Page 4 of Jonah’s Lure

“He didn’t tell you what it was?”

“No.” Clara’s expression changed—not quite hurt, more like someone revising an assumption she hadn’t realized she was making. “Jonah tells me most things. We’re close. The fact that he was keeping this particular thing back meant it was something he wanted to present finished. Something he wanted to arrive with rather than develop out loud.”

Frank shifted in his chair. “He’s always chasing the next idea. The northern expansion, the Penobscot Bay grounds—he has these plans.”

“The northern expansion,” Angus said. “Tell me about that.”

Frank’s expression flattened. “It’s not viable. I’ve told him that. The licensing costs, the fuel range for the fleet we have—” He stopped and shook his head. “He disagrees.”

“He doesn’t just disagree,” Clara said quietly. She didn’t add anything else. She didn’t need to.

The gap between those two statements held more information than anything Frank had said in the past five minutes. Angus noted it and moved on.

“Did Jonah have plans for the weekend? Was he meeting anyone? Did he mention going anywhere?”

Frank shook his head.

“Clara?”

“Nothing specific. He texted me Saturday morning. Just checking in. Nothing about plans.” She set the mug on the edge of the desk. “When he didn’t answer Saturday afternoon, I called twice. Sunday I drove to his apartment. His truck was gone. I knocked for a long time.” She looked directly at Angus. “Jonah doesn’t go dark. Not with me. Whatever this is, he didn’t choose it.”

The certainty in her voice came from knowing someone, not from hoping. Angus believed her.

“We’ll need access to his apartment,” he said. “And anything here that was his—his desk, any files or notes, computer access if he had one here.”

Frank nodded and pushed himself up from the chair. He moved with the heaviness of a man carrying something he hadn’t put down since Saturday and wasn’t sure how.

He led them through the office door and along the side of the main building. At the north end of the property, beyond the fuel pumps, a separate structure sat lower than the rest, its corrugated siding darker with age and weathering.

“North Annex,” Frank said, following Angus’s glance. “Hasn’t been worth much since the storm.”

“Still part of the operation?”

“Technically.” Frank kept walking. “Jonah had opinions about it. Wanted money spent there before I was ready to spend it.”

Clara looked toward the building, then away. “He said the old water system needed attention.”

Frank’s mouth tightened. “Jonah said a lot of things needed attention.”

* * *

Jonah’s workspace was a small desk in the corner of the operations room next to the dock office—separated from Frank’s domain by a partition wall and a door that didn’t quite shut flush. A working desk, not a tidy one. Manifests and printouts, a tide atlas open to Penobscot Bay, a ruled notebook with a cracked spine. Pencils. A stapler. A dried coffee ring on the corner of a manila folder.

Miguel photographed it before they touched anything.

Angus worked through the notebook while Miguel took the manifests. Jonah’s handwriting was small and angled, the kind produced by someone who wrote fast and didn’t go back. The pages were dense—fleet schedules, fuel cost calculations, and contact names for buyers as far north as Bar Harbor. Pages of work. In the margins of one page, a column of figures resolved, at the bottom, into a projected annual revenue number for a northern operation. The figure was circled twice.

At the back of the notebook, separated from the fleet notes by several blank pages, was a different kind of list. Names and phone numbers, mostly unfamiliar. Supplier contacts, by the look of them. Restaurant groups, a cold storage facility in Ellsworth, a seafood distributor operating out of Bangor.

And between those pages, loose, was a business card.

Plain white. No logo. A name printed in simple type: R. Cobb, with a mobile number below it. No address, no company name, no other details.

Angus turned it over. The back was blank.

He held it up. “Clara.”

She came to the doorway. He showed her the card.