CHAPTER NINE
Reyes read through her notes twice, standing at the small brick station's front counter at nine-thirty at night, with the particular stillness of a man recalibrating everything he thought he knew about a case he'd already half-closed in his head.
"Where's the ledger now?"
"In my bag. I brought it."
"Good." He held out his hand, and Marin passed it over, feeling an odd, small pang at letting it go — she'd been holding onto it, she realized, the way Walter must have held onto it, like something too important to set down.
"I'm going to need you to write a formal statement.
Everything you told me the other day, plus this.
And I'm going to need to talk to Ruth Whitfield and Oswald Finch myself, properly, on the record. "
"Does this mean you believe me?"
Reyes looked up from the ledger, and for the first time since Marin had met him, the careful professional neutrality slipped a little, replaced by something more tired and more honest. "I believe there's enough here that I was wrong to close this as fast as I did.
I believe Walter Kessler might have found something worth killing over, and I believe that's a genuinely uncomfortable thing to sit with in a town where I know pretty much everyone the finger could eventually point at.
" He set the ledger down carefully, like it might bruise.
"I don't believe you should be the one doing this digging, Ms. Ashworth.
I mean that. If you're right, whoever's behind this has already shown they're willing to make a murder look like an accident and get away with it clean for two full days before anyone questioned it.
That's not somebody I want you going up against with a legal pad and good intentions. "
"I wasn't planning on confronting anyone," Marin said, which was, at the time she said it, mostly true.
"Good. Keep it that way. Let me do my job.
" He hesitated, and something almost apologetic crossed his face.
"For what it's worth — I'm sorry I brushed you off the first time.
I've been doing this job fourteen years, and this town likes its stories tidy, and I let that make me tidy too, when I should've listened harder to a woman who runs a bookshop and reads people's manuscripts for a living.
That's a skill, noticing when something doesn't sit right on the page. I should've weighted it more."
It was, Marin thought, walking home along the darkened harbor with the ledger's absence a strange lightness in her bag, the nicest thing anyone in Cormorant Cove had said to her since she'd arrived, and she was slightly, uselessly annoyed at herself for noticing how much she'd liked hearing it.
The town was quiet at this hour, Wharf Street lit only by the old iron lampposts and the last lit window of Ruth's diner, closing up for the night.
Across the water, the marina project's construction lights blazed along the western waterfront — the old Whitfield dock, Marin thought now, looking at it differently than she had three weeks ago — a bright, ambitious scaffold of steel against the dark harbor, already half-built, already, according to Priya, scheduled for a town vote on final approval in just under three weeks.
Three weeks. Not much time, Marin thought, for a thirty-year-old secret to come all the way to light. Not much time at all, if someone out there was still willing to do whatever it took to keep it buried a little longer.
She didn't notice, walking home, the car idling two streets back with its headlights off, or the careful, unhurried way it pulled out and followed her, at a respectful distance, all the way to her door.
? ? ?
She noticed the next morning, though not the car itself — only its trace, a faint double impression of tire tracks in the damp gravel of the small alley beside the shop where no delivery truck had any business parking overnight, and, tucked beneath the Inkwell & Anchor's front doormat, a single sheet of plain paper, unsigned, the message typed rather than handwritten, as though whoever had left it understood exactly how much handwriting could give away.
Some doors are better left closed. Ask yourself who benefits from opening this one, and who gets hurt.
Marin stood on her own front step for a long moment, the paper trembling faintly in her hand — not fear, exactly, or not only fear, but a kind of cold, clarifying anger that surprised her with its steadiness.
Priya arrived twenty minutes later to find her still standing there, and went very pale reading over Marin's shoulder.
"Okay," Priya said, in the flat, controlled voice of someone forcing calm onto a situation that did not currently have any.
"Okay, that's — that's a real, actual threat, Marin.
That's not a hunch anymore, that's someone with a typewriter and bad intentions standing on your doormat in the middle of the night. "
"I know."
"Call Reyes. Right now, before you even open the register."
"I'm calling him," Marin said, already dialing, and found, waiting for him to pick up, that her hand had stopped trembling entirely, replaced by something steadier and more determined.
Whoever had left the note wanted her frightened enough to stop.
It occurred to her, standing there in the pale morning light with Priya's hand steady on her shoulder, that it had done exactly the opposite.