly trusted but not completely.

            The beach itself was nearly as sad as the town. Once, before Earline or anyone she knew had been born, it had been a touristy escape for the rich folks in the city. They’d drive inland with their coolers and cigars and lay out on the sand like sea lions. Now the place was mostly struggling families, farm workers, the occasional meth addict, and Earline.

            BEEEEEP.

            Earline’s heart soared at the longer, more aggressive beep that meant that she had found something. Nowadays these discoveries were the only time she felt that kind of feeling. She dropped to her boney knees and dug.

            Out from the sandy abyss came the necklace. It was a gaudy, heart-shaped thing on a long gold chain, and as Earline squinted at in the mean, bright sun, she realized the heart was a vessel with a tiny screw top connecting it to the chain. On its face was an engraved date, and the name JAMANTHA JANE, if one could really call that a name. Earline shoved it in her treasure bag and kept it moving.

#

That afternoon at the pawn shop, Earline deposited her usual trove of findings on the counter. The pawn man, Gary, looked it over patiently, like he always did.

            “Got some pop tops there, Earline. I keep tellin’ you about them.”  

            “I read an article in the goddamn New York Times,” said Earline, who had not read anything in years, “about pop tops becoming a collector’s item in the a-vont garde art world.”

            “Nope,” said Gary simply.

            “Well, check this out why don’tcha.” She held up a broken hearing aid, her moon-sized eyes gleaming with mania. “This here’s an important piece of medical equipment. Expensive. Rare. But I’ll letcha have it for only three hundred smackers.”

            Gary ignored this and pointed to the heart-shaped necklace, half-hidden beneath sand and pop tops.

            “What’s that there? Some jewelry?”

            Earline hoisted it high into the air where it dangled, glinting in the light.

            “Aw, jeez, Earline. Ain’t you recognize an urn when you see one?”

            Earline looked closer at the necklace and felt a creeping, sickly sensation come over her. An urn. Now she thought on it, of course it was. Earline didn’t like things that made her remember death. She didn’t like it at all, and she could feel herself getting real riled up about it. Gary seemed to sense this.

            “Hey,” he said, and pointed her towards his eyes with two fingers. “You’re all good, Earline. Ain’t no big thing.”

            She nodded and kept her eyes on Gary, trying her very best to keep from going to the dark place.

            “Know what you oughta do? Post a picture of it on the LFLF.”

            “The what now?”

            “Lake Farley Lost and Found. On the FaceTube.”    

The librarians were never very nice to her when she popped by to use the computers, but Earline did so nonetheless that evening.

            HEART NECKLACE WITH DEAD PERSON ASHES (JAMANTHA JANE) FOUND ON EAST BEACH. PHONE IS BROKE. PLS FIND ME UNDER THE FREEWAY TO CLAIM.

            She hit post and watched her message in a bottle float out to the Facebook group sea.

#

Earline had been staying under the freeway overpass for a few years now. Maybe a decade. Who’s counting. It was a far cry from the little house on the lake that she used to live in with Genevieve– but it was important not to think about the little house, and especially not about Genevieve, so she very rarely did.

            Her ankles burned and stung as she trudged towards her tarp mansion on the way home from the library. Fancy, her wrinkly old neighbor who always wore a zebra print fleece, even in the dead of summer, was sweeping up outside her torn-up Coleman tent.

            “Earline, them legs of yours ain’t look too hot.”

            “Anybody come by looking for a necklace in the last half hour?” Earline asked. She didn’t know how FaceTube worked. Maybe somebody had seen her message right quick and come down straight away.

            “What the hell I look like, a jewelry store?” Fancy went back to sweeping.

            Earline crawled under the flap that led inside her tarp mansion. She’d fixed it up real nice– even had herself a queen-sized mattress that she’d dragged halfway across town after finding it on the curb. There was a banged up old nightstand where she kept the books she sometimes stole and never read from the library (she unloaded one from her pants now and added it to the collection), and a little gas stove that some good Samaritan had given her a while back. Earline knew not to get too attached to things, though. Her first year under the freeway, she’d come back from a stroll and found the cops tearing her entire place apart. Everything she owned in trash bags. Even her last remaining photo of pretty little Genevieve. Losing that photo hurt near as bad as losing Genevieve herself, and it was then that Earline made the executive decision to simply stop thinking about her. Shortly after that she found the metal detector, and she gratefully let herself get consumed by her obsession with it. It was the only thing the was afraid to lose.

