Stitch's Arc

Chapter 1 of 6

Stitch counted the torn pages again. Six. The journal had held forty. Somewhere in those missing pages, a dead woman had written the killer's name. He spread the six scraps across his desk under the lamp. Rain streaked the shadowed windows of his apartment. His tortoiseshell cat watched from the sill, her patchwork coat orange and black in the lamplight. The scraps told him little. A date. A half-sentence about a meeting at the water. One torn edge read "he came by boat." The rest of the sentence was gone. Stitch had dragged these six from the mud the night the woman died. The wind had scattered the others before he arrived. He pressed the edges together and found a match. Two scraps lined up. The woman had written about a place she feared. A shelter on the river where a man kept his boat. Stitch knew only one such building near the spot she was found. He pulled on his coat. The cat followed him to the door and cried once. "Stay," he said, and locked her inside. The river ran high and brown. The boathouse stood on stilts above the dock, its wood siding gray with age. Oars hung in a neat row along the front wall. The doors were shut but not locked. Stitch pushed inside. Damp air met him. Coils of rope hung from pegs. A small boat rocked in the slip. And across the planks, caught against a mooring post, lay a clump of pale paper, soaked and curled. The scattered pages. The current had pushed them under the dock and lodged them here. Stitch knelt and gathered them with both hands. Wet. Fragile. Some had rotted to pulp. But many held. He counted as he worked. Twelve pages. Fifteen. He peeled them apart slowly so the ink would not smear. Then a small orange shape darted past his boot. A kitten, soaked and shivering, had been hiding among the pages. It had been chewing a bundle of green stalks someone left on the dock. Catnip. The kitten had dragged pages loose, scattering them again across the wet planks. Stitch grabbed for the pages before they slid into the water. He saved most. Two floated out of reach and sank. He clutched the rest to his chest and breathed hard. Back under his lamp, he laid them out to dry. He fit the scraps together, edge to edge, hour after hour. The name should have been there. He found the sentence that promised it. "The man who did this is—" The next word was gone. Those were the two pages the kitten had sent into the river. Stitch stared at the gap. He had the whole journal now but one word. The killer's name had sunk beneath the dock where he knelt an hour ago. He would have to go back into that water.