Oligarch's Daughter, Part One: A Boat Builder's Secret Past Collides With a Deadly Day
Grant Anderson, a quiet boat builder in the New Hampshire town of Derfield, has spent five years hiding his past. He lives with Sarah Harrison, a first-grade teacher, but keeps secrets from her and has built a life around a small boat workshop, cash-only business, and constant caution. One day, his friend Captain Lyle Boudreau asks him to cover an early-morning fishing trip for a customer, Frederick Newman, who is due to meet the boat at 7:30 a.m.
Grant takes Newman out on Boudreau’s 8.5-meter boat, Susanna B., expecting an ordinary charter. Newman, a thickset man with a slight Slavic, likely Russian accent, quickly turns sinister, calls Grant by another name, and says, “You knew this day would come, Paul.” He pulls a gun, orders Grant to sail seven miles south-west, and says he intends to kill him and dump the body in the Labrador Current. Grant fights back, knocks the gun away, and in the struggle Newman fires a speargun into his own neck and dies. Grant throws Newman’s phone, wallet and car keys into the sea and drops the body to sharks.
Back home, Grant scrubs the boat and himself, then serves Sarah dinner while trying to act normal. He gives her a bag of cash and a disposable phone in case he has to disappear suddenly, but refuses to explain more. For two days he waits anxiously until police detective Frank Landberg arrives asking about Newman, whose New York Porsche was found by the dock in nearby Hamlin. Grant says Newman never showed up. Soon after, his friend Alec Wood, a police deputy in Derfield, warns him that federal agents are coming.
Grant opens a hidden stash in his workshop, finds more than $48,000, and is on the road when he sees Wood confronted at his house by a black government Chevy Tahoe. The man from the boat, identified as Bersin, appears with another armed agent. Grant watches on his security app as they shoot Alec dead. He flees north, tells Sarah to stay with her aunt Tilda and not return home, and warns her to leave her iPhone off because they can track it. Driving through New Hampshire’s back roads and forests, he thinks he has lost the Tahoe, but reaches a closed gate on a forest road and realizes he is trapped. The next installment will appear tomorrow.
