“DAD… PLEASE COME GET ME… HE H:IT ME AGAIN…” Then a scream. Something crashed. Then nothing. Twenty minutes later, I walked into that house and found my daughter lying in bl00d on a white Persian rug, while his mother stood nearby and smirked. “Go back to your lonely little house,” she said.

The fog on Tuesday morning was so thick the Ogeechee River looked like a sheet of unpolished zinc, the long gray moss on the live oaks hanging down into the water like wet hair. The Thorne mansion was silent, its wide stone portico dark, the white paint looking cold and dead under the dripping trees.

Meredith Thorne sat on a white wicker sofa in the morning room, her mink coat pulled tight around her shoulders against the chill. The heating system had been cut off at midnight when the municipal utility company processed the foreclosure order on the residential parcel. Behind her, three moving men in gray overalls were methodically packing her crystal glassware into heavy cardboard boxes, each box carrying a red liquidation tag from the county sheriff's department.

"This furniture was brought from England by my great-grandmother, Mr. Miller," she said as I stepped through the sunroom door, my boots making a loud, wet squelch on the white Persian rug where Callie’s blood had been scrubbed down to a faint, yellowish ring. "You cannot include it in a commercial foreclosure. It is personal property protected by the domestic inheritance statutes."

"The inheritance statutes don't apply when the property was used as collateral for an illegal credit line, Mrs. Thorne," I said, setting a copy of the sheriff's inventory on the glass table between us. "Your son signed the chattel mortgage on these specific pieces to secure the emergency bunker fuel for the Marlin Two before it left the channel. The furniture belongs to the port authority now."

She looked at the paper, her thin face tightening until the skin around her nose turned white. "You're a small, vindictive man," she said, her voice dropping into that quiet, rhythmic venom that had kept the historic district quiet for fifty years. "You think you're saving your daughter, but she's already broken. She spent three years in this house learning exactly how insignificant your name is. She’ll never go back to the marsh, John. She’ll spend the rest of her life looking at her own face in the mirror and remembering that she wasn't good enough for the stone floors."

"She won't have to go back to the marsh," I said. "We're buying the historic district townhouse on Abercorn Street tomorrow morning. The one that used to belong to your sister before she went bankrupt in ninety-eight."

Meredith's hand shook, her fingers losing their grip on her mink collar. "That house is a historical monument," she whispered.

"It’s a three-story brick building with a leaky roof and four hundred thousand dollars in back taxes," I said. "And by noon tomorrow, it will have my daughter's name on the gate brass."

Simon came down the wide marble staircase, his suit gone, replaced by a rough canvas hunting jacket that looked too large for his narrow shoulders. He carried a single leather suitcase, its handle mended with black electrical tape. He didn't look at his mother; he didn't look at the moving men. He walked straight toward the front door, his eyes fixed on the gravel driveway where the sheriff's cruiser was waiting to escort them past the gate.

"The police are waiting at the terminal, Simon," I said as he reached the threshold.

He stopped, his hand resting on the heavy brass door handle—the one shaped like a sea monster that his grandfather had brought from New Orleans. "For what?" he asked, his voice flat, all the old arrogance drained out of his throat. "The bank default is a civil matter. My lawyers said there’s no criminal jurisdiction for an institutional margin call."

"The police aren't there for the bank default," I said, pulling a small, sealed plastic envelope from my pocket and setting it on the sideboard. Inside was the original logbook from the Marlin Two, its edges charred by engine oil but the entries in the captain’s hand perfectly legible. "They’re there for the maritime fraud indictment. The captain didn't go down with the ship, Simon. He’s been staying at our fishing camp in the Altamaha basin for the last four days. He gave the state troopers his personal phone log from the night the valves were opened."

Simon’s suitcase slipped from his hand, hitting the limestone floor with a heavy, hollow thud that echoed up into the empty ballroom. He looked at his mother, but Meredith had already turned her back to him, her eyes fixed on the moving men who were currently lifting her great-grandmother's crystal chandelier down from the ceiling.