Chapter 8

After he dropped her at the dock office, Wren locked the door, pulled every blind, and set the old fish-house deck on her desk. She put in his tape first-she owed the man that much, to know what he'd meant to play.

It was exactly what he'd said: two boatyard men, drinks, one doing a bad version of Grant's voice, cut and clipped into nonsense and a laugh. A piece of theater. If the crowd had heard that, Grant would have been a saint by noon and Birdie would have been gone by dark.

Then she took out his tape and put in Birdie's.

For thirty-one minutes she sat absolutely still.

It began with the boathouse door. Grant's voice, real this time, low and hard, nothing like the man who'd put a ring on her finger.

"...the Meridian. You cut that line clean and let the weather take the rest. One fire, one story, and Hayes Kettering's the one who cracked a line and didn't smell it. Bad luck. Hard lake."

The other man-Dell; she could hear the size of him in the way he breathed-said, "You're not paying me enough for that."

"You'll get paid when the note closes. Kettering thinks I saved her. She'll marry the dock right into my hand."

"You made her the deal before you killed him?"

"I bought the note three years ago, Dell. Everything after that was just weather."

Wren closed her eyes. Her father was in this room. Fourteen months dead and sitting right here on a tape in his own daughter's office, being talked about like a line item.

Dell again: "And the girl?"

"There's a scav kid living in my yard. Snooping. She heard something or she didn't, but she's a loose end either way." A pause. "After the merger, the mother's a problem I can handle. The kid's easier. A foster runaway with a theft record-nobody's coming for her. One day she's in the yard, and one day she's not."

"Jesus, Grant."

"You wanted your money. This is the cost of it. You already cut the line. Don't get tender now."

The tape spooled on. Wren put her head down on her father's whistle and cried once, dry and short, the way you cry when the person you're crying for can't hear and the person who hurt them can.

Then she lifted her head and looked at the clock and understood she was out of time.

Because that was the whole thing, wasn't it-the voice on the tape wanted the loose end gone after the merger, and the merger was tomorrow at ten, and the loose end was asleep in a shed boat on his own property.

Wren rewound Birdie's tape, took it out, and slid it into her inside pocket. She put Grant's fake tape in her other pocket. She wrote three words on the back of a yard receipt, looked at them, and went out into the dark toward the shed boat.

Tomorrow she would play a tape in front of the whole town.

The only question left was how to keep a child alive through lunch.