What the Tide Keeps

Chapter 3: Forty-One Strokes

She did not sleep. She sat at the table until the clock on the wall read 3:30, the notebook open in front of her, her tea gone cold, listening to a silence that now seemed to have a shape.

The bell had stopped at last. The wind had dropped with it. When Nell finally went to the window, the street was empty and the rain had thinned to a fine, drifting mist, and every house on Candle Lane was dark.

Every house except one.

Across the lane, at the very end, a single window glowed amber behind a drawn curtain. As Nell watched, the curtain shifted. A hand, pale and thin, held it back by a few inches. Behind it, indistinct in the lamplight, a face looked out at Maren's house.

At Nell.

She didn't move. Neither did the figure. For a long moment they regarded one another across forty feet of wet cobbles, and Nell had the distinct impression she was being weighed.

Then the curtain dropped, and the window went dark.

Morning came gray and reluctant. Nell dressed in yesterday's clothes, pocketed the notebook, and walked down to the harbor, where the island's only café was already open, steaming its windows against the cold.

Inside, six heads turned when she entered. Six heads turned back just as quickly, with the studied indifference of people who have been talking about you for nine days.

Behind the counter stood a heavyset woman with flour to her elbows. "You're Maren's sister," she said. It was not a question.

"Nell."

"Birdie Hallam. I knew your mother." She slid a mug across the counter without being asked. "I'm sorry. Your sister was good people. Best on the island, some of us thought."

"Some of you."

Birdie's eyes flickered toward the corner table, where a man in a constable's jacket sat alone with a newspaper he was not reading. "Others had opinions," she said carefully.

Nell took her coffee to the corner. "Constable Pruitt?"

Dale Pruitt was in his fifties, soft around the middle, with the tired, careful face of a man who had spent thirty years policing a place where the worst crime was usually a stolen lobster pot. He half rose, then thought better of it.

"Ms. Garrity. I'd hoped to meet you under better circumstances."

"I read your report."

Something crossed his face, quick as a fish beneath ice. "It was a hard case. I did what I could."

"Her boots were dry."

The silence that followed was so complete she could hear the espresso machine ticking as it cooled. Pruitt set the newspaper down very slowly.

"I'm not sure I follow."

"I think you do." Nell kept her voice low and even, the voice she used with families in the worst hour of their lives. "You wrote it down and you didn't say anything about it. Either you didn't notice, which I don't believe, or you noticed and decided to leave it for someone else to find. I'd like to know which."

Pruitt looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked, almost involuntarily, toward the window, toward the headland to the north where, a mile off, the black stub of the old lighthouse stood against the sky.

"Ms. Garrity," he said quietly. "There's a ferry in March. I'd consider being on it."

"Is that a threat?"

"It's a kindness." His hands were trembling, just slightly, against the table. "The last person who started asking questions on this island is in the ground. I'd hate to see it happen twice."

He stood, left a few coins beside his untouched coffee, and walked out into the mist without looking back.

Nell sat very still. Around her the café had gone quiet in the particular way a room goes quiet when everyone in it has heard everything.

Birdie Hallam appeared at her elbow, wiping her hands on her apron, her voice dropped to nearly nothing.

"Not here," she whispered. "Come by the back door at closing. And Nell?" Her eyes were wide, and for the first time Nell saw that the woman was frightened. "Don't go near the lighthouse. Not alone. Not after dark."

"Why not?"

Birdie glanced at the notebook-shaped bulge in Nell's coat pocket, and then away.

"Because that's where she went," she said. "The night she died. And somebody on this island knows exactly who she went to meet."

Outside, from the direction of the headland, a single bronze note rolled across the water in broad daylight, and every head in the café turned toward the sound.

None of them, Nell noticed, looked surprised.

End of part one.