The breakwater road is a slick tongue jutting into gray water, and my tires hiss over stone like I’m driving a kettle about to boil. Wind shreds the audio of the world into ribbons. A seiche must be working the basin; the lake is breathing, not lapping—big, slow exhale, then a shove. In the rearview, the dark SUV lifts onto the crown of the road, patience gone. Its grill wears the same fixed smile Everett used at the vigil.
I taste metal, not from the heater but from the locket tapping my collarbone; brass in my mouth, brass in my chest. I keep my speed steady—forty, then thirty-eight—and press my phone into the dash mount so the camera can see clean. The dashcam above the mirror blinks its little red dot. I whisper into the mic, “Tape note, moving, breakwater approach, tail present.” The windshield scours with sand flecks. Diesel ghosts in from the harbor, sweet and dirty together, a perfume of boats and budgets.
The SUV eases closer until I can count the pockmarks in its bumper paint. I can’t hear its engine over the wind, but I feel it, a bass line under my seatback. To the right, riprap stones shoulder waves; to the left, thin reeds rattle like a bin of umbrella handles. The sound bounces wrong; the seiche throws it across the hood so I hear the lake like it’s coming through my vents.
“Not today,” I say to the rearview, and hit call.
Ruth answers on the second ring, a throat-clear before hello. “Driving?”
“Breakwater road,” I say. “Our library friend’s admirer found wheels.”
“Color and plate?” Her voice goes flat, the way it does when she starts sorting the world into lanes.
“Black, late model, plates unreadable in spray. I’m recording. I can’t lose it without doing something dumb.”
“You won’t do something dumb,” she says. Paper rattles near her cheek—maps, I know that sound now. “You’ll do something planned. Listen. Harbor Patrol has a seatbelt and lighting checkpoint by the public boat launch. They owe me a favor. You’re going to give them a headline they can live with.”
“Copy,” I say, and the word makes me feel borrowed-cop steady. “Distance?”
“Half a mile if the road stays a road,” Ruth says. “The seiche is kissing the blocks. Keep your line. Don’t brake unless you have to. Signal the turn even if God is the only one who can see it.”
The SUV bumps my lane. My car noses into wind and the wheel twitches in my hands like a hooked fish. The locket thunks my sternum once, bingo, I get it, live now, narrate later. My mouth dries to paper. I signal left, because Ruth told me to.
“Put me on speaker,” she says.
“You already are,” I say.
“Good,” Ruth says. “Then listen. If he tries to pass, let him commit to the inside line and then give him nothing to hit. The patrol unit is a quarter mile. Officer Kline—he’s the one who calls the regatta a fundraiser for boat polish—he’ll flare his lights when you come around the bait shack. You go left of his push bumper. He goes right. Your camera sees the nose.”
“And if he taps me?” I ask.
“Then your airbags do their job, and my old badge number buys you an ambulance faster than guilt,” she says. “Eyes up.”
Micro-hook: the checkpoint is there whether I make it or not—so the question is whether I can bring a plate to it without turning myself into the headline the donor wall would love.
Wind shoulders the car again. I pass the bait shack; its peeling sign swings a few slow inches, squeal drowned by gale. The road narrows to the width of a dare. My tires whisper over algae-slick patches; the smell of wet rope rockets in from a coil left on a bollard, old hemp gone sour and clean at once, the tower’s rope smell transposed to ground level. I blink salt-water that isn’t salt, freshwater spray with a little grit between teeth.
The SUV wobbles in my mirror—new driver or drunk courage, I can’t tell. A dry laugh lifts out of me without permission; stress hisses like the tires. I let off the gas for the turn and thumb my hazard lights once like a prayer made of orange.
“He’s close,” I say.
“Let him be,” Ruth says. “Don’t teach him to slow down.”
Then light: red-blue, red-blue, thin strips of day braided with authority. The cruiser is parked cross-angled at the mouth of the launch lot, push bumper gleaming wet. An orange cone skitters like a crab across the asphalt and then halts under a boot. The patrol officer stands there, compact and planted, palm up in the classic stop that makes even honest drivers stand straighter. His radio crackles faintly—seiche does its thing to radio too—but I catch “launch,” “vehicle,” “coming in hot.”
