Page 21 of Jonah’s Lure

It was the most solid thing he had, that image of Clara at his desk, finding the one thing he’d accidentally left behind. He’d been annoyed on the drive home that Friday. He’d remembered it halfway home and told himself he’d pick it up Monday, then forgotten it again by the time he got home. Three weeks of meetings with Ray, and he’d left the only tangible evidence of the man’s existence sitting in the back of a notebook in the dock office because he’d been in a hurry to get off the dock before dark.

Grace in the mistake.

He wasn’t sure he believed in that kind of grace—the accidental kind, the kind that arrived through carelessness rather than intention. But sitting in this room, on this floor, he was willing to reconsider.

He prayed. Not the structured prayer of someone who had it together. Not the confident prayer of a man with sound theology and a clear conscience. The stripped-down version. The kind that started with I don’t know what I’m doing and worked from there.

He asked for his father to keep looking. He asked for Clara to have found the card. He asked, with more feeling than he expected, that whatever had been built around his disappearance would not hold—that someone on the other side of these walls was looking at it clearly and seeing it for what it was.

He asked for six more days of water through the slot, food on the paper plate, and the line of light beneath the door cycling from dark to gray to bright and back again, because six more days meant he was still here and still findable, and the alternative to six more days wasn’t something he was willing to look at directly.

He kept his eyes open in the dark.

He waited.

Chapter Thirteen

He was at the south dock by eight.

Not as sheriff. He’d told himself that on the drive over and he almost believed it—just a man in a jacket with a notebook, asking questions any private citizen could ask about a mechanic who had rented a unit on the public waterfront and was now gone. Nothing restricted. Nothing that touched the Holt investigation officially.

The distinction felt thinner each time he made it.

The dock was active at this hour, the weekend drawing out the smaller boat owners who worked during the week and saved maintenance for Saturday mornings. Two men were antifouling the hull of a trailered sloop in the yard. A teenager in oversized rubber boots was hosing down a center console at the near end of the dock, moving the hose in long arcs without much purpose. The smell of fiberglass, diesel, and saltwater hung over everything, unchanged by the season, the day, or whatever was happening in the town above.

Angus worked the dock slowly. He didn’t flash his badge. He introduced himself by name—which was introduction enough in Weyport—and asked about Ray Cobb, listening to what people remembered.

Most of it was thin. Cobb had kept to himself, paid cash, and caused no problems. A competent mechanic by reputation, although nobody had used him personally. He’d asked questions when he first arrived—the kind a new arrival asked—about how things worked locally, who handled what, who to talk to if you had a licensing question or a dispute about dock space. Nothing memorable. The questions of a man learning about a new place.

Except.

An older man who ran a boat charter operation from the middle of the dock—weathered, spare, and possessing the unhurried manner of someone who’d watched the waterfront long enough that little surprised him anymore—remembered something specific. He leaned against his boat trailer with his arms crossed and looked into the middle distance while he thought about it.

“He asked about the sheriff’s office,” the man said. “Not the harbormaster, not the DMR. Specifically, the sheriff’s office. Asked how often they dealt with waterfront business. Whether you handled those matters personally or delegated them to a deputy.” He looked at Angus. “I thought it was an odd question for a mechanic. Figured maybe he’d had trouble somewhere else and wanted to know what he was dealing with here.”

“What did you tell him?”

“The truth. That you handled things yourself when they needed handling. That you’re straight and fast and if someone had a legitimate dispute, you were the right man to bring it to.” A pause. “Cobb seemed satisfied with that.”

Angus wrote it down. Straight and fast. The same words Cobb had apparently gone looking for, here and elsewhere. A sheriff who processed things quickly and personally and left his name on documents. The picture of a man whose signature was worth forging.

He thanked the charter operator and walked to the end of the dock road.

* * *

He sat on the low concrete barrier and looked at the sight line he’d photographed on Wednesday. Cobb’s unit, padlocked and dark, halfway down the row, with the harbor beyond it. And, at an angle across the water, the roofline of the sheriff’s office.

Cobb had sat here, probably, in a dark sedan in those early months—before the workshop routine, before anyone got used to seeing his truck on this road instead. He’d have chosen this spot for a reason. Movement could be tracked at both locations. You could see when the sheriff’s truck was in the lot and when it wasn’t. When the lights came on and when they went off.

He thought about the prologue to his life in this town—the years of building, the cases worked, the people helped, the slow accumulation of trust that a place like Weyport gave reluctantly and only to someone who earned it over time. He thought about someone sitting at the end of the road with a notebook of their own, documenting everything from the outside. Studying him the way a hunter studies terrain.

His jaw tightened. He looked at his hands gripping the concrete barrier, the knuckles pale in the cold morning air, and made himself breathe evenly.

He had one more stop.

* * *

Walt Greer answered the door wearing his robe, a mug of coffee in one hand and the expression of a man who had expected the day to be quieter than this. He looked at Angus on his front step, and something moved behind his eyes—not surprise exactly. More the look of a man who had been half expecting this visit and hadn’t yet decided how to handle it.