Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Scarlett
I walk down Main Street at seven fifteen on a Tuesday morning, and the town I met two weeks ago is gone.
It’s been replaced by something louder. Something hungrier.
The sidewalks are packed at an hour when they should be empty.
Tourists in matching windbreakers cluster outside Brine and Bean, phones out, maps open, voices carrying across the street.
A drone buzzes overhead—cheap, civilian, the kind you order online and fly without thinking about who might be underneath it.
The sound sets my teeth on edge the same way it set Dean’s.
I’ve been carrying this since the Rosen cancellation.
Carrying it in my chest like a stone I pretend isn’t there.
Four thousand dollars. A family that drove home because the island felt like a circus.
Dean’s face when he hung up the phone. I’ve been carrying all of it and doing nothing about it because doing something would mean admitting how badly I’ve fucked this up, and I am very good at not admitting things.
I turn the corner onto Harbor Street and stop.
Piper Haven is on a ladder.
She’s balanced on the top rung in front of her bookstore, one hand braced against the glass, the other working a rag in tight circles.
Her reading glasses are pushed up into her wild dark curls.
She’s wearing a cardigan with the sleeves rolled to her elbows and jeans with paint splatters I recognize from Hazel’s art day.
Her mouth is set in a line I’ve never seen on her before.
Not angry. Something worse. Quiet devastation.
The window behind her rag says THIEFS in red spray paint. Below it, running the width of the display: MURDERERS.
I cross the street without deciding to. “What happened?”
Piper doesn’t look down. She scrubs. The rag makes a wet, grinding sound against the glass. Red bleeds into the fabric, mixes with the soap, and runs pink water down her forearm.
“Piper?”
She startles. The ladder wobbles. I plant a hand on the side rail, and she steadies, looking down at me with those blue-gray Haven eyes behind smudged glasses.
“Hey.” Her voice is thin. “You’re up early.”
“So are you.”
She goes back to scrubbing. “Somebody did this around four. Bev’s security camera caught a shadow. Couldn’t make out the face.” She stops scrubbing to frown at the words. “They didn’t even spell it right.”
That grammatical crime seems to upset her just as much as the actual crime.
I grab a rag out of the bucket at the foot of the ladder and climb up the rungs on the opposite side of her.
I scrub at the FS in “THIEFS”. The red comes off in smears.
Underneath, the display window is intact—children’s books arranged in a rainbow, a hand-lettered sign that says SPRING READS, a stuffed animal rabbit wearing tiny spectacles.
“This is my favorite place,” Piper says.
She doesn’t look at me. “I opened it three years ago. Saved for five. Every book in there I picked. Every shelf I built. Well, Colter built, but he did it exactly how I wanted them. The paint color I mixed myself because the swatch wasn’t right.
” She scrubs harder. A fleck of red flicks onto her cardigan.
She doesn’t notice. “Somebody stood here at four in the morning and decided I deserved this because of something my great-great—however many great-grandfather might have done.”
My throat closes. “Piper—”
“It’s not your fault.” She says it too fast, like she’s been rehearsing. “You didn’t spray the paint. You’re just telling a story.”
“I’m the reason they’re here to hear it.”
She stops scrubbing and looks at me with sad, angry eyes.
“Yeah. You are. But the people who did this were already looking for a reason.” She tucks a curl behind her ear.
Her hand is shaking. “The island’s been like this forever.
The feud. The sides. People pick one and hate the other because that’s what people do. ”
A tourist walks by with a phone raised and captures the graffiti before we can finish cleaning it. Piper flinches at the shutter click.
“Is that part of the treasure story?” The woman lowers her phone. She’s in her mid-twenties, wearing a Patagonia vest and Oakley sunglasses. “The graffiti? Is it, like, a clue?”
Piper’s mouth opens. Nothing comes out.
“It’s vandalism,” I snap, and throw my rag into the bucket. “Somebody spray-painted hate on a small business at four in the morning. It’s not a clue. It’s a crime.”
The woman blinks. Backs up a step. “I was just asking.”
“Don’t.” I climb down from the ladder and step between her and the window. “Don’t take pictures of someone’s pain and call it content.”
She walks away fast, head bent over her phone, thumbs moving fast over the screen. I watch her go, my heart hammering against my ribs. She definitely recorded that, and it would be all over the internet in a few hours.
