What the Tide Keeps

Part Two: The Calloway Girl

Chapter 4: The Back Door

The café closed at six, and by ten past, the harbor had emptied of everyone but the gulls.

Nell came around the side of the building as the light failed, past stacked crab traps and a bin of cold ashes, and found the back door already ajar. Birdie Hallam stood in the gap with a dish towel wrung between her fists, looking past Nell's shoulder at the street.

"Did anyone see you?"

"Everyone sees everything here. You taught me that."

"I never taught you anything, love. Your mother did." Birdie pulled her inside and shot the bolt.

The kitchen was warm and smelled of yeast and scorched sugar. Birdie sat her at a flour-dusted table, poured two cups of something that was not coffee, and did not speak for a full minute. When she did, it was to the table.

"Your sister came to me three weeks ago. She asked me what I remembered about the night the bell came down."

"Nineteen eighty-seven," said Nell.

"You read her notebook."

"The last page."

Birdie nodded slowly, as if that were a relief and a sorrow at once. "I was twenty-two. The Calloways kept the lighthouse then, old Hugh and his wife, and their girl, Tess. Nine years old. She'd follow the bell ringer up the tower on Sundays, hold the rope for him, thought she was helping." Her thumb worried the edge of the cup. "One night in November she went up there and didn't come down."

"They searched."

"The whole island searched. Three days. Dogs, boats, divers from the mainland. Nothing. Not a shoe, not a ribbon. And that first night, while we were all out in the dark calling her name, the bell rang."

Nell waited.

"Forty-one strokes," Birdie said. "Nobody was in the tower. We checked. Nobody could've been. And the next morning old Hugh Calloway took a hammer to the frame and brought that bell down himself, and he'd not let a soul near it after. They dropped it in the deep water off the Point. Said it was cursed."

"And the Calloways?"

"Left on the spring ferry. Never came back."

The stove ticked. Somewhere above them a floorboard settled.

"Maren heard it ring," Nell said. "Eleven days before she died. Forty-one strokes again."

"And she went up there," Birdie said, "because she was Maren, and couldn't leave a question alone if you paid her." She reached into her apron and set something on the table between them, small and cold and heavy.

A brass key, tarnished green at the teeth. A paper tag was knotted through the bow, and on it, in Maren's cramped hand, a single date.

Nov. 14.

"She left it with me," Birdie said. "The day before she died. Said if anything happened, I was to give it to the one person on this island who'd know what it opened. I've been waiting nine days to find out whether that was you."

Nell turned the key over in her palm.

"I don't know what it opens," she said.

Birdie's face did something complicated. "Then God help you, because somebody else is going to work it out first."