Read Chapter 5: Driftwood

The motor coughed twice before settling into a low, steady hum. Yann stood at the helm of the research station's battered aluminum boat, one hand on the throttle, the other shielding his eyes against the mid-morning glare. Camille sat on the bench beside him, her father's logbook zipped inside her raincoat pocket like a talisman.

"Outflow point's just past the point of Trézien," Yann said, pointing at a jut of dark rock ahead. "The circled note in your father's log. We'll start there."

Camille nodded, watching the harbour shrink behind them. The houseboat had looked almost peaceful from the water, its peeling paint and crooked mast softened by distance. She'd locked the cabin door that morning, half-afraid the sound she'd heard on her first night would still be waiting inside. It hadn't been. The boat was just a boat. Old. Empty. Waiting to be sold.

"You ever wonder why he chose this spot?" she asked.

Yann adjusted the wheel slightly. "Your father surveyed the whole coast for years. But he kept coming back to the bay of Trézien. Said the water told him things."

"Water doesn't talk."

"It does if you listen long enough." He glanced at her, a flicker of a smile. "That's what he used to say."

Camille looked away, watching the shoreline slide past. Cottages gave way to fields, then to a long stretch of dunes, pale and tufted with marram grass. The sea here was calmer than she remembered, an almost-green expanse that seemed to breathe out of rhythm with the wind.

"There," Yann said, cutting the throttle. "You see the discoloration? That brownish film running along the surface."

Camille squinted. The water near the shore did look wrong, a bruised tea-colour staining the shallows. "That's where the map said to check?"

"Your father's map pointed here. His data suggested this exact stretch had the highest concentration." He killed the engine completely and the boat drifted. "But according to the official records, the blooms start two kilometres north, near the salmon farms. For fifteen years, every report has traced them to runoff."

"And your research?"

"My research agrees with your father's map." Yann stepped to the side of the boat, pulling on a pair of rubber waders. "The blooms start here. This exact outflow. Whatever's happening, it's been hiding in plain sight."

The sound of an outboard motor split the quiet. A small fishing skiff rounded the point, its hull white with age and salt. The man at the helm was thin, weathered, his face folded into a permanent squint beneath a knitted cap.

He cut his own engine as he drew alongside them. "Cormorant," he called to Yann. "Trouble?"

"Just surveying, Jos." Yann raised a hand in greeting. "Nothing to worry about."

The old fisherman's eyes moved from Yann to Camille. Something sparked in them. He stood up a little straighter, shading his gaze. "You're Josiane's girl. No—" He shook his head. "You're Gwenole's daughter. Camille."

She stiffened. "Yes. I'm Camille Le Goff."

The man—Jos, she placed him now, one of the older fishermen who'd haunted the quay when she was small—broke into a gap-toothed grin. "I've been hoping you'd come home. Your father was the best of us." He rested his forearms on the gunwale of his skiff. "You know how I know that?"

Camille shook her head.

"July, must have been '89. You, you weren't even born yet, or maybe just a wee thing. The currents off the Pointe were savage that summer. Three of us got caught in a rip going after a lost net." Jos tapped his chest. "I was young then. Stupid. The water pulled me straight out—you don't fight it, you just go. And Gwenole came out in his little boat, worse than this one, no radio, no float suit, and he pulled us all out." He laughed, a dry rasping sound. "Your father never told anyone. Kept his mouth shut the rest of his life."

Yann shifted beside her. Camille saw something pass over his face—a brief tightening, quickly smoothed.

"But there was a boy that day," Jos went on, staring at the water like he was seeing it again. "A kid on the beach, swept clean off the rocks by the same current. Your father dove in after him. Pulled him under the breakers and didn't surface for a long time." Jos shook his head slowly. "We thought we'd lost them both."

Camille's throat felt tight. "What happened to the boy?"

Jos opened his mouth to answer, but Yann spoke first.

"He grew up." Yann's voice was steady, but there was a rawness underneath it. "He never forgot. And he spent the rest of his life trying to figure out why a man like Gwenole Le Goff would risk his life for a stranger's kid."

Camille stared at him. The sun caught the faint scar on his jaw she'd never noticed before. "You."

Yann nodded once. "He used to come by the station when I was first starting out. Not to visit me. To check the water." He looked away. "I didn't know he was your father until I saw the houseboat registration. Funny how the tide works."

Jos tipped his cap, sensing the turn in the conversation. "You take care of that boat, Camille. She's got more of your father in her than you think." He restarted his engine with a pull of the cord. "If you need anything, you know where I am."

He throttled away, leaving them rocking gently in his wake.

