Sergio Hensley would open his door to the Don and to no one else, which meant the only way to reach the man who could clear Rafe was to confess to Rafe. I had stood in the study at Gull Point for eleven minutes, counting the books on one shelf, before I understood that. Forty-one.
"I've been my father's spy since the first night," I said. "Your schedule was me. The lock, the photographs, all fourteen pages. He has not asked for more, but I would have given it."
Rafe sat very still behind the desk. I waited for the shouting I had earned.
"Why tell me now?"
I put my phone on the blotter and turned it to him. Doherty's yellow note, Enzo's name, the date. "Because I need you to drive me to Sergio Hensley. That's the price. You can have the rest of me after."
He read it twice. When he looked up his eyes were gray and flat as slate, and the anger in them belonged to Enzo. "Get your coat," he said.
Sergio's bait shop stood on stilts over the water, brine-gray and cold. He was sixty-seven, with hands like knotted line, and he held the screen door with one foot while he looked past me at Rafe's car.
"Twenty-two years on that pier," he said. "Fired on a Tuesday. By a boy who couldn't tie a bowline."
"Enzo came to see you on the thirteenth," I said. "What did he tell you?"
"Who are you?"
"Nico Ferro's sister."
His mouth worked. Behind me Rafe had not got out of the car, and I understood he never would. Sergio let me in.
I did not ask what happened. I asked small questions, with times in them, the way I would check a column. When did you hear the shot? "Eleven fifty-eight. I looked at the clock." When did you open the vehicle gate? "Midnight, one minute past. Mr. Corvino's car." Rafe's car came after the shot, then. Three minutes after.
I wrote nothing down. My hands were shaking and I did not want him to see.
"Was anyone else at the gate?"
Sergio looked at his coffee. "A car sat outside the fence. Lights off, engine running."
"Whose?"
"I won't say."
"Mr. Hensley."
"Enzo told me to forget that car." He said it to the cup. "I have a daughter in Salem, miss. I'll tell you this and no more. Earlier, a quarter to twelve, a man in a gray coat walked the pier toward the boat steps. I thought he was one of yours."
Nobody had told me about a gray coat.
Rafe drove along the water for a while with both hands on the wheel. I had the bait shop in my coat, brine and cold coffee, and the number three, three minutes between the shot and his headlights.
"You arrived after," I said.
"Yes."
"Then why say you were there when he died?"
"Because I was."
That was the answer he had given me at the grave, and it was no better in a moving car. I turned in my seat. "That's the second thing I've paid for today. I want the photo to mean something. What was Nico doing on Pier 9 at midnight with you?"
His jaw moved, once. The nick had healed, and I found I missed it.
"Thirteen summers ago I raced a boat called Gull at the regatta," he said. "A boy of fifteen hit my stern with his dinghy and told me I'd steered into it."
"That sounds like Nico."
"He sailed with me every summer after. We never told anyone." The road bent. "In June he came to me with a pencil and an idea. One board for both harbors. The Table names Ferro head of it. No more funerals at St. Agnes."
"Four months?" I said. "June to October?"
"Yes."
"Papa never knew."
"No. He wouldn't have let it stand." He said it carefully, and I did not push, because I had half proved it myself and he had answered only that much. "Nico called me to Pier 9 to sign."
At Gull Point Serafina had bread rising and said nothing when we came in. Rafe unlocked a drawer in the study and set a sheaf of pages in front of me, soft at the edges from folding.
The Harbor Accord, eleven pages, in Nico's handwriting. The same slanted capitals that had labeled every box in my childhood. In the margin of clause four he had drawn a small boat and written: Rafe will hate this one. Beside a paragraph on shared tariffs: Liv would catch this error, she catches everything.
I read it standing up. Page six had a coffee ring, and in the margin: Do NOT tell Papa until the Table has signed. He'll want a bigger boat.
I laughed. It came out wrong and I covered my mouth, and Rafe, who had not moved, said, "He wrote those at my kitchen table."
"His jokes aren't funny."
"No."
I turned the page so he would not see my face. Nico's hand had pressed hard on the last line, the way he did when he was pleased with himself. When I looked up, Rafe was closer than the desk allowed. Cedar and rain. Neither of us moved. At last he stepped back and straightened a book that did not need it.
"Go and eat," he said. "Serafina will put it in front of you either way."
I woke at one in the morning to a car in the drive and a door slammed hard enough to shake the glass.
Enzo's voice came through the floor, loud and quick, and then Rafe's, which never rose, only grew lower. I crept to the head of the stairs. The study door was shut. I caught one word, over and over, spat like a curse.
"Ferro."
Then nothing. Then the front door, and the engine, and the quiet.
Tuesday morning I went down in my socks. The study fireplace was full of ash and still faintly warm, one corner of a page curled and black at the edge, and on it, whole and unburned, Nico's signature.