Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Dean
Bodhi doesn’t ask. Bodhi doesn’t negotiate. Bodhi texts me a time, a dock, and the words “be there or I sell the boat,” and then he stops answering his phone.
I stare at the screen. Doug snores from his nest of life jackets. Captain mutters something obscene and goes back to preening.
“He can’t sell the boat,” I tell them. “The boat’s registered to me.”
Captain squawks, “Abort! Abort! Abort!”
I scowl at him. He fluffs up like he’s won something.
“Nobody asked you.”
I’m at the dock at eight. The Rosen charter slot is still empty, the weather’s holding, and if I’m going to be miserable I might as well be miserable on the water. That’s the story I’m telling myself at seven-forty when I’m already fueled and rigged and watching the road for her car.
She shows up at eight-fifteen with a backpack, the journal, and the same boots she’s worn every day since she fell in the harbor. Her hair’s pulled back. No makeup. Dark circles under her eyes that match mine, which means she’s been up reading that damn diary again.
I look at her too long. I know I’m doing it while I’m doing it.
We don’t say hello.
I hand her a life jacket. “Put this on.”
“I know how to put on a life jacket.”
“Good. Do it anyway.” I check the fuel. Check the bilge.
Check the weather on my phone for the third time this morning.
NOAA says clear until evening. Wind seven to ten.
Visibility good. Standard April day on the sound, which means absolutely nothing because the sound does what it wants and NOAA is guessing.
The chop’s already running outside the breakwater. Two feet, maybe. Enough.
“You get seasick,” I say.
“I didn’t throw up.”
“You would’ve if I hadn’t given you that ginger chew.”
She digs into the side pocket of the backpack and holds up a blister pack, two tablets already gone.
“Took these at seven. There’s a second dose in here, more ginger chews, and those wristband things my old publicist swears by.
” She zips the pocket. “So don’t use it as an excuse to leave me on the dock. ”
“Didn’t say I would.”
“You were thinking about it.”
I was thinking about it.
She clips the jacket and stands at the edge of the dock, waiting.
“Last chance to have Corey Merrick take you,” I warn.
“Nope. It’s you or nobody.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re the only captain on the island who knows the water well enough to get there without killing me.” She meets my eyes. “Bodhi’s words, not mine.”
I almost smile. “Get in.”
We don’t talk for the first twenty minutes. I keep the bow into the wind. She sits on the port rail with the journal open in her lap, one hand braced against the gunwale, reading. Her hair whips across her face, and she doesn’t push it back.
I keep my eyes on the water. I keep putting them back on the water.
That’s the whole morning. A hundred small corrections, a hundred small failures.
She’s a client. She’s a problem. She’s a woman who blew a hole in my town, and I want her so badly my hands ache on the wheel, and there’s no version of that math where I come out looking like anything but a fool.
The wind’s already stronger than NOAA promised. Ten, maybe twelve knots. Nothing concerning. Yet.
No Name appears on the horizon as a dark smudge. Gull Shit Rock. Two acres of exposed granite and stunted evergreens, a place that exists solely to make larger islands feel hospitable by comparison. From a distance it looks benign. Up close it’s all teeth.
“You ever been there?” she asks. First real sentence she’s offered.
“Yeah.”
“What’s it like?”
“Unpleasant.” I adjust our heading. “No dock. No shelter. The east side has a cove that’s marginally less suicidal to land in, but the tide runs hard through there. Get the timing wrong, and you’re swimming.”
She nods like I’ve given her useful information instead of a warning. “That’s where we’re going. The east cove.”
“Figured.”
The wind picks up. Fifteen knots now. Whitecaps on the water ahead. I check my phone again. NOAA hasn’t changed the forecast. Clear until evening, my ass.
We reach the island forty minutes later. The east cove is exactly as advertised: a narrow inlet cut into the rock, maybe thirty feet wide, water the color of steel. The tide’s running out. Bad timing. We’ve got a two-hour window before the inlet becomes impassable.
I kill the engine twenty yards out and drop the anchor. The chain rattles through the hawsepipe. The boat swings into the wind and holds.
“We’ll take the dinghy,” I say. “You’ll get wet.”
“I’m fine with wet.”
“Everybody’s fine with wet until they’re cold and there’s no dry clothes.”
She shoulders her backpack. “I brought a change.”
“Well, at least you’re learning.”
The dinghy is a twelve-foot inflatable with a fifteen-horse outboard. I lower it over the side, climb down, start the motor. Scarlett follows, more graceful than I expected. She settles on the bow seat with the journal zipped into her backpack and both hands gripping the rope.
