Chapter 1 - The Thing Beneath the Floorboards
“What ledger?”
Nora looked at Molly, then at the photograph of her truck.
Outside the workshop windows, the harbor lay gray beneath a low November sky. Inside, an apprentice laughed at something near the sanding station. The ordinary sound made the threat in Nora’s hand feel even stranger.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But somebody thinks I do.”
Molly reached for the envelope.
“Wait.”
Nora set it on a clean sheet of packing paper and photographed it where it lay. Then she photographed the front door, the strip of tape, and the footprints darkening the wet concrete outside.
She had spent twelve years learning that damage told a story.
The first rule was not to destroy the evidence while trying to understand it.
By nine, she had reported the threat and contacted a business attorney recommended by their insurance agent. By ten, Molly had stopped all unfamiliar payments and begun assembling records for the bank.
Nora called the employees together beside an unfinished fishing boat.
“There’s a false allegation involving our accounts,” she told them. “We’re addressing it. Nobody signs for deliveries, opens unusual attachments, or lets strangers into the shop without checking with Molly.”
“What about payroll?” asked Luis, their senior carpenter.
“I’m working on that.”
She refused to promise what she couldn’t yet guarantee.
Luis nodded. That quiet acceptance nearly broke her.
After the meeting, their youngest apprentice lingered.
June Mercer was nineteen, with copper shavings caught in her dark braid.
“Does the ledger happen to be red?”
Nora’s pulse changed.
“Why?”
June pointed toward the storage loft.
“There was a notebook inside the St. Agnes. Behind the battery compartment. I put it with the things we removed.”
The St. Agnes was a forty-foot harbor launch Northline had bought at an estate sale six weeks earlier. Nora intended to restore it as a demonstration vessel.
“Show me.”
June climbed the stairs.
Nora followed, moving carefully when a wave of nausea rose through her.
The loft smelled of old canvas and cedar dust. June opened a plastic crate containing a cracked compass, brass fittings, and a red notebook swollen slightly from damp.
Nora didn’t touch it immediately.
She photographed the crate.
Then the notebook.
Then the first page.
LEONARD VOSS.
CHIEF ENGINEER.
Underneath were dates, vessel movements, fuel purchases, and neat columns of numbers.
Nothing that looked worth threatening someone over.
Then Nora turned a page.
Bellweather appeared in the margin.
Her mouth went dry.
Molly came upstairs carrying her laptop.
“I found Bellweather Marine Holdings.”
Nora looked up.
“Who owns it?”
“The public records get complicated. But one of the addresses matches a company associated with Rourke Harbor Logistics.”
Cassian’s company.
For a moment, Nora heard the service-room door opening again.
Not here.
Not here.
Not here.
She forced herself to look back at the ledger.
Several entries had been crossed out and rewritten. Beside a shipment marked contaminated sediment were the words EMPTY RETURN.
Under another payment, someone had written:
Invoice says twelve loads. We moved three.
June shifted beside her.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“No.” Nora met her eyes. “You found something. That’s all.”
But somebody had known she found it.
Somebody had photographed Nora’s truck before she confronted Cassian.
This wasn’t punishment for ending their engagement.
The engagement had simply ended while something larger was already closing around her.
Her new attorney, Mara Chen, arrived shortly before noon.
She wore a wool coat, carried a battered leather bag, and read the threat without changing expression.
Then she asked the first question nobody else had asked.
“Who knew you bought that boat?”
“The auction house. The shipping company. My staff.”
“And Cassian Rourke?”
Nora remembered him standing in this very loft three weeks earlier, smiling while she described her restoration plans.
“Yes.”
Mara looked toward the red notebook.
“We need copies secured outside this building. Then we need the appropriate investigators looking at the original.”
“Will that clear our account?”
“Possibly. It won’t happen instantly.”
Nora put a hand against the edge of the workbench.
Twelve employees.
An unborn child.
A business she had built without anyone’s permission.
“Then tell me what happens next.”
Mara studied her for a moment.
“First, we stop treating this as a problem you have to solve alone.”
Below them, the workshop door opened.
A familiar voice carried through the building.
“Nora.”
Cassian stood beside the unfinished launch, rain shining on his black coat.
Nora looked down at him from the loft.
May you like
For the first time since she had known him, she had something he needed.
And she intended to find out why.
