The Bait Shop in Splinters
The first thing I noticed was the smell. Not the usual bait shop smell—that mix of sawdust, minnow buckets, and the faint metallic tang of hooks and sinkers that had clung to Theo's clothes since we were kids. This was different. Sharper. Like the air after lightning hits a tree, all ozone and burnt wood and something else underneath, something that made my stomach turn before I even saw the glass.
I saw the glass first. It was everywhere. A constellation of it glittering on the sidewalk in the early morning light, catching the sun like the lake used to when it was still a lake and not a memory. The windows of Theo's bait shop—both of them, the big one facing the street and the smaller one by the door—were gone. Not cracked. Not broken in one spot. Gone. The frames stood empty like eye sockets, and inside, the dark was full of shapes I couldn't quite make out.
"TRAITOR" was spray-painted across the door. Red paint, the kind that drips. It ran down the wood in thin rivulets, pooling in the grain like blood from a wound. The letters were uneven, angry, the work of someone who'd been shaking when they wrote it. Or maybe just in a hurry.
I stood there for a long moment, my backpack heavy on my shoulders, the ledger inside it feeling like it had gained weight overnight. The street was quiet. It was barely past six, and the heat was already starting to build, that dry pressing weight that made everything feel slow and thick. A dog barked somewhere down the block. A screen door slammed. Normal sounds. Normal morning. Except for the fact that Theo's shop—the only thing his family had left, the only thing that still tied them to this town—was a wreck.
I didn't think. I just moved. My boots crunched through the glass as I pushed the door open, and the smell hit me full in the face. Fish. Old blood. And something else. Something chemical. I stepped inside and my foot caught on something that skittered across the floor—a reel, maybe, or a tackle box lid. The dark was cool, a relief from the heat, but it felt wrong. The shop had always been a place of order, of careful arrangement. Hooks sorted by size. Lures by color. The glass counter where Theo's father used to keep the good rods, the ones you had to ask to see.
Now the counter was tipped over. The rods were scattered on the floor like pickup sticks. A display of bobbers had been knocked off the wall, and the little red and white spheres rolled gently in the breeze from the open door, bumping against each other like they were trying to wake up.
Theo was in the back, by the bait fridge. He was standing with his back to me, his shoulders hunched, and I could see the glass crunching under his boots as he shifted his weight. He was holding a broom, but he wasn't sweeping. He was just standing there, gripping it like it was the only thing keeping him upright.
"Theo," I said.
He didn't turn around. "You shouldn't be here."
"I saw the windows."
"Yeah." His voice was flat. "I figured you would. Everyone will. That's kind of the point."
I stepped over a broken rod—a nice one, graphite, the kind that cost more than a week of groceries—and moved toward him. The chemical smell was stronger here. I looked at the bait fridge. The glass door was cracked, a spiderweb of fractures radiating from a single point in the center. Someone had punched it. Or hit it with something. The fridge was still running, humming its low hum, but the bait inside—the little cups of bloodworms, the trays of minnows—was a mess. One of the cups had tipped over, and the worms were drying on the shelf, curling in the cold air.
"Theo," I said again. "Who did this?"
He finally turned. His face was a mask I didn't recognize. Not the Theo I'd known as a kid, the one who laughed too loud and threw rocks at the water tower just to hear them clang. Not even the harder Theo I'd seen at the funeral, the one who stood at the back with his arms crossed and his jaw set. This was something else. Something tired. Something that had been up all night, maybe, watching the dark and waiting for the sound of breaking glass.
"Does it matter?" he said. "It's just stuff. It's just a shop."
"It's not just a shop and you know it."
He laughed, but it wasn't a real laugh. It was a dry, hollow sound, like a stone skipping across a dead lake. "Yeah. I know it. But I don't know what to do about it, Wren. I don't know what to do about any of it."
He set the broom down and walked past me, toward the front of the shop. I followed. The glass crunched under both our boots now, a duet of destruction. He stopped at the counter—the tipped-over counter—and righted it with a grunt. The glass top was cracked but intact. He ran his hand over it, wiping away a smear of something dark that might have been paint or might have been blood.
"Your grandmother's shop," I said.
