Page 58 of Dead Men Tell No Shells

“Not in Hartwell Cove.”

Despite myself, I laughed. The sound loosened something between us, easing the tension that had settled over the conversation. For a few seconds, we were simply Max and Josiah again, sharing a joke that would have made our old friends roll their eyes and join in. I’d missed that ease more than I wanted to admit. I’d missed the way he could tease me without making me feel small, the way a single smile could make a difficult day seem less burdensome. Remembering how naturally we’d once fit together was both comforting and painful, because it reminded me of everything we’d lost and how little I knew about whether we could ever find our way back.

Josiah’s smile faded as he glanced at the folder. “One more thing. I need to tell you something about Harvey’s watch.”

I lowered my hand. “The one that stopped at 7:43?”

“That’s the one. I don’t want you treating that as his time of death. A stopped watch gives us a time to consider, not a conclusion. We have other evidence to evaluate, and the watch might not tell us what we think it does.”

“I understand. It could have stopped before he died.”

“Exactly. We need to establish whether it was working properly, when it was last seen running, and whether anything about it suggests it stopped or was damaged- when Harvey fell.”

I thought about the watch and the way its hands had fixed that particular time in my mind. “So it might be a clue, but it might also be a coincidence.”

“Or something else entirely. We don’t know yet.”

I nodded, trying to put aside the instinct to turn every detail into a neat piece of a puzzle. Fiction taught you to look for patterns, to assume that the odd detail someone mentioned in passing would eventually prove important. Real life wasn’t so obliging. Sometimes a stopped watch was just a stopped watch, and sometimes the most significant clue was the one nobody thought to mention.

Josiah watched me for a moment before asking, “Is there anything else you saw at the festival that you haven’t told me?”

The question caught me off guard. I’d come intending to hand over my notes and discuss the property records. I hadn’t planned to talk about the other thing, the detail I’d kept to myself because I hadn’t known what to make of it. I’d told myself I was being sensible by waiting until I had more information, but now that I was sitting in front of Josiah, I could see how easily that excuse might become a habit. If I wanted him to trust me with a role in the investigation, I couldn’t keep important information to myself simply because I wasn’t sure it mattered.

“There is something,” I admitted. “I should have told you earlier, but I wasn’t sure whether it was connected to Harvey’s death.”

His expression sharpened. “Max?”

“I saw a message on Harvey’s phone.”

Josiah sat forward. “When?”

“Before he died. I’d seen him checking his phone earlier at the diner, and at some point I caught sight of the screen. I didn’t deliberately look through his messages, if that’s what you’re thinking. The words were just there and i only saw because he was standing by where I was sitting.”

“What did it say?”

I took a breath, suddenly aware of how different the words sounded when spoken aloud in a sheriff’s office instead of turning over and over in my mind. “You should’ve left it buried twenty years ago.”

The room seemed to grow quieter around us. Josiah’s expression changed in a way I couldn’t quite interpret at first. His attention had gone from concerned to intensely focused, and every trace of our earlier amusement disappeared. I’d expected him to ask questions, perhaps to tell me I should have mentioned it sooner. I hadn’t expected the immediate sense that the words had shifted the ground beneath us.

“You saw that on Harvey’s phone yourself?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And you haven’t told anyone else?”

“No. Not Ricky, not Tammy, and not anyone else. I wasn’t sure what it meant, and I didn’t want to spread something around town that might turn out to be nothing.”

“Good.” He paused, his gaze still fixed on me. “I wish you’d told me sooner, but I’m glad you’re telling me now.”

Guilt pricked at me, sharper than I’d anticipated. I hadn’t deliberately withheld the message to frustrate the investigation. I’d seen it, wondered about it, and then been pulled in a dozen directions by the shock of Harvey’s death and the discovery that his past might be tied to the present. But I could see how it looked from Josiah’s side. He was trying to piece together a murder, and I’d been holding on to a clue that might matter.

“I thought it might relate to the redevelopment. The timing seemed significant, especially after I started finding those old records.”

“It could. It could also refer to something we haven’t discovered yet.” He reached for a notebook and wrote down the wording. “Did you see who sent it?”

“No. I didn’t see a name, and I don’t know whether it was a text message or something sent through another app. I only saw the words.”

“Do you remember when you saw it?”