The harbor master’s office keeps its own weather. Fluorescents buzz like trapped flies, the space heater under the counter clicks with a rhythm that never reaches my ankles, and the air tastes like wet rope and diesel drizzled over percolated coffee. I rub my palms together once and slide my driver’s license across the scratched laminate.
“Public record request,” I say, keeping my voice friendly but already recording in my sleeve. “Regatta-week registry, 2008. Vessel arrivals, departures, mooring assignments, fuel slips. I can read on-site.”
The harbor master—wind-chapped, beard salted the way the docks are—takes my ID between two fingers the way people handle parking tickets. His name patch reads MARTIN, but everybody calls him Harbormaster like it’s a medieval title. He scans my face, then my press card, then Ruth’s polite statue pose to my left.
“Paper’s fragile,” he says. “Half of it got damp that fall.”
“I like damp paper,” I say. “It photographs with texture.”
Ruth coughs a single consonant that means behave, and I adjust my smile. The lake, out the fogged window behind him, lifts in a skinny shrug—a seiche nudge that makes the mooring lines thrum against cleats. Sound travels here in odd routes; the marina office door amplifies the rope’s hum like a throat.
Martin turns, keys clacking, and opens a low steel cabinet. He pulls out a ledger wrapped in a trash bag and a towel that used to be white. “We don’t release copies,” he says, as if I asked. “You can look.”
“Looking is a kind of copy,” I murmur, and he squints without answering.
I set the ledger on the counter and peel the towel back the way I’d handle an old quilt at a yard sale—slow, fingers to the corners, eyes on the seams. The book exhales must and something sweet like old paste. Inside, pages curl like lake ice at the edges. The grid is hand-ruled: DATE, VESSEL, SLIP, IN, OUT, NOTES. The ink shifts through the rainbow of a decade—black to blue to a black that wanted to be blue.
Ruth leans in close enough to fog a margin. “Start the week before,” she says, soft. “You’ll see the habits form.”
I scan lines with my finger and push the recorder closer to my palm. “Monday—quiet; Tuesday—more charters; Wednesday—club boats shuffling in for practice. Thursday—here.” I tap the first page with heavy annotation. “Regatta staging. Slip assignments hand-corrected.”
Martin edges the ledger nearer the counter lip, a subtle shepherding. “You got a focus you want, Ms. Keane?” he asks. “Saves you time. Saves me coffee.”
“Boat 17,” I say, keeping my tone neutral enough to mean nothing. “I heard it was a popular spectator slip that season.”
He doesn’t blink, and that’s the blink. “Seventeens come and go,” he says. “Numbers are numbers.”
I turn the page and photograph with my eyes first. There: a square of white-out glossier than the faded page, and over it a heavier hand has written new times—neater, slower, almost printed. The notes column shows a three-letter initial that matches no other line. I lower my phone, slide, lift, shoot. The shutter sound stays off; the habit stays on.
“Walk me through the correction,” I say. “Who updates? Pen styles show two hands.”
Martin folds his arms. “Volunteers fill; we verify later. Holiday weekend, you know the drill. People are helpful until they aren’t.”
“Gentle correction,” Ruth says, smiling with her molars. “Verification is a fancy word for trust.”
I sniff, catch old coffee under the counter, and let the smell make room for memory: the donor wall’s brass ovals, the priest’s pocketed keys. “What’s the original under the white-out?” I ask. “I can FOIA the harbor camera, but I’d rather not waste anyone’s hours.”
Martin’s gaze tilts to the side window. Outside, a kid in a knit cap coils a hose with the solemnity of an altar boy. A gull skates sideways on shoreline wind. The harbor master returns his eyes to the ledger and shrugs like he’s rearranging sand. “Old information spoils,” he says. “Like bait. We keep what works.”
“I keep what happened,” I answer.
Micro-hook: A knock lands on the side door—two taps, one drag—and a face I don’t know peeks in with the look of someone asking for a confession they won’t give.
Martin lifts his chin. “What.”
The deckhand—gloves still on, salt dried into the seams—slips inside and closes the door with his shoulder. He avoids eye contact like it’s expensive. “Fuel meter’s sticky,” he says to Martin, then drops his voice into the space I occupy. “You’re the locket podcast.”
I nod once. “I am.”
He looks at Ruth, then at the ledger, then at the corridor to the yard. “Break’s five,” he says. “Behind the ice chest. Bring your phone.”
Martin snorts. “He’s poetic when he wants a smoke.”
“I’m allergic to poetry,” the deckhand says, and leaves.
I turn back to the page. Boat 17’s line is smooth as a cover story: IN 23:50, OUT —; a tidy dash pretends the night sat still. The note says COMMITTEE, printed in a block hand not used anywhere else. I know that word from Everett’s mouth at too many toasts: committee boat, committee friends, committee protocol.
