Page 93 of Everything You Hate
“Wouldn’t have been my first choice of how to spend the morning.” The chief turns to me and offers his hand. His grip is firm and unhurried, and his eyes take me in without any of the sideways curiosity I’ve gotten used to on this island. “Jacob McNamara, Port Haven chief of police. Sorry we’re meeting like this, Ms. Crawford.”
“Scarlett,” I say. “Thank you, Chief McNamara.”
“Please, everyone around here calls me Jake or Jacob if you want to stand on formality. Coffee’s terrible, but it’s hot if you want it.”
“We had some at Shea’s,” Dean says.
Jacob chuckles. “Good call. Especially if you want to keep your stomach lining. Shea’s coffee is a thousand times better than here. He gestures toward the back. “Curt’s been asking for you by name, Dean. Wants an audience. I told him he could havethirty seconds and then he’s done. Figured you’d want to hear it from him anyway.”
Dean’s jaw tightens. “I want to hear it.”
Curt Malloy sits up when he sees us, and his gaze finds Dean first. Something ugly moves across his face.
“Coastie.” He spits it through the bars. “Figured you’d show.”
“You wanted an audience.” Dean stops a few feet short of the cell, close enough. “You’ve got one. Talk.”
Curt’s bloodshot eyes slide to me. “Didn’t mean nothing by it. Just wanted to scare her a little. Get even.” He tips his head at Dean. “Man fired me last year. Showed up three sheets to the wind, I’ll cop to that. Doesn’t give him the right to ruin a man’s livelihood.”
“You climbed to my balcony at midnight,” I say. “You stood there and watched me sleep.”
“Wasn’t watching you sleep. Couldn’t see shit through those windows.” He leans back against the cinderblock, and the fight goes out of him. He suddenly looks like exactly what he is: a tired old man fueled by alcohol and bitterness. “Just wanted you to know I was there.”
“Why?” I ask.
He sneers and jerks his head in Dean’s direction. “Everyone knows he’s fucking you. Thought I’d make him jealous.”
Dean scoffs at that.
Behind us, Jacob leans a shoulder against the doorframe, arms crossed. “Curt,” he says, easy, “the day Dean’s jealous ofyou is the day I retire to Fiji. Now you want to tell us about the items that you took from Ms. Crawford’s room?”
“What items?” He looks from the chief to me, and for the first time the belligerence drops clean off his face. “I never went inside. Door was locked. I stood on the balcony for a minute—two, tops—and climbed back down. Somebody else took ‘em.” Curt’s leaning forward now, gripping the bars, and there’s an edge of real offense in his voice. “I climbed a wall to spook a woman. I’ll say that to a judge. But I never set foot in that room, and you can stand here askin’ till you’re blue, Chief, the answer don’t change.”
I believe him. He didn’t take the journal.
Curt climbed a wall to frighten me, loud and stupid and drunk. Whoever’s been coming into my room did it quietly, more than once, and left with something each time.
Beside me, Dean exhales, but I can’t tell if he believes Curt too or if he still thinks the man is behind everything.
Jacob straightens off the doorframe. “That’s your thirty seconds, Curt.” To us, quieter, walking us back toward the front: “We’ll hold him on the trespass and the harassment, and I’ll pull all of the resort’s footage to compare against the room entries myself. If Curt’s lying, I’ll know. Scarlett, if anything else goes missing, you come straight to me. Not a neighbor, not a rumor. Me.”
“I will.”
“Good.” He holds the door for us. “Try to have a better day than you’ve started with.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Outside, the town square has turned into a carnival.
Across from the station, in the little park with the war memorial and the good shade trees, someone has set up a riser and a bank of microphones. A banner sags between two poles: PORT HAVEN TREASURE—THE LEGEND LIVES. There are cameras, a Seattle news van with its dish cranked up, and a loose crowd of tourists holding paper cups and phones, drawn to the promise of a spectacle. Merrick Marine Tours fleeces move through them, handing out maps.
Dean stops on the station steps and takes it in. “Fuck.”
I stand beside him and catalog the damage. The riser is professional-grade—fold-out aluminum, black skirting, the kind you rent for corporate events. Someone’s strung fairy lights across the front even though it’s nine in the morning and broad daylight. A sound tech in a black t-shirt adjusts a microphone stand, his movements quick and practiced. The Seattle news van idles at the curb, its generator humming, a cameraman unloading gear from the back while a woman in a blazer checks her phone like she’s on a tight schedule.
The crowd is maybe a hundred people. Not huge by city standards, but for Port Haven on a Tuesday morning, it’s aninvasion. Tourists in windbreakers and hiking boots, most of them holding laminated maps from Merrick Tours. A woman in a Patagonia vest lectures a small group about tide charts, her voice carrying across the square. A drone buzzes overhead—cheap, civilian, the same model that’s been haunting the island since my first post went viral.
I spot faces in the crowd. Piper stands on the far side of the square, arms crossed, glasses pushed up into her wild curls. She’s watching the riser with an expression I can read from fifty yards: quiet devastation. Colter has Hazel by the hand near the war memorial, Radar sitting alert at his side, the dog’s ears pricked forward as if he’s cataloging threats. Hazel points at the fairy lights. Colter shakes his head, his smile strained.
