The fissure opens into a chamber. Not large. Twelve feet deep, eight wide, the ceiling low enough that I have to duck. The air is still and cold and smells of wet stone and something older. Mineral. Organic. The mustiness of a space that hasn’t been disturbed in decades.
Scarlett pulls a flashlight from her backpack. The beam sweeps the walls.
“Oh,” she says. Quiet. Reverent.
Carved into the granite, waist-high, running the length of the left wall: a series of marks. Not words. Symbols. Crosses. Circles. Dates, some of them. 1887. 1889. 1891. Cut into the stone with a tool that left clean lines. Someone stood here. Someone came back. Someone wanted to record their presence in a place nobody was supposed to find.
Below the carvings, wedged into a natural shelf in the rock: a wooden box. Cedar, maybe. Salt-weathered, the hinges rusted shut. Scarlett doesn’t touch it. She kneels beside it and trains thelight on its surface. No lock. No markings. Just wood and time and something left behind.
“Thomas was here.” She sits back on her heels. “He came here for years.”
I run my hand along the carvings. The stone is cold under my fingers. The dates are spaced roughly a year apart. Thomas Haven visited for at least four years before Evangeline Merrick disappeared.
“Why?” I ask.
“You’re not a romantic, are you?”
“That’s one thing I’ve never been accused of.”
She glances over at me, a wry twist to her lips. “He came back because he loved her, and this was their spot, so once she was gone—” Outside, the wind howls through the cove. A gust drives spray through the fissure opening, cold and sharp, and her flashlight beam wobbles. She recovers fast, though, and pulls her phone from her pocket, opening the camera. “We should document this. Photos. Video. Enough to prove it’s real before?—”
The chamber goes suddenly dark.
Not the flashlight—it’s working fine—but the world outside. The gray light from the fissure dims and then vanishes.
I cross to the opening and stare out at a sky that has gone purple-black. The storm clouds are low and heavy, rolling in from the northwest fast enough to drop my stomach. The water in the cove is already building, waves hitting the shore with twice the force they had twenty minutes ago.
“We’re leaving. Now.”
“Dean, wait. The box?—”
“Leave it. It’s been here a hundred years. It’ll be here tomorrow.” I grab her arm. The storm hadn’t been in the forecast when we left the marina, meaning it built fast, and nowit looks mean. “We can’t be in this cave when that storm surge hits. We’ll drown.”
She looks at the box. At the carvings. At me. Her mouth opens and I brace for the argument.
She zips the journal into her backpack, shoulders it, and follows me out of the chamber.
The climb down is worse than the climb up. The rock is slick now, spray blowing horizontally across the face, and twice Scarlett slides and catches herself on her palms. I stay behind her with one hand on her lower back to keep her from going over. The dinghy waits below, bucking against its painter, the outboard tilted clear of the water.
“Get in,” I say. “Sit in the middle. Low center of gravity.”
She climbs in. I follow, untie the painter, shove us off. The outboard starts on the first pull. Thank fuck for small mercies.
The run back to the boat takes forever. The dinghy pitches and yaws. Spray comes over the bow in sheets, cold and stinging. Scarlett hunches in the center with her arms wrapped around her backpack, her hair plastered to her skull, her jacket dark with water. She doesn’t complain. Doesn’t scream. She holds on and watches the horizon and keeps her face still.
The horizon is gone. The storm has swallowed it. What was purple-black is now uniform gray, the water and the sky the same featureless shade, and the wind has doubled in the time it took us to cross fifty yards of open water. Thirty knots. Maybe more. Wind that finds every gap in your clothing and fills it with cold.
We reach the boat. I cut the outboard, grab the swim ladder, haul myself up. Scarlett follows. I secure the dinghy in a hurried job, lines crossed, the knot something I’ll curse myself for later, and climb to the helm.
The instruments tell me what I already know. Wind: thirty-two knots and building. Barometer: falling fast. Visibility: lessthan a quarter mile and deteriorating. Port Haven is eight miles southeast. Against this wind, in these seas, with visibility this poor, it might as well be eighty.
I make the call. It isn’t hard. It’s the only call.
“We’re not going back.” I kill the main engine. The boat rocks violently, a wave hitting the starboard quarter hard enough to send unsecured gear sliding across the deck. “We anchor here. Ride it out.”
She stands in the companionway, dripping, backpack clutched to her chest. “How long?”
“Overnight. Maybe longer. Depends on the front.”
