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“I’ve got something!”
The rest of us rise to stand behind him, allowing us to see his screen. It’s the view from the most easterly point of the island. On the water, in the distance, is a small white blob. The boat.
I shake my head, pissed that none of us saw it earlier. If we had, we might have realized something was wrong. But it wasn’t as though we didn’t get boats passing the island. Sometimes, we even got dickheads taking it upon themselves to moor here, but we saw them off quickly enough.
“Can you blow that image up?” I ask. “There’s a name on the side of the boat. If we can read it, it might be a lead.”
Wilder turns to Asher. “This is your department, not mine.”
The two men switch places.
“Give me two secs,” Asher says.
He adjusts his glasses, then his fingers fly over the keyboard. The image fills the screen, then shifts and sharpens. We can see the text now but it’s too distorted to read.
“Fuck.” I drag my hand through my hair.
Asher shakes his head. “I’m not done yet.”
He minimizes the window and pulls up another program, then imports the image into that. I don’t know exactly what he’s doing, but as Asher works, the name of the boat becomes legible.
“Got you,” Asher says.
Secret Truth
I read it, and my heart thuds. The room seems to tilt.
“Does that mean anything to any of you?” I manage to say.
Brody frowns. “It’s ringing a bell. Why do I know it?”
Wilder growls. “Isn’t that something Pastor Wren used to say?”
I stare at it, ice running through my veins, chilling me, so the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. It must be a coincidence. Nothing more than that. But I’m sick to my stomach, just as I always am when something reminds me of him and that time. I’m transported back to being a skinny kid, and the confusion and shame and guilt that comes with it.
I hate that man for doing what he did to us. And the four of us are most likely only a fraction of the boys he’s abused over the years. We were so lucky to have found each other—or at least it wasn’t luck but was down to Asher’s computer-smarts. Wren is still out there, though, possibly still into adolescent boys. I hate that we haven’t stopped him yet, but we’re close now. Brody is right when he says Honor has been a distraction, and she continues to be a distraction, but we’ll get there. I’m hoping that because of his age—he must be in his sixties by now—that hisurgeswill have left him. But there are plenty of cases of men in their sixties fathering children, so it’s not as though his age is guaranteed to put a stop to it.
“Aren’t boats supposed to be named after women?” Brody says.
I narrow my eyes. “This one clearly isn’t.”
Asher sits back. “They’re not always named after women. It’s more that the boats themselves are supposed to be considered female. They can have names likeSea Dancer,orLegacy, orMidlife Crisis.”
I arch my brow. “Midlife Crisis?”
Asher shrugs. “What I’m trying to say is that a boat can pretty much be called anything.”
“You think it’s just coincidence, then?”
He turns in his chair and holds my eye. “It has to be, doesn’t it?”
Something else occurs to me. “What if we’re making the wrong assumption? What if the reason the boat has that name is because it’s Pastor Wren who’s taken Honor, not her stepfather?”
He shakes his head. “Not possible.”
“Isn’t it? How can you be so sure?”
“Wren has no idea we’ve come together.”
