Twenty minutes later, her towel was still beside mine.
Her sandals were neatly placed on top of it.
Her phone was still inside her beach bag.
At first, I assumed she had simply stopped somewhere to talk to someone or gotten distracted.
But as the minutes passed, the feeling in my stomach grew stronger.
Something wasn’t right.
The Search
The beach quickly became the center of a frantic search.
Lifeguards checked the water.
Police officers searched the restrooms, parking areas, nearby businesses, hotels, and roads leading away from the beach.
People who had been sitting nearby were asked whether they had noticed anything unusual.
Investigators even checked the ice cream stand Nora had mentioned.
But no employee remembered seeing her.
There was no clear explanation for where she had gone.
It was as though she had simply vanished into the crowd.
One of the details investigators had from that afternoon was a photograph I had taken less than an hour before.
