The first board of the porch creaked under Luis Ardent's boot, the pitch flat and complaining, and he paused with one hand on the worn rail. A gulls screamed somewhere over the inlet, high and reedy. The cottage sat hunched against the dune grass, its clapboards weathered to the color of driftwood, the shingles lifting at the eaves where the salt had gotten under them. Wind off the water carried the green-rot smell of low tide and the sharper, iodine sting of rockweed that had cooked in the morning sun.
Wren Halloran was already on the step, crouching to examine the lock. She had a small leather pouch open beside her knee, picks laid out on a square of felt, and her head was tilted at the angle of someone listening to tumblers. A strand of dark hair had fallen across her cheek and she did not bother to push it back.
"No broken windows," she said, without looking up. "No jimmy marks on the frame. Whoever came in either had a key or she let them in."
Luis took the rail in his other hand and leaned his weight onto it, testing. It held. He had half-expected it not to.
"Or," he said, "she went out with them and never came back. Door was never locked to begin with."
Wren glanced up at him then. Her eyes were the color of wet stone, and there was a stillness in them he had learned not to mistake for calm. She pocketed a pick, slid the other back into the pouch, and stood. The boards of the porch gave a deep groan as her weight shifted and she steadied herself against the door frame.
"Either way," she said, "we go in careful. If Mara calls the sheriff before we're out, I want us to have left this place better than we found it."
"You always say that."
"And I'm always right."
The lock surrendered with a soft, oiled click. Wren eased the door inward and the hinges made a thin, warbling sound, like a whistle over water. The air that came out of the cottage was cooler, faintly musty, touched with something herbal and dry, lavender, maybe, or rosemary hung in bundles, and under that, the chalky ghost of old plaster.
Luis stepped in after her, one hand on the jamb. The front room was small. A cast-iron stove crouched in the corner, its pipe crooked up through the ceiling. A low settee sat under the window with a folded quilt across its back. The window faced east, and the light through it fell in a long pale bar across the floor, illuminating dust that moved in slow, swimming coils. On a peg by the door hung a canvas jacket with the cuffs frayed, and beneath it, a pair of rubber boots caked with dried mud.
He let his gaze travel. Habit. He had fished these waters since he was a boy, known half the houses along the shore by the shape of their chimneys, the angle of their docks, the color of the paint their owners favored. This cottage had belonged to the Lemays for three generations. He had bought bait off old Lemay's widow once, summers ago, when his mother had sent him down the road with a five-dollar bill and instructions not to lose the change.
"Nothing looks tossed," Wren said, from beside the settee. She was scanning the room the way she used to scan a city council meeting, cataloguing faces and seating charts. "If she fought someone, it wasn't in here."
"She wouldn't have," Luis said. "She wouldn't have let anyone she didn't trust inside."
"You're sure of that."
"I'm sure of her. She was particular."
Wren gave a small, humorless sound. She moved toward the kitchen. He followed.
The kitchen was narrow, a galley really, with a sink under a window that looked out on a stand of bayberry. A mug sat on the drainboard, a tea bag still inside, the string hanging over the rim. A single plate. A single fork. No crumbs. The dish towel was folded and hung on the oven handle with a carefulness that felt recent. Iris had eaten alone, and not long before she vanished.
Wren opened a drawer. Silverware, rubber bands, a screwdriver, a pencil with a worn eraser. She closed it. Opened the next. Matches, a few birthday candles, a tangle of takeout menus. Closed.
"Her mother says she kept a notebook," Wren said. "Spiral-bound. Black cover. She wouldn't let anyone look at it."
"And her mother told you that because."
"Because I asked. Because Mara's scared, Luis. She thinks if she doesn't give us something, no one else will. And she may be right."
