Chapter 41
He drove to the harbor.
He let Scout out of the back of the truck and walked the length of the dock. The tide had gone out. Along the pilings the waterline showed itself in dark bands—all the places the harbor had reached and receded from, leaving the truth of the wood exposed.
Scout trotted ahead of him, nose down, reading the dock the way he read everything, without sentimentality. He circled back once to confirm Angus was still there, then moved ahead again.
Across the water, Holt Marine sat quiet beneath the morning sky. The North Annex was quiet now, ringed with tape and the hard white lights of the scene crew, visible in a way it hadn’t been the morning Angus first walked that dock. It was hard to unsee a building once you’d looked at it properly.
He stood at the end of the dock and looked at the water.
The lure had not looked like evil. That was the thing.
It had looked like a father’s approval. A mother’s love for her son. A clean case built on solid evidence. A town’s respect. Justice delivered in time to count.
It had looked like things people could justify carrying.
Until they carried them too far.
He had read the verse before any of them knew how literal the darkness would be.
“Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them.”
He had always thought idols would be easier to name. That they would look the way idols looked in stories—obvious, hollow, brittle under examination. They did not. Sometimes they looked like justice. Sometimes they looked like everything a man could ever want.
That was why they worked.
Scout came back and pressed against his leg, and he reached down and scratched behind his ears. Scout leaned into it and that was enough. The water was doing what the water did—pulling back from the pilings, exposing the dark line of what had been covered.
Nothing was fixed. Not fully. Jonah would carry the scars on his wrists for years. Frank would carry the burden of discarded maintenance files piled beside the tide charts for the rest of his life. Tammy would confront what she had chosen. Pete would answer for what his pride had set in motion.
And Angus would carry this—the memory of how close the lure had come, how reasonable it had seemed, and how close he had come to becoming the man Pete had built the trap for.
But Jonah Holt was alive.
And Angus Reid was still standing on the right side of the line.
He stood there until the water gave back the rocks.
Then he turned from the harbor and went home.
“Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them.”
Jonah 2:8 (NIV)
Thank you for reading Jonah’s Lure. I pray you were entertained while encouraged by the faith message.