Chapter 3

I slept in the old cider shed in the north orchard with the door wedged shut and my fist around the locket.

By midmorning I was at the boathouse, because it was the only structure on the property that still felt like mine, and because someone had been living in it. Cigarette ends. A tin cup. A bedroll rolled tight behind the fuel drums.

Milo Vance came in at eleven carrying a bucket of river water. When he saw me standing in the light from the sea gate, he dropped the bucket and sat down hard on the bench like a man whose legs had quit on him.

"You're real," he said.

"I'm real. And you put that locket in my hand in front of two hundred people, so you'd better have something to say."

He rubbed his scarred forearm - a long, puckered burn, shiny as wax - and told me.

Grant came to him a week before the accident with an envelope and a story. Five thousand dollars to cut the fuel line. Just cut it, let her drift a mile, and I'll bring her back myself. She'll be so frightened she'll sign anything I put in front of her. Milo had believed him, because it was easier to believe a man like Grant Harrow than to keep fixing boats for cash under the table in a county that had already decided he was a thief.

"I thought he'd pull you out of the water," Milo said. "I swear to God, Evie. I thought he'd be the hero."

He was the one who ran down the bluff when the boat went. He dragged me out of the shallows and burned his arm on the hot engine cover doing it. He ran back up for a lantern and help, and when he came down again the shingle was empty.

For a long moment I stood there while two years of rage stood up in me and asked to be spent.

"Stand up," I said finally.

He looked up.

"You're not going to apologize to me. You're going to stand in a courtroom and say all of it out loud, on the record, with your name on it." I put my hand out. "And you're going to give me the fuel line you cut, because I know you kept it, because you're the kind of man who keeps his own sins in a drawer."

He stared at my hand, then went to his pack and unwrapped an oilcloth bundle with a foot of black hose inside, sliced clean through with a blade.

Then he told me the other thing. Grant Harrow didn't trust anybody, not even the people he paid. He taped his meetings. There was a waterproof recorder taped under the workbench behind us, and Milo had been careful never to touch it.

At four o'clock I walked into Warren Sills's office in the village with the hidden will in my coat. He sat me down, brought me water, and read it twice with his hand over his mouth.

"Thank God," he kept saying. "Thank God."

He asked to keep the original overnight. He said we would go to the county attorney in the morning together, and he walked me to the door and told me to come back at nine.

At 9:40 that night, Tessa's cousin called me from the road and said Warren Sills's Mercedes was parked under Grant's portico, and the porch light was on.