What the Tide Keeps

Chapter 9: The Third Stroke

She heard him on the stairs before she saw him.

Not the heavy tread of the gray coat. This was lighter, slower. Pausing on each step. A man out of breath, afraid of what waited at the bottom.

Nell blew out the lantern and flattened herself into the shadow of the beam.

The light that descended was a flashlight, its beam swinging wildly across the walls. It found the bell, and stopped, trembling. It found the empty hole beneath. It dropped to the straw and slid, slowly, across the floor until it touched the toes of Nell's boots.

"Ms. Garrity."

Constable Dale Pruitt stood at the foot of the stairs. His face was gray and wet. His uniform jacket hung open, and in his left hand, held by the laces like something dead, he carried a pair of black leather boots with a freshly resoled heel.

Nell stood slowly, Maren's jacket crushed against her chest.

"You took them."

"I did." His voice cracked. "I took them out of that house at half past five, because I wanted to put them somewhere nobody could ever find them, and I got as far as the harbor and I couldn't." He looked at the boots as though he could not understand how they had come into his hand. "I couldn't throw them in. I stood on the pier for an hour. And then the bell started, and I thought, she's gone down there, and I came."

"You said the last person who asked questions was in the ground."

"Yes."

"My sister."

"Yes."

"Did you kill her, Dale?"

He flinched as though she had struck him. "No. God, no." Tears were running openly down his face now. "But I knew who did. I knew the minute I saw her on the slab. I wrote the report the way they told me to, and I put the boots in, because I couldn't stand to leave nothing, and I told myself somebody smarter than me would see it, and now you have." He drew a long, shuddering breath. "Nell. You have to understand. It's not one man. It never was. It's half this island. It was half this island in 1987."

"Who?"

Pruitt opened his mouth.

Above them, in the cottage, a door slammed.

Both of them looked up. Footsteps crossed the floor overhead, unhurried, and stopped at the head of the stairs. A voice drifted down, calm, cultured, almost kind. A voice Nell had never heard before and somehow recognized instantly, because she had been hearing its echo in her sister's handwriting for days.

"Dale. I did ask you to keep her on the ferry."

Pruitt went white to the lips.

The footsteps began to descend.

Between them, in the dark, the great bronze bell stirred on its chains. No rope was pulled. No hand touched it. But the clapper swung once, slow and enormous, and struck the lip with a sound so deep that the stones themselves shuddered, and Nell felt it in her teeth, in her bones, in the dry, buried place where she had hidden a sixteen-year-old's secret for twenty-two years.

One.

Her sister's boots dropped from Pruitt's hand.

Two.

And somewhere above them, a man began, very softly, to hum.

End of Part Three.