He nodded. "She left it to me. Did you know that? She left it to me in her will, even though I wasn't family. Not by blood. She said I was the only one who still knew how to tie a proper knot." He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "She taught me, you know. When I was eight. My dad was gone by then, and my mom was working double shifts at the hospital, and your grandmother—" He stopped. Swallowed. "She taught me how to tie a clinch knot. A palomar. A blood knot. She said a man who could tie a blood knot could survive anything."
I didn't know what to say. I'd known Theo's grandmother, of course. Everyone in Calder's Landing had. She was a small woman with a voice like a chain saw and a laugh that could carry across the whole lake. She'd run the bait shop for forty years, and when she died, the town had turned out in force. I'd been twelve. I'd stood at the back with my sister, June, and watched Theo cry for the first time in his life.
"I'm sorry," I said.
He shrugged. "It's just stuff. I keep saying that. Maybe if I say it enough, I'll believe it."
He picked up a broom from the corner—the one he'd set down—and started sweeping. The glass made a sound like rain on a tin roof, a sound that didn't belong in this dry, dead town. I watched him for a moment, then found another broom and started on the other side of the shop.
We worked in silence for a while. The sun was climbing higher, and the light through the empty windows was harsh and white, picking out every crack in the floor, every stain on the walls. I swept up the bobbers, the lures, the scattered hooks. I found a photograph under a pile of shattered display cases—Theo and his brother, Danny, standing on the dock with a stringer of bass, both of them grinning like they'd just won the lottery. The glass was cracked across Danny's face, splitting his smile in two.
I picked it up. "This was in the display case."
Theo glanced at it, then looked away. "Yeah. That was the summer before—" He stopped. "Before everything."
I set the photograph on the counter, propping it against the cash register. The register was still there, still locked, still full of whatever small bills Theo had made yesterday. The vandals hadn't bothered with it. They hadn't come for money. They'd come to send a message.
"TRAITOR," I said. "They think you're a traitor."
"I know what it says. I wrote it."
I stopped sweeping. "What?"
He didn't look at me. He kept sweeping, his movements mechanical, his eyes fixed on the floor. "I wrote it. Last night. After Cole came by."
"Cole came by?"
"He came by the house. Around midnight. He had two guys with him, guys I've known since high school. Guys who used to fish off my dock." He laughed again, that same hollow sound. "He told me I had a choice. I could stop poking around the lake, stop helping you, stop pretending I gave a shit about a body of water that's been dead for a decade. Or I could be the next thing that gets buried in it."
I felt the cold start in my chest and spread outward. "Theo—"
"He didn't touch me. He didn't have to. He just stood there on my porch, smiling that smile he does, and told me that my brother was lucky to be in prison. Because at least in prison, he was safe. At least in prison, no one could make him disappear."
The broom fell from my hands. It clattered on the floor, and the sound was too loud in the quiet shop. "He threatened Danny?"
"He threatened everyone." Theo finally stopped sweeping. He leaned on the broom, his head bowed, his shoulders rising and falling with breath that was too fast, too shallow. "He said he knew about the ledger. He said he knew about the spring. He said if I didn't back off, he'd make sure my mother lost her job, make sure Danny never got out of prison, make sure I didn't have a shop to come back to." He gestured at the broken windows, the scattered glass. "So I did it myself. I figured if he was going to destroy me anyway, I'd rather do it on my own terms. I'd rather be the one holding the hammer."
I crossed the room. I didn't think about what I was doing. I just did it. I put my hand on his arm, and he flinched, but he didn't pull away. "Theo. Look at me."
He didn't. He kept his eyes on the floor, on the glass, on the wreckage of his grandmother's shop.
"Theo," I said again. "Look at me."
He looked. His eyes were red-rimmed, but he wasn't crying. I wasn't sure he knew how to cry anymore. "I'm tired, Wren. I'm so tired. I've been visiting Danny every month for three years. Every month, I sit across from him in that room with the plastic chairs and the vending machine that's always out of order, and I tell him I'm working on it. I tell him I'm going to get him out. And he just—" Theo's voice cracked. "He just sits there. He just looks at me with those eyes, and he says, 'It's okay, Theo. I'd have done the same.'"
"Done the same?"
"Testified." Theo's voice was barely a whisper. "He thinks you did what you had to do. He thinks you were just a scared kid who didn't know any better. He doesn't blame you, Wren. He's never blamed you."
