"Maybe." Mr. Tran shrugged. "Maybe also he thinks, if they arrest the old man for a few hours, even better. More time." He took the trap from Wade and shook it out. "I don't know. I'm only a fisherman. You are the police. But if I am the police"—and here something glinted in him, very dry—"I check the color twice."
* * *
The shed under the live oak smelled of resin and two-stroke oil and sawdust and the faint ammonia of old bait. It was bigger inside than it looked from the road, and more orderly than any workshop Wade had ever seen: pegboard walls with the outline of every tool drawn in marker so a missing one would announce itself, coffee cans of screws labeled in two languages, a half-rebuilt outboard on a stand with its parts laid out on a towel in the order they'd come off.
Mr. Tran showed him the window that had been forced, a small high one at the back, its latch pried with something flat. He showed him the shelf where the paint cans had sat; there were two clean rings in the dust.
"Did you touch anything after?"
"I am old," said Mr. Tran, "not stupid."
Wade photographed the window and the latch and the rings on the shelf with his phone. He found, in the soft dirt below the window outside, half a boot print, and he photographed that too, laying a dollar bill beside it for scale because he didn't have anything better. He would come back with a proper kit. He knew already that it wouldn't matter much, but he would come back with one anyway, because this time he was going to do every single thing right, even the things that didn't matter.
It was when he came back inside, ducking under the low door, that he saw the lid.
It was nailed to the wall above the workbench, the way some men nail up a lucky horseshoe or a license plate. An old paint-can lid, rusted at the rim, its top crusted with layer upon layer of dried green drips. Someone had written on it, long ago, in black marker gone brown with age. Most of the writing had flaked away. But two words were still perfectly legible, block capitals in a heavy, pressing hand that Wade had seen on the backs of photographs and in the margins of an old family Bible and on the inside cover of a tide table that still sat in his mother's kitchen drawer.
DELIA P.
He stood there with his phone in his hand.
Behind him, Mr. Tran had gone very still. When Wade turned around, the old man was watching him, and for the first time since the ramp his face was not unreadable at all. It was tired, and careful, and, under that, something else that might have been hope or might have been the fear of it.
"That's my grandmother's name," Wade said. "That's my grandfather's boat."