Chapter 2 - The Salt Shed at Pier Four
The wooden skiff moored beneath Pier Six creaked violently against the pilings as the tide turned.
Ruth did not ask Voss if he could walk. She hauled his right arm over her shoulders, driving her boots into the packed ice, taking seventy percent of his dead weight onto her own frame.
The two mastiffs—stirred by Voss’s ragged breathing—staggered to their feet, their massive bodies swaying on stiff, shivering legs, following their master like dark phantoms through the blizzard.
Pier Four sat three hundred yards north, hidden behind the rotting timber breakwater of the old canning company.
The salt shed was an abandoned cedar-shingle structure that smelled of dried kelp, rock salt, and fifty years of cured cod. Ruth kicked the side latch free, dragging Voss inside, throwing the heavy wooden bar across the door before collapsing onto a mound of dry burlap sacks.
Voss hit the floor with a heavy thud, his chest heaving in rapid, shallow tremors.
Ruth did not hesitate.
She stripped off his ice-soaked wool overcoat, threw four dry canvas tarps over his body, and pulled the two shivering mastiffs on top of him, using their massive eighty-pound frames to trap his residual body heat.
From her apron pocket, she pulled a half-empty stainless-steel flask of overproof rye whiskey she had taken from the bar’s restocking shelf at closing time.
She forced the rim between Voss’s blue lips.
"Drink," she ordered.
Voss swallowed twice, coughing violently as the alcohol burned through his throat. The gray in his cheeks receded by an imperceptible fraction, replaced by a mottled, feverish red.
He reached out from beneath the canvas, his freezing, bruised fingers closing around Ruth’s wrist with surprising, iron-clad grip.
"Who was in the truck?" Voss whispered, his voice gaining substance.
"A black Escalade," Ruth answered, kneeling beside him in the dark shed. "Someone was filming your body with a red record light. They waited until they thought you were dead."
Voss let out a sound that was half-cough, half-laugh—a dark, terrible sound that raised the hair on the back of Ruth’s neck.
"Julian Sterling," Voss muttered, his gray eyes narrowing in the blackness. "My managing partner. He took sixty million dollars in offshore development loans against the harbor docks yesterday afternoon. He needed me dead before the banking registry opened at eight o'clock."
"And my father?" Ruth asked, leaning down until her face was inches from his. "Why did you speak to Ambrose Penhale three days before his boat vanished seven years ago?"
Voss stared up at her through the gloom, his breathing leveling out as the dogs’ body heat worked against his hypothermia.
"Your father didn't drown in a storm, Ruth," Voss said softly. "Ambrose was the chief surveyor for the State Maritime Commission. He discovered that Julian Sterling’s father had forged the master title deeds for every deepwater berth from Kittery to Bar Harbor. Ambrose came to me with the original brass register to file a federal injunction."
Voss lifted his chin toward the far corner of the salt shed, where three heavy floorboards were secured with hand-forged iron nails.
"The night Ambrose sailed," Voss revealed, "Julian’s men cut the fuel lines on the Marrow. I managed to hide your father’s master register beneath those boards before the fire spread to his office. I've spent seven years waiting for the only person in Maine who knew how to read his survey coordinates."
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Ruth’s heart slammed against her ribs.
She stood up, walked to the corner of the shed, and jammed the blade of her lemon knife into the seam between the floorboards.
