Chapter 8 #3
He doesn’t drive away. The truck idles behind me the whole way across the sidewalk, and when I pull the door open and look back, he’s still there, wipers going, watching me through the rain.
Saltbox Hardware smells like sawdust and machine oil, and the tools hang on pegboard in rows straight enough to have been laid out with a ruler. Behind the counter, a small white-bearded man in a red flannel shirt is sorting washers into a tackle box.
“Fish sent me,” I say. “From the coffee shop.”
“Malcolm’s reporter.” He doesn’t look up. “Here about the treasure.”
“I’m not—”
“Hardware store’s not an archive. We sell nails and paint.”
I’ve been dismissed by better, and I’m too wet and too raw to be gracious about it. “Fine. Sorry to bother you.”
I’m at the door when he says, “The north shore purchase was 1895.”
I stop.
“Thomas Haven’s name on the deed. Eleanor’s money. Her people were in shipping out of Seattle.” He drops another washer in the box. “Old money. Not stolen. Earned.”
“That’s what Mimi told me.”
“Mimi’s right about that and wrong about six other things, but I’ll take what I can get.” He sets the tackle box aside. “The Merricks have been lying for a hundred years because the truth makes Thomas a decent man who married well, and they can’t have that. Decent doesn’t fit the story.”
“Can you prove it?”
He looks at me then, and his whole face changes.
“Sit down,” he says. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
Three hours. Three hours of tea gone cold and refilled twice in the back room of Saltbox Hardware, and I have never in my career had a source like this one.
He doesn’t need coaxing. He doesn’t need flattering.
He’s been waiting sixty years for somebody to ask, and now that somebody has, it comes out of him like coins out of a machine that’s finally hit.
The Fairchild ship. The weather that night.
A cargo manifest listing gold ingots and also lumber, textiles, hardware.
A harbor master who wrote unusually heavy for personal effects in a margin.
Names I have never seen in Malcolm’s archive.
Dates that don’t line up with Malcolm’s timeline.
A whole population of people who were on this island in 1893 and have since been edited out of it.
I stop writing somewhere in the second hour and just listen.
“Where did you get all this?” I finally ask.
He shrugs. “Always known it.”
“From documents? Family records?”
“Some.” He refills my tea. “Some I just know.”
“That’s not an answer, Gus.”
“It’s the one I’ve got.” No defensiveness in it. No evasion. He says it like he’s telling me his own birthday. Then he’s off into a story about a lighthouse keeper’s daughter and the moment is gone.
By the time the light through the front window has gone amber, I have thirty pages of notes and a headache and the unwelcome certainty that Malcolm Merrick has been lying to me since the day I stepped off the ferry.
Not shading. Not spinning. Lying, with documents he chose not to give me and names he chose not to mention.
I’m packing up when Gus reaches under the counter.
The box is cardboard, battered, reinforced with duct tape along the seams and covered in enough dust to suggest it hasn’t moved in years. He slides it across without ceremony.
“Might be something in there you’d find interesting,” he says. “Or might be nothing. Hard to say.”
I lift the lid. Inside, wrapped in a square of oilcloth that smells of motor oil and time, is a small leather-bound journal, the cover cracked, the spine soft from handling. Stamped on the front in faded gold:
E.M.
My hands go still.
“Gus.” My voice comes out in a squeak, and I turn toward him. “Is this—”
But he’s already disappeared into the back room and shut the door, putting a period on the conversation.
The Tidewater is quiet when I get back. Lobby lights dimmed. The night manager nods from behind the desk. My key card works on the first try.
My room is exactly as I left it. Bed made. Windows closed. Curtains drawn.
The notebook I left open on the desk is closed. The pen is capped and set beside it, aligned with the edge of the desk. The pages are squared, corners meeting at right angles.
I didn’t close it. I never close it. I leave it open to the page I’m working on because that’s how I work.
Housekeeping. They came in, straightened up, closed the notebook.
I pick it up. The spine falls open to Mimi’s interview. He doesn’t kiss women unless he means it. The words sit there in my handwriting with nothing underneath them. No follow-up. No analysis.
I set the notebook down and square it against the edge of the desk. Whoever closed it squared it too.
I check the door. The lock is intact. The security chain is still fastened from the inside.
The balcony, then. I slide the glass door open and step out into cold, salt-damp air. Wet railing. No footprints on the tile. No sign of anything.
But the notebook was closed.
I lock the balcony door and sit on the edge of the bed with Evangeline’s journal in my lap.
Malcolm’s archive has holes. Big ones. The kind a man with his resources doesn’t leave by accident.
I open the journal and start reading.