Chapter 8: The Man with the Master Key
Ellis moved first.
He backed through the bridge doorway, the master key tight in his fist. Reyes followed, radio raised, while I came behind her, refusing to let the space between us grow.
“Stop,” Reyes ordered.
Ellis stopped in the narrow linen passage. Shelves of folded towels pressed close on either side, smelling of bleach and damp cotton. Reyes planted herself between him and the bridge. I took the other end.
He looked from her to me. “You can’t keep me here.”
“Try me,” Reyes said.
His eyes dropped to the key. “I opened the service route. I told you that.”
“You told us what you did,” I said. “Not why. Not who paid you. Not what you knew.”
His mouth tightened. For a moment, the ship’s low groan seemed louder than the storm.
“Flynn paid me,” he said. “I thought I could take the money and keep things under control.”
“Control what?”
“I never agreed to murder.”
The words came quick, almost offended, as if he expected them to count for something.
“You helped my husband reach me,” I said. “You knew he was coming for me.”
“I thought he wanted to frighten you. Make you cooperate. I didn’t know he’d actually—”
“You didn’t ask.”
Ellis looked down. His shoulders were drawn up beneath his dark uniform, rain still beaded along one sleeve. “I needed the money.”
“So did my parents when they built their lives,” I said. “They didn’t buy their way out by putting someone else in danger.”
A tremor rolled through the deck. Ellis caught the shelf; towels slumped against his wrist. The master key flashed under the corridor light.
“Flynn knew I was in trouble,” he said. “He made it sound simple. A little help. A little cash. I told myself it was just a door held open.”
“A door doesn’t make you innocent when you know who’s walking through it.”
Reyes’s radio crackled, then fell silent. She glanced at it without lowering her guard.
Ellis’s phone buzzed at his hip.
He put his hand over it. The movement was small, but his face changed—just enough to make me look closer.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“No one.”
His thumb touched the screen. A message preview lit beneath it.
Graham Shaw: If Arthur and Judith come down, keep them from reaching the road.
I reached for the phone.
Ellis jerked it back, but not before the words had burned themselves into me. “You knew,” I said. “You knew about the fire.”
“I knew what Graham wanted.”
“And you agreed to keep my parents there.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t have to. Your phone did.”
His grip tightened around the device. The storm shuddered against the hull, and somewhere beyond the passage a heavy door slammed.
Reyes stepped closer. “Hand it over, Ellis.”
He stared at the message, not at her. “They were supposed to leave.”
“You knew someone was at the house,” I said. “You knew they might come down to the boathouse. And you still took their money.”
“I thought they’d be gone before anything happened.”
“That’s not a defense.”
His eyes lifted to mine. For the first time, I saw fear beneath the shame—not just fear of arrest, but fear of what he had helped set in motion. It didn’t soften me. My parents were out there, in a storm, and this man had made their escape part of the plan.
“Tell us how to reach them,” I said.
“I don’t know where they are.”
“You know more than you’re saying.”
He didn’t answer. The phone stayed clenched in his hand, and the master key in the other.
Reyes shifted to block the passage more completely. “Put both hands where I can see them.”
Ellis’s gaze flicked past her, toward the steel service door at the far end. His fingers curled around the key.
“No,” I said.
He lunged—not at Reyes, but at me. His hand closed around my wrist, reaching for the prepaid phone I held against my palm.
The two of us slammed into the shelf. Towels spilled over our shoulders. I twisted, trying to keep the phone, while Reyes seized Ellis’s arm and hauled him back.
“Let go!” she shouted.
The ship lurched hard beneath us.
My wrist tore free. The phone struck the deck, skidded through a scatter of towels, and shot toward the steel door. I lunged after it, but the passage tipped again. The slim device slipped beneath the door’s lower edge.
I hit the metal with both hands. It didn’t move.
“Open it!” I shouted.
Reyes seized Ellis’s key ring, but the key he’d dropped had bounced out of reach, beneath the shelf.
Then a sound came from the other side: a brief scrape against the deck.
I froze, one hand still flat against the cold steel.
May you like
The phone gave a soft, familiar chime as it was lifted.
Flynn had found it.
