Read Chapter 21: The Truth About Tomas

The village had gone quiet by the time I found Mrs. Polwhele. She was locking the church gate, a bundle of dried flowers in one arm, and she startled when I called her name across the lane.

“Miss Ash.” She recovered quickly, but her eyes flickered past me toward the cliff road. “You’re out late. The path’s treacherous this time of year.”

“I need to ask you about someone.” I stopped a pace from her, close enough that she couldn’t avoid my gaze. “Tomas. The man who kept the cottage at Merrick Manor before you.”

Her hand stilled on the latch. A gull screamed overhead, and she waited for it to pass before she spoke.

“What about him?”

“Merrick told me he left. Walked off one morning and never came back.” I watched her face. “But I don’t think that’s true.”

Mrs. Polwhele was a good woman. I’d come to know that in the weeks since I’d arrived. She brought me bread when the storms kept me indoors, warned me about the tide, asked no questions when I turned up at her door with salt on my coat and something wild in my eyes. But she was not a good liar.

She exhaled slowly, and her shoulders dropped an inch.

“You’d better come inside.”

Her cottage smelled of lavender and coal smoke. She set the flowers on the table and put the kettle on without asking if I wanted tea, which I took as a sign that this conversation would take a while.

“Tomas drowned,” she said, her back to me. “Three weeks after that girl died. Lillian.”

The words landed like stones in my chest. I sat down heavily in the chair by her hearth.

“Merrick said he left.”

“Merrick wasn’t here.” She turned, and her face was worn, older than I’d seen it. “He was in London, settling the estate. The coroner’s report went to the family solicitor. There wasn’t much of an inquiry.”

“A boating accident?”

“That’s what they called it.” She poured the tea, hands steady, but I saw the tremor at her wrist. “Tomas knew those waters better than any man alive. He’d been fishing them since he was a boy. The sea doesn’t take men like that by accident.”

“You think it was deliberate.”

She set the cup in front of me and sat down opposite. “I think Tomas was the only other person who knew that girl was at the manor. And I think he’s the only one who could have testified to what he saw that night.”

My fingers tightened around the cup. “What did he see?”

Mrs. Polwhele was quiet for a long moment. Then she reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a key. It was brass, tarnished at the edges, with a number scratched into the bow: seventeen.

“This was his,” she said. “He gave it to me the week before he died. Said if anything happened to him, I should hold it until someone came asking the right questions.”

“The shed,” I breathed. “The locked one by the garden wall.”

“He kept his things in there. His tools, his papers.” She pressed the key into my palm. “I never opened it. I figured whatever he left, it would know when the time was right.”

The key was warm from her pocket. I closed my hand around it.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Because you weren’t asking the right questions before.” She held my gaze. “And because I wasn’t sure you were ready to hear the answers.”

The shed was cold when I opened it, thick with the smell of salt and oil and something older—dried seaweed, perhaps, or the ghost of a fire long extinguished. Tomas’s boat shoes hung on a hook by the door, still crusted with sand. A wool sweater lay folded on a shelf, and I touched it without meaning to, imagining the man who’d worn it, who’d known Lillian, who’d kept her secrets.

I wondered if he’d loved her. The thought came unbidden, and I let it sit.

His workbench ran along the far wall, covered in coils of rope and rusted tools. But it was the wooden box beneath the bench that caught my eye. It was plain, unvarnished, bound with a leather strap. I knelt and worked the buckle loose.

Inside were journals. Five of them, leather-bound, their spines cracked with age and salt. The handwriting inside was small and neat, a man careful with words.

I opened the first and found accounts of the garden. The roses he’d pruned, the camellias he’d coaxed through the winter. The second held weather logs and tide tables, dates and wind directions and the size of the catch each morning.

The third was different.

I knew it by the first line, which was not about the weather or the garden but about her.

*She walks the cliffs at dusk, always the same path. She doesn’t know I watch her. She doesn’t know anyone watches.*

My blood went cold. I flipped forward, skimming.

*She told me her name today. Lillian. Lillian Ash. She asked about the gardens, and I told her about the roses, and she laughed like she hadn’t laughed in years. I think she is lonely. I think she is running from something.*

*She asked about the family. I told her what I knew—the old man, the sons. She went quiet after that. I shouldn’t have said anything about William.*

*She has been meeting someone on the cliffs. I see them from the garden wall, figures against the sky. I think it is the younger son, though I cannot be sure. She looks at him the way the sea looks at the moon.*

*He gave her a ring. I saw it catch the light when she waved to me this morning. She tried to hide it, but she smiled too wide. I hope he is worthy of her. I hope he does not break her heart.*

The entries grew shorter as the weeks passed. The last one was dated four days before Lillian fell.

*She came to me tonight, weeping. Said the old man had found out about the engagement, said he threatened her. She showed me the letter he’d sent her—a warning to leave, or else. I told her to go to the constable, but she said there was no proof, no record, nothing but his word against theirs. She said she was going to meet him one last time, on the cliffs at midnight, to settle it. I begged her not to go alone. She said she had no choice.*

*I will follow her. I will watch from the rocks. Whatever happens, there will be a witness.*

The page after was blank. And the one after that. The rest of the journal was empty, as if he’d planned to write more and never found the chance.

But it was the second-to-last entry that stopped my breath.

*The old man came to my cottage tonight. Offered me money to leave the estate quietly. Said there had been an accident, and it would be better for everyone if I didn’t remember what I’d seen. I told him I didn’t know what he meant. He smiled and said, “Good.” He knows. He knows I was there. He knows what happened on the cliff.*

*I have written it all down. I have hidden it where they will not find it. If something happens to me, someone will come looking. They always do.*

The journal slipped from my hands.

Tomas hadn’t left. Tomas had been silenced.

And he’d hidden something—the full account of what he’d seen that night—somewhere on this estate. Somewhere they hadn’t found it.

I flipped back to his earlier entries, scanning for a location, a mention of a hiding place. And near the end, scrawled in the margin of an entry about the garden, I found a single line I’d missed:

*The sea keeps what we give it. The cave will guard my words until she is ready.*

A cave. On the cliffs.

I shoved the journal into my coat and locked the shed behind me. The wind had picked up, and the sky was going dark over the water. Somewhere out there, beyond the rocks, was a cave that held the truth about Lillian’s death.

And I intended to find it.