Chapter 5: Two Lines

I stared at the photo until the screen went dark.

"State police," Mavis said. "That's a state police boat. I know that boat. They towed my cousin's skiff with it."

"I know what it is."

"So what's he doing on it? Getting a ride?"

I didn't answer.

Orson didn't ride with police. Orson paid them.

Unless.

I put the phone face down on the counter.

"Don't tell anybody about this," I said.

"Who'm I going to tell? The pie?"

"Mavis."

"Nobody," she said. "Not even the pie."

On Monday morning Hesketh's grandson met me at the yacht club and handed me a ring of keys without a word.

He was thirty and soft and he hated me so much his ears were red.

One of the keys opened the safe in the back room.

The loan book was inside.

I had kept that book for eight years, but I had never held it.

I'd worked from the monthly sheets Orson brought home. Payments in, payments late, boats taken.

The book itself was a leather ledger as thick as a Bible.

I sat down in Orson's chair and opened it.

One hundred and forty families.

Thirty percent. Every one.

On every page, in red, the same line: one month missed, title transfers to the lender.

I knew most of the names. I'd served them coffee at three in the morning.

Page sixty-one.

The Hannah Dell.

My father's name, in someone else's handwriting.

A loan he took the year I turned fifteen, after the engine died.

A red stamp across the bottom. FORECLOSED.

The date was four months before the night his borrowed boat went down off the east ledge.

I sat with my hand flat on the page for a long time.

That night I put the twins and Mavis in the back booth and closed the blinds.

"I'm going to burn it," I said.

Mavis didn't blink.

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