Page 29 of Jonah’s Lure

He held her gaze. In her phrasing—took—he heard the awareness of the alternative. She’d chosen the lighter word deliberately, but they both knew what lay beneath it—one call four days ago that had raised more questions than it answered, and nothing since.

“Clara.”

“Don’t.” Her voice didn’t waver. “I’ve been going through everything I can find. His files, his email, anything the police didn’t take.” She reached into her bag and placed a small planner on the counter between them. Oxblood cover, well-used, the spine cracked from being carried in a jacket pocket. “This was at my house. Jonah came over about a week before he disappeared. He brought a toy car for my little boy. He’s his godfather.” She paused, then pushed through whatever had caused it. “He left this on my kitchen counter and I forgot I had it. The police have his work planner from the desk at Holt Marine. He used this one for personal matters. Family. Times he went to see Dad.” She pushed it toward him. “I don’t know what made me look at it properly.”

Angus opened the planner.

The entries were in Jonah’s handwriting—small, angled, the same hand as the notepad in the apartment. He turned the pages slowly. Personal appointments, family dinners, a note about his nephew’s birthday. Then near the back, on a page for the week before his disappearance, a line in the margin had been underlined and circled:

RC says AR approval already confirmed.

He read it twice.

RC was Ray Cobb. AR. He considered the initials for a moment. Alan Roper was the county administrator, handling planning approvals and licensing at the county level. A reasonable read on the surface—a read that would make sense to anyone who didn’t know what he knew.

But he knew what he knew.

He sat with the planner in his hands and felt its cold precision. Cobb had told Jonah that someone with those initials had pre-confirmed the approval. For the expansion plan, Jonah would have assumed. But the note wasn’t in the work planner the police had. It was here, in a personal planner that had been sitting on Clara’s kitchen counter. A note in Jonah’s handwriting, in a document nobody knew existed, connecting Cobb’s initials to an approval and two letters that could be read two ways.

Letters that matched his own initials exactly.

“I thought it might be Alan Roper,” Clara said quietly. “The county administrator. But then I thought about what’s been happening to you. About what’s been built around you.” She looked at him steadily. “And I thought you should have it.”

He looked at the planner in his hands.

The police didn’t have this. Miguel didn’t have this. Nobody involved the official investigation knew it existed. Clara had come straight to him. A man without a badge sitting at a diner counter on a Monday morning.

He could call Miguel right now. Walk the planner into the investigation, hand it over, let the process do what it was supposed to do. That was the right thing, the procedurally correct thing. The thing he’d spent nine years building his career on.

Or he could sit with it a little longer. Work it himself. Move faster than the review process allowed, outside the channels that had turned against him, answerable to nobody—the way Logan had said was the only way to get to the truth when the system was the obstacle.

The thought arrived fully formed, and he recognized it for what it was.

He looked at the planner.

He looked at Clara, her fingers still spread on the counter, her eyes on him, her little boy at home without his godfather for nine days and counting.

He closed the planner and said, “Thank you.”

Chapter Eighteen

He drove home with the oxblood planner on the passenger seat.

He didn’t touch it until he was at the kitchen table with the door locked, his jacket off, and an untouched glass of water sitting beside him. Then he opened it and went through it properly, page by page, the way he’d been trained to examine things—slowly, without deciding in advance what mattered.

Most of it was what Clara had described. Family dinners recorded in Jonah’s compressed handwriting. Times he’d visited his father, annotations beside them that were either optimistic or resigned depending on how the meeting had gone—a tick, a question mark, once just the word fine underlined twice in the way that meant the opposite. Supplier meetings Clara had attended with him, her name beside his in the entries, included the way siblings often were—by assumption rather than formal notation. A reminder about his nephew’s birthday in three months, underlined and starred.

A man’s life in shorthand. The parts of it that didn’t belong at the office.

He turned the pages carefully.

The RC entries started four months ago. Earlier than the coffee shop meetings—the harbor board contact first, then the gap, then the patterns shifting into something more deliberate. The first entry was just initials and a time. RC — 7am. Harbor board. Then a gap of several weeks. Then another. Brief, infrequent, the early stage of an acquaintance that hadn’t yet become a plan.

The entries grew more frequent in the last three months. Times, locations, occasional notes beside them. Survey maps—good. Penobscot licensing—check DMR timeline. RC confirms north grounds viable. The language of a young man building toward something, each entry a brick in a wall he believed he was constructing for himself. Reading it now, knowing what the entries were actually recording, Angus felt the heaviness of watching someone be used without knowing it. The enthusiasm in the handwriting. The hope.

Then, near the back, the circled line Clara had found.

RC says AR approval already confirmed.