He put the glass in his pocket, next to the compass. Two broken things, side by side.
Six twenty-five.
Margot would be at the dock shed in five minutes.
He had something to show her now.
The glass shard. The keel marks. The empty slip.
Proof that the theft had gone through the water.
He headed for the shed.
For the first time since the lights went out, he wasn’t bringing her a theory.
He was bringing her a lead.
Chapter fifteen
The Separate Circuit
Thedockshedsmelledlike motor oil and coffee.
Margot accepted the mug Evan handed her and wrapped both hands around it, grateful for the warmth. He had a small pot going on a single-burner camp stove tucked between a socket set and a can of marine varnish.
She leaned against the workbench.
Six thirty-two in the morning. The sun was barely up, painting the harbor in shades of pink and gold. Along the back wall, his tools hung on a pegboard, each one outlined in marker so it could be returned to exactly the right spot. A man who kept track of things. She understood that impulse.
The shed was small enough that they stood only a few feet apart, and she was aware of every inch of it. The smell of coffee mixing with motor oil and salt. He turned his mug slowly in one hand, not drinking from it.
“You do this every morning?” she asked. “Coffee in the dock shed at dawn?”
“Most mornings.”
“Doesn’t it get lonely?”
He looked at her over the rim of his cup. “It did.”
Past tense. She heard it. “You said you wanted to show me something.”
He reached into his pocket and set a small object on the workbench between them. A shard of glass. Curved, iridescent, catching the overhead light in a shimmer of blue and green.
Margot set down her coffee. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Found it at the waterline this morning. Twenty yards south of the dock, half buried in the sand.” He pointed through the shed’s open door toward the beach. “Fresh break. Hasn’t been in the water long enough to tumble.”
She picked it up carefully. The glass was lighter than she expected, and the iridescent surface shifted color as she turned it. She’d watched Lila place these ornaments.
She knew this glass. The metallic oxide layering, the way the color changed with the angle. This was from one of the larger pieces, a sphere, judging by the curve. “Someone carried the collection to the water.”
“That’s what I think.” He leaned against the opposite wall. “There are drag marks in the sand. Faint, because the tide came in, but they’re there. And two parallel grooves at the waterline. The width of a small boat’s keel.”
“The boat in the guest slip. The one with no registration.”
“Gone. Cleared out between the theft and dawn.”
“So, someone stole a hundred and seventy thousand dollars in glass, carried it across the dunes, loaded it onto an unregistered boat, and disappeared into the sound. In five minutes.” She set the shard down on the workbench. “That’s not a crime of opportunity.”
