Dex looked at the water. The afternoon light was cutting low across the lake, turning the surface the color of old brass, and from here the western bank was a dark line of tree and shoreline with nothing visible of the cottage or the meadow behind it.
"I want you asking questions," Rafe said. "Quietly, the way you do. Dock workers, freight runners, anyone who movesthrough this river and might have noticed a charter or a face they didn't recognize. Don't push. Don't let it look like we're building a case."
"And if someone's already talking about us?"
"Find out who and what they're saying. But carefully." He grabbed the cargo manifest he'd left on the dock rail and went back to work. "Malrick is good at making the people he uses think they're doing him a favor."
"He's not the only one," Dex said, and went back to checking the seam.
Rafe didn't answer that. He stood at the dock rail with the manifest in his hand and looked at the lake and thought about the way his wolf had gone quiet on that track, and how every decent instinct he had was pointing him in directions that were going to cost him something before this week was done.
10
ISLA
The cottage smelled like dried lavender and lake water when she got back, which meant the windows had been leaking again. She'd need to ask Bette about the seal on the south-facing frame. Small problem. Fixable. She liked fixable.
The afternoon at Corin's had been good. After Rafe left and the irritation burned off, she'd gotten back into the meadow work and held the connection for six minutes. Six. The wind had moved the way she'd asked it to, precise rotations along the ridge, and the sky had responded with clarity that made her believe the whole thing might actually be learnable. Not tameable. She'd given up on that word. But learnable, yes. She could live with learnable.
She dropped her bag inside the door and went to fill the kettle. The light was going gold through the west window, the lake throwing it back in long sheets across the stone floor, and the evening had that particular late-spring quality where everything smelled green and slightly electric.
The simplicity and beauty of it all almost made her miss the note that was tucked under the edge of the doormat, folded once,no envelope. She saw the corner of it when she came back to close the door properly and for a moment thought it was one of Fen's delivery slips, the harbourmaster's office still figuring out that she didn't need advance weather warnings from her own sky.
She let out a sigh as she picked it up and unfolded it.
The handwriting was neat. Not rushed, not theatrical. Just three lines, centered on the page.
The Ardenmere fleet lost three vessels on the night of September 14th. The girl who watched from the tree line was seventeen. She's been running ever since.
Isla read it twice. Then she folded it back along the crease and placed it on the worktable and put both hands flat on either side of it. She stood there frozen while the kettle started to hiss on the stove behind her.
September 14th. The date was right. The detail about the tree line was right. The number of vessels was wrong. It had been fishing boats, not fleet ships, and there had been two, not three, but the rest of it sat on the page with the casual accuracy of someone who had done research rather than guessed.
Nobody in Hollow Oak knew that date. She had never told anyone the specifics. Twyla knew pieces like that Isla's father had died on a dock, that the storms had been involved, that she'd been young, but not the date, not the tree line, not the number seventeen. Those were details that lived in coast records, harbor reports, the kind of documentation that got filed and forgotten in municipal offices three hundred miles from here and that only a witness would remember. But why now?
Someone had gone looking.
The kettle screamed. She took it off the heat, poured water over nothing because she'd forgotten the tea, and stood at the counter holding a cup of hot water and looking at the note on the worktable.
She could burn it. That was the first impulse, the same reflex that had made her leave every other place that got too close to the truth. Burn it, pack light, be gone before the questions started. She'd done it four times in ten years and she was good at it by now. Instead, she put the cup down, picked up the note, and walked out the door toward town.
The Hollow Oak Book Nook was still lit when she reached the square, warm light spilling from the front windows onto the cobblestones. Lucien's shop cat sat in the display window like a furry gargoyle, watching her approach with the unsettling intelligence of an animal that had lived longer than any cat should.
Inside, the shop smelled like old paper and beeswax candles and the particular woody musk that clung to everything Lucien touched. The front room was empty, shelves rising to the ceiling on both sides, the narrow aisle between them barely wide enough for two people. She could hear movement in the back.
"We're closing," Lucien's voice came from somewhere deep in the stacks. Low, clipped, the voice of a man who had turned unfriendliness into an art form.
"I'm looking for Moira."
There was a pause before Lucien appeared at the end of the aisle, dark hair falling to his shoulders, green eyes assessing her with the liquid attention of his panther. Whatever he saw there made him step aside without further comment.
"Archive room. Down the hall, second left."
"Thank you."
"She hasn't eaten since noon," he said to her back as she passed. "If you're going to keep her in there, make her eat something."
The archive room was exactly what Isla had expected and nothing like it. Floor to ceiling shelves, yes, but also filing cabinets, a long table covered in open books and loose pages,three oil lamps casting overlapping circles of amber light, and Moira Marsh sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by what appeared to be a deconstructed genealogy chart.
