Page 41 of Everything You Hate
“Know what?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer.
“Dean. Know what?”
“Get out of the truck, Scarlett.”
His voice isn’t cruel. It’s worse than cruel. It’s exhausted.
I get out. The rain hits me all at once. I stand there with my hand on the door and rainwater running into my collar, and I have one thing left to say and no good reason to say it.
“For the record,” I tell him, “everything I learned about you today, I learned from people who love you. Every single one of them told me what you did, not what you failed at. You should ask yourself why you’re so sure the story is bad.”
I shut the door before he can answer.
He doesn’t drive away. The truck idles behind me the whole way across the sidewalk, and when I pull the door open and look back, he’s still there, wipers going, watching me through the rain.
Saltbox Hardware smells like sawdust and machine oil, and the tools hang on pegboard in rows straight enough to have been laid out with a ruler. Behind the counter, a small white-bearded man in a red flannel shirt is sorting washers into a tackle box.
“Fish sent me,” I say. “From the coffee shop.”
“Malcolm’s reporter.” He doesn’t look up. “Here about the treasure.”
“I’m not?—”
“Hardware store’s not an archive. We sell nails and paint.”
I’ve been dismissed by better, and I’m too wet and too raw to be gracious about it. “Fine. Sorry to bother you.”
I’m at the door when he says, “The north shore purchase was 1895.”
I stop.
“Thomas Haven’s name on the deed. Eleanor’s money. Her people were in shipping out of Seattle.” He drops another washer in the box. “Old money. Not stolen. Earned.”
“That’s what Mimi told me.”
“Mimi’s right about that and wrong about six other things, but I’ll take what I can get.” He sets the tackle box aside. “The Merricks have been lying for a hundred years because the truth makes Thomas a decent man who married well, and they can’t have that. Decent doesn’t fit the story.”
“Can you prove it?”
He looks at me then, and his whole face changes.
“Sit down,” he says. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
Three hours. Three hours of tea gone cold and refilled twice in the back room of Saltbox Hardware, and I have never in my career had a source like this one. He doesn’t need coaxing. He doesn’t need flattering. He’s been waiting sixty years for somebody to ask, and now that somebody has, it comes out of him like coins out of a machine that’s finally hit.
The Fairchild ship. The weather that night. A cargo manifest listing gold ingots and also lumber, textiles, hardware. A harbor master who wroteunusually heavy for personal effectsin a margin. Names I have never seen in Malcolm’s archive. Dates that don’t line up with Malcolm’s timeline. A whole populationof people who were on this island in 1893 and have since been edited out of it.
I stop writing somewhere in the second hour and just listen.
“Where did you get all this?” I finally ask.
He shrugs. “Always known it.”
“From documents? Family records?”
“Some.” He refills my tea. “Some I just know.”
