Editor’s Note: This is the opening installment of a serialized novel we will publish over the next four months, with new chapters posted on Tuesdays and Fridays. For those who enjoy this story set in Edgefield and McCormick Counties, the complete novel will be available for purchase early next spring. Thank you!

Morning Light

The boat creaked in its moorings, gentle and familiar, like the bones of an old friend settling in their sleep.

Rebecca Troy lay still in the v-berth of the Yazoo Freshet, eyes open long before Monday morning dawned. The ceiling just inches above her nose was painted in faint glimmers of light, moonlit reflections dancing from Clarks Hill Lake outside her cabin window. A wood duck’s call echoed across the water – squealing, plaintive, and solitary. Rebecca breathed in the sounds of nature like scripture.

There had been a time when she lived by deadlines, headline fonts, and column inches. Now she lived by the rhythm of water, wind, sunlight, moonlight and the occasional groan of this 38-foot sailboat she inherited from her beloved father. In the years since she left The Edgefield County Dispatch, she had learned to measure time not in news cycles, but in lake levels and storms rolling in across the Savannah River.

She rolled onto her side, the cool jersey-knit sheet slipping from her bare shoulder, and stared at the framed photo clipped to the mahogany shelf above her berth. Her father, the Reverend Dylan Troy, stood beaming in a Sunday suit with a fishing rod slung casually over one shoulder and a largemouth bass in his right hand. The date was scribbled on the corner in his shaky handwriting:

June 2019. Another catch.

He had died that same month. Heart attack on the golf course while entertaining a real estate client. In addition to preaching fire and brimstone on Sunday mornings, the Reverend Troy was one of the area’s most respected real estate agents Monday through Friday.

Though preaching to a small congregation in the tiny village of Trenton, a short drive from the family home in Edgefield, he had made enough money selling land to send Rebecca and her brothers to Willington Academy, a private Christian school. In a rare personal indulgence, he also purchased the Yazoo Freshet for Saturdays on the lake with his children.

“God wanted to talk business and learn how to sail,” the associate pastor had quipped at her father’s funeral. Rebecca had wanted to slap the chubby little troll who now would lead her father’s church. Surely only with the help of the Holy Spirit, she had resisted.

Rebecca sat up and stretched, her short graying hair mussed in every direction. Just a hint of early morning light sifted through a porthole, landing on the tiny French press she’d left out the night before.

Coffee. Sanity in liquid form. Rebecca stumbled toward the sailboat’s rear head.

By 6:45, she was showered, dressed and seated in the cockpit, legs tucked under her, a steaming mug in hand, laptop open beside her on the bench. The intro music to her podcast queued softly in her headphones – just a few plucked guitar notes, rising into an Appalachian fiddle refrain.

“Welcome back to High Water with Rebecca Troy,” she spoke into the mic, her voice still awakening from her restless sleep. “Today, we’re sailing into a bit of Revolutionary War history, submerged quite literally beneath the surface of Clarks Hill Lake. Fort Charlotte was a little-known outpost from a time when this region was raw, divided, and dangerous. And maybe, just maybe, it is still holding secrets 100 or so feet below the water’s surface.”

She paused, sipped her coffee, and looked out across the lake. Dr. Geoffrey Poole’s face flickered in Rebecca’s mind, uninvited. At age 42, he was fourteen years her junior. That boyish, crooked smile. That former college swimmer’s body in clay-stained khaki pants and his University of Georgia Department of Anthropology fishing shirt. The way he spoke in hushed tones about artifacts like they were old lovers – fragments of history that only needed him to listen.

Their relationship had been a thunderstorm of late-night whiskey, archaeological theories, and long, tangled mornings that left her breathless. Until recently.

Lately, Geoffrey had grown distant, guarded. His replies to her texts came hours late, if at all. He had been cagey about his team’s last dive, something about an unexpected find at the Fort Charlotte site. And then he had clammed up. No details. No follow-up.

He hadn’t responded to the message she sent yesterday: “Podcast recording at 7. You still on for lunch after?”

She leaned into the microphone. “Some say Fort Charlotte was just a footnote, a minor outpost swallowed by time and water. But others – some less than eager to speak on the record – think there’s more buried down there than bricks and musket balls. Maybe even a piece of the past someone wants left alone.”

She stopped the recording and sat back. The wind had picked up, just a breath of it, brushing ripples across the water.

Her phone buzzed. A text from her best friend Marge:

Greenfields Festival. Saturday night. Big surprise you’ll want to see. Trust me.

Rebecca sighed. She wasn’t in the mood for crowded festivals or surprises, but Marge rarely steered her wrong.

She stood, stretched again, and drained the rest of her coffee. Somewhere beneath the calm surface of Clarks Hill Lake, something was stirring. Whether it was history, lies, or something more dangerous, Rebecca was drifting closer to it.

And for the first time in a long while, she didn’t want to pull away.