“What’s the fuel slip for that one?” I ask.
Martin opens a drawer, flips a flipbook where triplicate papers live. He lands on a lot of nothing, then a carbon that’s been peeled wrong—top page gone, pressure image faint. He holds it up to the light; the window makes it show off a ghost. “Legible’s not the word I’d use,” he says.
I snap a photo. Legible is what software is for; ghosts love contrast.
“We can check the dock map,” Ruth says, gentle as a wire saw. “Seventeens tie on D in this era, right? You probably posted an assignment map for volunteers.”
Martin hesitates, then gestures to a corkboard. “Back then, yeah. Don’t pull the pins.”
The corkboard is a scrapbook of ordinary: laminated safety reminders, a cartoon about cleat hitches, a faded ad for a bell race, a swap group flyer with the moderator’s number circled like a gate. In the bottom corner, behind a sun-cooked pushpin, a printout of the regatta map shows D-Row in highlighter. Boat 17 glows like a bruise.
Ruth studies the margins and moves her phone across in a lazy arc that collects everything without looking greedy. “You know who loved D-Row,” she says softly, not a question.
“Good families,” I answer, just as soft. “Those with plaques and parking spots.”
Martin pretends to answer an email that isn’t there.
We step out for air because that’s the excuse we have, and the lake immediately edits the day. Wind lifts salt from the pilings into my throat. The seiche has gathered into a single long breath; water slips forward, then socks the dock with a flat slap that flattens my pulse. Behind the ice chest by the bait fridge, the deckhand waits with his jaw loaded like a winch.
“Two minutes,” he says, not to be dramatic but because time is currency here. “You didn’t get this from me. You didn’t get anything.”
I hold up my empty hands. “I only get what I can keep.”
He glances at the office window, where Martin performs the pantomime of paperwork, then digs into his coat and pulls out a torn strip of ledger paper. It’s rough on one side, clean on the tear. The handwriting leans left—the rushed lefty of a person who had to write standing up. IN 21:05. OUT 22:47. NOTE: TOWER RUN. The box around the words shakes like a boat.
I go still enough to hear my own blood. “Where did you—?”
“Recycle bin,” he says. “Pastor’s kid.” He flicks a look that says don’t and then adds, low, “The rewrite showed committee. The first one said tower. Someone picked a different noun.”
“Whose boat,” Ruth asks, not blinking. “I don’t need the owner; I need the network.”
He licks a split in his lip. “Paper says owner: Nagel Marine Trust. Everybody calls it seventeen. Crew wore Crane House hats. The guy who paid fuel liked to say ‘committee.’ That’s Everett’s friend—no names.”
The torn strip warms in my mitten. I photograph it, front and back, then slide it into the inner pocket with the locket felt. “Your break’s generous,” I say.
He shrugs. “Bad habits,” he says. “I like to tell the truth where the wind can carry it.”
“Regatta night?” I ask. “Did seventeen go toward the tower?”
He lifts his chin, reportorial. “Lights off. Two ferry trips. Then it tucked into D like it wanted a lullaby. The out time you got? That was the second trip. It came back later again.” He scrapes the sole of his boot on the dock cedar. “I didn’t see who climbed. I heard the bells doing something wrong.”
The seiche pushes once, harder, and the ropes on D-Row go taut in a sudden chord. Sound from the tower could have carried that night like a rumor that doesn’t need a microphone.
“Thank you,” I say.
He’s already going. “You didn’t get it from me,” he repeats, and disappears into the yard’s moving parts.
Back inside the office, the heat hits like a half-warmed pew. Martin watches us with the expression of a man who knows how many screws hold the docks together and resents each one personally. Ruth wanders to the corkboard again, the way a cat loops past the same chair to check it still exists. I move toward the counter and the ledger while keeping him in my peripheral.
“How late did you work that night?” I ask. “You always sign the bottom of the page.”
He rubs the bridge of his nose. “Late enough to get yelled at by wives,” he says. “Not late enough to hear bells.”
“You heard the town after,” I say.
“Everybody heard the town after.”
Ruth has gone very still. When I look over, she isn’t at the map anymore. She’s at a laminated safety sheet—a little human outline printed with do’s and don’ts for cleats and pilings. On its thigh, a diagram of parallel bruises shows the distance between cleats, neat as a ruler. Someone has written “2x4 pattern, D-Row, 2008” in ballpoint along the margin, then tried to scrub it off leaving a gray shadow.
“Ruth?” I ask.
