Phần I
At 6:10 a.m. her phone lit up on Dani's coffee table.
Wade. A photo, and then a message.
The photo was of a yellowed carbon-copy form, the kind with three colors of paper, lying on a workbench under a shop light. ELLIS MARINE SERVICE - WORK ORDER #4471. Vessel: CELESTE MARIE. Owner: T. Marsh. Date in: 03/08/2011. Problem: cracked block, port engine. Date out: 03/14/2011.
Found this in the old shop files last night, Wade had written. Ellis was the shop before ours took over. I went looking because of what I remembered. Daddy's boat was in the shop the whole week. It never left the dock, Ellie. Where was he?
She typed with cold fingers. I'm finding out. This morning. Please let me do this one.
The dots came and went three times.
ok. call me after. love you.
The lot was wrapped in fog when she got there. The marsh grass disappeared ten feet out into gray, and Heron Hall across the water was only a pale shape, like a memory of a house. A heron stood motionless on a piling at the end of the crooked dock.
At 6:58 the old white Ford came down the overgrown drive and stopped.
Tom got out slowly. He was carrying two gas-station coffees in a cardboard tray and a paper sack that she knew, without looking, held sausage biscuits from the Sunoco on Maybank. He'd brought her the same breakfast every Saturday of her childhood.
He handed her a coffee. He sat down on the brick footings, right about where the kitchen used to be. He didn't look at the dock.
Ellie laid them out on the bricks beside him, one by one, the way a lawyer lays out exhibits. The photograph. The phone. The evidence log. Wade's picture of the work order.
Her father looked at them for a long time.
"Tell me," Ellie said. "From the beginning. Don't skip anything, Daddy. I'll know."