I raise my hand from the wheel long enough to wave like I’m ending a hymn, and then I take the line Ruth drew on the inside of my skull: left of the bumper, wide around the cone, keep the camera square.
The SUV guns it. I feel its urgency, smell it—raw, wet gasoline almost masked by the diesel haze—before I see the nose swing. The driver commits right where Ruth said he would. For a stupid sliver of time I picture Everett at the wheel; then the angle is wrong and the SUV is just a car with someone who learned power where consequences were for other people.
The patrol officer moves without drama. He doesn’t step in front; he steps into frame. His lights wash the SUV’s hood; the plate fills my camera for a blink—letters and a number that flash-stamp into my brain, burned in like a bright afterimage. The SUV’s right front tire kisses green algae, and the road becomes a slip. The vehicle yaws. Wind carts the sound away and then back, so the squeal arrives twice.
I breathe through my teeth to keep from shouting.
The SUV spins. It doesn’t flip; it rotates, bumper to water and back, a slow, ugly carousel. Spray leaps higher than it should, the seiche pushing from below like a bully lifting a bucket. Somewhere behind the cruiser a coffee urn hisses; the smell of percolated church coffee rides the wind and lands in my throat, memory saying we gather after loss. The SUV recovers—driver or mother luck grabs the wheel—and fishtails out of the lot, back toward town, the rear hatch flashing a rectangle in the glass: a Marina Club hangtag, white burgee printed blue.
“Plate,” Ruth says, voice low with triumph and warning.
I recite it. “K-something 8—no, K18-VNR.” My voice finds the shape again. “K18-VNR. Captain ribbon special.”
The patrol officer jogs to my window as I stop by the bumper. He is younger than I expected. His cheeks are red with wind; his mustache is the kind that says he wants promotion more than fashion. “You okay?” he says, loud enough to beat the gale.
“Recording,” I say, tapping the dashcam dot and then the phone. “Both got plate. He had a hangtag for the Crane House Marina Club.”
He glances into my cabin, clocking the locket chain, the mess of printed ledgers on the passenger seat. His jaw ticks once. “Name’s Kline,” he says, like Ruth promised. “Hold tight. We’ll run it.”
He lifts his mic. “Unit Four, plate K18-VNR, possible 23103, negative collision, vehicle fled eastbound from launch. Note club tag.” The speaker answers in chunks, chopped by wind. “Kline again,” he says to me, dropping his voice now. “We get who it’s registered to; sometimes it’s a shell. You’re—” He squints. “Keane?”
“Yes,” I say.
His mouth does a thing I’ve seen in this town: a mix of pity and professional courtesy that says he wishes he didn’t recognize me. “You picked a loud road,” he says.
“Loud roads carry,” I say. “That’s the point.”
Micro-hook: if the car belongs to the club on paper, the club will fall on the paper like a blanket—and I’ll have to decide whether to peel it back now or wait until the deposition locks the hands to the signatures.
Ruth is still on the line. “Kline with you?” she asks.
“Present,” Kline says to my phone like it’s a person. “Calder, you owe me a coffee, not the library kind.” He looks at me then, assessing. “Where were you headed?”
“Home,” I say, because it’s half true and I won’t give the rest to a stranger, even a helpful one. “Eventually.”
The radio coughs up a return. Kline listens with his head tilted, then scribbles in rain on a cardboard ticket book. He shows me the page, the pencil nearly illegible but enough for my eyes: Registered to Ashgrove Harbor Services LLC. He taps another line: Mailing address—Crane House Marina office. He doesn’t say the rest out loud, but I hear it anyway: the loop threads the donor wall, every time.
“You gonna take a statement?” I ask.
“If you can keep it to what you saw and smelled and heard,” he says. “Not what you know.” He half-smiles. “I know who you are.”
“Senses only,” I say. “Wind, diesel, wet rope, coffee. Plate. Hangtag. Tire squeal doubled by the seiche.”
He huffs. “You talk like a report.”