She peels the lamination back: the edge is loose where the heat failed. A photo lies half-stuck behind it—print-paper glossy, dated by an old timestamp: 2008-08-17 03:12. It shows a faint grid on skin, purple ladders runged by swell—dock cleats kissing flesh in a regular pattern. The angle is clinical; the subject’s face isn’t visible. The background is D-Row, the cleats unmistakable, the spacing identical to the diagram.
“Training materials,” Martin says too fast. “We teach volunteers what to look for. It’s not…that’s generic.”
Ruth slides the photo free like a magician palming a coin. Her body blocks the motion. “I’ll make sure it finds its way to an appropriate file,” she says, the exact sentence of a person who used to sign evidence seals. She tucks it into her pocket with a smooth pat. “You don’t mind.”
He minds. He also calculates. “Those aren’t for the public.”
“Nothing in this town is,” I say, and flip the ledger back to Boat 17’s line. The white-out smiles blandly. The re-inked OUT time pretends to be a fix; the dash pretends to be rest. The torn strip in my coat sings against my ribs.
“Everett says he was on a committee boat until midnight,” I put on tape in my sleeve, but I also say it out loud. “This page says seventeen was out early, then in, then out again when the bells misbehaved. Someone didn’t like the noun ‘tower.’ They wrote ‘committee’ on top.”
Martin’s jaw ticks. “Alibis aren’t my department.”
“Slips are,” I answer. “So is fuel. So are cameras.”
He lifts a palm. “Footage cycles. Back then, we used tapes. Lake air eats tapes.”
“Lake air eats lies,” I say, and Ruth snaps me a side-look that translates to no speeches. I nod like I’ve swallowed the rope.
Micro-hook: The heater clicks off and, in the new quiet, a brass bell on the counter rings itself once with no hand on it—the seiche’s subtle jerk, metal answering water.
I finish photographing the page edges, the impressions under the white-out, the corners where fingerprints live longer than stories. I ask for nothing else; I thank him for everything.
Outside, wind lifts the smell of diesel off the fuel dock in a fresh sheet. A Facebook swap group post brightens my phone—“Found this life jacket at D-Row, good family only please,” the caption says—and I almost laugh from the tidy cruelty of it. Ruth doesn’t laugh. She pulls the safety-sheet photo back out and stares at the spacing like she can measure time with it.
“Two-inch cleats, four-inch gaps,” she says. “D-Row’s an old build.”
“Celia’s autopsy mentioned a laddering,” I say. “No one filed where it matched.”
“We’ll file it,” she answers. “And I’ll get Delaney at the Annex to remember how to type.”
We walk down the dock past the empty slip with the painted 17, the number flaking like it wants to confess. I stop and look at the cleats, then at the water lapping the cedar, then at the tower shouldering the clouded sky. Sound carries across this distance on days like this; I’ve recorded that lesson and played it back enough to memorize the pitch. Bells, boat, door. Door, boat, bells.
“Everett says he was doing committee work at midnight,” I say again, quieter. “Boat 17 says someone went to the tower early, came back, went again. If committee was a cover word, then the cover leaks.”
Ruth lifts her phone and photographs the cleats with a surveyor’s patience. “Leaks leave rings,” she says. “They tell on you.”
I tuck the torn strip deeper, next to the locket’s felt. The brass warms and cools in my pocket, heartbeat for a thing that learned to scream. “We have a noun that fought another noun,” I say. “We have a timeline that hates its correction. We have a bruise pattern waiting for a body report.”
“We have a reason to expect visitors,” Ruth adds, scanning the lot. “Word travels faster than any boat.”
It does. By the time we reach the car, a navy blazer turns into the yard’s blind spot and stops, just long enough to watch us through the reflection in the office glass. The wind picks up, nudges the chime on the bait shop. It tinkles in a key the bell won’t own.
I settle behind the wheel and set the recorder on my thigh. “Log,” I say. “Harbor registry shows white-out over Boat 17’s original ‘TOWER RUN’ note. Deckhand provided torn pre-correction with in/out times contradicting Everett Crane’s alibi. Ruth obtained—temporarily—a training photo of cleat-pattern bruising from D-Row. Next step: transcribe, duplicate, secure. Cross with Theo’s ‘Three.’”
The bell at St. Brigid’s is a dull coin in the gray distance. I feel the office fluorescent buzz still in my ears, the rope hum under my teeth. “And next step after that,” I add, not recording now, speaking to the dashboard, “is to brace for the kind of reply that travels through glass.”
Ruth hears anyway. “We’ll put film on your windows,” she says.
I nod and start the car. The heater coughs. Lake smell rides in the vents no matter what I do. I grip the wheel and take one last look at the slip numbers, counting forward to seventeen, then past it to the tower line. The unresolved chord hangs between water and wood, waiting for a strike.
I drive, and I listen for it.