9. Avery
AVERY
The harbor master won't hand me the incident report, so I go to the man who signed it. Greer is on the public landing, watching the wrecked trawler get winched onto the slip.
"It's a gearbox, Dr. Quinn. Failed bearing, engine failure, one man lost overboard. The other died of his injuries before anyone reached them. That's the report."
"One man overboard." I stop beside him. "There are two dead."
"Heavy water does ugly things."
"It doesn't shred a net." The gear still hangs off the gantry, and I've handled enough of it to know a snag from a thing that was opened. "A failed bearing doesn't tear webbing four feet above the waterline. And your survivors can't agree on whether it was fire, a wave, or the rocks."
"Men rarely agree. You catalog seals, Doctor. Let me catalog men."
"The boat was found inside my survey grid."
"I know where it happened."
"Then you know it's the fourth bad thing. Two people missing, a seal opened up like that net, now this. You don’t have to believe me. I'm asking for the chart coordinates."
He gazes out to the ocean instead of to me. "They won't be released while the report is open." Then, lower: "And if you already know where to look, I'd suggest asking yourself why everyone keeps pretending you don't."
I leave Greer with questions circling and take a walk down near the trawler. A lanky photographer carrying a camera bag nearly backs into a stack of crab pots. He's tall and lanky with sandy blond hair, and glasses slipping down his nose.
"You're doing surveillance badly," I tell him.
He lowers the camera. "I prefer coastal documentation with a side of plausible innocence."
"That sounds much more professional."
"Owen Lark." He nods toward my field book. "You're the seal researcher. I'm shooting the decline for a conservation spread, until the harbor started behaving like it doesn't want witnesses."
That gets my attention. "Witnesses to what?"
He hesitates, then turns the camera screen toward me. The image is blurred, taken from the cliff path: the trawler offshore, the north headland behind it, and two warped vertical streaks near the rocks where no footpath exists.
"Long exposure?" I ask.
"One-fortieth of a second." He zooms in. The streaks bend toward a black notch in the cliff base. "I thought it was lens flare until I checked the sequence. They move between frames."
"What's the notch?"
"Old drain mouth. Cannery storm outfall. Capped years ago, supposedly. Nothing runs through it now. That's the version people like."
I ask for a copy of the photographs and he sends them to me.
I return to Harbor House and lay them out.
The boat's position drops onto my survey grid like it was placed there—a stone's throw from the cove gate I photographed yesterday, the iron one with the waterline standing a foot too high.
I dig out the oldest harbor chart in the other files, and there it is: a storm outfall at the headland, a dotted line running back under the bluff and off the paper. Sealed, the legend says. Decades ago.
A capped drain doesn't fill a cove on a schedule the moon never set. Someone is running water through ground the town swears is closed, and every name on my missing list sits a short walk from a door.
Dorian is on the lane when I come out, and he doesn't pretend he wandered by.
"You went to Greer."
"News travels quick."
"Here it sprints." He falls into step without invitation. "Let the report go."
"You were on that water last night. Wet to the collar at my door an hour after two men died." I stop. "How did you know to go out there?"
"I survey the closures."
"At three in the morning."
"When they're failing, yes."
"The nets. The damage. Two dead from a gearbox." I wait for a look like the one he gave my photographs, and lied anyway. "You already know none of it fits. You knew before I did."
He doesn't deny it. "Come have coffee," he says.
The café is half empty, Nora behind the counter. She sets down my coffee, glances at Dorian, then at me.
"I'm not saying anything," she says.
"That sounded like something."
"It was the restraint talking." She looks at Dorian. "Black coffee?"
He inclines his head.
"Of course." She goes to the urn. "The handsome local who keeps appearing near disasters would drink coffee like a court sentence."
"You're not going to stop, are you?" he asks.
"No."
"Then bring your findings to me before anyone else. I know this coastline. I can be truthful with you about which closures are simply old and which are old for a reason."
"That's not help. That's a filter."
"It's both."
"Why would I route my work through you? You lie to me about walls?"
"Because I'm the only one in this harbor not pretending they aren't there.
" He turns the cup again. For a moment there's something worn beneath all that control—the kind a person carries from watching the same thing far longer than anyone should—and then he folds it away.
"Greer will manage you. The fishermen won't talk. I'll at least argue with you."
"Argue, or steer me."
"Both. You'll know the difference. You notice."
It isn't built to flatter, and I set it down before it can do any work on me. "Here's my offer. You see what I find when I decide you see it, not before. And you give me the real closure list—the one Greer won't read me—dates and codes they're filed under."
"Some of those codes are sealed."
"Then we have something to talk about."
He doesn't agree, but he doesn't refuse. He's measuring how much he can give me to keep me where he can watch me, and I allow it, for now.
I unroll the old chart between us, then set Owen's camera stills beside it.
"This," I say. "The cut. It isn't sealed. Something's using it on a schedule."
Dorian looks at the photographs first, not the map. His hand stills beside the nearest image.
"Who else has seen these?"
"Owen. Me. Now you."
"Keep it that way."
"Because they're useful, or because they're dangerous?"
"Yes."
I tap the dotted line. "You didn't answer the question."
"It's all I can give you without making things worse."
"The cut," I say. "It leads inland."
"Into the old storm works."
"I said cut. You said storm works."
The silence between us does useful work.
"The old storm works run under half this town," he says. "Most are flooded. The rest are worse."
"Worse how?"
"Unstable. Unmapped. And not as empty as the closures claim." He slides the photograph back to me. "If you insist on checking it, I can get you close to one access point. Daylight. Low tide. No improvising."
"That sounds like help wearing a leash."
"It is assistance wearing conditions."
"At least it dressed honestly."
I roll the chart and squeeze it under my arm. I haven't agreed to anything. But I have my confirmation: the cut is a door, he knows it's a door, and he wants the handle more than he wants me away from it.
Outside, gulls work the slip. I ought to be counting them. Instead I'm sitting too still next to Dorian whose warnings keep landing one truth short, and the dangerous part isn't the lying. It's that some part of me wants to believe the next thing he says. I should know better.
Instead of dwelling on it, I go looking for a map of the tunnels. Whatever moves under this town has been reading the coastline ahead of me, and I'm finished being last to the evidence.