Chapter 6 #3
He got up quiet, and dressed, and did not leave — went out to the little kitchen instead to make the coffee, because if he was going to be a coward about the leaving he could at least not be a coward about the coffee, and it was there, waiting to knife him, on the kitchen table where Hollis had dropped it days ago and forgotten it in the wreck of the week: the Tern Point paperwork.
The whole packet of it, the rezone filing, the glossy renderings, the pages of it Hollis couldn't make himself read.
And clipped to the front, the cover letter, the letterhead, the principal's name where the lawyers had to print it, the man behind the shell company, the money under Sutter's quarter-zip.
Corliss Holdings LLC. Principal: G. Alan Corliss.
Roan stood in the gray kitchen with the coffee going cold in his hand and felt the floor of the last three weeks drop out from under him.
He knew that name. He knew it the way you know a name you've written on forty invoices.
He'd moved that man's boats — plural, boats, the old Hinckley and then the big new custom sloop Corliss had commissioned and never learned to handle, Fair Wind, sixty-two feet of other people's money that Roan had personally delivered up this exact coast eighteen months ago, Corliss flying in to make the last leg so he could tell the yacht club he'd sailed her home.
Roan had brought that boat into these waters.
Had sat in Corliss's cockpit and listened to him talk, the way that kind of money talked, about the little dying harbors up the coast and how somebody with vision could do something with all that wasted frontage.
Roan had thought he was making conversation. Roan had thought a lot of things.
He made himself pick the letter up and read it all the way through, the whole cold legal length of it, the way Hollis never could.
Corliss Holdings had been quietly assembling waterfront up and down the midcoast for three years — a marina here, a "residential marine village" there, the exact pattern Roan had watched eat a dozen working harbors, except that now he could put a face on the pattern.
He could put a cockpit on it, and a gin and tonic, and a soft rich unhurried voice.
He could remember Corliss saying, somewhere off Pemaquid with Roan on the helm of his sixty-two feet of daydream, that the real trouble with these little fishing towns was that nobody had the nerve to sit them down and tell them they were already dead.
Roan had trimmed the sheet and said nothing, because the client was always right and the check always cleared, and he had sailed that man's beautiful boat into these waters and pocketed his money and gone, and never once imagined it would be waiting here for him when he came around the point.
He set the coffee down before he dropped it.
Nobody in Merritt Harbor knew. That was the whole of it, standing there in the cold kitchen light.
Nobody in this town knew that the stranger who'd sailed in during the Blessing and stood up at their meeting and gutted Sutter's pitch — the man now sleeping with the yard he'd defended — had spent his career as the pair of hands that delivered the trophies to men exactly like Corliss, and had brought Corliss's own boat into these waters, and had sat in Corliss's cockpit while the man daydreamed out loud about doing precisely this.
It didn't matter that Roan hadn't known.
It didn't matter that it was the ugliest kind of coincidence, that his whole world was this world and so of course a thread of it ran straight through him to the man trying to kill the yard.
It would not matter at all, when it came out.
And it would come out — a town like this, a name like that, it was a matter of days.
It would look like exactly what a leaving man always turns out to have been.
He could tell Hollis. That was the clean thing, the thing a better man would do — climb back up the stairs and wake him and say it plain before the town got there, the money behind Tern Point is a client of mine, I brought his boat into these waters, I didn't know and I know that doesn't fix it.
Get out ahead of it. Trust the big man to hear it right.
Except Roan knew what happened when you handed somebody the true ugly thing about yourself and asked them to hold it.
He knew because he'd spent seven years making certain he was never in one harbor long enough for anyone to have to.
You gave a person your worst coincidence and you watched their face do the arithmetic — watched the doubt come up in it, the small recalculation, the what else don't I know — and Hollis.
Hollis who'd been sold out by his own brother from a barstool.
Hollis who had built his whole scarred heart around the iron certainty that everyone he wanted would eventually find the reason to go.
Hollis would sit across a kitchen table and hear it, and the doubt would come up in that steady brown gaze no matter how hard the man fought it down, and Roan did not think he could stand in this harbor and watch that happen to the one face that had looked at him like he was worth staying for.
It would be easier to be gone before it did. That was the whole rotten genius of the thing. It was always, always easier to be gone.
Up the hill, in the warm bed, Hollis slept the sleep of a man who'd finally, at forty-six, let himself want something out loud. And Roan Mercer stood in his kitchen holding the fuse in both hands, and did the arithmetic, and hated every answer it gave him.