The motor sounds louder in the dark.
Wind flattens my jacket against my ribs and flings spray into my face. The air tastes like salt and gasoline and that marshy rot you only get where rich people park their sailboats and pretend the water doesn’t carry everything away eventually.
Luz leans into the tiller at the back of the skiff, eyes narrowed at the black shape of Harrow Island ahead. “Last chance to tell me this is a bad idea,” she calls over the engine.
I clutch the plastic-wrapped map in my hands, knuckles stiff. The old regatta alumnus pressed it into my palms at the marina with a quick hug and a muttered, “Watch the shelf on the east side, it eats props.” His boat, his racing stickers faded, now rocks under our feet.
“You already know it’s a bad idea,” I shout back. “That’s not the question.”
Waves slap the hull in heavy, wet smacks that vibrate up my spine. Behind us, Crescent Bay is a smear of lights along the curve of the shore—yacht club lanterns, the Harrow House glass cube on the cliffs, the faint rhythmic pulse of bass from waterfront parties doing their best impression of the Prom Throwback dance. On a different night, adults in slip dresses and rented tuxes would be clinking glasses under balloon arches, pretending they were still sixteen. Tonight, I head for the place where their original story broke.
Luz angles us between two floating markers. “The question,” she says, “is whether the judge will be more impressed by your dedication or by your arrest record.”
I press the edge of the laminated map against my thigh to keep my hands from shaking. The ink shows soundings and pencil notes, little Xs where the treacherous rock shelf juts out under supposedly safe water. One X is circled three times in different ink colors. Shelf. Don’t cut inside. Harrow boys flipped here ’03.
“We’re not getting arrested,” I say. “We’re collecting context.”
Luz snorts. “That line may work on your listeners. It does not work on harbor patrol.”
The engine drops to a throaty rumble as she eases off the throttle. The skiff noses around a small outcropping, and Harrow Island’s silhouette swells in front of us—a lump of rock and scrub with the Harrow House perched up top, all clean angles and quiet glass, watching the bay like a god that charges membership dues.
Under the cliffs, the water glitters. I know that, just under the surface, the rock shelf sits like a broken plate. That’s where the official story says Juliet fell. The dock in Oracle’s photo juts from the island’s opposite side, tucked in a little cove out of sight of the main regatta routes. A place for quiet landings and quieter departures.
“We can’t get a warrant on a dock photo and a podcast transcript,” Luz says. She raises her voice as the wind gusts, but I hear the grind of frustration under the words. “I’ve already pushed my captain as far as I can. If I show up on Harrow property without probable cause—”
“This isn’t Harrow House,” I cut in. “This is the island. The dock’s on the waterline. Public access, right?”
“Mara.” Her tone carries an entire policy manual and internal affairs file.
I swallow the urge to argue that the Harrows treat the entire bay like their backyard. My hands have left damp palm prints on the map’s plastic. The memory of Oracle’s message pulses behind my eyes: Come finish this. The carved rose in the dock. The chain.
“I’m on hiatus,” I say instead. “I’m doing what they told me. No new episodes. No crowdsourcing. No Reddit puzzles. I’m here as the person who lived in this town when Juliet died, not as the podcaster. You’re here as—”
“An idiot,” she says.
“A cop,” I correct. “Who doesn’t need a warrant to look at what any drunk Harrow nephew can stumble across on a weekend.”
The muscles along her jaw flex, then loosen. She steers us into the shadow of the island where the water flattens, the wind dropped by the land’s bulk. “I hate that your logic makes sense,” she says quietly.
“You love my logic,” I say. “You just hate my methods.”
She huffs, but her mouth twitches.
We cut the motor two hundred yards from the cove. The sudden absence of noise hits my ears with a ringing silence. I can hear the slap of small waves against rock now, the faint rattle of halyards from boats on the Crescent Bay side. A distant laugh travels over the water, thin and weirdly high.
Luz picks up the oars. “We row the rest,” she says. “Less noise. If anyone hears us, we are two stupid women who took the alumni Prom Throwback after-party theme too literally and got lost.”