Rebecca finished recording her podcast, closed the laptop and made her way topside. The sun peeked over the trees lining the opposite shore, scattering gold across the lake like coins tossed in offering. The breeze brushed at her cheek in a way that reminded her of Geoffrey’s touch.

It was quiet, eerily so. Geoffrey hadn’t set foot on the Yazoo Freshet in nearly three weeks.

They used to talk for hours, wine bottles stretched to their last glass, laughing about the sorry state of politics in America and their mutual loathing for the necessary evil of social media. He’d once told her he liked her voice better in person than on the podcast.

“It’s too polished when you record,” he had said with a wry smile. “In real life, you let the whiskey color the vowels.”

It was the kind of compliment only Geoffrey could deliver – half dissection, half devotion.

She’d fallen for him too quickly. She blamed the pandemic. Everyone was lonely, afraid. And there was something reckless in her grief at the time, the way she’d cast herself off from everything following her Daddy’s death: journalism, Edgefield, the idea of permanence.

Geoffrey had appeared in her inbox after he listened to her podcast on the effects of the 1918 flu epidemic on rural South Carolina. He’d written:

“Enjoyed your episode. You might like what we’re studying at Fort Charlotte. Ever wonder what history does under pressure? Let me buy you a drink and explain.”

That was December 2021. By February, he was staying on the boat two or three nights a week. By spring, his toothbrush lived in her headboard cubby, and they had developed a strange, lovely rhythm. He’d bring early peaches from nearby roadside stands; she’d make French toast and fact-check his grant applications.

And then after four years of a comfortable intellectual and physical rapport, something shifted. It wasn’t abrupt. No slammed doors, no betrayal, not even a real argument. Just a slow fog of silence rolling in. A drift.

He grew evasive. He seemed obsessed with something he wouldn’t explain. He was less attentive, less hungry in their most intimate moments. She tried to let him work it out, tried to give him space, but the boat felt emptier with each passing week.

And now? She wasn’t even sure what they were anymore. A paused romance? A cooling friendship with benefits? Officially ex-lovers? She hadn’t dared to dig deeper.

Rebecca took a deep breath, letting the crisp morning air settle into her lungs. Beneath her, the hull groaned faintly, straining at the dock lines like a horse that wanted to run.

“I’m not waiting for you, Geoffrey,” she said aloud, to no one.

The wood duck called again across the water, and this time, Rebecca heard something different in its cry. Not loneliness. Warning.

Back inside the cabin, Rebecca checked her phone again out of habit. Still nothing.

She set it down on the counter and told herself not to care. Let Geoffrey chase ghosts under the lake if that’s what made him feel alive. She had her own ghosts to manage somehow.

By 10:30, the sun was high enough to warm the sailboat’s cabin. Rebecca stripped down to her black sleeveless undershirt and was halfway through editing a new podcast script when her phone lit up with a call.

GEOFFREY – MOBILE

She stared at it for a few seconds before picking up, just long enough to register the flicker of annoyance rising through her. “Geoffrey,” she said evenly.

“Hey,” he said, voice bright, like nothing was amiss. “We still on for lunch?”

She blinked, caught between irritation and disbelief. “Ideally, that would have required an actual plan, not radio silence and a last-minute phone call.”

He chuckled softly. “Fair enough. Sorry. It’s been quite a week.”

“It’s been three.”

He didn’t answer that. Instead, he said, “I’ve found something. Something you will want to see.”

That caught her attention. “Something what? Another brick? Another button?”

“No. Not this time,” Geoffrey said, his voice shifting, growing quieter. “It’s metal. Flat. Engraved. We haven’t fully cleaned it yet, but it was buried in sediment right near the wall foundation.”

She sat up straighter. “Engraved with what?”

“Hard to say. A pattern. Maybe writing. Maybe a map. You’ll see.”

He let the silence hang a moment too long, like he knew he’d hooked her.

“Lunch,” he continued. “Hickory Knob restaurant. 12:30? We’re staying at the lodge now during the next series of dives. Our whole crew’s based here.”

She exhaled slowly, weighing the sting of being treated like an afterthought against the itch of a journalist’s curiosity she hadn’t fully shaken.

“I’ll come,” she said. “But remember: I’m not your free PR machine.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to be,” he replied.

“Good,” she said, already regretting her tone but not taking it back. “See you at 12:30.”

Rebecca ended the call before he could say anything else. The truth was, she did want to see Geoffrey and what he had found. Maybe for the history. Maybe for the story. Or maybe just to remind herself why she had ever let this man close enough to forget how to protect her own heart.

She pulled on her faded Furman University tee, slipped into her favorite pair of Sperrys and reached for her keys. Whatever was buried under Clarks Hill Lake, it apparently wasn’t going to remain hidden for much longer if the ambitious young Dr. Geoffrey Poole had anything to do with it.

Next up: The Artifact