The Cedar Tide Marker
After their twenty-four-year-old surveyor daughter drowns in an apparent coastal accident, a grieving timber carpenter axes her salvaged wooden skiff—only to find an unrecorded data logger embedded in the transom that unlocks a dangerous truth.
Fictional story. Depicts parental grief, death of an adult child, dismantling of a vessel, and maritime accident investigation.Chapter 1: The Weight of Cedar
The county coroner's report on Julianne was five pages long, bound in a heavy blue folder that smelled faintly of damp cardboard and rubbing alcohol. It stated that our twenty-four-year-old daughter had perished from hypothermia and accidental drowning when her sixteen-foot wooden survey skiff capsized off Cape Mercer during an early November squall. The document cited gale-force winds, rogue coastal swells, and engine failure as the sole contributing factors. It concluded that no criminal foul play was suspected, and that her death was a tragic misadventure of the sea.
For twelve days after the memorial service, that blue folder sat on our kitchen table beside a half-empty jar of wildflower honey. Neither my husband Arthur nor I moved it. Moving it felt like admitting that the paper possessed the authority to define Julianne’s last living breath on the water.