The Sinner's Obsession

Rain slashes at the station's single-pane window. Declan O'Shea has his boots on the desk and a cold cup of coffee in his hand when dispatch calls in a noise complaint: a neighbour heard screaming at the lighthouse keeper's cottage at 6:45 this morning. Female voice. Young. It is a uniform's call. He takes it anyway, because the red-taped files on his desk have been staring at him since seven - a quarter of a million dollars of town money gone across three fiscal years, Mayor Croft's signature on every approval form, and a trail that goes cold at every interview. Jerry Maddox has kept that light for thirty-two years. His coat is still on the peg. His boots are lined up neat beneath it. A half-eaten piece of toast is going stiff on the counter, and the window screen above the sink has been pushed out from the inside, not cut. Under the cot, wedged against the floorboards, is a page of ledger paper in cramped, heavy-handed writing that is not the mayor's. When Declan comes out onto the stoop, there is a woman standing at the end of the pier in a tailored blazer in the rain, and he knows the shape of her before she turns. Lila Marchetti has not been in Port Blaine since her sister's funeral. She writes for a paper in Portland now. She has a thin white scar through her left eyebrow and an old refusal to accept what the coroner put on the form: that Cassie's death was a fall, that it was accidental, that the case was closed. *Rules didn't save my sister.* The neighbour who reported the screaming called Lila before she called the police, because the town already knows Lila is asking questions again. And what she and Declan piece together - a town planner who has disappeared, a stack of surveillance photographs a previous investigator took of boat meetings at the marina, an enforcer in a leather vest who was somewhere he should not have been - keeps folding two separate cases into the same one. Her mother has been holding a name back for three years. A small-town dark romance of municipal corruption, an unclosed grave and a cop who would rather have a warrant than a shortcut - closed-door, with a returning journalist, a detective who has known her since high school, and an ending that includes a proposal made in a hospital waiting room with carnations bought on sale.