Three Open Sides
Chapter nine
The white van arrived at seven forty-five on a Thursday morning.
Evan was replacing a dock line on Slip Six when it pulled into the service entrance. No company logo. Asheville plates. Climate-controlled, judging by the rooftop unit. Two men got out and opened the rear doors while Margot and the glass artist waited on the asphalt.
He noticed he’d started thinking of her as Margot instead of “the event planner.” He wasn’t sure when that had happened.
Somewhere between the boardwalk and the way she’d looked at him when he’d told her about the boat.
Like he was the first person all week who’d brought her a problem she hadn’t already anticipated.
She stood with her pen gripped tightly in her hand. Bracing. He was starting to learn her postures the way he’d learned the harbor’s moods, involuntarily, from repetition and proximity.
Pete from security leaned against the wall scrolling his phone. Margot glanced at Pete, then away. He could see the restraint in her jaw from fifty yards.
They unloaded twelve crates. Custom-built, foam-lined. The glass artist supervised every step in white cotton gloves, her voice carrying across the lot in short, precise commands. Caleb hovered near the crates with the easy familiarity of a man who belonged everywhere.
Evan finished the dock line and watched. A hundred and seventy thousand dollars, headed into an open pavilion with one guard and an electronic lock.
He checked Slip Fourteen first. The Robalo was still there. The duffel bag was gone, but the cable and battery pack had been pushed under the console. The knot hadn’t changed. Nobody had moved the boat. The bilge pump was still dripping its slow rhythm against the water, steady as a heartbeat.
Patty hadn’t found anything in the guest log. No name, no reservation, no record of anyone asking about slip rental. Whoever owned this boat was a ghost.
Then he walked to the pavilion. The air inside was cooler than the terrace. Someone had rigged a portable AC unit near the back wall, and he could hear it humming behind the display.
The display case ran the length of the back wall, glass-topped, LED-lit, every ornament glowing from within. The first piece, a deep amber sphere with veins of iridescent blue, caught the morning sun and threw a faint rainbow across the floor.
Evan stopped in the doorway. He wasn’t an art person. He didn’t know anything about blown glass or metallic oxide or whatever Caleb had been explaining to anyone who’d listen. But he knew what something valuable looked like when it was vulnerable.
This looked vulnerable.
Three open sides. One back wall against the storage wing, where an unlocked utility closet held the electrical panel for this section of the building. One camera, still in its box on the floor. The motion sensor still in its packaging beside it. Pete, standing by the entrance, still on his phone.
Tessa was filming from three angles, crouching low for the last shot.
Caleb was at the far end, adjusting a light strip with an unhurried precision that didn’t match his usual personality.
His fingers moved along the LED housing.
The glass artist watched him without complaint, which, given what Evan had seen of her temperament, was practically an endorsement.
Margot was testing the keycard reader. Swipe, click, open, close, swipe again. Methodical. Thorough. She reminded him of himself checking bilge pumps.
“Impressive,” he said from the doorway.
She looked up. A flicker crossed her expression. Not surprise. More like she’d been waiting for him without knowing it. He recognized that flicker. It unsettled him.
“Which part?”
“The case. The lighting. Not many events get people to stop and stare before they’ve officially started.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“It’s an observation.” The corner of his mouth moved. “Keycard only?”
“Keycard plus a physical key held by Lila and Elaine. Four authorized cards total.” She held up hers.
“What about him?” Evan nodded toward Caleb at the far end of the case.
“Vendor card. Not authorized for the display case.”
“Good.” He paused. “What about the power?”
“What about it?”
“The keycard system, the cameras, the motion sensor. All electronic. What happens if somebody cuts the power?”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Rotated her pen.
“The electrical panel for this section is in an unlocked utility closet about forty feet behind us.” He kept his voice even. “Anyone with a flashlight could find it.”
Her pen stopped moving. She looked over her shoulder at the back wall of the pavilion, then at the ornaments glowing in their case, then back at him. The professional mask slipped for just a second, and underneath it, for a second, was fear. Not of the closet. Of having missed it.
She wrote something down. Fast, hard strokes. He could hear the pen from six feet away.
“You notice a lot of things,” she said without looking up.
“It’s a small marina. Not much else to do.”
She looked up. Held his gaze. “That’s not true and we both know it.”
The pavilion was full of people. Caleb adjusting lights, Tessa filming, Pete theoretically guarding.
For a second, the room narrowed to the two of them and six feet of warm salt air.
“I can put a padlock on the closet tonight,” he said, because talking about padlocks was easier than whatever was happening across those six feet. “I’ve got a spare in the dock shed.”
“You’d do that?”
“It’s a padlock. Not a favor.” He didn’t add that the spare was old, the shackle worn soft from a decade of salt air, or that a padlock only worked if the hasp it hung from was solid.
The hasp on that closet door was screwed into forty-year-old trim.
He made a note to replace it. Later. After the walk-through.
She almost smiled. The real kind, not the professional one she used on vendors. He could tell the difference now. That was another thing that unsettled him.
“All right then. I’ll add you to the security walk-through. Tomorrow morning, seven o’clock.”
He hadn’t volunteered for anything at this resort in five years. “Seven o’clock.”
He walked back into the sunlight. Halfway down the boardwalk he stopped and looked at the pavilion. The ornaments glowed through the open walls, visible from the terrace, the lawn, and the guest slips. Including Slip Fourteen.
The Robalo was still there. Still tied with the wrong knot.
He looked at the boat. Then at the pavilion. Then at the utility closet door, propped open in the heat.
He went to get the padlock.
The service corridor was dim and cool after the glare off the water, the overhead lights still on their daytime setting.
Halfway down it, near the staff door to the back of house, a kid in a resort polo was going through his pockets.
Front, back, front again. Then crouching to check the floor along the baseboard, the way you do when you’ve already looked once and didn’t believe it.
Evan knew him by sight. One of the new seasonal hires. Derek, maybe. He’d been hauling chairs for Caleb earlier.
“Lose something?”
The kid straightened up fast, the way the young ones did when a staffer they didn’t know spoke to them. “No. I mean. Dropped something. I’ll find it.” He patted the lanyard at his hip, then stopped himself, like he’d realized the gesture gave something away. “It’s fine. Thanks.”
Evan looked at him a second longer than the moment called for. The kid’s ears had gone red. Not the face of someone who’d dropped a pen.
But it wasn’t his business, and he had a closet to lock before morning. “Check the storage room,” he said. “Things end up there.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” The kid went the other way, still patting his pockets.
Evan filed it away without deciding to, the same way he filed a knot tied wrong or a slip that didn’t match the log. Then he let it go and kept walking.
And he went to get it now, before he could think too hard about the fact that the first thing he’d wanted to do was go back and tell Margot he’d see her in the morning.