Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Scarlett
I sit on the harbor bench with Evangeline’s journal open in my lap and the truth burning a hole through my chest. Charles Fairchild raped her. Not Thomas Haven. Not a jealous fiancé. A man who put his hand over her mouth and called it his right, and then went downstairs and asked about the weather.
The harbor stretches out in front of me, boats bobbing at their slips, water flat and gray under the afternoon sky. A tourist drone buzzes overhead, then veers north toward No Name. I flinch.
I’ve been sitting here for twenty minutes. Maybe longer. The bench wood is cold through my jeans. My phone sits beside me, screen dark. I haven’t moved since I finished reading.
Malcolm’s archive is a lie. The whole curated exhibit, the maps with No Name erased, the narrative he’s been feeding the island for decades—all of it built on the bones of a woman who was running from a rapist. Evangeline didn’t steal that treasure.
She took back what was hers. Her father accepted a bride price for her body, and she reclaimed it with a combination she’d memorized because his hands were failing him.
Thomas Haven loved her. He stood on a pier and asked who hurt her, and when she didn’t answer, he knew.
I pick up my phone and call Dean.
The line rings. Once, twice, three times. The harbor wind pushes against my face, carrying salt and diesel and the distant cry of gulls. Four rings. Five.
Someone picks up.
“Dean’s phone.”
Not Dean. The voice is younger, softer at the edges. Strained.
“Abel?”
“Yeah. Who’s this?” Background noise: an engine, low and steady. Wind cutting across a microphone. Voices somewhere behind him, too muffled to make out.
“It’s Scarlett. Is Dean there?”
“He’s—” A pause. Something shifts on his end, fabric against the phone. “He’s busy right now. We’ve got a situation.”
The strain in his voice tightens. I sit up straighter. “What kind of situation?”
“Two treasure hunters. Took a dinghy out to No Name this morning. Storm’s coming in. NOAA just upgraded to a small craft advisory.” His words come fast, clipped. “Nobody’s heard from them since ten. Dad’s out. Dean’s out. Every boat on the island with a radio is looking.”
My stomach drops. “No Name? The east cove?”
“East side, yeah. Where you and Dean found that chamber.” He doesn’t mean it as an accusation. It lands like one anyway.
“I can help. What do you need? I can come down to the marina, coordinate from shore, something—”
“You’ve done enough, don’t you think?”
The words hit the air between us and freeze there. Abel Merrick, who names marina rats and speaks Italian to his mother and has never raised his voice in my hearing, just snapped at me like I’m the reason his world is coming apart.
He breathes out. “Sorry. That was—we’re all worried.
Storm’s coming in fast. NOAA missed the forecast again.
Dean’s pissed. Bodhi’s pissed. Half the search boats are Merrick, half are Haven, and nobody’s talking to each other except through the radio, which is its own kind of miracle.
” Another pause. I hear someone call his name in the background.
“I gotta go. Stay put. We’ll call when we find them. ”
He hangs up.
I sit on the bench with the dead phone in my hand and Abel’s words ringing in my ears.
You’ve done enough.
The harbor looks different suddenly. The water isn’t picturesque anymore. It’s a problem. Eight miles of open sound between Port Haven and No Name Island, and somewhere out there, two people in a dinghy too small for the weather that’s coming.
Two people who came here because of me.
I stand. My legs are stiff from sitting.
I tuck the journal into my backpack and walk back toward Main Street, and the town I walked through this morning has transformed again.
The treasure hunters have multiplied. They cluster outside Brine and Bean with laminated maps and metal detectors propped against the wall.
A woman in a Patagonia vest lectures a group about tide charts.
A man in cargo shorts unpacks a drone from its case.
None of them know about the storm. Or if they know, they don’t care.
Piper’s bookstore window is clean. The glass shines in the gray light, the children’s books arranged behind it in their rainbow, the rabbit with its tiny spectacles watching the street with stuffed animal resignation. I press my palm against the glass. Cold. Smooth. No trace of the red paint.
Inside, the shop is dark. Closed sign in the window. Piper must have gone home.
I keep walking. Past the Driftwood, where Patty Sue stands in the doorway with a coffee pot, watching the street with narrowed eyes.
Past Saltbox Hardware, where Gus Pemberton leans against the doorframe with his arms crossed, tracking the treasure hunters with the flat gaze of a man who has seen every version of stupid this island can produce.
