Chapter 15 Holt
HOLT
Holt stared at June across the small table by the waterfront window, the sounds of the restaurant dimming around him as her words took hold. What if ten years ago, that was the story Gilbert Fry was chasing?
For a second, he didn’t answer. Not because he had nothing to say, but because the thought had already been in him, half-formed and unwelcome, from the moment his mother told him about the cat burglar. June hadn’t planted the idea so much as given it shape and a name.
She saw it in his face immediately. “You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?” June asked quietly.
“I am.” Holt exhaled and sat back slightly, though his eyes never left hers. “To be honest, the thought had crossed my mind, but I’d dismissed it.”
“But now it’s taken root in there,” June guessed and grinned slyly.
“Yes.” Holt glanced down at his almost finished plate of food for a moment, then back at her. “It has. Especially after everything we’ve just discussed.”
Because once she had said it aloud, too much of it aligned in ways he couldn’t dismiss.
Gilbert Fry had not been some drifting madman who happened to collide with the worst fire in Sandpiper Shores' history, and after reading the reports from ten years ago, it never made sense to him that Gilbert had been the one setting the fires to get a great YouTube show.
Willa and Margo had both told Holt that Gilbert and the four firefighters had been investigating the earlier fires because they believed there was more behind them than the official line had ever admitted.
Nigel Frost’s report had painted the cabin scene in simple terms. Gilbert was unstable.
The firefighters were trying to talk him down. He locked them in and set the fire.
But if Gilbert had uncovered something else, something older, something tied to the town and not just the fires, then the cabin might not have been a standoff at all. It might have been a silencing.
June watched him with that same infuriating, disarming clarity she had always had with him.
“What are you wondering?” she asked, leaning in a little closer and making it harder for him to concentrate when her familiar scent tantalized his senses.
Holt rubbed a hand over his jaw and forced himself to concentrate.
“Whether the bracelet at Teacups was an accident. Or whether it was meant to help us connect everything happening now to what happened ten years ago.” His mind raced.
June’s eyes narrowed in thought. Then, with the familiar efficiency that used to charm and exasperate him in equal measure, she opened her notepad once again, holding up her pen in readiness to capture more of their thoughts.
“Then let’s join the dots,” she said.
The urge to smile tugged at him despite everything. “Here?” Holt glanced around. “I’m not trying to be overly paranoid. But we have to reason that there are eyes on us.”
June followed his gaze and glanced around the cozy restaurant, then shook her head.
“You’re right,” she stated and caught his eyes. “Not here.”
“Okay, but we should finish dinner first.” Holt looked at the half-finished meal between them, ignoring the tug in his stomach and the excitement that spurted through him that their night together would be prolonged. He shook the feeling off and concentrated on his meal.
“Agreed.” June nodded.
Then they both tried to finish and enjoy the rest of their food, while the food was still good.
He knew that, because objectively it tasted of garlic, butter, fresh herbs, and the sort of rich tomato sauce that should have made the meal memorable.
But the conversation had shifted the night, and neither of them could pretend otherwise.
They both ate a little more, finished their wine, and left enough on the plates to suggest appetite rather than distraction.
When the bill came, Holt paid it, while June stuffed her notepad and pen back in her purse, before standing and walking to the door.
They stepped outside into one of those evenings that felt almost too lovely for the case they were carrying.
The air was cooler than earlier, touched by salt and the faint sweetness of night-blooming flowers from the planters along the boardwalk.
Lights had begun to glow in the storefronts, and the harbor beyond them shimmered with gold reflections from the restaurants and dock lamps.
Holt turned slightly, taking in the boardwalk stretching along the waterfront.
“Do you want to walk and talk?” He patted his pocket where his phone was. “We could record our thoughts.”
June followed his gaze, then pointed instead toward a small bench-and-table set farther along where the boardwalk widened into a viewing point over the ocean.
“That’s a great idea, but why don’t we sit there instead?” June turned and smiled up at him. “I prefer to write down my thoughts.” She shrugged. “I’m old-fashioned that way.”
Holt looked where she was pointing, and his chest gave an unexpected, painful little jolt. It was their old table.
