CHAPTER FIVE
"You want to know local history, you want Oswald Finch," Priya said the next morning, elbow-deep in the pastry case, not looking up.
"He's worked here on and off since before I was born, practically.
Knows everyone's business back three generations.
Your aunt used to say he was better than the newspaper archive and cheaper. "
"Why isn't he working today?"
"He only does Thursdays and Saturdays now. Says his knees have opinions about the rest of the week." Priya finally looked up, catching something in Marin's expression. "Why? What are you working on?"
Marin hesitated, then decided that if she was going to trust anyone in this town with half-formed suspicions, it might as well be the person who'd already proven she could keep a secret about the cat's vet bills from the entire book club.
She told her — the ledger, the marginalia, Walter's cryptic comment about things buried at sea, the missing canvas bag.
Priya listened with her arms folded and her expression going steadily more serious, which was, in itself, unusual enough that Marin knew she'd been heard.
"D.W.," Priya repeated slowly. "You know who that could be, right?"
"I was hoping you'd tell me, because I have a guess I don't love."
"Danny Whitfield." Priya said it like a name she hadn't spoken out loud in a while.
"Ruth's brother. He drowned — God, it must be almost thirty years ago now.
Before I was born, but everybody's grandma still talks about it.
There was a whole thing about it at the time.
Some people said it wasn't really an accident, but nothing ever came of it, and Ruth's still — well, you've seen her.
She doesn't exactly light up when Vance's name comes up. "
Marin felt something settle into place, cold and careful, like a key finding its lock. "And R.?"
"Could be Ruth. Ask Ruth, that tracks." Priya's eyes had gone wide. "Marin. You think Walter found something about Danny Whitfield's death. Thirty years old. And two days after he tells you he found something, he ends up drowned off the same pier."
"I don't know what I think yet." It was true, mostly. "I think I need to talk to Oswald Finch. And Ruth."
"And maybe the police," Priya said pointedly.
"I already talked to the police. He was very reasonable and told me questions aren't evidence." Marin closed the ledger. "I need evidence."
She went to see Oswald Finch that afternoon, tracking him down not at the shop but at the small clapboard house two streets back from the harbor where he lived alone with, by her count, four cats and an alarming number of framed photographs of Cormorant Cove going back to what looked like the turn of the last century.
He was somewhere north of seventy, spare and precise, with the careful, unhurried manner of a man who had spent forty years as the town librarian before Aunt Jo lured him into part-time bookshop work with what he described, with evident satisfaction, as "better coffee and worse hours. "
He listened to her account of the ledger without interrupting, his pale eyes sharpening steadily, and when she finished he was quiet for a long moment, looking out his front window at nothing in particular.
"Danny Whitfield," he said finally. "I wondered if someone would come asking about that, someday. I rather hoped it wouldn't be over another body."
"You remember it?"
"I remember everything about this town, Ms. Ashworth, it's the curse of my particular temperament.
" He said it without much humor. "Daniel Whitfield.
Twenty-six years old. Fisherman, like his father and his father's father — the Whitfields worked the Cove's western dock for three generations, back when that whole stretch of waterfront belonged to fishing families instead of —" he made a small, distasteful gesture, "— development committees.
Danny went out alone one night in October, a bad storm, much like the one we just had, and his boat was found the next morning, capsized, no sign of him.
He washed up two days later, down past the point. "
"Was it ruled an accident?"
"Officially, yes. There were people at the time who thought otherwise — his sister among them, loudest of all, though nobody with any authority took it particularly seriously.
She said the bilge pump had been tampered with.
Said Danny knew that boat better than his own hands and wouldn't have gone out in weather like that without checking it twice.
Nobody could prove anything, and grief makes people see conspiracies in ordinary tragedies more often than it uncovers real ones, so the town moved on, the way towns do. "
"What happened right around then? Anything unusual — land deals, business changes?"
Oswald's eyes went very still, the look of a man deciding how much of his hand to show.
"The Whitfield family sold their dock rights that same winter.
To the Vance family, as it happens — Prescott's father, Harold, who was just beginning to buy up waterfront property all along that stretch.
Everyone assumed it was grief. The family couldn't bear to keep working that water after what happened to Danny, and Harold Vance made a fair offer, and people needed to move on with their lives.
" He folded his hands together, precise as a man closing a book.
"It was all very tidy, Ms. Ashworth. That's the thing about tidy explanations. They're usually true. But not always."
"Ruth still runs the diner across from my shop."
"She does. And I'd wager, if you ask her about her brother, you'll get further in five minutes than you would with the town's official records in five years.
" He fixed her with a look that was suddenly, unmistakably, a warning.
"But be careful how you go about it, and be careful who you tell you're asking.
If there's any truth buried in this — and I confess I've always half suspected there might be — it's stayed buried thirty years because someone with money and standing in this town wanted it that way.
That kind of person doesn't enjoy having old graves dug back up. "
"One more thing," Oswald added, as she gathered herself to leave, and something in his tone made her pause at the door.
"Your aunt knew some of this. Not all of it, I'd wager, but some.
She and Ruth were close, in their way — not intimate friends, exactly, but two women who'd each buried a great deal and understood, without needing to say so, what that costs a person over the years.
I remember Josephine saying to me once, not long after the land transfer went through, that she thought Harold Vance's generosity toward a grieving family smelled less like kindness and more like a man settling a debt he didn't want examined too closely.
I told her she was being uncharitable. She told me I was being naive, and dared me to name one other family on this stretch of coast Harold Vance had ever gone out of his way to help, unprompted, out of nothing but the goodness of his heart.
" Oswald's mouth twisted, something between a smile and a grimace.
"I never did think of one. I've regretted, more than a little, that I never pushed her further on it while she was still here to be pushed. "
"She never told me any of this."
"I doubt she wanted to burden you with an old suspicion she couldn't prove.
Josephine was fierce about a great many things, Ms. Ashworth, but she was also careful about which fights she handed down to the people she loved.
" Oswald walked her to the door himself, moving with the slow deliberateness of a man whose knees had developed strong opinions about the afternoon's exertions.
"I think, if she'd lived to see what Walter found, she'd have been standing exactly where you're standing now.
I think she'd be glad it was you carrying it forward instead of letting it go quiet again. "
Marin thanked him and left, walking back toward Wharf Street with the September light going long and gold across the water, and thought about her aunt's fierce, unspoken suspicions, about Prescott Vance's careful arithmetic eyes, and about Walter Kessler's canvas bag, missing from the scene where he'd died, and felt, for the first time since she'd come back to Cormorant Cove, genuinely afraid of what she might be walking toward — and, underneath the fear, something steadier and more stubborn, an inheritance every bit as real as the shop itself.