Chapter 2: The Man at the Rescue Station

Cane Walker drained the last of his black coffee just as the rescue station radio crackled with a call from the landlord of Driftwood Cottage: the new female guest had arrived, alone, and was inside.

He didn’t move. He stared at the yellowed town group photo on the wall—the 1987 Fourth of July parade, a bunch of kids holding flags in front of city hall. His gaze settled on the ponytailed girl at the far right, held there two seconds, then moved away. That was his sister Megan, seventeen that year.

“Cane.” His partner Jess poked his head in the door. “The new woman. She’s at Driftwood.”

“Yeah.”

“You gonna ask what she’s doing here?”

“She’d tell me if she wanted me to know.” Cane stood, grabbed his life vest. “When’d she get in?”

“Half an hour ago. Portland plates, a Subaru. Backseat’s full of easels and paper.” Jess paused, lowered his voice. “Brother. Her name’s Mason. Those Masons.”

Cane’s hands, buckling the vest, stilled.

“Which Mason?”

“Which do you think.” Jess looked at him. “Emily Mason. The one who vanished from this town in ’87. Her sister.”

Outside the rescue station, the fog hung low. Cane pushed open the wooden door, and the sea wind slammed rain into his face. He looked toward the cliff. Driftwood Cottage’s light was on, a single lamp floating on the water.

He couldn’t quite remember the faces of the five girls from twenty years ago. But he remembered that night’s fog, remembered the flashlight beam on the reef, remembered someone leaning in to say—

“If you saw something, you saw nothing, kid. Otherwise, the next high tide takes your sister.”

His sister.

Cane’s hand clenched at his side until his knuckles went white.

He took the binoculars off the wall and trained them on the second-floor bedroom of Driftwood. The curtain moved. The woman stood with her back to the window, on the phone, her shoulders rigid.

She wasn’t a tourist. Cane had been doing rescue work eleven years; he could tell at a glance—tourists stared at the sea like they were spacing out. She was looking at it like she was searching for something.

He lowered the binoculars and made a decision he hadn’t seen coming.

He unclipped a small brass key from his key ring and closed his hand around it. It was the key to Megan’s nightstand drawer at the care facility—the drawer where she’d locked every picture of the sea she’d drawn in twenty years, and never let anyone see.