Read Chapter 9: The Missing Boat

The cove was called Sgeir Dubh on the charts, though the fishermen called it the Black Tooth, and it chewed boats the way a dog chewed bones. Isla stood at the ridgeline above it, the wind whipping her jacket against her ribs, and stared down at what was left of the *Morven*.

Her boat. Her research. Her father's name painted on the bow, still legible beneath a fresh wound of splintered fiberglass.

The hull lay on its side against a clutch of black rocks, keel exposed to the grey sky like the belly of a beached whale. The storm had been bad—unnatural bad—but not this bad. Not enough to throw a mooring line and drag a heavy research vessel half a mile into a cove that required local knowledge to find.

She scrambled down the scree slope, gravel skittering ahead of her. The tide was out, leaving a skirt of bladderwrack around the wreck, and the smell of diesel and cold salt hit her as she approached.

Jamie was already there, standing at a respectful distance from the hull, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his anorak. He was twenty-four, fresh from Oban, and he still looked at the sea like it owed him something. Right now, he looked at the *Morven* like it had personally betrayed him.

"Was like this when I got here," he said. "Half an hour ago. I was checking the mooring lines after last night, and—" He gestured at the wreck, helpless.

"You raise the alarm?"

"Aye. Coast guard's not coming for a wrecked boat, Isla. They've got bigger problems than us."

She didn't answer. She was already walking around the hull, running her hand along the scarred fiberglass. The damage was wrong. The impact points were too high, too clean. A storm-driven boat didn't slide up onto rocks like this, gentle as a mother laying down a child.

It was dragged.

She knelt, pressing her palm to the sand where the hull met stone. Drag marks. Deep, scored channels running from the waterline up to the rocks, as if something had hauled the *Morven* ashore with a rope the size of a ship's hawser.

"Jamie," she said quietly. "Look at this."

He came over, crouched beside her. He was quiet for a long moment. "That's not tide work."

"No. It's not."

She stood and climbed over the lower edge of the hull, dropping into the cockpit. The cabin door was jammed, and she had to put her shoulder into it, wood groaning and splintering before it gave. Inside, the *Morven* was a wreck of scattered papers and broken instruments. The chart table had been swept clean, everything piled against the aft bulkhead like the boat had been picked up and shaken.

She righted the logbook from where it had fallen, flipping it open. Water had stained the edges of the pages, but the ink was still legible. Her own hand, her own pen. Entries from the past two weeks, all routine. Survey points, seal counts, water temperatures.

Then she stopped.

The entry was dated four days ago. A Tuesday. She had been at the archive with Tam that day, going through Fiona's records on the seal-born. She remembered the rain against the windows, the smell of old paper, Tam's voice low and strange as he read the folktales aloud.

But the logbook said she had taken the *Morven* out that morning. A survey run to the northern rookery. Seal count, bull haulout, two pups weaned.

The handwriting was hers. She would have sworn it was hers.

"I didn't write this," she said.

Jamie was at the cabin door, his face half in shadow. "What?"

"This entry. It's dated Tuesday. I wasn't on the boat Tuesday. I never left the island." She held up the logbook. "I was at the archive. You know that. You drove me there."

Jamie looked at the page, then at her. His face was unreadable. He took the logbook from her hands, turning it to face the light. He studied the handwriting for a long moment.

"It looks like yours," he said.

"It is mine. That's the problem. It's my hand, but I didn't write it."

Jamie was quiet. The boat creaked around them, settling into its ruin. Water dripped somewhere, a steady ticking against metal.

He said, "I saw Tam."

Isla didn't move. The air in the cabin suddenly felt too thin.

"Where?"

"Here. The night of the storm." Jamie wouldn't meet her eyes. He was looking at the logbook, turning it over and over in his hands. "I was checking the north moorings after the boy was pulled out. Making sure nothing had come loose. And I saw him, Isla. Standing on the jetty, looking out at the water. I called to him, but he didn't answer. He just walked down to the end of the pier and stood there."

"Tam was with me," Isla said. "The whole night. After the rescue, I took him back to the cottage. He was exhausted. He slept."

"Did you watch him sleep?"

The question hit her like a slap. She opened her mouth to answer, but the words stumbled. The night after the storm had been a blur of adrenaline and relief. She had made tea. She had called Morag. She had sat in her chair, watching the rain hammer against the windows, her mind racing with the image of Tam's webbed fingers, his lungs full of sea.

She had not watched him sleep.

"I saw him," Jamie repeated. "There's a lamp on the end of the jetty. It caught his face. It was him."

Isla closed her eyes. The boat shifted again, and she could feel the sea moving beneath them, patient and deep.

"Maybe he was sleepwalking," she said. "Given everything he's been through—"

"Maybe." Jamie's voice was flat. "But the boat was dragged ashore, Isla. Not sunk. Not wrecked by the storm. Dragged. Onto rocks that aren't even on the tide charts. Somebody wanted her here."

