When Devils Sing(88)
Reid went still, straining his ears as footsteps sounded above them. Someone was on the boat. Their footfalls were uneven, as if stumbling, as they moved across the deck. The person barreled down the steps to the cabin’s unlocked door, banging on it loudly. A muffled grunt sounded on the other side of it. The person then began fumbling for the door handle, jiggling it open after several attempts.
When it seemed as if they were about to push through the door, a voice called out, “That’s not our boat, idiot!”
“Oh, shit,” someone slurred. It sounded like Jonah’s voice. “My bad, no need to name call!”
Reid crept to the cruiser’s nearest porthole and peeked out the window. He watched as Jonah stumbled up the boat’s steps and joined a group of his friends on the dock. They all dogpiled him as they carried bottles of alcohol and red plastic cups in their hands.
A moment later, the group boarded a different boat that was a few yards down. The engine sounded, and they were off, howling into the night.
“All clear,” Reid announced, letting out a heavy breath. He leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes, trying to calm his racing heart. “It was just my brother and his dick friends.”
Isaiah was quiet for a beat, as if to give Reid a moment to collect himself. He then asked, “Do your siblings think your mom really … drowned?”
“I don’t know.” Reid opened his eyes, realizing Isaiah had turned the flashlight back on. The cruiser felt eerier somehow. “I’m not sure it even matters. They weren’t as close with her as I was. I think they knew that there was something different about her—the way she didn’t fit into Lake Clearwater. They were always more interested in pleasing our father anyway.”
Isaiah nodded, his expression solemn. “That makes sense.”
Reid moved across the floor, returning to the tackle box. “Okay, let’s do this.”
The first three keys didn’t work. The lock clicked open courtesy of the fourth. When they flipped open the tackle box, it unfolded into tiered sections, with the biggest section filled to the brim with sharp, gleaming fishhooks. His heartbeat thudded in his chest as he carefully placed his hand in the box.
Gently, Reid dug around the tackle box’s contents, fingers searching for anything that felt out of the ordinary. Then he felt it, at the very bottom. Something that wasn’t a fishhook at all. But it seemed to be taped down. “There’s something here.”
“What is it?” Isaiah asked, his voice taut.
“I’m not sure.” When Reid pulled his hand from the box, it was a butchered mess of tiny, bloody scrapes. He barely noticed the pain as he dumped the contents of the tackle box onto the floor, sending the hooks sliding in every direction. “Holy shit. This is Dawson’s.”
Duct-taped to the bottom of the box was Dawson’s watch, with the familiar sun-bleached leather band and the broken watch face. Except now, the glass was shattered. Reid held the watch to the light, and he thought he saw flecks of dried blood staining the leather.
Isaiah was preoccupied with his own finding. He pulled something else from the tackle box, unwrapping it from the duct tape. “There’s a key here, too.”
Reid blinked, turning his attention back to Isaiah. “A key to what?”
“A room key,” Isaiah said slowly, meeting Reid’s gaze. “For the Colonial motel.”
Why did Leblanc have these two things, kept so intentionally hidden from prying eyes?
A phone buzzed, startling the boys. Isaiah cursed beneath his breath, eyeing his phone’s screen. “My father’s asking for me. We need to go.”
Reid hesitated, looking around the tiny cabin. He’d made a mess with the hooks. If Leblanc came looking for them now, they’d be hard-pressed to lie their way out of it. “Should we take this stuff? What if he comes looking for it?”
Isaiah shook his head. “No, but we can do this instead.” He snapped several photos of the key, the watch, the tackle box with his phone. Then, for good measure, he took photos of the objects with his film camera. “This is enough to go off for now. We don’t want to raise Leblanc’s suspicion. I mean, he clearly did something to Dawson.”
“Yeah,” Reid said, his voice coming out hard. His hands shook as he taped the watch and the key back at the bottom of the tackle box. He then scraped the hooks back in the box, while Isaiah grabbed the stray ones from across the room. A few minutes later and the cabin was in the same shape they’d found it in.
As they climbed out of the cabin and returned to the boat’s helm, Reid bemoaned, “We still don’t have enough to go on.”
But Isaiah ignored him, looking past him to something Reid couldn’t see. He whispered, “Look at that.”
Reid tilted his phone’s flashlight in the direction Isaiah pointed, the light lingering on a small security camera facing away from them. It was embedded in a floodlight on the stern, easy to miss for the average, untrained eye. It was angled to watch the back of the cruiser. From its position, it could reasonably record every person that walked onto the boat and walked off. Whistling low, he whispered, “We need to see what’s on that camera.”
Isaiah nodded. “Leblanc is smart enough to keep the recordings digitized. If I can figure out a way to get into his computer at the firm, I have a feeling we’ll find out exactly what happened to Dawson.”