Read Chapter 20: The Vanishing

The rain had stopped by the time they reached the cove, leaving the air thick and salt-heavy. Yann cut the engine and let the skiff drift the last twenty meters toward the mooring where Le Bozec’s *Ar Mor* should have been.

The space was empty. Just a frayed length of rope dangling from the buoy, its end cleanly sliced.

“Someone didn’t untie that,” Yann said, his voice flat.

Camille stared at the cut fibers, a cold weight settling in her chest. “He’s been gone two days. The boat too. Whoever took him didn’t want to leave a trail.”

Yann pulled out his phone, snapped a photo of the rope, then the buoy, then the empty water beyond. “The harbor master would have logged any tow or salvage request. We both know he won’t tell us the truth.”

“Then we don’t ask.” Camille pointed toward the headland, where a narrow dirt lane climbed past a cluster of squat fisherman’s cottages. “His house is up there. I remember it from when I was a kid—he used to dry his nets on the fence.”

They tied the skiff to the abandoned buoy and walked up the lane. The cottage sat at the end of the row, its whitewashed walls streaked with moss, a rusted winch half-buried in the garden. The front door was closed but not locked. Yann pushed it open with one finger.

Inside smelled of tobacco and cold ashes. A cup of coffee sat on the table, a dark film on its surface. A newspaper from three days ago lay open beside it. A pair of reading glasses, folded neatly.

“He left mid-morning,” Yann said, touching the cup. “Coffee gone cold. Didn’t wash the cup, didn’t lock the door. That’s not a planned departure.”

Camille moved through the small room. A photograph on the mantel showed Le Bozec standing beside her father on the deck of a boat, both of them younger, grinning at the camera. Behind them, the sea was a flat silver sheet. She picked it up, ran her thumb over the glass.

“My father was never a fisherman,” she said quietly. “Not really. He crewed for Le Bozec on the nights he needed to be out there, taking his own readings. But Le Bozec was the one with the boat, the license, the reason to be on the water at all hours.”

“And now he’s gone.”

Camille set the photo down. The back of it was loose—not glued to the frame backing. She turned it over. On the white card was a torn slip of paper, folded in half, the writing cramped and hasty:

*M— if this finds you, the data is under—*

It cut off mid-word. The rest of the sheet was gone, ripped away along a jagged line.

“Yann.” Her voice came out thin. He crossed the room, looked over her shoulder. She handed him the note.

He read it twice. “M. Marianne, or you?”

“My mother was dead before Le Bozec started taking my father out. He wouldn’t have left a note for her. Unless he didn’t know she was gone.” She shook her head. “But he knew. He attended her funeral. My father told me.”

“Then he wrote it recently. Maybe when he first suspected someone was closing in.” Yann turned the note over, checked the back. Nothing. “The data is under—under what? A floorboard? A rock? The boat?”

“If the boat’s gone, and whoever took it knows about the hiding place, we need to find out what was under before they do.” Camille pocketed the note. “He would have hidden it somewhere he could access quickly, without being seen. Not far from the house.”

They searched the cottage methodically. Under the mattress, behind the loose hearthstone, inside the hollow leg of the kitchen table. Nothing. Yann checked the garden, probing the soft earth with a stick, finding only roots and stones.

Camille stood in the doorway, staring at the lane. The cottage was the last one in the row. Behind it, a narrow path descended through gorse bushes toward the cliff edge. She hadn’t noticed it before—overgrown, easy to miss.

“There,” she said.

They pushed through the wet bushes, branches snagging their sleeves. The path ended at a small wooden shed, half-hidden by a tarp draped over its roof. The door was padlocked, but the lock rusted through on one hinge. Yann wrenched it free with two pulls.

Inside, the shed was a fisherman’s chaos: coils of rope, floats, a stack of netting, a gas canister, tools hanging from nails. On a workbench against the wall, a neat square had been cleared in the dust.

Something had sat there. Recently.

Yann ran his fingers over the empty space. “He kept something here. Papers, maybe. Or a hard drive. And he took it with him, or someone else did.”

Camille’s phone buzzed. She pulled it out—a number she didn’t recognize. The message was short:

*You’re looking in the wrong places. He had no hard drive. He had a map. Check the skiff.*

She stared at the screen, then showed Yann.

“Who sent that?”

“I don’t know.” She typed back: *Who is this?*

The reply came immediately: *Someone who knew Marianne. Meet me at the old Algeco office behind the fish market. Midnight. Come alone or not at all.*

Camille’s thumb hovered over the message. Yann was reading her face.

“No,” he said. “That’s a trap. The harbor master’s been watching us, Perrot’s lawyer knows about the file, Le Bozec disappears, and now a stranger wants you alone at midnight in an abandoned building.”

“The note was meant for Marianne. That means whoever wrote this knows about her and knows about the data under—something. If Le Bozec had a map, it might show the islet. The one that’s not on any chart. And if my mother’s research was leading her there, then whatever’s under that islet is the evidence we need.”

“You’re not going alone.”

“They said come alone.”

“They said come alone or not at all. It didn’t say you couldn’t be nearby.” He pulled out his own phone, called up the dock map. “The fish market sits on the north pier. The Algeco office is a corrugated shell with three entrances: the front door, a loading door on the east wall, and a hatch in the roof.” He looked at her. “I can be on the roof of the cold storage unit across the lane, within sight of the loading door. If anything goes wrong, I’m thirty seconds away.”

Camille chewed her lip. The text still glowed on her screen. *Someone who knew Marianne.* Her mother had been dead for twenty years. The circle of people who knew her—truly knew her work—was vanishing one by one. Le Bozec, missing. Soizic, elderly. Her father, hidden.

And now an anonymous voice from the dark.

“They knew about the USB. They knew about the surveillance cameras at the harbor. They’re the only one telling us the truth so far, even if it’s a knife-edged version of it.” She met his gaze. “I’m going. At midnight.”

Yann’s jaw tightened, but he nodded. “Then we have four hours to figure out what Le Bozec kept under his boat, because if this contact doesn’t have it, we’re going to need to find it ourselves.” He pulled the folded map from his jacket—the one from her father’s logbook. “The islet. Your mother’s handwriting. Le Bozec took your father there a dozen times a year.” He tapped the marked location. “Whatever’s under this, your father would know. He’s the last one who’s seen it.”

Camille looked out through the shed door, past the gorse, to the gray expanse of the sea. Her father was in a rented room above a garage in Quimper, waiting for her call. Today, she had planned to tell him about the hearing, about Le Bozec’s disappearance, about the threatening text.

Instead, she’d ask him a different question.

She’d ask him what was buried on a tiny, uncharted islet named for the woman he’d watched die.