He set the logbook down on the chart table and stepped back, out of the cabin, out into the grey daylight. Isla stood alone among the wreckage, the paper and broken glass and diesel smell pressing in on her.

She couldn't explain the logbook. She couldn't explain the drag marks. She couldn't explain the rational, scientific parts of her brain screaming at her that all of this was impossible.

But she could explain Jamie's face when he said Tam's name. He wasn't afraid of the wreck. He was afraid of her. Afraid of what she might do next, afraid she might choose the wrong side.

She picked up the logbook and tucked it into her jacket.

By the time she climbed out of the hull, the sun had burned through the cloud cover, laying a pale wash of light across the cove. Jamie stood at the waterline, his back to her, watching the waves slide over the drag marks and erase them, one by one.

"Isla," he said without turning. "You need to think about what you're doing. That man—whatever he is—the village is splitting over him. Angus is calling for a vote. And now this."

"The boat didn't sink in the storm, Jamie. It was brought here. That takes strength. Real strength. Not sleepwalking strength."

He finally turned to face her. His eyes were strained, and for a moment he looked older than he was. "Then you tell me what it was. You're the scientist. You're the one who knows about the seals."

He meant it as a challenge. But Isla heard something else underneath. A plea. *Tell me this has an explanation. Tell me the world still makes sense.*

She didn't have an answer for him.

"Tam has gaps in his memory," she said. "He told me himself. There are whole hours he can't account for. Morag thinks the sea is calling him, using him."

"Using him to drag your boat onto a beach?"

Isla let out a breath. The logbook was heavy against her chest, a weight pressing over her heart.

"I don't know," she admitted. "But I'm going to find out."

She turned and started the climb back up the ridgeline. Behind her, the *Morven* lay broken on the stones. Her father's boat. Her father's name. All that research and hope and years of careful work, pulled apart like a toy.

The pendant was warm against her collarbone. Warmer than it had been a few hours ago. She touched it through her jacket and felt the spiral pattern pressing into her palm, an old song trying to be heard.

Don't, she told it. Don't you start too.

But the warmth didn't fade. It sat against her skin, patient and familiar, as the tide rolled in and took the drag marks away.

Later, she found Jamie on the road back to the village. He was leaning against his Land Rover, smoking a cigarette, and she could see the day's events written in the slump of his shoulders.

She stopped beside him. "Who else saw Tam on the jetty that night?"

He dropped the cigarette and ground it out with his heel. "I dinnae know. The boy's father, maybe. He was down at the harbor half the night, getting the lifeboat checked."

"The boy's father."

"Aye. Callum MacIver. The boy Tam pulled out of the water." Jamie looked at her, something unreadable in his eyes. "He owes Tam his son's life. Doesn't mean he trusts him. People are strange about debts, Isla. They get owed too much and they start to wonder if they're being used."

Isla climbed into the driver's seat of her own car, a battered Fiat she'd had since university. Jamie's words followed her down the narrow road.

*People are strange about debts.*

Angus had said much the same thing. The sea collected what it was owed. The selkie woman he'd freed, twenty years ago, green eyes like sea glass, resembling Isla.

*Maybe she was my mother,* Isla thought. The words felt strange even inside her head, too large to hold.

She gripped the wheel and drove toward Tam.

He was sitting on the cottage steps when she pulled up, the late sun catching the dark fall of his hair. He stood as she approached, reading her face, his expression shifting from welcome to concern.

"Isla? What's happened?"

She stopped a few feet away from him. The logbook was still pressed against her chest. She could feel it there, that impossible handwriting, her own hand, lying.

"Where were you the night of the storm?" she asked. "After you pulled the boy out. After we went inside."

Tam frowned. "I was with you. We had tea. You wrapped my hands. I fell asleep on the sofa."

"You remember that."

"Yes." He hesitated. "Isla, what is this?"

"Do you remember anything else about that night? Anything after you fell asleep?"

A flicker crossed his face. She caught it before he could suppress it. A moment of doubt, of reaching, and coming up empty.

"No," he said quietly. "I remember falling asleep. And I remember waking up when you put your hand on my shoulder." A pause. "Why?"

Isla took the logbook from her jacket. She opened it to Tuesday's entry and held it out to him.

He took it, reading. His face didn't change.

"This is your handwriting," he said.

"Yes."

"Then what am I looking at?"

She heard what he wasn't saying. *Are you accusing me of this?*

The pendant was warm again. Warmer. She looked at his hands, steady and human now, the webbing safely hidden beneath the skin.

"I don't know what I'm looking at," she said. "That's the problem."

The sea went on breathing at the bottom of the garden, patient, endless, wearing down stones.