I felt something crack inside me, something I'd been holding together with willpower and guilt and the careful lists I made in my head. "He should blame me. I sent him to prison. I—"
"You were seventeen." Theo's voice was harder now. "You were seventeen, and your sister was dead, and the police told you Danny was driving the boat, and you believed them. Because why wouldn't you? Why would you think the town you grew up in would lie to you about something like that?"
"Because I should have known better." My voice was shaking. "Because I grew up here too. Because I knew what the council was capable of. I knew—"
"You knew what your grandmother knew. And she didn't tell you everything, did she? She kept the ledger hidden. She kept the truth hidden. She was trying to protect you."
I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell him that my grandmother's protection had cost Danny three years of his life, had cost June her life, had cost this town its lake. But I couldn't. Because he was right. She had been trying to protect me. And I had let her.
I let go of his arm. I stepped back. The shop was quiet except for the hum of the bait fridge and the distant sound of a truck engine somewhere on the highway. The heat was pressing in through the broken windows, and I could feel sweat starting to bead on my forehead, on my upper lip.
"We have to stop them," I said. "We have to—"
"I know." Theo picked up the broom again. "I know. But we can't do it from here. We can't do it from a shop with broken windows and a word painted on the door. We have to do it from somewhere they can't reach."
"The spring," I said.
He nodded. "The spring. We clear the fissure. We get the water flowing. And then we show them what they've done."
I looked around the shop—at the scattered lures, the broken rods, the photograph of Theo and Danny with their stringer of bass. I thought about June. I thought about the way she used to laugh, loud and unapologetic, the way she'd skip stones across the lake and count every bounce. I thought about the ledger in my backpack, the one with my grandmother's handwriting, the one that held the names of everyone who'd ever hurt this town.
"Okay," I said. "Okay. We clear the fissure. But first—" I picked up the photograph and handed it to him. "First we fix this."
He looked at the photograph for a long moment. Then he set it on the counter, propped against the cash register, and picked up his broom.
"Okay," he said. "Okay."
We swept in silence after that. The glass piled up in the dustpan, glittering in the morning light. The sun climbed higher. The heat pressed down. And somewhere beneath the cracked earth of the lake basin, the water kept moving, waiting for us to find it again.
I saw the glass first. It was everywhere. A constellation of it glittering on the sidewalk in the early morning light, catching the sun like the lake used to when it was still a lake and not a memory. The windows of Theo's bait shop—both of them, the big one facing the street and the smaller one by the door—were gone. Not cracked. Not broken in one spot. Gone. The frames stood empty like eye sockets, and inside, the dark was full of shapes I couldn't quite make out.
"TRAITOR" was spray-painted across the door. Red paint, the kind that drips. It ran down the wood in thin rivulets, pooling in the grain like blood from a wound. The letters were uneven, angry, the work of someone who'd been shaking when they wrote it. Or maybe just in a hurry.
I stood there for a long moment, my backpack heavy on my shoulders, the ledger inside it feeling like it had gained weight overnight. The street was quiet. It was barely past six, and the heat was already starting to build, that dry pressing weight that made everything feel slow and thick. A dog barked somewhere down the block. A screen door slammed. Normal sounds. Normal morning. Except for the fact that Theo's shop—the only thing his family had left, the only thing that still tied them to this town—was a wreck.
I didn't think. I just moved. My boots crunched through the glass as I pushed the door open, and the smell hit me full in the face. Fish. Old blood. And something else. Something chemical. I stepped inside and my foot caught on something that skittered across the floor—a reel, maybe, or a tackle box lid. The dark was cool, a relief from the heat, but it felt wrong. The shop had always been a place of order, of careful arrangement. Hooks sorted by size. Lures by color. The glass counter where Theo's father used to keep the good rods, the ones you had to ask to see.
Now the counter was tipped over. The rods were scattered on the floor like pickup sticks. A display of bobbers had been knocked off the wall, and the little red and white spheres rolled gently in the breeze from the open door, bumping against each other like they were trying to wake up.
Theo was in the back, by the bait fridge. He was standing with his back to me, his shoulders hunched, and I could see the glass crunching under his boots as he shifted his weight. He was holding a broom, but he wasn't sweeping. He was just standing there, gripping it like it was the only thing keeping him upright.
