PART 1: THE GIRL WHO COUNTED
At 3:12 in the morning, a barefoot seven-year-old girl crept into the bedroom of the most feared man on the Georgia coast and whispered in his ear:
“Mr. Kincaid, somebody switches your pills while you sleep.”
Jasper Kincaid opened his eyes.
For eighteen years, warehouse owners, truckers, and businessmen around the Port of Brunswick had known better than to speak his name carelessly.
Jasper ran a network of maritime businesses he had inherited from his father. Some were entirely legal. Others were wrapped in silences nobody wanted to break.
Yet the forty-six-year-old man who had intimidated half the coastline could no longer leave his bed without help.
For four months he had been losing weight and hair. His legs barely obeyed him, and he suffered spells of confusion.
The specialists in Atlanta spoke of a strange mix of exhaustion, neurological problems, and an old heart condition.
Jasper had even started putting his estate in order.
But Hattie Ames, the seven-year-old daughter of his night nurse, had spotted something every adult had missed.
Her mother, Renee, had taken the job at the Kincaid estate because she needed the money.
She had been a widow for five years. Her husband, Eddie Ames, had died on a night run out to sea while working for one of Jasper’s companies.
Ever since, Renee had distrusted that family.
Hattie, though, understood nothing of last names or old grudges.
She understood numbers.
She counted the thirty-nine steps in the house, the sixty-four floor tiles in the hallway, the gulls landing on the dock, and even how many times a loose board creaked outside Jasper’s bedroom.
That was how she found out that on certain nights, just after three o’clock, someone walked down that hallway.
The person wore checkered slippers.
Let themselves in with a key.
Stayed less than two minutes.
Then vanished.
Hattie had also noticed that Jasper’s white pills sometimes looked slightly yellowish by morning, with a different edge.
For five nights she did something nobody would have expected from a little girl. She waited for the figure to leave, slipped in quietly, and carried off the suspicious pills before Jasper could swallow them.
By the sixth night, she no longer wanted to keep the secret.
“The bad ones are under your pillow,” she said.
Jasper slid a trembling hand beneath the cloth and found a small packet.
He opened it.
Inside were eighteen tablets.
He looked at Hattie.
“Does your mother know about this?”
The girl shook her head.
“Mama says kids imagine things when they can’t sleep.”
Jasper lay motionless.
Only five people had a key to that room: his brother Travis, his doctor, the housekeeper, Renee, and Lyle Hargrove, the man who had worked at his father’s side for more than thirty years.
Any one of them could be waiting for Jasper to disappear.
But there was something worse.
Whoever had been switching the pills didn’t yet know that a seven-year-old had figured it out.
Jasper gently took Hattie’s wrist.
“From now on, don’t walk around this house alone at night.”
“Why not?”
Jasper looked at the tablets on the blanket.
Because he grasped something that frightened even him.
If that person discovered who had been taking the pills away, Jasper would stop being their main problem.
Hattie would be next.
The next morning, Jasper used an old phone he kept locked in a safe and called Dr. Lorraine Whitfield, a toxicologist in Atlanta who had owed him a favor for years.
Lorraine arrived posing as a rehabilitation specialist.
She quietly analyzed the tablets and collected samples from Jasper.
Forty-eight hours later, she called.
“You’re being given a toxic substance, repeatedly. The tablets you gave me contain a much higher concentration than the earlier ones.”
Jasper said nothing.
“How long do I have?”
“If the girl hadn’t pulled several doses, you probably wouldn’t have made it to Monday.”
Monday.
That was the day Jasper was due to sign a new will.
Only five people knew.
He decided to pretend he was still getting worse while Lorraine began treating him in secret.
But he needed Renee.
When he told her what had happened, she stood staring out the window.
“My husband left from one of your docks one night and never came back,” she said. “I took this job swearing my daughter would never have anything to do with your world. And now it turns out she’s spent five nights watching your bedroom because none of your men knows how to protect you.”
“I’m not asking you to do it for me.”
“Good thing.”
Renee wanted to leave immediately with Hattie.
Jasper stopped her.
“If you leave today, whoever is doing this will figure out we know something. Then they’ll ask who found out.”
Renee looked down the hall, where her daughter was playing and lining up seashells.
She agreed to stay three days.
The tension erupted the very next day.
Travis stormed into the bedroom with two guards.
“We found her!”
He was holding a jar of powder.
“It was hidden in Renee’s purse.”
The guards pinned the woman in the hallway while Hattie sobbed, clinging to her skirt.
Travis pointed at Renee.
“She’s trying to kill you!”
Then Jasper noticed something on the table: an anonymous note spelling out exactly where to search.
It was too perfect.
He sat up.
After weeks of being unable to walk alone, he set both feet on the floor.
Everyone fell silent.
“Let her go.”
“Jasper…”
“I said let her go.”
Travis went pale.
Jasper ordered that from that night on, Renee and Hattie would sleep inside his own room.
Hours later, with the lights off, Hattie said:
“Mr. Kincaid, I forgot to tell you something.”
“What?”
“The man in the slippers smells like peppermint candy.”
Jasper felt his whole body turn cold.
He knew only one person who always carried a round tin of peppermints.
Lyle Hargrove.
The man who had been like a second father to him.
