Storm Surge. Celia Ashley

charter out in October?” The woman shook her head at what she obviously viewed as an imprudent undertaking. “What was the name of the ship?”

      “I…I don’t know. But the owner, the captain, would have been Edwin Waters.”

      With a nod, the clerk began to type something on the keyboard at her elbow. After several minutes, she shrugged apologetically. “Are you sure he operated out of this harbor?”

      “That’s what I was told,” Paige said. “Or just sailed from here that day.”

      “Wait one sec.” The woman resumed typing and read through the results that popped up after. “Here’s a charter went down. Not much of a story. Just a paragraph. The sailboat capsized in heavy seas during a storm. Never should have been out there, if you ask me,” she added in an aside. “A couple of commercial fishing boats made an attempt to aid the ship when the SOS came, but without success. It’s not even mentioned here how many went down with the ship. I would assume he had a crew, passengers? Doesn’t say. We picked this up from another paper. Not one of our stories.”

      Paige craned her neck in an attempt to view the monitor. “Did the ship operate out of your harbor here?”

      “Can’t tell from this, but I doubt it. We would have been all over that if it had. I’m sorry. Is this someone you knew?”

      “Not well,” Paige said, and then left with a thank you and no gazette.

      Locating a bench down the block, Paige confiscated it from a child with an ice cream cone whose parents were calling him anyway and planted her rear end in the middle. Masts with sails furled bobbed from side to side in the near distance against a bluebell sky. Between whitewashed buildings, Paige glimpsed sailing craft and motorized boats, but no commercial vessels. Not surprising, since the town appeared to be a playground of the moneyed crowd and sightseers. She would head toward the docks in a few minutes, though she didn’t anticipate receiving any hard facts. For now, she needed to think. Sit and think about what she had ever hoped to gain from her search.

      “Excuse me, I think you dropped this.”

      Paige glanced at the hand extended before her face. Calloused and hard. A working man’s hand. She looked up.

      For a fleeting moment, she thought she knew him from somewhere, but then she realized he possessed what she and her friends at home had dubbed “the everyman face.” The high cheekbones and chiseled jaw advertisers used to grace ads by the hundreds in glossy magazines. The kind of man women wished they knew. The guy standing in front of her, however, hadn’t looked like that in a while. One too many battles had shattered his handsome countenance, and time had healed it in ways it shouldn’t have. The expression on his face made Paige draw back.

      “I don’t know what that is,” she said with a nod at his hand, “but it’s not mine.”

      “Are you sure? Take another look.”

      She frowned at the folded cardstock printed with a colorful, wrinkled depiction on the inner side. “I’m positive.”

      “Take it.”

      “I beg your pardon?”

      “It belongs to you.”

      “I’m going to call the police.” Paige reached for her cell phone and pulled it from her purse. With a laugh, the man flung the object down at her feet and strode away. Clutching the phone in her fist, Paige watched until he was safely out of sight before bending to pick the article off the sidewalk. She grabbed the edge of paper with her fingernails, setting it down on the bench at her side, afraid something might fall out. After a moment, she used the edge of her phone to spread the cardstock flat. Her heart skipped a solid beat.

      She hadn’t dropped this. Not here. The last time she had seen this particular item had been three nights ago, where it had marked her place in her book on the nightstand.