Chapter 63 - Blood in the Bilge
The silence, when it came, felt heavy and unnatural.
We limped into a protected cove on the lee side of Sentinel Island, two miles south of the reef. The engine sputtered, wheezed, and finally died as the prop fouled on eelgrass, leaving us drifting quietly into the muddy shallows beside the rotted timber piers of an abandoned nineteenth-century quarantine station.
The storm was muffled here behind the granite bluff, but the rain still fell in a steady, cold drizzle, tapping against the plastic canopy of the console.
"Julian," I whispered, dropping to my knees beside him.
He was slumped against the bench seat, his breathing shallow, his face coated in cold sweat. The back of his jacket was saturated with thick, dark blood. The bullet hadn't grazed him—it had punched clean through his right trapezius, exiting just above the collarbone.
"I’m... fine," he murmured, his eyes struggling to focus on mine. "Just need... five minutes."
"Shut up," I said, tearing open the boat's emergency medical kit with my teeth.
I cut away the heavy canvas of his coat and the wool sweater underneath. The wound was ugly—a ragged entry surrounded by blackened skin where the muzzle blast had singed the fibers, blood pumping steadily with every ragged beat of his heart. I grabbed the packet of celox clotting powder, ripped it open, and dumped it directly into the wound.
Julian’s body arched, an agonizing gasp escaping his throat as his fingers dug into the fiberglass deck until the nails cracked.
"I know, I know, I'm sorry," I muttered, tears finally spilling over my eyelashes, mingling with the salt on my skin. I pressed a thick pressure bandage against the hole, wrapping the elastic gauze around his torso, binding his arm tightly against his chest to immobilize the joint. "You're going to hold on, Julian. You didn't pull me out of that house just to die in a salt marsh."
He forced a weak, blood-flecked grin. "You're getting... entirely too good... at triage, Clara."
"I had twenty-four years of cleaning up Vance disasters. Bandaging bullet holes isn't that much different from paying unpaid tax liens."
I hauled his good arm over my shoulder, gritted my teeth, and stood up. Julian groaned, his dead weight nearly pulling us both down into the bloody bilge water, but I braced my legs against the transom, hauled him over the gunwale, and dragged him onto the slippery, moss-covered boards of the low pier.
The quarantine station was a hollow shell—corrugated iron walls rusted through to the studs, the roof sagging beneath decades of winter ice, smelling of dead cedar, bat guano, and salt. I dragged Julian through the doorway, out of the direct rain, laying him against an overturned wooden packing crate.
I went back to the boat, retrieved our packs, the heavy iron lockbox, and the dead man's ledger.
Inside the shelter of the rotting shed, I flicked on a small, hooded tactical penlight. Julian had his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling in rhythmic, strained gasps, the clotting powder doing its brutal work.
I sat down on the dirt floor opposite him, pulled the rusted lockbox onto my lap, and opened it.
The heavy, leather-bound volume inside—the ledger that Arthur Vance had been willing to sink boats and murder his own flesh and blood to retrieve—smelled of old paraffin and river damp. Its pages were numbered in iron-gall ink, every line entered in the sharp, sloping hand of the patriarch.
I began to read.
May you like
And as I turned the brittle, foxed pages under the pale yellow beam of the flashlight, the twenty-five years of my life—the sacrifice, the humiliation, the poverty, the constant shame of being the "ungrateful" daughter—revealed themselves not as a series of familial dysfunctions, but as an engineered, calculated fraud.
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