Chapter 5 - The Night the Boat Exploded
I spent the next hour in my father's old study, searching through boxes he had left behind. The official report called Nicholas's death a boating accident caused by a fuel leak. The Coast Guard had found no body. The insurance company had paid out. The family had held a memorial, and the case had been closed.
But one detail bothered me.
The boat had been registered under a company that did not exist until six months after the explosion.
Grace found the same inconsistency in the insurance file. She also found a name buried in an old witness statement: Elias Ward, the boat's mechanic.
He lived in a small town near Mystic. Omar and I drove there before noon.
Elias was seventy, broad-shouldered, and angry before we had even introduced ourselves. When I said Nicholas's name, his hands began to shake.
"I told the police what I knew," he said. "They told me to forget it."
"What did you know?"
He looked at the road, then at Omar.
"The boat didn't have a fuel leak. Someone planted a charge under the engine cover. I saw it two days before the explosion."
"Why didn't you report that?"
"I did. The report disappeared. Then a man came to my house and told me my granddaughter could have an accident too."
I felt cold. "Who sent him?"
Elias reached into a drawer and took out an old photograph. It showed Nicholas on the dock beside a woman in a dark coat.
Camila.
"She was there that night," Elias said. "And she wasn't alone."
He turned the photograph over. A date was written on the back, followed by two initials.
May you like
R.S.
Richard Sloane. Camila's father.
