Read Chapter 3: The Locket

The hold of the *Evelyn Frost* smelled of damp rope and creosote, the same as every other scow Jack had crawled through in the past week. He'd taken to volunteering for the shit detail—unloading the broken crates, sweeping out the bilge-slick corners—anything that put him below decks on his own. The crew thought he was building favor with the stevedore boss. He let them think it.

He was looking for loose cargo.

The *Evelyn* was a tramp steamer that ran tobacco down from Norfolk and brought up molasses and machine parts. Not a usual suspect for the rum trade. But the *Meridian* wasn't usual either, and somebody had tucked a case of bonded whiskey behind her ballast tanks like a mother hiding candy from a child.

Jack ran his palm along the inner hull planking, feeling for seams that didn't belong. His fingers caught on a splinter and he cursed, sucking the blood off his thumb. The light from his capped lantern threw long shadows that swayed with the gentle roll of the ship. He'd been at this an hour. Nothing.

Then his boot knocked against something that rang like a bell.

He dropped to his knees. Loose plank—no, loose plate. A steel access panel, painted the same rust-brown as the surrounding hull but held by two brass screws that gleamed where the paint had worn thin. Someone had been here recently. Someone with a screwdriver.

Jack fished the folding knife from his pocket, used the blade tip to work the screws loose. The panel swung open on a hinge.

Empty.

He'd expected a case of hooch, maybe a crate of canned goods that fell off a truck. But the little compartment was clean, swept, like an empty pocket turned inside out. All that remained was a glint of silver in the corner.

He picked it up.

A locket. Oval, the size of his thumbnail, with an engraved filigree border. He worked the clasp with his fingernails. Inside, a faded photograph of a woman with dark hair and a serious mouth, and on the other side, scratched in tiny, careful letters: *To M from F*.

M. F.

He turned it over in his palm. Silver, and not cheap—the kind of thing a sailor bought in a port city when he had money burning a hole in his pocket and a girl back home he wanted to remember him. Or a girl in the next port he wanted to convince.

Jack pocketed the locket and rescrewed the panel.

The watchman's whistle sounded two short blasts. Shift change. He wiped his hands on his trousers and climbed up into the maritime gray of the late afternoon, the locket a small, warm weight against his hip.

---

The Green Lamp was already filling when Jack walked in an hour later, his pay envelope four dollars lighter after buying a round for the dock crew. Gus's place had a piano and a singer on Saturdays, but midweek it was just sawdust and smoke and the low murmur of men who'd worked a day too long for a dollar too short.

Danny O'Brien was at the bar with a ginger ale, his seventeen-year-old face still trying to decide if it wanted to be a man's. Jack clapped him on the shoulder. "You eat yet?"

"I had a sandwich," Danny said, which meant he hadn't.

Jack slid a dollar across the bar. "Get the stew. And one for yourself, sitting down, before your knees give out."

Danny flushed but took the money. He was a good kid—eager, sharp-eyed, the kind who watched everything and said little. Jack had seen him take a beating from two older dockhands rather than cry out, and that was the kind of mettle that couldn't be taught. Just needed pointing in the right direction.

"Jack." The voice came from a table near the back. Frank.

Jack grabbed a beer and joined him. Frank's glass was still full, condensation beading down the sides. He didn't drink much—said alcohol dulled the thinking, and Frank Bell was a thinker. Accountant by trade, dockworker by necessity, and the only man Jack knew who could read a shipping manifest like it was a newspaper and spot the lies in it.

"Anything?" Frank asked.

Jack shook his head. "The *Evelyn* was clean. I checked the panel where the *Meridian* stashed its goods—someone beat me to it."

Frank nodded slowly. "So we're down to three suspects."

"Two," Jack said. "I caught O'Leary drunk in the hold yesterday. If he'd found a payday, he wouldn't need to pocket rum from the cargo." He took a long swallow of beer. "That leaves Harrigan and the new man, Sutter."

"Harrigan's been on the waterfront twenty years," Frank said. "Never had but a workingman's wages."

"Twenty years of working for a pittance does not make a man honest. It makes him tired." Jack set down his glass. "And Sutter joined the *Meridian* crew three weeks before that crate turned up."

"You're guessing."

"I'm watching." Jack leaned back. The locket pressed against his hip, and he thought of the empty compartment, the clean sweep of it. Someone had come back for their goods. Whoever they were, they'd left in a hurry. A man in a hurry made mistakes.

Danny came over with a bowl of stew and sat at the end of the table, eating quietly, eyes on the door. Jack watched him watch. The kid had instincts. He'd spotted the bar fight before most of the room had even heard the first shattering glass.

"You see the way he does that?" Jack nodded toward Danny. "Eyes always moving. Counting exits. That's not something you learn. That's something you're born with."

"Or something you learn young and hard," Frank said. He studied Danny with the same detached calculation he applied to ledgers. "What's his story?"

"His father worked the docks. Killed two years ago in a crane accident." Jack kept his voice low. "Makeshift arrangements keep the family fed. He's got two sisters."

