What the Tide Keeps

Chapter 1: The Last Ferry The ferry to Harrow's End made its final crossing of the season at 4:10 in the afternoon, and by the time Nell Garrity stepped onto the slick concrete of the landing, the mainland had already dissolved behind her into a gray smear of rain. She was the only passenger. The deckhand, a boy who couldn't have been twenty, tossed her duffel onto the dock as if it might bite him. "Next boat's March," he said. "Unless the weather breaks." "It won't," said Nell. "No, ma'am." He didn't quite look at her. "Sorry about your sister." Then the engines churned, and the ferry pulled away, and she stood in the rain with the strange, final feeling of a door being locked from the other side. Twenty-two years she had stayed away from this island. Twenty-two years of coroner's offices and cold rooms and the patient, unglamorous work of listening to the dead. She had told herself she left because there was nothing here. The truth was simpler. She had left because of what was here, and the way it had looked at her when she was sixteen. The phone call had come nine days ago. Her sister Maren was dead. A drowning, the island constable said, in the voice of a man reading from a card. Maren had gone out walking on the Marrow Flats at low tide, as she did most evenings, and the tide had come in faster than she'd judged. Her body had been found two days later, snagged in the kelp beneath the old lighthouse. An accident. Tragic. Common enough in a place where the sea gave and took with the same indifferent hand. Nell had accepted that for exactly as long as it took her to read the report. It was a thin document, three pages, signed by Constable Dale Pruitt. It described the body's condition, the water temperature, the estimated time of death. It was competent in every way except one, and Nell had spent nine days trying to decide whether that one thing was nothing at all or the only thing that mattered. The report listed Maren's clothing. A wool coat. Jeans. A gray sweater. One pair of leather walking boots. One pair, dry. Not recovered dry. Not dried by the time of inspection. Just listed, plainly, without comment, as if nobody had stopped to wonder how a woman who drowned in the tidal flats and spent two days in the sea could have walked into the morgue wearing boots with dry, salt-free soles. Nell shouldered her duffel and started up the hill toward the only light she could see.