CHAPTER TWENTY
The old boathouse crouched at the far edge of the marina site, half-obscured by construction fencing and stacked pallets of building material, its windows boarded, its door secured with a padlock that had clearly, recently, been forced.
Rain hammered sideways against Marin's slicker as she and Ivy picked their way through the mud and debris of the half-finished construction site, the harbor beyond churning white and furious under the storm's assault, the same water, Marin thought, that had taken Danny Whitfield thirty years ago and Walter Kessler two months before.
A light moved inside the boathouse, faint and unsteady — a flashlight beam, sweeping across shelving, searching.
"We should wait for Reyes," Ivy said, close to Marin's ear, though her voice carried a thread of the same urgency Marin felt herself.
"If he's destroying evidence right now, there won't be anything left to find by the time Reyes gets down here." Marin's heart was pounding, but her voice, when it came, was steadier than she expected. "I just need to see. I just need to know what's in there before it's gone."
"Try Reyes again," Marin said, pulling her hood tighter against the driving rain. "Tell him exactly where we are. If he can't get through by phone, tell him to come straight down here the second he can."
Ivy fumbled with her own phone, shielding it from the rain with her body, and swore under her breath at the single flickering bar of signal, the call failing twice before finally, mercifully, connecting — a garbled, half-audible exchange that Marin caught only in fragments over the wind: boathouse — marina site — Vance's car — hurry.
"He's coming," Ivy said, pocketing the phone. "Said fifteen minutes, maybe less if he runs every light between here and the station. He also said, and I'm quoting directly, tell her not to go in there, I mean it, Ivy, do not let her go in there."
Marin looked past the fencing toward the boathouse, its faint, unsteady light still sweeping across the boarded windows, and felt the full weight of Reyes's warning pressing against every instinct that had gotten her this far — the same stubborn, careful attention that had noticed a discrepancy in a dead man's blood alcohol level, that had sat up late with an old ledger until the pencil marks finally made sense, that had refused, again and again, to let a tidy story stand in for the truth.
"Fifteen minutes is a long time," she said quietly. "If he's in there right now destroying the one physical record that could prove any of this, fifteen minutes might be all it takes for it to be gone for good."
"Marin—"
"I'm not going to confront him. I promise you that.
I just need to see what's in that box before it disappears.
If it's already gone, I'll come straight back out, and we'll wait for Reyes together, and I'll never mention going anywhere near that door again.
" Marin met Ivy's eyes through the driving rain, and something in her own steadiness must have reached her friend, because Ivy's shoulders dropped, reluctant, resigned.
"If you're not out in three minutes, I'm coming in after you, storm or no storm," Ivy said. "That's not a negotiation."
"Deal."
She should have listened to Ivy anyway. She would think that, later, many times, turning the decision over with the particular clarity hindsight always provides.
But in the moment, with the storm roaring and thirty years of a dead man's silence finally within arm's reach, she eased open the boathouse's forced door and slipped inside, Ivy close behind her after all, three minutes' patience apparently not being among her more reliable qualities.
The beam of light swung toward them instantly.
"Ms. Ashworth." Prescott Vance's voice, when it came, had none of the practiced warmth she'd heard from him before — just something flat and exhausted and, underneath it, genuinely frightening.
He stood beside an old metal shelving unit, a half-emptied box at his feet, a logbook — cloth-bound, water-stained, unmistakably old — clutched in one hand.
"I confess I didn't expect an audience tonight. "
"It's over, Prescott." Marin kept her voice as steady as she could manage, though her whole body had gone cold with something that wasn't just the storm.
"We know about the claim filed before the storm.
We know about Curtis Aldrich. We know Denise confessed everything to Walter before he died, and that you knew she was about to. "
Something moved across Vance's face in the unsteady flashlight glow — not quite surprise, more like a man watching a card he'd been holding for thirty years finally, inevitably, get played by someone else's hand.
"My father built this town's entire waterfront on a lie he made me complicit in before I was even old enough to understand what I was agreeing to," he said, and his voice, for the first time since Marin had met him, had nothing engineered about it at all — just old, buried rage, finally surfacing.
"I spent thirty years trying to build something good on top of what he did.
Jobs, tax revenue, a real future for this harbor instead of a handful of dying fishing families clinging to a way of life that was already gone.
And Walter Kessler was going to burn all of it down two weeks before the vote, over a thirty-year-old accident nobody could even properly prove, because he cared more about being right than about what this town actually needed. "
"Danny Whitfield wasn't an accident," Marin said. "You know that. You've always known that."
"I didn't sabotage that boat." Vance's grip on the logbook had gone white-knuckled.
"My father did that, and God help me, I've spent every year since telling myself that not doing it myself made me innocent of it.
But when Denise told me she was going to confess — when I understood that Walter had proof, real proof, that could unravel everything the night before the storm gave me the only cover I was ever going to get—"
He stopped himself, but it was too late, and they both knew it.
"You went to the pier," Marin said quietly. "You met him there. And you made sure he never got the chance to bring any of this to the police."