            Earline laid down on the worn and dirty mattress and closed her eyes. With one hand she scratched her ankles until they bled, and with the other she clutched the heart-shaped necklace that contained some poor girl’s earthly remains.

#

The weather was unusually fabulous the next day on the beach. Bright blue sky with big old puffy clouds, and a soft breeze that cut the heat and made it bearable. As a result, Earline was faced with the challenge of navigating far more beach goers than usual. The metal detector flung sand onto their towels as she swung it to and fro, and they looked up at her with contemptuous expressions and pulled their babies closer as she passed.

            Beep. Beep. Beep.

            Tough day. It had been two whole hours and she was coming up empty. Earline could feel the heart-shaped necklace pressed against the sunburnt skin of her chest under her t-shirt.

            A little ways down the shoreline, a small boy, maybe four at the max, was splashing a plastic shovel against the gentle waves of the lake. Earline watched as he waded on unsteady little legs through the muck and algae until he was waist-deep in water. He was all by himself. She looked around. A pair of married roughnecks, both with beet-red skin and faded tattoos, were lounging on beach chairs drinking Modelos. They were the only parent-types nearby, and yet neither of them had a glace to spare for the little boy playing in the lake. Earline watched as he stumbled, splashed in the water, then righted himself. He seemed to be having a grand old time. Earline felt the dark place overwhelming her.

            “That your boy?” she demanded, flinging sand up in her wake as she stormed over to the roughneck man and woman. The handle of the metal detector felt sweaty in her grasp.

            “Huh?”

            “Him,” said Earline. She thrust a skeletal finger towards the child.

            “Who’s asking?” said the man.

            “Ain’t even watching him. Dumb fuckin’ hicks. Know how easy it is for a little kid to drown? Happens like that.” Earline snapped her fingers in the air. Her face had slipped back into the manic mask of urgency that often made passersby grip their purses a little tighter.

            “Mind your business, crazy,” said the man, and went back to his beer.

            In a flash, Earline scooped a fistful of sand and threw it in their faces. The man let out a roar of anger and leapt from his chair, towering over her.

            “You dumb bitch!”

            “He’s playin’ out there all by himself! Gonna trip and fall in the water and end up a pile of ashes in somebody’s goddamn necklace—”

            Before Earline could finish, the man snatched the metal detector out of her hand. He raised his knee, raised the handle of the detector, and in an instant, cracked it in two across his thigh. Earline opened her mouth in a silent scream of horror. The world felt like it was dissolving into fragments. He might as well have cracked her soul in half.

            She fell to her knees and wept. The man and woman exchanged a look and then scooted their setup a few yards down the beach, beckoning towards the shore for the little boy to follow.

#

Earline transported the pieces of the broken metal detector back to the freeway overpass as somberly as if they were the bones of an ancient prince. She laid them down on the sidewalk outside her tarp and sunk to a seat on the cement. The noise of the traffic over her head seemed quieter than usual. Everything felt dull and distant. She tried to think about what she might do tomorrow, but the gap in her routine was too painful to comprehend.

            “Well, shit. You must be lookin’ for Earline, not me.”

            Fancy’s voice floated towards her on a slight delay. Earline looked up at Fancy’s tent and saw her hunched over her broom as usual, talking to woman who clearly didn’t belong here.

            She must’ve been around Earline’s age but she looked two decades younger. Her long brown hair hung limp and her eyes were sunken into dark circles of exhaustion, but her clothes were neat and clean. She looked like she’d been crying for years.

            “Are you Earline?” the woman asked, moving past Fancy like she’d never been there.

            Earline just nodded. There was a familiar hint of mania in the woman’s eyes; for a flicker of a moment, Earline wondered why people always looked at her strangely where there were so many others just like her.

            “I saw your Facebook post – the necklace?” The woman dropped to her knees right there on the piss-covered sidewalk. “It’s my daughter. My daughter’s in that necklace. Please – I need her back.”

            Earline felt acutely aware of the pain in her blood-crusted ankles and the cool metal of the urn on her chest. She wondered if it was obvious through her t-shirt. She looked the woman over, knelt there on the ground, her hands clasped in front of her like Earline was some kind of savior. They were just like each other, and yet not at all. Earline’s broken metal detector let out a sad, off-key beep. The empty space of tomorrow loomed over her. The empty space of the metal detector, the empty space of Genevieve.

            Earline drew her knees up to her chest in case the outline of the necklace was discernable.

            “Sorry,” she said. “I already pawned it.”

– Amy Monaghan