CHAPTER TWELVE
The Cormorant Cove Harbor Futures Gala was exactly the kind of event Marin would have avoided in Boston without a second thought, and exactly the kind of event she couldn't afford to avoid here, not when Priya mentioned that the Inkwell & Anchor had been asked, along with half the businesses on Wharf Street, to provide a dessert table in exchange for a banner reading LOCAL PARTNER OF THE CORMORANT COVE MARINA PROJECT that Marin had agreed to with considerably less enthusiasm than the words implied.
It was held in the half-finished marina pavilion itself, strung with string lights against the dark water, and Prescott Vance moved through the crowd of investors and town councilmembers and hopeful local business owners with the same unhurried, engineered warmth he'd brought into her shop on opening day, multiplied by an open bar and a string quartet.
"Ms. Ashworth." He found her by the dessert table, inevitably, holding a glass of something pale gold. "I hope Wharf Street's treating you well. I've heard nothing but good things — you've got Josephine's touch for the place, whatever else you've changed."
"I'm getting there," Marin said, and found herself, despite everything she now suspected about him, unable to entirely dislike his practiced charm — which was, she thought, probably exactly the point of it. "This is quite an event."
"We wanted the vote in three weeks to feel like a beginning, not just a formality.
" He gestured out at the dark water beyond the pavilion's lights, the construction cranes standing silent against the stars.
"This project's been thirty years in the making, in a lot of ways.
My father saw the potential in this waterfront before anyone else did.
I'd like to think I'm finishing what he started. "
"Finishing what he started," Marin repeated carefully, watching his face.
"In a manner of speaking." Something in his eyes did the careful arithmetic again, assessing her, and Marin had the distinct, uncomfortable sense that he was very good at reading rooms, and that she needed to be better at hiding what she knew than she currently felt capable of being.
"You knew Walter Kessler, I understand. Terrible loss.
He and my father never quite saw eye to eye on this waterfront, you know — history buffs and developers rarely do, there's always some old grudge or another getting mistaken for principle.
" He said it lightly, but his eyes had gone very still.
"I do hope whatever project he was working on doesn't get finished by someone with less rigor than he had.
Grief makes people credulous. They'll believe almost anything, if it comes wrapped in a dead man's good intentions. "
It was, Marin thought, a remarkably specific thing to say to a woman he had no particular reason to believe was investigating anything at all.
"I didn't know him well enough to say what rigor he had," she said carefully. "Just that he seemed to care about getting the town's history right."
"Admirable." Vance's smile didn't waver, but something behind it had gone colder, more watchful.
"This town has a great deal of history, Ms. Ashworth.
Not all of it useful to dig up. Some old stories are better left where the tide left them.
" He raised his glass slightly, an almost-toast, and moved off into the crowd before she could answer, leaving her standing at the dessert table with her heart beating harder than the moment, on its surface, should have warranted.
She was still standing there, turning his words over, when she noticed a woman watching her from near the bar — mid-fifties, sharply dressed, with the alert, careful stillness of someone whose entire job was noticing things before they became problems. Denise Hartwell, Marin would learn later, Vance's longtime executive assistant, who had worked for the family since she was barely older than Priya, and who was watching Marin now with an expression that wasn't quite suspicion and wasn't quite sympathy, but sat somewhere uneasily between the two.
When their eyes met, Denise didn't look away.
For a moment, Marin thought she might come over, might say something.
Instead she set down her glass, untouched, and slipped out through the pavilion's side entrance into the dark, leaving Marin with the growing, unshakable feeling that Prescott Vance was not the only person at the Harbor Futures Gala carrying a secret about what had really happened thirty years ago on the Whitfield dock.
? ? ?
"You look like a woman who'd rather be anywhere else," said a familiar voice at her elbow, and Marin turned to find Sam Reyes standing there, distinctly out of place in a blazer that didn't quite fit the ease with which he wore his uniform, a bottle of sparkling water in one hand in place of the champagne everyone else was drinking.
"Is it that obvious?"
"Only to someone who's spent the last two weeks watching you very carefully.
" He said it lightly, but something in his eyes suggested he'd heard himself and was slightly surprised by his own honesty.
"I'm here in an official capacity, technically.
Town asks for a police presence at events like this.
Mostly I'm making sure nobody drives home who shouldn't.
" He glanced across the pavilion toward Vance, who was mid-handshake with a man in an expensive suit, laughing at something with his whole practiced charm on display. "You talked to him."
"Briefly. He said something strange. About old stories being better left where the tide left them." Marin kept her voice low. "It didn't feel like small talk."
Reyes's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "I don't love that you're close enough to him to hear things like that."
"I didn't go looking for the conversation. He found me."
"That's not better, from where I'm standing.
" He looked at her for a long moment, and something behind his careful professionalism softened, just slightly.
"I meant what I said the other night. Let me be part of this.
Not because I don't trust you to be careful — because I don't trust him, and I'd rather you weren't standing this close to whatever he's protecting without someone watching your back. "
"Are you offering to watch my back, Detective?"
"I believe I am, Ms. Ashworth." The corner of his mouth lifted, just barely, the first real crack of warmth she'd seen from him all evening. "Purely professionally, of course."
"Of course," Marin said, and found, despite the cold current of unease running under the whole gilded evening, that she was smiling too.
They didn't get much further than that — a councilwoman called Reyes away to ask about parking arrangements for the coming vote, and Marin was pulled back into dessert-table duty by Priya's increasingly urgent hand signals from across the pavilion — but she carried the small exchange with her for the rest of the night, a warm, steady thread running underneath everything colder that Vance's words and Denise's careful, watchful retreat had left behind.