The footsteps stopped just outside the boathouse door. Cassia held her breath, her hand tightening around the flashlight, her mind racing through options that all seemed equally futile. She was alone, miles from town, in the middle of a nor'easter, with no cell service and no weapon and no way to call for help. The bag in her hand contained evidence that someone had been hiding for sixteen years, evidence that could destroy a powerful family and reopen a murder investigation that had been cold for more than a decade. If the person outside that door was the killer, or someone the killer had sent, she was in more danger than she had ever been in her life.
The door swung open on its single rusted hinge. And the man who stepped through it was not a killer.
He was tall and broad-shouldered, with dark hair going gray at the temples and a face that was weathered but kind. He wore a yellow rain slicker and knee-high rubber boots, and he carried a lantern that cast a warm, flickering light across the ruined interior of the boathouse. His eyes were dark and steady, and when he saw Cassia standing by the workbench with the flashlight in her hand, he stopped and raised both hands in a gesture of peace.
"I'm not here to hurt you," he said, his voice calm and low, the kind of voice you might use to soothe a frightened animal. "My name is Sebastian Cross. I think you've been looking for me."
Cassia stared at him. The photograph in her bag. The drawing. The diary entries. All of it had led to this man, the lost twin, the child who had been given away, the stranger who had visited Elara Ashford on the morning before she died. And here he was, standing in the boathouse where it had all begun, as if the storm had conjured him out of the past.
"How did you find me?" she asked, her voice steadier than she felt.
"I've been watching the house for weeks," Sebastian said. "Ever since the newspapers reported that someone had found my mother's diary. I knew someone would come here eventually. I've been waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
"For the truth to come out." He lowered his hands and stepped further into the boathouse, the lantern light dancing across the walls. "I've been living with this for sixteen years, Miss Vance. I've been carrying the weight of what I saw, and what I didn't see, and what I should have done. I think it's time I told someone."
Cassia set down the crowbar—she hadn't realized she had picked it up—and gestured toward the overturned workbench. "Then tell me."
Sebastian sat on a wooden crate that had somehow survived the flood and the years of decay. He set the lantern on the floor between them, and the light threw long shadows up the walls, turning the boathouse into a cathedral of darkness and memory.
"I came here on October 27, 1997," he began. "I had received a letter, a few weeks earlier, telling me that Elara Ashford was my biological mother. I had been adopted as an infant, and I had never known anything about my birth parents. The letter gave me her address and told me that if I wanted the truth, I should come to Havenmoor before the end of October. So I did."
"Who sent the letter?"
"I don't know. I still don't know. It was typed on an old manual machine, no return address, postmarked from Kennebec. I burned it after I read it. I didn't want my adoptive parents to find it." Sebastian's voice was quiet, reflective, the voice of a man who had spent years going over these memories and still found them incomprehensible. "I drove to Havenmoor on the morning of the 27th. I knocked on the door of Windfall House, and Elara answered. She looked at me like she was seeing a ghost. And then she took me to this boathouse, and she told me everything."
"What did she tell you?"
"That I had a twin brother. That our father was a state senator from Kennebec who had died in a plane crash. That her own father had forced her to give me up for adoption, and that she had spent twenty-three years trying to find me." Sebastian's jaw tightened. "She told me she was sorry. She told me she had failed me. And then she told me she was going to change her will to include me, to give me a third of everything, as a way of making amends."
"How did you react?"
"I told her I didn't want the money. I told her I had a life, a good life, and that I hadn't come here for an inheritance. I just wanted to know where I came from. I just wanted to see her face." He paused, his eyes meeting Cassia's. "She cried. Elara Ashford, the richest woman in Havenmoor, the woman who had built walls around herself for fifty years, cried in this boathouse. And I held her, and I forgave her, and then I left."
"What time did you leave?"
"Around nine in the morning. The storm was still far off, but the weather reports were getting worse. Elara told me to leave before the roads flooded. So I did. I drove back to Kennebec, and I was halfway home when I heard on the radio that the hurricane had shifted course, that it was going to hit Havenmoor directly. I tried to call Elara, but the phones were already out. I tried to turn back, but the highways were closed." He looked down at his hands. "I spent the night in a shelter in Westmoreland, listening to the wind, wondering if I would ever see my mother again. And the next morning, I heard that she was dead."
Cassia studied his face in the lantern light. He looked like Gideon—the same dark eyes, the same jawline, the same bone structure—but there was none of Gideon's bitterness, none of his anger. Sebastian Cross was a man who had made peace with his past, or at least had learned to carry it without letting it crush him.
"The diary says you were kind," Cassia said. "Elara wrote that you were kind and steady, everything Gideon was not."
"I didn't feel kind. I felt lost. I had just found my mother, and then I lost her again, all in the space of a single day." Sebastian's voice cracked slightly. "I never got to know her. I never got to ask her the questions I should have asked. I never got to tell her that I was grateful, even though she gave me away, because the family who adopted me loved me, and I had a good life, and I wouldn't have had any of it if she hadn't made the choice she made."
