Chapter 4 · The Rental Cabin (Reed)

By the time Reed turned onto the gravel road up to the cliff, the rain had let up a little.

Megan sat in the passenger seat, holding the oak chest wrapped in an old blanket she’d grabbed from his car. She was shivering—the kind that comes from the bones out, not from cold. He didn’t say anything. He cranked the heat all the way up.

The cabin he’d rented was twelve miles north of Blackharbor, wedged between spruce forest and the cliff edge, nowhere near anything. He’d scouted it a week ago—fresh asphalt on the roof, its own well, a drive to the main road with two turnaround bends. He’d deliberately picked a place with no neighbors.

When the car stopped, he led her inside. A fireplace was burning—he’d banked it before he left that afternoon. He poked the embers and the flames licked up again.

“Sit,” he said.

Megan didn’t sit. She set the chest on the dining table, opened it, and took the letters from the false bottom. By firelight, she read them again.

“What,” Reed leaned against the doorframe watching her, “do they actually say?”

Megan was quiet a long time.

Then she handed them to him.

Reed read page by page. He read slowly. By the third page, his jaw had tightened. The letters didn’t just mention the Blackwood family—the girl writing was Samantha Bell, seventeen when she disappeared. She wrote that two of the five girls had tried to go to the police, and the next day their homes had been “visited.” She wrote that the Blackwoods’ eldest son, Henry, was a pimp who procured poor local girls for visiting fishing boat captains. She wrote that on that November night, the five of them had been planning to escape to the next town on a small fishing boat—but halfway out, the mooring lines had been cut from outside.

“They didn’t disappear,” Reed read the words softly aloud. “They were deliberately left out on the ocean.”

“Four of the five girls died on that boat,” Megan said. “Devon was earlier—she was the first. When Samantha wrote this letter, she probably already knew she wasn’t getting out. She sealed it in the crate. She probably meant for the tide to bring it back to shore.”

“Instead it got stuck on the reef for twenty years.”

“Until last week’s offshore wind.”

Reed set the letters down. He stared at the fire for a long time without speaking.

“When I took this case in 2008,” he finally said, “local police had sat on it for two years. Then a judge in Portland got sick of it and kicked it up to Quantico. We were halfway through when my supervisor flew in from Quantico personally, said this town ‘had more important things to do,’ and pulled us. I thought it was political pressure. Now I know—it was the Blackwoods.”

“What are you going to do?”

“The evidence has to leave this town.” Reed said. “Copies go to a federal prosecutor in Portland. The originals stay with us. But before that—” he glanced out the window at the dark coastline. “They burned your shop tonight. Next, they come for you.”

Megan’s face was pale in the firelight.

“What about you?” she asked. “Why are you risking this? You resigned. This case has nothing to do with you.”

Reed watched the flames dance in the fireplace.

“It does,” he said, his voice almost too low to hear. “That night in 2008, I was supposed to be working late in town. My supervisor ordered me to leave. I’ve always remembered the page on Devon in the file—she was the first of the five to disappear. Her car was found parked at the cliff edge, like she’d jumped. The last witness said she’d been got into a car by a man in a black jacket.”

He paused.

“That man in the black jacket,” he said, “was my partner.”

Megan gasped.

Outside, a car’s headlights swept across the gravel road, then drove off.

Reed snapped upright.

“Someone’s been following us.”