Journals? Won’t produce them.
“Ask what happened to my?—”
Everybody docks where we let them.
I look at those for a long time.
Then I turn to a clean page and start a list of everything Malcolm Merrick told me today, and beside it, a second list.
Everything he didn’t.
Chapter Four
Scarlett
“Last call for the two o’clock wildlife tour.” Abel’s voice carries across the dock. “Slip five. Blue boat, white stripe.”
I’m already halfway up the gangway, my leather jacket pulled tight against the afternoon chill, blazer underneath for professional armor, notebook clutched against my chest. The recorder’s clipped to my lapel, red light blinking. Ready. My list of questions about the Haven-Merrick feud is bulleted and color-coded inside the notebook, because I am nothing if not thorough, and because I don’t fully believe Malcolm Merrick’s version of history. I want a counterweight, and Dean Kinsella will give it to me, whether he wants to or not.
My heels—different heels, my only other pair, sensible black pumps that cost less than the Pradas and will not, God willing, end up in the harbor—click against the wooden dock. The boat sways gently at its mooring. Blue hull, white stripe, just like Abel said. A white canvas cover stretches over the stern, sheltering a row of benches. Six passengers are already aboard, chatting, settling into seats, pulling out phones.
The captain stands at the wheel.
Dean doesn’t look up when I step onto the deck. He checks something on the console, adjusts a dial, and only then does his gaze cut across the boat and land on me, full of the same irritation he had on the dock this morning. Only this time, he’d dialed back to maybe a seven instead of a nine.
Then he turns his back to me and faces the rest of the tourists.
“Welcome to Haven Tours,” he says, and his voice warms to a degree I didn’t think him capable of. “I’m Dean. We’ll be out on the water for about two hours, following the shoreline north toward No Name Island. You have life jackets accessible under your seats. The head’s below deck on the port side.” He gestures to the stairs on his left. “For those of you that don’t speak boat, that means the bathroom is down these stairs to your left.”
That got him a few chuckles.
He’s… making jokes? And smiling, his eyes crinkling with it. Even seems to be enjoying himself as he chats with the tourists and guides the boat away from the dock with a low rumble of diesel.
I stare at his back.
How is this the same man that grunted at me all the way across the sound this morning?
I find a spot at the stern rail, notebook open, pen ready. The water is gray-green and choppier than this morning, whitecaps breaking against the hull, but I’m steady. I’m good. I’ve been on boats before. This is nothing.
Then we hit the open channel.
The first bad roll hits the port side, and the deck tilts under my feet. My stomach lurches. Not a gentleoh, we’re movingsensation. A full-body revolt that starts somewhere below my ribs and radiates outward in a cold, creeping wave.
I grip the rail.
The second roll is worse. The boat pitches into a trough, rises, and the horizon tilts, rotates, slides sideways. Salt spray hits my face. I blink it away, and my stomach lurches again, harder this time.
Cold sweat breaks along my hairline.
This is fine. I’m fine. I’ve interviewed senators and celebrities and once a man who was accused of killing three women, and I did not vomit on any of them.
I will not vomit on Dean Kinsella’s boat.
I look down at my notebook. Big mistake. The words swim. My color-coded bullet points blur into a nauseating smear of ink. I take a breath and focus on what Dean’s saying.
“To your right, you’ll see the old cannery pilings.” He’s standing at the wheel, one hand relaxed on the throttle, the other pointing toward a cluster of weathered wooden posts jutting from the water.
“…built in 1892 by Lemuel Merrick…”