"The diary also mentions a child," Cassia said. "A little girl named Cora Lindqvist. She was hiding in this boathouse during your conversation with Elara. She saw you. She heard everything."
Sebastian's expression flickered. "I didn't know that. Not until years later, when I read about the case in the newspapers. They mentioned a possible child witness, but by then the family had disappeared. I've tried to find her. I've spent years trying. But there's no trace of her anywhere."
"Lottie Minter told me Cora was still in the boathouse later that day. She heard Gideon arguing with Elara. She heard Gideon threaten to kill her."
"I know." Sebastian's voice was heavy. "I've read every report, every article, every scrap of information about my mother's death. I know Gideon threatened her. I know he was on the highway that night. I know the police couldn't prove he made it to the house. And I know that for sixteen years, I've wondered whether my brother—my twin brother—killed our mother to stop her from changing her will."
"Did he?"
"I don't know." Sebastian looked up at her, and his eyes were full of a grief that had been aging for sixteen years. "I want to believe he didn't. I want to believe that whatever Gideon is, whatever he's done, he isn't capable of murder. But I don't know. I've never even met him. The closest I've come to meeting my twin brother is reading about him in the newspaper, seeing his photograph in the archives. He looks like me, but I don't know if he thinks like me. I don't know what he's capable of."
Cassia reached into her bag and pulled out the child's drawing, still wrapped in its oilcloth. She handed it to Sebastian. "I found this tonight. It was hidden in a strongbox behind one of the walls. It was drawn by Cora Lindqvist after your mother told her about the night the twins were separated."
Sebastian unwrapped the drawing carefully, his rough carpenter's hands surprisingly gentle. He stared at the charcoal sketch for a long time—the woman in the blue dress, the hooded figure, the boy in the window. Then he turned it over and read the words on the back.
"G.A. was there," he murmured. "G.A. saw what happened. G.A. knows." He looked up at Cassia, his face pale. "Gideon knew. He knew about me all along. He saw our mother give me away."
"Yes. And he lied about it. He told me he learned about you from a letter in October 1997. But this drawing suggests he knew since childhood."
Sebastian was silent for a long moment. The storm raged outside, the wind howling through the ruins of Windfall House, the rain hammering against the boathouse roof. When he spoke again, his voice was barely audible.
"If he knew all along, then why did he wait? Why did he only confront our mother in 1997? What changed?"
"The letter," Cassia said. "Someone sent letters to all three of you—to your mother, to Gideon, and to you. Someone wanted all of you in Havenmoor before the storm. Someone set this in motion."
"But who?" Sebastian asked. "Who would have known about all of this? Who would have had the power to bring us all together?"
Cassia thought about the photograph in her bag. The senator. The powerful family. The political dynasty that still held sway in Kennebec. "I think I might have an idea," she said. "But I need more information. I need to know who sent those letters, and why."
She pulled out the photograph and handed it to Sebastian. "This was in the strongbox too. The man in the picture is your father. The senator."
Sebastian looked at the photograph, and his face went very still. "I know this man," he said. "Not personally. But I know his face. Everyone in Kennebec knows his face. His family still runs half the state."
"His family is still powerful. And if this photograph became public, if it became known that the senator had an illegitimate child with Elara Ashford, it could destroy them. The scandal would be enormous."
"You think his family sent the letters?"
"I think it's possible. I think someone wanted your mother dead, and they used the storm to cover it up. And I think the key to everything is Cora Lindqvist. She saw something that night. Something that frightened her so badly that her father took her away and hid her for the rest of his life."
Sebastian handed the photograph back to Cassia. "Then we need to find her. Before anyone else does."
The wind screamed through the boathouse, and somewhere in the distance, a tree branch cracked and fell. The storm was intensifying, and Cassia knew they couldn't stay here much longer. But she had one more question.
"Sebastian," she said, "why did you come back tonight? After all these years, why now?"
Sebastian stood up, his rain slicker dripping onto the warped floorboards. "Because I've been dreaming about this place for sixteen years. I dream about the boathouse, and the storm, and the child hiding behind the sailcloth. I dream about my mother's voice, telling me she was sorry. And I dream about my brother, my twin, walking through the eye of the hurricane with a letter opener in his hand." He looked at Cassia, and his eyes were haunted. "I need to know if the dreams are true. I need to know if my brother is a murderer. And I think you're the only person who can find out."
He turned and walked out into the storm, his lantern swinging in the wind, his figure swallowed by the rain and the darkness. Cassia stood alone in the boathouse, the drawing and the photograph and the locket heavy in her bag, the weight of sixteen years of secrets pressing down on her shoulders.
The storm was getting worse. The roads would be impassable soon. But she had found the drawing, and she had found Sebastian Cross, and she had found a connection to a powerful family that had never been revealed.
The truth was out there, somewhere in the mountains, in a town with a name like a bird. And Cassia Vance was going to find it.
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