Nobody looks at me. Or everyone looks at me and then looks away. I can’t tell which is worse.
The Tidewater lobby is a disaster. Maps spread across every flat surface.
Coffee cups. Laptops. A whiteboard covered in coordinates and question marks.
Three men argue over a topographic survey near the fireplace.
A woman with a tablet takes notes, nodding along like she’s covering a press conference instead of a potential search and rescue.
I duck my head and take the stairs. My room is exactly as I left it: bed unmade, laptop open on the desk, the curtains drawn against the afternoon light. I drop my backpack on the chair and sit on the edge of the bed.
My phone buzzes. Malcolm.
I ignore it.
It buzzes again. Jasper.
I set it face-down on the nightstand.
The analytics dashboard Malcolm sent me is still open on my laptop. The graph spikes toward the ceiling. Comments scroll in real time: Has anyone checked the east shore? Coordinates? Drone footage? I’m booking a flight next week. Where’s the best place to dig?
I close the laptop. The screen goes dark, and my reflection stares back at me: blonde hair coming loose from its knot, dark circles under my eyes, the sweatshirt I’ve been wearing for two days because it smells like Dean’s boat.
I open Evangeline’s journal again. The March entry. Her handwriting is steadier here than in the earlier pages. The pen pressed hard into the paper. I trace the line with my fingertip: He held me down on my mother’s settee, and he violated me.
Malcolm has to know. Or he suspects. That’s the only explanation for No Name’s absence from his maps, for the curated archive, for the narrative he’s built so carefully around Thomas Haven the murderer.
He can’t have the real story get out. The Merrick family legacy depends on Thomas being the villain.
If Evangeline’s journal is authentic—and Gus Pemberton had no reason to lie, not after forty years of holding it—then everything Malcolm has built collapses. The feud. The businesses. The righteousness.
I lie back on the bed with the journal open on my chest. The ceiling is beige. The air conditioner hums. Somewhere down the hall, a door closes.
I must fall asleep, because the next thing I know, the room is dark and the digital clock on the nightstand reads 12:17.
And someone is watching me.
I know it before I open my eyes. The quality of the darkness has changed. The air in the room feels charged, the way it does before lightning. My skin prickles. Every hair on my arms stands up.
I open my eyes.
The figure stands on the balcony.
Motionless. Silhouette against the lighter dark of the night sky. Shoulders. Head. The outline of a person standing at the sliding glass door, looking in.
My heart stops. Actually stops. One skipped beat where the world goes silent, and then it hammers back to life so hard I feel it in my throat.
I don’t move. Don’t breathe. The figure doesn’t move either.
We stare at each other through the glass. I can’t see a face. Just darkness where a face should be, and the certain knowledge that whoever is out there can see me perfectly in the dim light from the bathroom nightlight.
Three seconds. Four.
Then the silhouette is gone.
Not walking. Not running. Gone. Vanished from the balcony like it was never there.
I bolt upright. The journal slides off my chest and hits the floor with a thud. I’m across the room in three strides, yanking the curtain aside, fumbling for the lock on the sliding door.
It’s already locked. I checked it before I fell asleep. I always check it.
I slide the door open. Cold air rushes in. The balcony is empty. Three feet of concrete, a metal railing, the harbor beyond. No footsteps. No sound of someone climbing down. No rustling in the bushes below.
Nothing.
I step outside. The night air bites through my sweatshirt. The harbor stretches below, dock lights strung along the waterfront, boats dark at their slips. No movement. No shadow fleeing across the lawn. The Tidewater’s grounds are empty.
I check the railing. No scuff marks. No handprints in the dew.
I go back inside and lock the door. My hands shake. I check the room: under the bed, in the closet, behind the bathroom door. Nobody.
I sit on the edge of the bed and press my palms against my thighs to steady them.
Someone was there. I didn’t dream it. The quality of the darkness changed. The air changed. I felt it the way you feel a presence in an empty room—not with your eyes, with your spine.
They wanted me to know. That’s the worst part. They stood there long enough for me to wake up. Long enough for our eyes to meet through the glass. They wanted me to see them.
I grab my phone from the nightstand. My fingers are numb. I find Dean’s number and press call.
The line rings. Once. Twice.
The harbor lights glow through my curtains. Somewhere out there, Dean is on a boat in the dark, searching for two people who might already be dead because I wrote a story that brought them here.
The phone rings a third time.
I press it to my ear and wait.