“I record for a living,” I say. “I try not to make speeches.”
He angles his body so we block the wind together. “You want an escort back?” he asks.
“I want your dash video and your time stamps,” I say. “And for the officer who pulls the Harbor Services owner file to remember that donor accounts don’t pay tickets.”
“That last part isn’t my lane,” he says. “But I can hand it to someone with a spine.” He takes my license like a formality, runs the numbers, hands it back. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Not sure,” I say. “But I’m functional.”
He nods. “Functional gets people to tomorrow,” he says, and then, because he’s a person and not just a uniform, he adds, “Don’t go to the marina tonight. Not alone.”
“I won’t,” I say, which is a promise I can keep for the stretch of time we’re both standing in.
Ruth inhales in my ear. “Bring the car by the Annex,” she says. “We’ll pull your dashcam and duplicate. Then go to your mom.”
My chest tightens at the thought of Lydia’s calendar day—if she’s strong enough tomorrow, we promised a drive by the lake. “Copy,” I say. “You saw the hangtag?”
“I heard the word,” she says. “Good enough for now. The legacy just put wheels on its fear.”
Kline returns with a card. “Write your statement on the back while it’s hot,” he says. “No flourishes. We’ll ping you for the video.”
I write in caps to keep my hand from shaking out curlicues. I print the plate; I diagram my lane, his lane, the push bumper, the yaw. I print hangtag, burgee, white/blue. I put my phone beside the card so the timestamp stares up like proof-of-life. I smell coffee again and for a second I’m back at St. Brigid’s basement after a funeral, styrofoam cups, polite hands, wet coats steaming in the stairwell: this town’s ritual for bad nights. I shake it off and hand Kline the card.
He scans it. “You left the motive field empty,” he says.
“That’s above your pay grade,” I say, and I let a small smile show so he knows I’m teasing the system, not him.
“Or below,” he says. “Good luck, Keane.”
I pull away slow, past the cones, past the bait shack, onto the straight where the wind hits the car broadside like a shoulder. Spray stripes the glass; the wipers jump. Behind me, the cruiser lights shrink, then disappear in the gray chop of distance.
On the quiet side of the road, I hit record one more time. “Tape note,” I say. “Breakwater chase, plate K18-VNR, registered to Harbor Services LLC—mail goes to Crane House Marina office. Patrol dash and mine both captured. I smelled diesel, wet rope; heard tire squeal doubled by seiche. Officer Kline present. I am turning toward the Annex to duplicate and secure. I am not going to the marina tonight.”
The lake inhales. Makes a new sound I haven’t cataloged—crushed ice on stone, a brittle chime. The locket rests warm against me; I touch it once, a tiny bell no one else hears.
Micro-hook: if the plate runs straight to a shell, and the shell’s mailbox is the club, which name signs the receipt when we serve the next paper—Everett’s, his father’s friends, or one of the “good families” who learned to hold the rope and say they were keeping the town safe?
I breathe to four and let the air out to six until my hands stop buzzing. I picture Lydia’s letter on my desk and the drive I promised her when she felt up to windows-down wind. “Tomorrow,” I say to no one and to her, “we’re going to hear the lake be loud without being afraid.”
The phone hums. Ruth again. “Go straight,” she says. “Don’t take Pine. Less room for a tail to play hero.”
“Copy,” I say. “Ruth?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m scared,” I say, keeping my eyes lined to the vanishing point, giving the fear a seatbelt so it doesn’t fly around the cabin.
“Good,” she says. “It means you’ll look both ways before you tell the truth.”
The breakwater falls behind me. The town climbs ahead, rooftops slick, donor wall hidden behind a rectangle of brick and brass. I roll through the checkpoint of my own body—hands, breath, pulse—and run the plate again in my head, each letter a rung. When I pass the Harbor Barn, the café out front exhales coffee, and the smell hits me like a benediction of ordinary.
I ask the question that has to make it into the episode without making it into a dare: now that the lake gave me wind and the checkpoint gave me numbers, who inside the club will move first to turn this into “harassment”—and will I keep tomorrow clear enough for Lydia’s drive if tonight turns loud again?