It had been replaced a dozen times over the years, no doubt, and the paint had changed, and the weather had done its work, but the spot was the same.
Tucked just enough away from the main path to feel half-private, with the sea stretching out in front of it and the town behind. Their private spot alone.
June smiled, and that smile reached somewhere in him that had never learned how to defend itself against her.
“Remember how we used to sit there when we were teenagers?” she asked, nostalgia darkening her beautiful eyes.
Holt felt the echo of it physically. He had kissed her there for the first time. They had sat there through summer evenings, and every version of themselves that had existed before life had begun to demand harder things from them.
“Yes, of course I do.” He looked at the table and then back at her. “I’m just surprised that it’s still there in the exact same spot where it has been for years.”
“This is a popular lazy day ice-cream spot,” June said with a little laugh. “So I doubt the town council would want to change it.” She glanced around the area. “I think they’d be very unpopular with all the mobile vendors that park near it during the summertime.”
He did smile then, and they walked there together.
The boardwalk boards creaked softly beneath their steps.
Holt glanced around out of habit, checking the darkness between the lamps, the couples strolling past, the man in fishing gear carrying a cooler toward the docks, the teenager on a bicycle weaving too close to the curb.
Ensuring that no one was close enough to overhear them and that no one was paying them any attention.
June sat first and pulled out her notepad and pen again, setting them neatly on the table between them. Holt took the seat opposite her and rested one forearm on the table.
The sea spread out behind her, darkening by the minute.
“What do you know for certain about ten years ago?” June asked as a starting point.
Holt thought about the reports, the statements, the official conclusions, and the things that had begun to feel less like facts and more like carefully preserved versions of them.
“The fire reports focus on the fires,” he said. “They were all ruled arson. That part was never really in dispute.”
June nodded for him to continue. “There was a fire at the campground first. If you look at the bigger picture now, you realize just how close that first fire was to the cabin Gilbert was renting for the summer.”
June’s pen paused above the page. “Like a warning to him?” she asked. “Someone was trying to make a point that they knew why he was there and what the story he was chasing was.”
“Yes,” Holt said. “Or possibly an attempt to burn the cabin and whatever he had already found out in it.”
“That’s a good point.” Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully.
Holt watched as she wrote quickly, her head bent, hair shifting lightly in the breeze. He had spent years trying to forget the small things about her. It hadn’t worked nearly as well as he had told himself.
Then her eyes widened.
“The first recent fire,” June said, looking up. “The first one that was officially treated as arson.” Holt already knew where she was going. “It was near the same place as the first fire ten years ago,” she finished.
“Yes.” He nodded once. “Nearly right on top of that spot.”
“The red gas cans are another similarity,” June pointed out, writing again. “They were found in both the recent fires and the ones ten years ago.”
“I think this time they want Willa, Margo, and Rad to back off, ” Holt told her his thoughts on that. “In particular, though, Margo for some reason.”
June’s head came up. “She is being targeted more than Rad and Willa.”
“Yes.” Holt nodded. “It does seem odd. Willa and Rad, at least up until now, haven’t had anything as bad as what has happened to Margo.” His brow creased. “Judy possibly knows something about what happened ten years ago, and getting a job here in Sandpiper Shores helps her to investigate it.”
“Then someone else finds out she is Gilbert’s sister and suspects.” June tapped her notepad. “So they try to get rid of her.”
She wrote that down too.
“I’ve been trying to contact Nigel for days now with no reply.
” Holt leaned his elbows on the table. “I want to know what he can tell me and what led him to believe the case was closed when Willa said it was strange that he’d done it.
” His brow furrowed deeper. “She said he suspected Gilbert had been set up and then suddenly accepted that Gilbert was the culprit, and the case was closed.”
June mirrored him by putting her elbows on the table and leaning in without seeming to notice she had done so.
“I can remember how angry Nigel had been after the fire,” June told him. “The whole town was. But Nigel was determined to find out what had happened.”
“I checked the channel,” Holt said. “You know, Gilbert Fry’s YouTube Channel, Hidden Truths.”
“Oh?” June’s brows rose curiously. “And?”
“Do you know it’s still running?” Holt told her.