Page 14 of Jonah’s Lure

“I’m alright.”

“I didn’t ask if you were alright. Come for dinner.”

He almost said yes. It was the closest he’d come all day to something uncomplicated. “Tomorrow,” he said. “I need tonight to think.”

She acquiesced without argument, which was its own form of grace. They said goodnight and he put the phone on the table.

* * *

He sat with the journal for a long time without opening it.

The question that had been forming since the call with Marsh was not whether the evidence was planted—he knew it was, the same way he knew the sky outside was dark, as a simple fact not requiring proof. The question was what did it mean that someone had planted it this well. So specifically. Using language from sealed records, registering a device to his home address, timing the messages to predate Jonah’s disappearance. This was not someone with a grudge and a lucky guess. This was someone who had studied him. Who knew how the system would respond to this specific arrangement of facts.

Who had access to sealed case records from his investigation into Logan.

Who understood law enforcement procedures well enough to build evidence that would withstand initial scrutiny.

Who had been patient enough to construct this weeks before Jonah Holt ever went missing.

He opened the journal. He looked at the two entries from Tuesday—Cobb on one line, Pete Hutchinson below, a gap between them. He looked at them for a long time. Then he closed the journal without adding anything and pushed it aside.

He reached for his Bible instead. He opened it without a destination in mind, and it fell, the way well-used Bibles fall, to a page he’d been to before. Jonah, chapter two. The prayer from the belly of the fish—Jonah in the darkness of the whale, three days and three nights, crying out from a depth he’d brought on himself.

“From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the LORD his God. He said: ‘In my distress I called to the LORD, and he answered me. From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help, and you listened to my cry.’”

He read to the end of the chapter. Then he sat with the book open on the table and looked at the top of the next page where chapter three began.

“Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time: ‘Go.’”

He paused. He wasn’t ready for chapter three yet. Chapter three was where Nineveh was spared, and right now he didn't have it in him to read about mercy for people who hadn't earned it.

He closed the Bible without reading any further.

Chapter Nine

The rain arrived Thursday morning—the way late March rain arrives on the mid-coast—not dramatically, just a steady presence that lowered the sky, flattened the harbor, and made everything feel closer and smaller than it had the day before. Angus drove to the office with the wipers on low, the heater running, and the awareness of a man who had slept poorly and knew the day ahead wasn’t going to improve.

Miguel was at his desk when he came in, which was expected. The woman in the waiting area was not.

She was in her late sixties, small and upright in the plastic chair, her coat still buttoned, a canvas bag on her lap held with both hands. She had the look of someone who had made a decision and followed through on it before she could talk herself out of it—a particular combination of resolve and slight discomfort that Angus recognized from years of dealing with people who came forward when they didn’t have to.

Miguel caught his eye over her head and gave a small nod.

Angus introduced himself and showed her into the conference room. Her name was Sheila Morse. She lived on Birch Street, in the second house from the north end, and had lived there for twenty-two years. She wanted to be clear, she said, sitting straight in the chair across from him, that she wasn’t accusing anyone of anything. She’d heard about the missing young man from the second floor and she thought it might help to say what she’d seen.

“Tell me,” Angus said.

She’d seen Angus’s truck, she said. On Birch Street. On a Thursday evening. She checked her calendar before coming in, and it was Thursday the nineteenth. It had been parked outside number fourteen for a while. She’d noticed it because she knew the sheriff’s truck by sight—most people in Weyport did—and she’d wondered briefly what it was doing there that time of evening. Nothing alarming. She’d simply noticed it the way you notice things on a quiet street while letting your cat in for the night.

“About what time?” Angus asked.

“Half past seven. Maybe a little after.”

“How long was it there?”

She thought about it. “After I let the cat in, I looked again maybe ten minutes later it was gone.”

Angus wrote the time and date in his journal. Thursday, March 19. Seven thirty in the evening. Birch Street, outside number fourteen. He remembered it exactly, now that she’d given him the time frame.