“Harbor patrol is three minutes out,” Dash said, his voice calm but carrying an authority that suggested arguing would be spectacularly unwise. “They have the proper equipment and training. You have a surfboard and a death wish. Which one do you think the whale needs?”
One of the Clemmons twins—the one with the questionable mohawk—made a move toward the paddleboard rental stand. Dash didn’t even turn his head. “Jake Clemmons, if your hand touches that board, you’ll be spending your weekends cleaning barnacles off the harbor patrol boats until you graduate. Your brother too, just for genetic proximity.”
The twin’s hand retreated as if the paddleboards had suddenly developed teeth.
The teenagers stood in a frustrated cluster, their heroic impulses thoroughly leashed by Dash’s calm authority. He hadn’t raised his voice once past that initial command, hadn’t needed to. He simply stood there, hands relaxed at his sides, watching the whale with the same steady attention he was somehow simultaneously giving to every teenager on the dock.
The next twenty minutes were controlled chaos. I found myself deputized as crowd control, which mostly meant using my local knowledge to assign tasks that made people feel helpful while keeping them from doing anything spectacularly stupid.
The crowd had swelled to nearly fifty people now, all jostling for the best view and creating the kind of chaos that could quickly turn dangerous on a narrow dock. Dash was handling the teenagers, but the adults were developing their own unhelpful ideas.
“Someone needs to organize these people before they push each other into the harbor,” I said, surveying the scene.
I intercepted Margaret Calhoun, who was inexplicably carrying a fishing net she’d grabbed from somewhere. “Margaret, would you mind going to the tea shop and making thermoses of hot tea? You know where the extra key is. The harbor patrol crew will need something warm when they’re done.” It was busywork, but it made her feel useful and, more importantly, got her and her fishing net away from the whale.
Howard needed no direction—he’d appointed himself official documentarian and was providing running commentary to his phone about witnessing maritime history in the making.
The Methodist youth group had begun an enthusiastic rendition of “Wade in the Water,” which, while thematically appropriate, was only adding to the chaos. Their youth leader looked grateful when I suggested they might better serve the situation with silent prayer at the foot of the dock—safely away from both the edge and the increasingly agitated whale.
“You’re good at this,” Dash said, materializing at my elbow just as the marine biologist—a woman named Dr. Battle who’d arrived moments earlier in a spray of gravel and barely contained scientific euphoria—arrived.
“I run a tea shop,” I said. “Half my job is managing people who think they’re being helpful.”
The whale chose that precise moment to demonstrate what Dr. Battle had been so excited about. Its massive head rose from the water—slow, deliberate, impossibly large. For one suspended heartbeat, an eye the size of a dinner plate regarded us all with what seemed like ancient patience. It was the sort of eye that had seen the ocean floor and remembered when the world was younger, and finding it here in our shallow harbor felt like discovering a cathedral in someone’s back garden—magnificent and entirely wrong.
“Juvenile humpback,” Dash said, though I hadn’t seen him leave or return from consulting with Dr. Battle. He had a talent for moving through crowds without seeming to move at all, appearing and disappearing like smoke. “Separated from its pod. Dr. Battle thinks it might be sick—that’s why it came so close to shore.”
Eugene’s singing bowls continued their ethereal drone. Someone had brought him a microphone and a small amplifier, because why not? The whale didn’t seem bothered by it, but then again, the whale didn’t seem specifically bothered by anything.
“When I took this job,” Dash said, settling beside me on the hood of his SUV where we could watch the entire scene, “I thought I’d be dealing with normal crime. Theft, vandalism, the occasional domestic dispute.”
“And instead you get whales and emotional-support iguanas.”
“Don’t forget the lighthouse incident last week.”
“That wasn’t an incident,” I said. “That was Gerald Fitzgerald forgetting his glasses and trying to break into what he thought was his own shed. For three hours.”
“He was very committed to that lock,” Dash said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “Even after I showed him his actual house across the street. That man has terrible eyesight.”
Margaret materialized through the thinning crowd like a ship emerging from fog, bearing a tray of my familiar to-go cups with the determined expression of someone who’d fought a minor war and emerged victorious. Wisps of silver hair had escaped her usually immaculate bun.
“I commandeered your apple spice tea,” she announced, as if confessing to a minor crime. “The one you keep hidden in the back like contraband. It smells like Christmas morning, and frankly, we could all use a bit of magic right now, even if it’s only the caffeinated kind.”
I accepted a cup with the resignation of someone watching their profit margins evaporate into steam. That particular tea cost more per ounce than some people’s car payments, which was precisely why I kept it hidden behind the everyday Earl Grey like a miser’s gold. But Margaret was right—it did smell like Christmas, all cinnamon and clove and the warmth that made you believe, if only for a moment, that everything might turn out all right.
“The ladies are putting your shop back together,” Margaret continued, brushing invisible dust from her cardigan with the efficiency of someone who organized charity auctions for sport. “We’ve left it better than we found it, which admittedly wasn’t difficult given that we found it with your counter covered in police evidence and what appeared to be someone’s collection of teeth.”
“Thank you, Margaret,” I said, making a mental note to warn Carly that “better than we found it” in Margaret’s vocabulary could mean anything from military precision to complete reorganization according to a system only Margaret understood.
She bustled off to distribute tea to the harbor patrol, leaving Dash and me standing in the strange quiet that follows chaos—the kind of silence that feels louder than noise because it’s so unexpected.
“Tell me something,” Dash said, his voice cutting through my thoughts. “Why do you stay here?”
The question caught me off guard. “What do you mean?”
“You’re young, talented, you could run a tea shop anywhere. Why Grimm Island?”
I thought about it, watching the whale surface again, its massive body ghostly in the fading light. “After Patrick died, I thought about leaving. His insurance money could have taken me anywhere. But this place…it’s like that whale. Sometimes you end up where you don’t belong because you’re lost or hurting, and then you discover that’s exactly where you need to be.”