“I didn’t even get invited to Prom Throwback,” I mutter, but I tug my hood up and sit low as she starts to row. The oars creak, wood against metal. Each pull glides us closer to the darker band that marks the island’s shore.
The dock appears like it did in Oracle’s photo: boards reaching out from a notch in the rocks, framed by scrubby pines that lean inland. No house lights above this side, only the dim wash from the mainland.
My pulse climbs into my throat. I know this angle. I’ve seen it as pixels, in my inbox, living proof that someone else was here first.
Luz grounds us against a narrow strip of pebbly beach beside the dock. The skiff grinds over stones with a sound that feels too loud, too human against the white noise of water. We drag the boat a few feet up, tie it to a ring set in the rock.
“Phones on airplane mode,” she says. “Flashlights on low. No talking if we can help it. Ready?”
My lungs feel too small. “Ready.”
The island smells different from Crescent Bay’s public beaches. Less fried food, more pine pitch and cold ash. My boots crunch over damp sand and then over broken shells and bottle caps, the detritus of parties that never appear on official calendars.
We skirt the dock at first, angling toward a darker patch under the trees. In the beam of Luz’s flashlight, I see the circle of stones before I smell it.
The firepit is maybe fifteen feet from the shoreline, ringed with rocks blackened by repeated burns. Inside, charred logs collapse on themselves. Someone arranged folding camp chairs in a loose semi-circle around it, all of them empty now. One chair bears the logo of a yacht brand I recognize from regatta sponsor banners.
“Check the ash,” I whisper.
Luz crouches, gloved fingers hovering over the gray mound. “Warm,” she says. “Not hot, but not cold either.”
I picture an earlier scene: laughter, the crack of driftwood snapping, glass bottles passing from hand to hand. Prom Throwback kids—or their younger siblings—telling ghost stories about Juliet Reeves, the prom queen in the bay, on the very island that swallowed her. Their parents probably signed the checks that helped bury the original report.
Empty bottles lie on their sides in the sand—imported beer, vodka, something in a pink glass with a designer label. One is still beaded with moisture. A faint trail of cigarette smoke lingers in the air, threaded with the sugary chemical tang of hair spray.
“Someone was here not long ago,” I say.
Luz shines her light down near the high-tide line. Footprints stamp the damp sand in overlapping layers. Bare feet, sneakers, wedge sandals. One small heel has sunk deep enough to leave the tread pattern clear—a row of little stars.
“New generation, same playground,” she says softly.
My stomach tightens. I think of the PTA mothers in their glossy blowouts, wagging fingers at me about “sensationalizing tragedy,” and the plaques lining the school lawn with their surnames etched into brass. The same names on regatta trophies, police rosters, donation walls at the hospital. They host charity balls to “support victims,” then send their kids to party on the island where the town’s most famous victim choked on dark water.
“They turned this into a campfire story,” I say. “They made her an attraction.”
“No recording,” Luz reminds me. “You promised.”
I did. I left my mic at home, the kitchen table bare except for my laptop and the folded court order. My phone weighs heavy in my pocket, its camera a familiar itch in my fingers. For the first time since I came back to Crescent Bay, I stand in a place that could rewrite the case and I am not wired to collect it.
Maybe that’s what makes this feel real.
“Dock,” Luz says. “In and out.”
The first board groans under my weight. The sound slices through the night, and I freeze, half expecting a floodlight to snap on from the cliffs. Nothing happens. Just the soft lap of water beneath the planks and the distant thud of bass drifting across from the mainland’s waterfront.
I ease forward.
The dock smells of salt and old fish and the sour tang of spilled beer. The wood is slick under my boots where spray has dried in a thin film. I keep my eyes low, mapping the pattern of boards, comparing it to Oracle’s photo burned into my brain.
Halfway out, I stop and glance toward the cliffs. From this angle, I can see the rope line the town erected after Juliet died, a pale slash along the cliff edge under the Harrow House lawn. Even now, I can picture a younger Juliet leaning against that rope, hair sprayed into glossy waves, laughing at something Noah said. The official story ends with that rope, the fall, the rocks below.
