The Separate Circuit
Chapter fifteen
The dock shed smelled like motor oil and coffee.
Margot accepted the mug Evan handed her and wrapped both hands around it, grateful for the warmth. He had a small pot going on a single-burner camp stove tucked between a socket set and a can of marine varnish.
She leaned against the workbench.
Six thirty-two in the morning. The sun was barely up, painting the harbor in shades of pink and gold. Along the back wall, his tools hung on a pegboard, each one outlined in marker so it could be returned to exactly the right spot. A man who kept track of things. She understood that impulse.
The shed was small enough that they stood only a few feet apart, and she was aware of every inch of it. The smell of coffee mixing with motor oil and salt. He turned his mug slowly in one hand, not drinking from it.
“You do this every morning?” she asked. “Coffee in the dock shed at dawn?”
“Most mornings.”
“Doesn’t it get lonely?”
He looked at her over the rim of his cup. “It did.”
Past tense. She heard it. “You said you wanted to show me something.”
He reached into his pocket and set a small object on the workbench between them. A shard of glass. Curved, iridescent, catching the overhead light in a shimmer of blue and green.
Margot set down her coffee. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Found it at the waterline this morning. Twenty yards south of the dock, half buried in the sand.” He pointed through the shed’s open door toward the beach. “Fresh break. Hasn’t been in the water long enough to tumble.”
She picked it up carefully. The glass was lighter than she expected, and the iridescent surface shifted color as she turned it. She’d watched Lila place these ornaments.
She knew this glass. The metallic oxide layering, the way the color changed with the angle. This was from one of the larger pieces, a sphere, judging by the curve. “Someone carried the collection to the water.”
“That’s what I think.” He leaned against the opposite wall. “There are drag marks in the sand. Faint, because the tide came in, but they’re there. And two parallel grooves at the waterline. The width of a small boat’s keel.”
“The boat in the guest slip. The one with no registration.”
“Gone. Cleared out between the theft and dawn.”
“So, someone stole a hundred and seventy thousand dollars in glass, carried it across the dunes, loaded it onto an unregistered boat, and disappeared into the sound. In five minutes.” She set the shard down on the workbench. “That’s not a crime of opportunity.”
“No.” His voice stayed level. “That’s someone who planned every step.”
She turned the shard, so it caught the light. A tiny rainbow flickered across the workbench, a stripe of color between the socket set and the varnish can.
“Who knew the resort well enough to pull this off?” she asked.
“That’s the question.”
“The police should know about this.”
“They will. But Harker’s the only detective the county’s got, and he’s spread across three towns.” Evan looked at her. “If we want answers, we’re going to have to do some of the legwork ourselves.”
We.
They sat on the dock with their feet over the water, finishing their coffee. The resort was waking up behind them. Margot could hear the kitchen staff, the clink of breakfast service, the distant whir of a vacuum. A heron stood in the shallows near the far pilings, perfectly still.
“Elaine told me to stay out of it,” Margot said.
“You mentioned that.”
“I can’t. If this falls apart, I’m the one holding the bag. Again.” The last word came out sharper than she intended.
He didn’t ask about the “again.” He just waited. She was starting to understand that about him. He didn’t push. He left space, resting his forearms on his knees. It was the opposite of David, who had filled every silence with charm and reassurance until there was no room left for the truth.
“I had a business partner once.” She hadn’t planned to say it.
But something about sitting on a dock at dawn with a man who made silence feel safe had loosened the thing she’d been holding.
“He left me holding worse than this. I rebuilt from nothing. I’m not going to stand on the sidelines and watch it happen again. ”
He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he looked at the glass. “I know this resort. The layout, the corridors, the dock schedules, the tides. If someone used the marina to move those ornaments, I’ll find the trail.”
“And I know the vendors. The contracts, the schedules, who has access to what. If someone on the inside set this up, it’ll show in the logistics.”
“So, we’re doing this.” She heard herself say it before she’d fully decided.
But the words settled into place.
The first thing that had settled into place since the lights went out.
“We’re doing this.”
Evan extended his hand. To shake on it. A deal.
She took it. His grip was the same as the stairwell. Warm. Rough. Steady.
This time, he held on a beat longer. Long enough for his thumb to shift against the back of her hand, a movement so small it might have been involuntary.
It wasn’t.
She let go first. Again. But she noticed that he didn’t seem to want her to. And she noticed that she didn’t want to either, which was new, and frightening, and warm. “Where do we start?”
“The keycard logs. Somebody accessed the service corridor during the blackout. The display case reader lost power, but the corridor has its own reader on a separate circuit.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I installed it three years ago when supplies kept disappearing from storage.”
She stared at him. Then she smiled. A real one. The first since the lights went out. “All right, Mr. Cole. Let’s go pull some records.”