Piper is still on the ladder behind me, rag dripping pink onto the sidewalk.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she says.
“Yeah. I did.”
We finish the window in silence. The red comes off in streaks, then smudges, then nothing. The glass is clean. Piper climbs down, folds the rag with mechanical precision, and tucks it into the pocket of her cardigan like she’s putting away evidence.
“Thank you,” she says.
“Piper—”
“Don’t.” She pushes her glasses up. “Just don’t, okay?
I can’t do the thing where you apologize and I make you feel better.
Not this morning.” She picks up the bucket and walks toward the front door of her shop, but pauses before going inside.
“Come by for book club Thursday. We’re doing romance novels with terrible covers. It’s my favorite night.”
The bell chimes as she shoves the door open and disappears inside.
Main Street is worse at eight than it was at seven.
The shops are opening. Tourists line up outside Wick and Wave, Brine and Bean, the Driftwood still fifteen minutes from unlocking its doors.
I pass a family arguing with Fish Monroe outside The Tangled Net.
The father has a metal detector propped against the doorframe.
Fish stands with his arms crossed, his face the same flat, unreadable neutrality it always is, and says nothing while the man explains, at volume, that the north shore is public land and he has every right to search it.
“It’s private property,” Fish says. Three words. His entire contribution to the conversation.
“The Havens don’t own the whole island.”
“North shore’s theirs. Has been since the 1890s.”
The father keeps arguing. Fish stares at a point six inches left of the man’s face and waits for him to run out of oxygen.
I keep walking. The guilt I’ve been carrying since the Rosen cancellation has a new weight now. Heavier. Sharper. It sits under my sternum like something with teeth.
Brine and Bean has a line out the door. I duck inside through the back—Donna let me in through the kitchen once, and I’ve been using the privilege like a local.
The shop is packed. Every table taken. Every chair.
Tourists with laptops and phones and printouts of my Instagram posts spread across the tables like evidence.
I slide past a group of women in their thirties and catch fragments.
“—the north shore is where the dowry was buried—”
“—Thomas definitely killed her—”
“—Malcolm Merrick’s archive has the shipping manifests—”
My words. Almost verbatim. Theories I floated, questions I asked, half-baked speculation I posted because speculation gets engagement and engagement keeps the production company happy.
These women drove here because of me. They’re planning their day around places I named.
They’re treating my Instagram like a treasure map and Port Haven like the set of a game they’re entitled to play.
A hand taps my shoulder. I turn.
“Scarlett Crawford? Oh my god.” The woman is beaming. Forties, friendly face, a husband and two teenagers hovering behind her. “We drove up from Eugene. Because of you. The treasure hunt. My husband’s been following since the first post.”
The husband offers a sheepish wave. The teenagers stare at their shoes.
“That’s—” I don’t have the word. “Thank you. For coming.”
“We’re so excited. We brought our metal detector.” She gestures to a backpack by the door. “Where should we start? The north shore? That’s what everyone’s saying.”
“You should start by respecting private property,” I say. “The north shore belongs to the Haven family. They graze sheep there. It’s not a dig site.”
Her smile falters. “Oh. I didn’t—the posts made it sound like—”
“I know what the posts made it sound like.” I soften my voice. It costs me. “I’m sorry. The north shore is off-limits. There are public beaches. The marina does tours. But please—don’t dig. Don’t trespass. This is someone’s home.”
She nods. The enthusiasm doesn’t come back. Her husband puts a hand on her shoulder and steers her toward the door. The teenagers follow, relieved to be leaving. I watch them go and hate myself a little more with each step they take.
The morning grinds on. I walk the length of Main Street twice, watching the town deteriorate in real time.
A drone buzzes the harbor. Tourists argue with Patty Sue about parking.
Someone’s dog gets loose outside Old Salt’s and causes a minor panic.
The Bilge Rats—Mimi’s gossip circle, self-appointed guardians of island decorum—hold court outside the gift shop, arms crossed, watching the chaos with the grim satisfaction of people whose predictions are coming true.
I’m halfway back to the Tidewater when Jasper Merrick materializes beside me.
I don’t hear him approach. One moment the sidewalk is empty, the next he’s there, his iron-gray hair slicked back, his cold blue eyes fixed on my face like he’s reading fine print. He smells like expensive cologne and something sharper underneath. Whiskey, maybe. It’s not quite nine.