"Theo," I said.
He didn't turn around. "You shouldn't be here."
"I saw the windows."
"Yeah." His voice was flat. "I figured you would. Everyone will. That's kind of the point."
I stepped over a broken rod—a nice one, graphite, the kind that cost more than a week of groceries—and moved toward him. The chemical smell was stronger here. I looked at the bait fridge. The glass door was cracked, a spiderweb of fractures radiating from a single point in the center. Someone had punched it. Or hit it with something. The fridge was still running, humming its low hum, but the bait inside—the little cups of bloodworms, the trays of minnows—was a mess. One of the cups had tipped over, and the worms were drying on the shelf, curling in the cold air.
"Theo," I said again. "Who did this?"
He finally turned. His face was a mask I didn't recognize. Not the Theo I'd known as a kid, the one who laughed too loud and threw rocks at the water tower just to hear them clang. Not even the harder Theo I'd seen at the funeral, the one who stood at the back with his arms crossed and his jaw set. This was something else. Something tired. Something that had been up all night, maybe, watching the dark and waiting for the sound of breaking glass.
"Does it matter?" he said. "It's just stuff. It's just a shop."
"It's not just a shop and you know it."
He laughed, but it wasn't a real laugh. It was a dry, hollow sound, like a stone skipping across a dead lake. "Yeah. I know it. But I don't know what to do about it, Wren. I don't know what to do about any of it."
He set the broom down and walked past me, toward the front of the shop. I followed. The glass crunched under both our boots now, a duet of destruction. He stopped at the counter—the tipped-over counter—and righted it with a grunt. The glass top was cracked but intact. He ran his hand over it, wiping away a smear of something dark that might have been paint or might have been blood.
"Your grandmother's shop," I said.
He nodded. "She left it to me. Did you know that? She left it to me in her will, even though I wasn't family. Not by blood. She said I was the only one who still knew how to tie a proper knot." He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "She taught me, you know. When I was eight. My dad was gone by then, and my mom was working double shifts at the hospital, and your grandmother—" He stopped. Swallowed. "She taught me how to tie a clinch knot. A palomar. A blood knot. She said a man who could tie a blood knot could survive anything."
I didn't know what to say. I'd known Theo's grandmother, of course. Everyone in Calder's Landing had. She was a small woman with a voice like a chain saw and a laugh that could carry across the whole lake. She'd run the bait shop for forty years, and when she died, the town had turned out in force. I'd been twelve. I'd stood at the back with my sister, June, and watched Theo cry for the first time in his life.
"I'm sorry," I said.
He shrugged. "It's just stuff. I keep saying that. Maybe if I say it enough, I'll believe it."
He picked up a broom from the corner—the one he'd set down—and started sweeping. The glass made a sound like rain on a tin roof, a sound that didn't belong in this dry, dead town. I watched him for a moment, then found another broom and started on the other side of the shop.
We worked in silence for a while. The sun was climbing higher, and the light through the empty windows was harsh and white, picking out every crack in the floor, every stain on the walls. I swept up the bobbers, the lures, the scattered hooks. I found a photograph under a pile of shattered display cases—Theo and his brother, Danny, standing on the dock with a stringer of bass, both of them grinning like they'd just won the lottery. The glass was cracked across Danny's face, splitting his smile in two.
I picked it up. "This was in the display case."
Theo glanced at it, then looked away. "Yeah. That was the summer before—" He stopped. "Before everything."
I set the photograph on the counter, propping it against the cash register. The register was still there, still locked, still full of whatever small bills Theo had made yesterday. The vandals hadn't bothered with it. They hadn't come for money. They'd come to send a message.
"TRAITOR," I said. "They think you're a traitor."
"I know what it says. I wrote it."
I stopped sweeping. "What?"
He didn't look at me. He kept sweeping, his movements mechanical, his eyes fixed on the floor. "I wrote it. Last night. After Cole came by."
"Cole came by?"
"He came by the house. Around midnight. He had two guys with him, guys I've known since high school. Guys who used to fish off my dock." He laughed again, that same hollow sound. "He told me I had a choice. I could stop poking around the lake, stop helping you, stop pretending I gave a shit about a body of water that's been dead for a decade. Or I could be the next thing that gets buried in it."
