What the Tide Keeps

Chapter 6: Three O'Clock

She did not go back to Maren's house. Odile would hear nothing of it.

"You'll sleep in the spare room," the old woman said, "with the door locked, and I'll sit up with the spyglass. I've had practice."

So Nell lay on a narrow bed under a quilt that smelled of lavender and camphor, the brass key clenched in her fist, and listened to the clocks.

She thought about the boots. Whoever had taken them had known they mattered, which meant they had known what Nell would see, which meant they had been watching her since the ferry. She thought about the knot. She thought about a nine-year-old girl holding a bell rope in the dark.

And she thought about the small, low hook beside Maren's door, screwed into the wall at a child's height, with nothing hanging from it.

Maren had no children. But Maren had been keeping something, in that house, for someone small.

Or someone had once lived there who was.

Nell sat up in the dark.

The key. Nov. 14. Not a date on a calendar, she realized. A date in a notebook. She dug the leather book from her coat on the chair, unclasped it by feel, and turned back through the pages with her thumb, past the tide times and the ferry schedule, until she found a line she'd skimmed in the kitchen and dismissed.

Nov. 14, 1987. Tess Calloway. Ask Birdie about the house.

The house.

Not the lighthouse. The house. The Calloways' home, the keeper's cottage that had stood empty at the base of the headland for thirty-nine years, boarded up, shunned, the place island children dared one another to touch on their way past.

The place with a lock that would take an old brass key.

A clock in the hall chimed once. Twice. Nell checked her watch.

Three o'clock.

And from far out on the headland, across a mile of black water and blacker fog, a deep bronze note rolled in, slow, patient, like a hand knocking from the wrong side of a door.

She did not count the strokes this time.

She was already pulling on her boots.

End of Part Two.