He filed it himself — he trusted no clerk with this one — sliding the folder between older, quieter sins in the Halden vault, and then he stood a moment in the paneled dark with his hand on the steel door, and permitted himself to feel what he had not felt in thirty years of service: doubt, small and cold as a coin. He pushed it down. He called Cornelia at Seabrook Residence.
"It's handled," he said.
"Good," said the old woman. "Some doors stay closed, Miles."
But doors, as Pryce would learn, have a way of opening from the inside.
Chapter 8
The Reporter
Nate Corvin had been working the Halden Marine story for four months and getting nowhere, which was, in his experience, usually a sign he was getting somewhere.
The 2002 Harrow Point crane collapse had killed two men — Marcus Webb, twenty-six, and an older rigger named Donny Fiske — and injured four others. The official finding was metal fatigue. The company's maintenance logs, subpoenaed years later in a civil suit, showed a crane that had been inspected and cleared six weeks before the collapse. Two men dead, four injured, and the town had mourned for a week and moved on — that was Greyport's way with Halden Marine, the way you moved on from weather. Nate had read the inquest transcript until he knew it by heart: the foreman's testimony, the inspector's findings, the company's statement of regret and its checkbook, open and generous. Case closed. Except that Nate's source in the shipyard office — a clerk with a conscience and a mortgage — had told him the logs were retyped. The originals, she said, showed three deferred maintenance orders on that crane's cable housing.
"Who retyped them?" Nate had asked.
"Above my pay grade," the clerk had said. "But the overtime chits for that weekend were signed by Pryce's office."
Pryce. The name kept surfacing like a buoy.
His editor had told him to drop it twice. "Halden Marine buys a full page every quarter, Nate." "I'm aware." "Then be aware somewhere else." Nate had nodded, and kept a second notebook — the real one — in his desk drawer under the press releases. Four months of dead ends had taught him patience. It had also taught him that in Greyport, every thread eventually led to the same two names: Halden, and Pryce.
He'd grown up in Greyport — his father had worked the Halden docks for thirty years — and he knew the particular silence of a company town: the way people lowered their voices when the name came up, the way records went missing and witnesses went fishing. It made him stubborn. His father had called it his worst trait. His editor called it job security.
Nate was twenty-nine, lanky, with ink under his fingernails from the days he still laid out pages by hand. He'd come to the Ledger from a Boston daily, chasing the kind of story that won prizes and ruined friendships. Greyport had given him both, in the end — the prize nomination and the ruined friendship with Halden Marine's PR chief, who had been his racquetball partner for two years. The Halden story was both.
He met Alba Moreno on a rainy Thursday at the Ledger's office, where she'd come to drop off gala prints for the society page. He noticed her because photographers interested him — they saw things — and then he noticed the birth certificate.
It was sticking out of her portfolio, which she'd left open on the counter while she argued with the society editor about cropping. "You're cutting the lighthouse out," Alba was saying. "The whole point of the shot is the lighthouse." The editor — sixty, unmovable — didn't look up. "The whole point of the page is Mrs. Halden's necklace, dear." Nate, waiting for the police blotter, found himself grinning into his coffee. He liked her immediately: the set of her jaw, the darkroom chemicals under her nails, the way she lost the argument and won it anyway by sliding a second print across the counter. "Fine. Run the necklace. But this one's better and you know it." Nate didn't mean to read it. But reporters read things the way dogs smell things: involuntarily.
"Hey," he said, when she came back. "Alba Moreno. Born October 12, 2001. Filed November 9." He tapped the paper lightly. "That's a late filing. Four weeks. And this signature —" He squinted. "Crowe? As in Anselm Crowe, St. Aubin's?"
Alba went very still. "You know a lot about my birth certificate for a man I just met."
"Occupational hazard." He grinned, then saw her face and dropped it. "Sorry. It's just — Crowe's clinic was shut down in 2008 after the state found record-keeping violations. Falsified certificates, among other things. If your certificate came out of St. Aubin's in late 2001, it's worth knowing the place was already dirty."
"My grandmother was a nurse there," Alba said slowly. "She's the most honest person I know."
"I'm sure she is." Nate studied her. "But late filings signed by Crowe are — well. In my line, that's what we call a thread. You pull it, see what unravels."
Alba thought of Vivienne Halden's face. Of the negative test. Of Rosa's too-long silence in the kitchen. She thought of the tin box on her desk, still open, like a question.
"I'm not a story," she said.
"Everyone's a story," Nate said cheerfully. "The question is whether it's an interesting one." He pulled out a card. "If you ever want to know what's on the other end of that thread — I'm very good at pulling."
She didn't take the card. She left with her prints and her portfolio and her questions. But that night, she looked up "St. Aubin's Clinic" on her phone, and read until two in the morning, and the thread — she could feel it now, thin and strong as fishing line — tugged at her with every word.
The state report was dry as dust and damning as sin: record-keeping violations, falsified certificates, a clinic operating for years on reputation and bribes. She found Crowe's obituary — 2015, brief, no mention of the closure. She found a photograph of St. Aubin's, greenish corridors and all, and stared at it until her eyes burned, trying to imagine Rosa young in those halls, trying to imagine herself born there. At two she closed the laptop. At three she was still awake, watching the lighthouse through her blinds.