I felt the cold start in my chest and spread outward. "Theo—"
"He didn't touch me. He didn't have to. He just stood there on my porch, smiling that smile he does, and told me that my brother was lucky to be in prison. Because at least in prison, he was safe. At least in prison, no one could make him disappear."
The broom fell from my hands. It clattered on the floor, and the sound was too loud in the quiet shop. "He threatened Danny?"
"He threatened everyone." Theo finally stopped sweeping. He leaned on the broom, his head bowed, his shoulders rising and falling with breath that was too fast, too shallow. "He said he knew about the ledger. He said he knew about the spring. He said if I didn't back off, he'd make sure my mother lost her job, make sure Danny never got out of prison, make sure I didn't have a shop to come back to." He gestured at the broken windows, the scattered glass. "So I did it myself. I figured if he was going to destroy me anyway, I'd rather do it on my own terms. I'd rather be the one holding the hammer."
I crossed the room. I didn't think about what I was doing. I just did it. I put my hand on his arm, and he flinched, but he didn't pull away. "Theo. Look at me."
He didn't. He kept his eyes on the floor, on the glass, on the wreckage of his grandmother's shop.
"Theo," I said again. "Look at me."
He looked. His eyes were red-rimmed, but he wasn't crying. I wasn't sure he knew how to cry anymore. "I'm tired, Wren. I'm so tired. I've been visiting Danny every month for three years. Every month, I sit across from him in that room with the plastic chairs and the vending machine that's always out of order, and I tell him I'm working on it. I tell him I'm going to get him out. And he just—" Theo's voice cracked. "He just sits there. He just looks at me with those eyes, and he says, 'It's okay, Theo. I'd have done the same.'"
"Done the same?"
"Testified." Theo's voice was barely a whisper. "He thinks you did what you had to do. He thinks you were just a scared kid who didn't know any better. He doesn't blame you, Wren. He's never blamed you."
I felt something crack inside me, something I'd been holding together with willpower and guilt and the careful lists I made in my head. "He should blame me. I sent him to prison. I—"
"You were seventeen." Theo's voice was harder now. "You were seventeen, and your sister was dead, and the police told you Danny was driving the boat, and you believed them. Because why wouldn't you? Why would you think the town you grew up in would lie to you about something like that?"
"Because I should have known better." My voice was shaking. "Because I grew up here too. Because I knew what the council was capable of. I knew—"
"You knew what your grandmother knew. And she didn't tell you everything, did she? She kept the ledger hidden. She kept the truth hidden. She was trying to protect you."
I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell him that my grandmother's protection had cost Danny three years of his life, had cost June her life, had cost this town its lake. But I couldn't. Because he was right. She had been trying to protect me. And I had let her.
I let go of his arm. I stepped back. The shop was quiet except for the hum of the bait fridge and the distant sound of a truck engine somewhere on the highway. The heat was pressing in through the broken windows, and I could feel sweat starting to bead on my forehead, on my upper lip.
"We have to stop them," I said. "We have to—"
"I know." Theo picked up the broom again. "I know. But we can't do it from here. We can't do it from a shop with broken windows and a word painted on the door. We have to do it from somewhere they can't reach."
"The spring," I said.
He nodded. "The spring. We clear the fissure. We get the water flowing. And then we show them what they've done."
I looked around the shop—at the scattered lures, the broken rods, the photograph of Theo and Danny with their stringer of bass. I thought about June. I thought about the way she used to laugh, loud and unapologetic, the way she'd skip stones across the lake and count every bounce. I thought about the ledger in my backpack, the one with my grandmother's handwriting, the one that held the names of everyone who'd ever hurt this town.
"Okay," I said. "Okay. We clear the fissure. But first—" I picked up the photograph and handed it to him. "First we fix this."
He looked at the photograph for a long moment. Then he set it on the counter, propped against the cash register, and picked up his broom.
"Okay," he said. "Okay."
We swept in silence after that. The glass piled up in the dustpan, glittering in the morning light. The sun climbed higher. The heat pressed down. And somewhere beneath the cracked earth of the lake basin, the water kept moving, waiting for us to find it again.