Avery
Ilay my photographs out on the kitchen table at Harbor House like a poker hand I'm not sure how to play. The cove shots first, then the seal images beside them, and the gray residue. I line them up as evidence. That doesn't get nervous, but everything and everyone else here does.
Marks on a seal, a man's blood on stone four days apart—my eye keeps pulling one toward the other. I open my field book and read Jasper's words back. Boats back wrong. Whole hours missing. The bell buoy. The Hadley boy.
I tear a clean page and rule three columns.
Where. What's hurt. Who's gone. Where: the northern coves, the buoy point, the breakwater everyone tries to deter me from.
Hurt: seals, a torn net, a man. Gone: the Hadley boy, and however many crewmen who lost hours they can't account for.
It's not proof. It's every wound and every missing person stacked along the same half mile of coast nobody will discuss out loud.
Mabel comes in with a thermos before I manage to cover the table, glances at my work, then deliberately doesn't. "Records room's in the town hall basement," she says, "if that's where this is going. Open till four." She's gone before I can ask how she knew. That's its own data point.
The basement smells of damp paper and floor wax.
I ask the clerk for incident reports and missing-person notices, last five years, coastal only.
She's halfway to the cabinet when a man in a sheriff's uniform comes down the stairs like someone told him I'd be here.
The brass nameplate over his pocket reads Greer, and the clerk straightens enough to fill in the rest before he says a word.
"Dr. Quinn." He doesn't offer the records. He doesn't stop the clerk either. "Mind if I ask what a marine biologist wants with our incident files?"
"Missing hours on returning boats. A worker who didn't come back. Animal wounds I can't classify—all inside the same stretch north of the breakwater." I keep it collegial. "I'm ruling things out. Carbon monoxide in the cabins. A predator I haven't identified. I'd take either."
He registers that and sets it aside. "Those coves are unstable ground. The shelf's undercut, the tides run odd past the point, and there are old storm tunnels under that headland—half caved, all sealed for a reason. I post the access closed. I'd rather not post names next."
"That's the official version. I've heard pieces of it from different people. Warm water. Bad seasons. Strange tides. It arrives polished, Sheriff, like everyone rehearsed off one sheet."
He sets both hands flat on the counter, careful. "Or it's a small town frightened of the same coast, saying so the same way. You found the cove. The Hadley scene."
"I photographed drag marks and blood on granite. Yes."
"Then you know it's an open case, and I'm asking you out of it. Not threatening. Asking. Whatever took that boy, I'd rather it didn't take another." He climbs the stairs. The clerk slides a thin folder across without being asked—and I notice he never told her not to.
My phone buzzes on the steps. Caleb. A voicemail, and a text stacked on top: Your last three updates read like hostage notes. "Fine, busy, bad signal." You're never fine and busy. Call me.
I call. "I'm okay. The grant's just bigger than I pitched. The decline's real and the data's messy."
"Messy how?" My brother skips small talk when he's worried.
"Sampling messy. Logistics messy. I'm being careful, Caleb. I promise. I'll send seal pictures to prove I'm doing science and not joining a cult."
"That's not the comfort you think it is." But he doesn't argue with my bye. I keep the worst and pocket the rest from him because I don't want him to do what older brothers do and insert himself.
I turn back toward the folder waiting downstairs, and Dorian is on the landing below, one hand resting on the rail as if the town keeps spare rooms available for him wherever he goes.
His dark coat is buttoned against the draft, his silver-streaked hair untouched by the damp, and I hate that my first thought is not danger, but precision.
"You followed me to a basement?" Suspicion climbs inside me.
"I happened to be at the town hall."
"You happen to be wherever I am the moment something inconvenient surfaces." I come up the last step. "You crossed forty feet of wet rock before I finished turning. Something hit stone, hard. When I looked, you were between me and the dark with nothing behind you. Explain the timing."
"I was already on the shoreline."
"Doing what?"
"Checking it, as I told you I do." He doesn't blink or fidget, and the stillness is its own tell. "People use those camps who shouldn't. I moved one off before he reached you. Disbelieve what you can't see; I'd think less of you otherwise."
"I disbelieve most of it." I shift the folder under my arm, and his eyes go to it.
"That's the public file. Five years, redacted, half the coast folded into 'exposure' or 'presumed drowning.' It won't show you what you're after."
"And you can."
"The harbor authority kept its own logs before the county took over.
Tide charts, rescue reports, tourism incidents, shoreline surveys, the access records from when the tunnels were sealed.
Not in that basement." A pause. "I can put them on a table this afternoon.
Draw your own conclusions. I won't draw them for you. "
That lands better than another warning. Worse, it's intelligent, which is harder to ignore. The smartest offer I've had since I arrived—which is exactly why it worries me. "Why help?"
"Because you'll keep going whether I do or not. I'd rather know what you know."
Honest, at least. "Fine. But I read everything myself."
We spread the logs across a table in a back room he has a key to and shouldn't.
He knows where things are before he looks—hands me a rescue report without checking the spine.
The idea comes fast once I have real pages.
Disappearances and exposure deaths cluster in three coves, all in the north.
Animal strandings log within a week of every missing-person date.
Damaged gear recovered; owners "disoriented," several noting hours missing from memory.
The statements are what stop me. I read four, from different years.
"These are nearly word for word," I say. "'Lost time on the water. No memory of the interval. No injury found.' Same phrasing. Different people, different decades. Who edits a witness to match one from fifteen years back?"
"People reach for the same words when they have none of their own." Smooth. Too smooth.
Three reports end the same way, too—subject found near the sealed tunnels beneath the harbor district. One survey shows the tunnels running farther beneath the town than the closures admit, branching toward the coves where bodies never surface.
"These aren't all caved," I say.
"No." That, he doesn't dress up.
He reaches across to square two maps, and I notice he doesn't touch me—in the part of my brain with no business clocking in—and he reads salvage records the way I read tide charts, fluent in a thing he claims no stake in. He knows this coast like he's been correcting its mistakes for years.
I stack the maps and don't give them back.
Here's where I've landed, and I don't love it: everyone in Crimson Harbor has steered me off this coast. Dorian's the only one who set its secrets on the table—which makes him the one person willing to help me, or the person hiding the deepest pocket of truth, handing me exactly what he expects me to find. I'm betting on both.