The trawler stank of diesel and old fish. Halloran stood at the rail, a dead man's notebook tucked in his coat, watching the spot on the chart where an island should be. Low tide would uncover it for six hours, then drown it again. Six hours to dig up whatever the Meridian settlement had buried before the water took it back. The captain spat over the side. "Mud's showing," he said. "Go now or go home."

Halloran took the dinghy and rowed for the gray smear of mud where the island was rising. The notebook said: dig at the broken church, ten paces north of the bell. He hit the flats and ran, boots sinking in the muck, the clock already ticking in his chest.

Halloran reached the church, but someone had beaten him to it. Fresh dig marks scarred the mud, and a lantern still burned by a half-open hole. A woman stood over it, pistol raised, eyes wild. "You're forty years too late," she said. "And I'm not sharing."

Halloran raised his empty hands. "Then tell me what you're not sharing," he said, "because the tide's coming and neither of us makes it off this mud alone." The woman's gun wavered. She glanced at the rising water, then back at him, and slowly lowered the pistol. "Help me lift it," she said. "Fast."

Together they dragged the box to her boat as the flats vanished under the tide. Inside was the ledger and the key. The woman, it turned out, was the granddaughter of a Meridian settler, hunting the names to clear or condemn her own blood. "Come with me," she said. "This story doesn't end on the water. It ends wherever they ran to."