The run to shore takes three minutes. The water in the cove is choppy, wind-driven, slapping against the rock walls on either side.
I beach the dinghy on a strip of gravel barely wide enough to call a shore.
Scarlett climbs out without waiting for help.
Her boots sink into the gravel. Water washes over the toes.
“Two hours,” I say. “Tide turns at eleven-thirty. We’re not here when it turns.”
She’s already moving. Up the gravel, onto the rock, following some internal map I can’t see. I secure the dinghy and follow.
No Name is worse up close. The rock is slick with spray.
Wind funnels through the cove at twenty knots, carrying salt and a damp cold that gets into your bones and stays there.
Evergreens cling to the higher ground, bent and stunted by decades of exposure.
Nothing grows straight here. Everything leans.
Scarlett stops at the mouth of the cove. The journal is open in her hands. She looks from the page to the rock face, back to the page, then points.
“There.”
A fissure. Not a cave. A crack in the granite, maybe four feet wide at the base, tapering upward into darkness. Scrub growth and a tangle of storm-wrack half hide the opening. Driftwood, kelp, the usual debris the sound delivers to inconvenient places.
I wouldn’t have seen it. Not without her pointing.
She climbs. I follow. The rock is treacherous, worn smooth by water and wind, and twice I catch her elbow when her boot slips. Twice I let go slower than I need to. She doesn’t thank me. Doesn’t pull away. She finds her footing and keeps going.
The fissure opens into a chamber. Not large. Twelve feet deep, eight wide, the ceiling low enough that I have to duck. The air is still and cold and smells of wet stone and something older. Mineral. Organic. The mustiness of a space that hasn’t been disturbed in decades.
Scarlett pulls a flashlight from her backpack. The beam sweeps the walls.
“Oh,” she says. Quiet. Reverent.
Carved into the granite, waist-high, running the length of the left wall: a series of marks.
Not words. Symbols. Crosses. Circles. Dates, some of them.
1887. 1889. 1891. Cut into the stone with a tool that left clean lines.
Someone stood here. Someone came back. Someone wanted to record their presence in a place nobody was supposed to find.
Below the carvings, wedged into a natural shelf in the rock: a wooden box. Cedar, maybe. Salt-weathered, the hinges rusted shut. Scarlett doesn’t touch it. She kneels beside it and trains the light on its surface. No lock. No markings. Just wood and time and something left behind.
“Thomas was here.” She sits back on her heels. “He came here for years.”
I run my hand along the carvings. The stone is cold under my fingers. The dates are spaced roughly a year apart. Thomas Haven visited for at least four years before Evangeline Merrick disappeared.
“Why?” I ask.
“You’re not a romantic, are you?”
“That’s one thing I’ve never been accused of.”
She glances over at me, a wry twist to her lips.
“He came back because he loved her, and this was their spot, so once she was gone—” Outside, the wind howls through the cove.
A gust drives spray through the fissure opening, cold and sharp, and her flashlight beam wobbles.
She recovers fast, though, and pulls her phone from her pocket, opening the camera.
“We should document this. Photos. Video. Enough to prove it’s real before—”
The chamber goes suddenly dark.
Not the flashlight—it’s working fine—but the world outside. The gray light from the fissure dims and then vanishes.
I cross to the opening and stare out at a sky that has gone purple-black. The storm clouds are low and heavy, rolling in from the northwest fast enough to drop my stomach. The water in the cove is already building, waves hitting the shore with twice the force they had twenty minutes ago.
“We’re leaving. Now.”
“Dean, wait. The box—”
“Leave it. It’s been here a hundred years. It’ll be here tomorrow.” I grab her arm. The storm hadn’t been in the forecast when we left the marina, meaning it built fast, and now it looks mean. “We can’t be in this cave when that storm surge hits. We’ll drown.”
She looks at the box. At the carvings. At me. Her mouth opens and I brace for the argument.
She zips the journal into her backpack, shoulders it, and follows me out of the chamber.
The climb down is worse than the climb up.
The rock is slick now, spray blowing horizontally across the face, and twice Scarlett slides and catches herself on her palms. I stay behind her with one hand on her lower back to keep her from going over.
The dinghy waits below, bucking against its painter, the outboard tilted clear of the water.
“Get in,” I say. “Sit in the middle. Low center of gravity.”
She climbs in. I follow, untie the painter, shove us off. The outboard starts on the first pull. Thank fuck for small mercies.