Camille sat silent for a long moment. The logbook felt heavier in her pocket. All this time she'd thought her father was a mystery—a quiet man who sold insurance and kept his distances. She'd never known he could read the sea. She'd never known he could swim toward danger.

"Can you hand me the sampling bottle?" Yann asked, his voice easier now, deliberately redirecting.

She reached into the gear crate and passed him a plastic cylinder. He leaned over the side, dipping it below the stain of the bloom. The boat shifted. The motor, still off, bobbed in the swell.

When he'd sealed the sample, he moved to restart the engine. The key turned. The battery whined.

Nothing.

He tried again. A click. A groan. Then silence.

"Electrical," Yann said grimly. "Probably a corroded terminal. Happens more than I'd like." He knelt and popped the engine cover, peering inside.

Camille suppressed a laugh. "You have a toolbox?"

"Under the bench. The red one." He gestured with his chin. "Be a dear and pass it over."

She found the box, heavy with rust-spotted tools, and handed it to him. Yann worked in silence for several minutes, tightening and cleaning. Camille watched the water around them, the stain of the bloom spreading like spilled ink toward the horizon.

The engine coughed once, then died again.

Yann sat back on his heels. "Battery's shot. Alternator's not charging." He looked out at the shore, distant and unreachable. "We're not going anywhere until the tide turns and someone comes out this way."

"How long?"

"Four hours. Maybe five." He pulled his cap off and ran a hand through his hair, a gesture of frustration she recognized because it was exactly what she did. "I've got a radio, but no mast on this boat. Range is short."

Camille tried to remember the last time she'd spent four hours with someone without a phone in her hand, without a deadline pulsing in her skull. She couldn't.

"You probably have somewhere to be," Yann said. "Big city things. Agency pitches."

"I told you, I'm on leave."

"Right. Two weeks of leave, and you've spent them in Saint-Briac dealing with a dead father's boat." He didn't say it meanly. Just as a statement of fact. "Must be burning through your holiday allowance."

Camille hugged her knees to her chest. The wind picked up, rattling the loose items in the boat. She found herself wanting to answer him, really answer him, in a way she hadn't wanted to answer anyone in years.

"I left because I couldn't face another morning." The words came out smaller than she'd intended. "I was winning awards. Doing the work I'd dreamed about. And every day I woke up and wanted to stay in bed until the light went out."

Yann was quiet. The sea lapped at the hull.

"My father was sick," he said finally. "A few years after he pulled me from the water, he had a bad heart. The doctors told him to stop diving. He ignored them." A pause. "He nearly died twice because he couldn't stop checking on the people he'd saved."

Camille looked at him sharply.

"I don't mean me," Yann said. "I mean the bay. The coast. Once he'd pulled that much danger out of the water, he felt responsible for it." He tilted his head toward the discolored shoreline. "That's what your father was doing in his logbook, Camille. He wasn't hiding anything. He was guarding the thing that nearly killed him."

She thought about the letter in the drawer, addressed to a woman she'd never heard of. About the person who'd stood on the deck of the houseboat two days before the storm. About the map that contradicted everything official records claimed.

"There's one entry," she said slowly, "from last month. He wrote that he'd found something near the outflow. Something he said needed to be 'buried properly.' I thought he meant the algae. Now I'm not so sure."

Yann's eyes found hers. "Buried properly?"

"It's the last entry before he died." She pulled the logbook from her pocket, handling it like it might break. "I think he knew he was running out of time."

The radio crackled to life. A tinny voice, barely audible through the static: "Research vessel Cormorant, this is the pontoon. We have a distress call logged for your position—repeat, we have a distress call logged for your position. What is your status?"

Yann grabbed the handset. "Pontoon, Cormorant. We're disabled, but safe. Waiting on the tide."

The static pulsed. "Affirmative. We'll send a tow before dusk. Stand by." The radio went silent.

Yann set the handset down. Four hours stretched ahead of them like a long, open sea.

Camille opened the logbook to the last page. Her father's handwriting was cramped, hurried, the ink smeared in places. Below the entry about the outflow, he'd drawn a small series of dashes—coordinates, maybe—and written, in letters that dug deep into the paper, not the bay.

She felt the afternoon light shift around her. Not the bay. The words opened a door she couldn't close, a corridor that led away from the green water and into something colder.

"Yann," she said, her voice strange to her own ears. "How well did you know the woman in that photo? Marianne Bréhat."

He didn't answer immediately. When he did, his voice was careful. "She worked at the station years ago. Before I arrived. She left a long time ago."

"Left for where?"

"I used to get a Christmas card from her, care of the station." He paused. "Cancun. She married a Mexican marine biologist."

Camille stared at the logbook. At the words her father had written with such intensity.

"That's not where she is now."