Chapter 2

The pier emptied slowly, the way a church does after bad news.

Wren stood at the rail watching the crowd break into knots on the seawall. Half of them kept glancing back at her. The other half kept glancing at Grant, who was on the stage with the mayor and the harbor master, laughing at something, holding a paper cup of coffee, a man wholly unbothered by having just been accused of murder in front of his neighbors.

"Wren." Grant's hand landed warm on her shoulder. She made herself not flinch. "Walk with me."

They walked the length of the pier. He kept his voice low and mild, the voice he used to close a deal.

"That girl's been stealing off these docks for a month," he said. "Props, bait, whatever isn't chained. Everybody knows it. Now somebody hands her a spliced tape and points her at us on Blessing morning. Think about who benefits."

"Who benefits?"

"Whoever wants this merger dead." He shrugged, generous. "Somebody down the lake. A competitor. Or a crank. Doesn't matter. Cade will sort the tape. It'll come back a fake, and by Monday it's a story we laugh about."

"And if it doesn't?"

Grant stopped walking. He turned her with two fingers on her elbow, gentle, so she had to look at him.

"Your father was my friend," he said. "You know I'd never." He let that sit. "You're rattled. Go home. Sleep. Tomorrow you sign and this town stops whispering."

Home was a trailer behind the office with a window that rattled in a north wind. Home was also the dock, which was the only thing she had ever wanted.

Wren went back to the boatyard end of the pier instead of home.

Mack Grieve was hosing down the apron when she walked up, his coveralls dark to the knee. He saw her face and turned the hose off.

"You heard it too," she said.

"Everybody heard it." Mack coiled the hose with fussy care. He didn't look at her. That was new. Mack had known her father thirty years; he had never once had trouble meeting her eyes.

"What do you know, Mack?"

"I know I'm sixty-one and I've got a mortgage," he said. "Go home, Wren."

She stood there a minute. The lake slapped the seawall. Somewhere behind the boathouse a gull screamed like a hinge.

Then she went to her office and locked the door and sat in the dark, replaying it-the tinny voice, the phrase, the way Grant's blood had gone out of his face before he remembered to be smooth. He had reached for the recorder. Not the girl. The recorder. A man who believed a tape was a fake does not lunge for it. He laughs. He holds it up to the crowd.

Wren looked at the ring on her finger for a long time. Then she pulled it off and put it in the drawer with her father's brass boat whistle, where things went when she didn't know what to do with them yet.

Her father had gone down on a calm-ish night with a clean engine and full tanks. A deckhand's mistake, they'd said. A cracked line, fuel everywhere, one spark.

Cut that line clean.

She sat up all night doing arithmetic on a dead man's boat.