Frank was quiet a moment. Then: "A boy like that, you're not just hiring muscle. You're taking on his troubles."

"That's the point," Jack said.

They drank in silence for a while. The piano player warmed up with a halting rendition of "Ain't We Got Fun," and the room's noise climbed as men loosened with drink. Jack kept an eye on Danny, who finished his stew and sat back, looking more settled than he had when he walked in.

At nine, the door opened and a woman came in.

She wasn't with anyone—that was the first thing Jack noticed. A woman alone in a speakeasy was either lost or working, and she didn't have the look of either. She walked straight to the bar, unhooked her coat, and handed it to Gus like she owned the place. Underneath she wore a dark green dress that caught the lamplight, and her hair was pinned up in a style that was a year out of date but somehow made her look more striking, not less.

Gus poured her a glass of water without being asked. She took it, turned, and scanned the room.

Their eyes met.

Her face flickered—a moment of recognition she couldn't quite place, the way you look at someone you think you know from a dream. Then she frowned slightly and looked away.

She took a seat near the piano.

Jack tried to go back to his beer, but the locket was suddenly heavy against his hip. He thought of the photograph inside—dark hair, serious mouth. He pulled the chain from his pocket and looked at it under the table.

Dark hair.

He looked at her again. The lamplight caught the sweep of her cheekbone, the set of her jaw.

No. It couldn't be. There were a thousand dark-haired women in the city.

But when the piano player stumbled on a chord and fell silent, she leaned over and said something to him, low and musical, and the man laughed and started again. She sang along, soft and sure, her voice threading through the notes.

Jack didn't consciously decide to get up. He just found himself standing, crossing the room, the locket closing in his fist.

"Excuse me," he said.

She turned. Up close, she was younger than he'd first guessed—early twenties, maybe. A scattering of freckles across her nose that the dim light had hidden.

"You dropped this." He opened his hand.

The locket caught the light. Her face went still—not the stillness of surprise, but the deeper stillness of something private touched by an open hand.

She took it from him slowly. Her fingers brushed his, and in that brief contact he felt the calluses on her thumbs—a workingwoman's hands, hidden by silk gloves.

She opened the clasp. Looked at the photograph inside. Closed it.

"Where did you find this?" Her voice was steady, but there was a crack in it, hairline thin.

"Ship hold. The *Evelyn Frost*, just in this afternoon. It was behind a panel in the hull." He hesitated. "Someone had hidden something there. This was all that was left."

She was quiet a long moment. Then she looked up at him, and the guarded distance in her eyes cracked wide open.

"I thought I'd never see this again." She said it to herself more than to him. "Three years I've been turning over every rock in this city."

"Jack," he said. "Jack Malloy."

Molly. A different M than he'd imagined.

She smiled then—not a performer's smile, but something rarer, warmer. "I owe you more than I can say."

"You don't owe me anything. I just found something that wasn't mine."

"When I lose something," Molly said, "I like to be the one who finds it again."

Jack wanted to ask who F was, what the locket meant, what a singer with a three-year-old grudge was doing combing through a city like this one. But something in the careful way she held the locket, the way her thumb kept stroking the filigree edge, told him that was a door he'd need permission to open.

He said, "I work the docks. If you ever need anything—a thing found, a question answered—you know where to look."

She tilted her head, studying him. "And what would a dockworker want in return for such an offer?"

"Nothing." He held her gaze. "But if I ever need something *you* might know, I'll hope the favor runs both directions."

The smile came back, sharper now, more knowing. "You're forward, Mr. Malloy."

"I'm a man who finishes the job he starts."

Molly laughed—a real laugh, quick and surprised, like she'd forgotten she had it in her. She tucked the locket into her dress, over her heart. "I'm at the Blue Parlor on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If your questions find a shape, come ask them."

She turned back to the piano, dismissing him gently.

Jack walked back to his table, sat down across from Frank, and found his beer exactly where he'd left it.

"Who was that?" Frank asked.

"Someone who knows how to lose a thing and keep hunting for it." Jack raised his glass, drank, and watched the woman in the green dress over the rim. The locket was gone from his pocket, but some things, once returned, found their way back to you in other forms. He could feel it—the way the night had shifted, the way the air in the room had changed.

He'd come to the Green Lamp looking for a supplier. He'd found a crew, a lead, and a woman with a secret three years deep.

None of it had touched his original problem. He still had cash, but no product. He still had suspects, but no proof. And Frank was still watching him with patient, skeptical eyes, waiting for Jack to prove that his grand ideas could survive contact with the real world.

"Danny," Jack said. "You know where the O'Malley brothers run their card game?"

Danny looked up from his empty bowl. "Fitzgerald's, Sundays."

Jack nodded. He had a source to find, and finding one cost money. The hundred and fifty was already half gone, spent on drinks and dock-brotherhood and the kind of loyalty that didn't come cheap.

Which meant he'd soon need the kind of money that came with a different kind of loyalty entirely.

He'd worry about crosses when he came to them.