Beneath the Stillwater
A silver fishing lure catches the morning sun, and beneath its flash, Ellis Voss lies dead on the granite slab where the old mill dam pours into the stillwater. Jonas Beckett counts the wobble of the spoon the way he counts everything in this river town: slowly, carefully, the way a man does when he knows the current can take more than it returns. He has fished this pool a thousand times. He has never fished it with a corpse at the bend. The body stirs up more than silt. Deputy Naomi Halloran arrives first, and her sister Rin isn't far behind, drawn back to a hometown that buried the wrong story the first time around. Sheriff Walt Calloway wants the death filed clean and closed before the trout season opens. Marcus Quill, whose family has owned the mill and the dam for three generations, insists the rocks have always been dangerous and the dead man was always reckless. Tommy Renfro saw what he saw and isn't talking. Sable Choi from the paper is talking too much. And old Harlan Calloway, sitting on his porch with nothing but time and a view of the water, seems to know exactly how the lure got there. In a place where everyone owes somebody something, the stillwater gives up its dead one piece at a time, along with the secrets the Beckett, Halloran, Quill, and Calloway families have been sinking beneath the surface for years. Calvin Beckett's silence, Petra Quill's old ledgers, Dovie Larkin's questions from the wrong side of the tracks, Edgar Vance's late-night visits to the dam, they're all part of a current that has been running longer than anyone wants to admit. By the time Jonas pulls the last hook free, the truth won't come clean. And neither will the water.