From the dock, the rock shelf lies off to my left, hidden under dark water. The tide glugs and swirls there in heavy breaths. If someone dropped a weighted body from here and later staged a fall at the cliffs, the current could carry her around the island, drag her to the shelf.
“Mara,” Luz hisses behind me. “Keep moving.”
I reach the end of the dock.
The boards narrow to a stub like the finger of a hand reaching into the bay. A short post rises from the right-hand corner, rope looped and knotted around it. It’s the same post that anchored Oracle’s frame. My stomach flips.
I drop to a crouch, knees pressing into damp wood.
The carved rose waits right where the photo showed it.
The lines are rough but careful, petals spiraling around a center, stem curling down. Whoever cut it took their time. The grooves are wide enough for my fingertip. Inside them, old water and grime have turned the wood darker.
I trace the shape without quite touching it.
“They branded the crime scene,” I whisper. “They turned the dock into a logo.”
The glass roses came first—our high school’s 1997 prom centerpieces, delicate glass petals under domes, the PTA’s idea of class. The whole town loved the image so much they put it on fundraiser invitations, banners, the eventual memorial plaque. I put it on my cover art, thinking I was reclaiming something.
Now I kneel on the original, carved into splintered wood where the circled princess lost her crown.
Luz angles her light lower. “There,” she says.
At the base of the post, a thick rusted chain bolts into the dock. The metal links are heavy, each one pitted with years of salt. Someone has wrapped the free end loosely around the post and secured it with an old padlock, orange with corrosion.
A few strands cling to the last link. Luz brings the beam in tight. I squint.
Fibers.
They snag on the rough metal, a tiny fraying tuft. Not rope—too fine. Not fishing line. Pale threads, maybe from fabric. Under the light they glow faintly beige, or maybe faded pink. Hard to tell under the rust.
“Gloves,” Luz says.
I watch her pull a small evidence pouch from her pocket. Her movements sharpen, cop muscles kicking in over the trespasser’s whisper. She uses tweezers to tease a piece free, hand steady.
“You brought kits,” I say.
“I’m an idiot,” she says again. “Not a complete one.”
My heart pounds so loudly I worry it will shake the dock. “Could that be from—”
“I don’t know,” she cuts in. “It could be from a boat cushion, a hoodie, a thousand things. Or it could be old. Or it could be exactly what you hope it is. That’s why we test it and don’t narrate it.”
I bite down on the urge to spin theories. To picture the chain wrapped around Juliet’s ankle, the fibers tearing from a dress as someone looped metal in the dark. To narrate the hell out of it.
Behind us, a sound breaks the water’s rhythm.
A low, distant engine.
Luz’s head snaps up. She kills the flashlight. We drop into blackness so complete I lose my bearings. For one wild second, I have no idea which way the dock points, where the edge ends and air begins.
The engine grows louder, a dull roar rolling across the bay. My eyes strain, searching for a shape. A patrol boat? A private launch? One of the Harrows’ sleek toys heading home from a yacht club party?
Luz’s hand finds my wrist in the dark, fingers iron-hard. Her breath brushes my ear. “We need to go,” she whispers. “Now.”
I think of Oracle’s dock photo, perfect and composed. I think of the carved rose under my knees and the chain at my hand. No microphones. No cameras. No proof I was ever here except the smear of salt on my jeans and the pounding in my skull.
My fingers close around my phone anyway.
One tap, one flash, and I could have the image I’ve been carrying in my head for nights, except anchored now by the real carved lines and the knotted chain. One tap, one flash, and we could also announce ourselves to whoever is splitting the water toward this side of the island.
The engine’s growl swells, vibrating through the boards into my bones.
“Mara,” Luz says, low and urgent. “Choose.”
I crouch in the dark at the end of Harrow’s dock, my thumb hovering over the screen, the sound of an unseen boat chewing up the distance, feeling the line between witness and content-maker stretch thinner than the snagged fibers on that rusted chain.