Another jumped off the bridge last week. That bridge had taken 34 in the last 5 years. If local legend was to be believed, the bay held fantastical creatures that granted you free passage to heaven if you were daring enough to jump. The theory was absolutely ridiculous, and it spoke volumes that it was the leading hypothesis.

Smith had been working as a detective at the police station for 26 years now, and in all that time, nobody had ever figured out how to tackle that bay. Anytime someone tried to measure, scan, or tamper with the bay for any reason, it went wrong. Equipment malfunctions, illogical readings, nothing had ever worked. And no bodies had ever been recovered.

The bay mystery had been Smith's pet project for months, but he'd made no headway whatsoever. It simply didn't make sense.

The most recent death had been one Matthew Enman, a law student visiting family for spring vacation. He had a well-off family, good friends, and a fiance that was to become a spouse in only a few months. Smith didn't claim to know about this boy's mental state, but by all accounts, he seemed to have been living a good life.

None of the deceased seemed to have anything in common. Wildly varying ages, backgrounds, and lives.

The bay was nothing if not a mystery, and Smith was set on figuring it out.

The deadly bay, rather than kept people at bay, attracted more curious souls who wanted to know why those who dared it never returned to say what the journey into it looked like and no skull -human or beast, had ever been retrieved for scientific analysis. As such, those who cautiously milled around the insatiable bay were droves of path-finders, proof-finders and reason-finders who as usual suffered the curiosity of tracing and tempting fate in a bid to investigate, research and publish their opinions and conclusions about the bay. Smith didn't mind the crowded scene of crime since, initially, he had been nearly the only one talking to the dumb bay and the skulls and lifeless bodies that it held in it and so, having some company of other interested parties brought about a respite and a morale booster. A toll of seven deaths per year at the bay was alarming enough for the whole place to be declared off-limits. A totally forbidden garden where death was guaranteed. But with detectives who serve the state that wants to prove effort and individuals that yearn to raise their professional bar and a restless community that wants to have, at least, the fossils and bodies brought to their families, venturing into the danger zone was an inevitable affair. It's why Smith couldn't run away from that pressure especially with twenty-six years of service on his collar that he must show worth for. It was another thing to die while trying, so, he had not quite immersed his thoughts into playing hero detective yet.

Mathew Enman's family had approached detective Smith countless times, pledging to spend every single coin in a bid to retrieve their kin's remains and even dangling a carrot of thousands of cash money persuading detective Smith to mobilise a team that would accomplish the mission assuring that they would pay the long bill without a blink. Detective Smith had an authority that he answered to and he wouldn't just stoop to the temptation to bend the rules in favor of a family much as his years were fast flying him into the pensioner phase of life. After all, Matthew's misfortune wasn't the first and was certainly not the last -unless the bay was firmly cordoned off or guarded twenty-four-seven. There were no resources for that. Not just yet.