He grunted. He could feel the reluctance in his own chest, the small, stubborn refusal to go pawing through a dead woman's rooms. He had known Iris since she was a girl of twelve running barefoot across the mudflats, her hair in two braids that whipped behind her. He had watched her grow sharp and quick and impatient, watched her leave for college and come back with a better vocabulary and a harder smile. He had liked her. He had worried about her, in the unfocused way you worry about a boat you cannot see in the dark.
He had not, he realized, known her at all.
"Upstairs," Wren said.
The stairs were steep and uncarpeted, and the third from the top gave under his weight with a sound like a knuckle cracking. He put his hand to the wall to steady himself, and his palm came away faintly chalky. At the top, a short hall. Two doors. The one on the left stood ajar, and through the gap he could see the corner of a quilt, the foot of a bed.
The door on the right was shut.
Wren went to the shut one and put her hand on the knob. She looked at him. He nodded. She turned it.
The room was small, and smelled of paper. A single bed, neatly made. A desk under the window, its surface almost entirely covered. Stacked folders, three or four, their colors muted by dust. A wooden tray of pens. A stapler without staples. And at the center of the desk, weighted down by a smooth river stone the size of a fist, a black notebook.
Wren crossed the room in two strides and picked it up. She turned it over in her hands, ran her thumb along the spiral. The cover was unadorned except for a small sticker in one corner, a crescent moon, the kind a child might put on a lunchbox.
"She was a kid once," Wren said, quietly. "I forget that, sometimes."
Luis came up behind her and looked over her shoulder. She opened the cover.
The first page was a list of names. He recognized half of them. Local names. Parsons, Calder, York, Drumm, Ellerby. Grant Ellerby. Cal Drumm. People who lived along the shore, who owned land or rented it, who showed up at the post office and the church suppers. Beside each name, a column of numbers. Dates, he thought at first, but the format was wrong. Two digits, a slash, four digits.
Coordinates.
He felt the hair on his arms prickle.
"This isn't a diary," Wren said. She turned the page. More names. More numbers. A small notation in the margin, in a hand that leaned hard to the right. A word, then a question mark. Then another word. Then a date that had already passed.
"Turn again," he said.
She did. The third page was different. A single line, underlined twice, in heavier ink. He read it, and the room seemed to tilt faintly, the way a deck tilts when a wave catches the stern.
CALDER PROPERTY 41.6730 -69.9952 CLOSING 09 14
"That's not on the market," he said.
"No," Wren said. "It isn't."
He thought of Old Man Calder, who had died in the spring, and of his daughter, who had come up from Boston with a moving truck and then, within a month, had signed papers with a buyer whose name Luis did not know. He had heard about it at the fuel dock. He had not paid attention. He had been gutting mackerel.
"She's been mapping them," Wren said. "Every closing. Every parcel. Every buyer."
"For how long?"
"Months. Maybe longer. Look at the ink. She started in a ballpoint, switched to felt-tip. The pressure changes. She's been at this."
He thought about Iris at the kitchen table with her tea, alone, the notebook open before her. He thought about the precision of her, the economy of her movements, the way she had crossed a room as if crossing a stage, certain that somewhere a person was watching.
"She was building a case," he said.
"Or keeping a record," Wren said. "In case something happened to her."
The words sat between them. Outside, a gust struck the house, and something in the eaves tapped, a hollow, repeating sound. Wren's thumb held the page down, and she was reading, her lips moving without sound.
He turned away and let her work. He crossed the room to the window and looked out. The bayberry brushed against the glass in the wind. Beyond it, the marsh, and beyond the marsh, the water, gray-green and stippled with whitecaps. A lobster boat was working the channel, moving slow, its wake a long, dark smear. He watched it for a moment without seeing it.
His hands were at his sides. He noticed that they were steady.
"Here," Wren said. "Listen to this."
He turned back. She was holding the notebook open with both hands, and she read aloud, her voice low and even.
"'E. nine figures. No escrow. Cashier check. Buyer rep. G.E. present at signing. 09 14. Why? Why G.E.?'"
"G.E.," he said. "Grant Ellerby."
"That's what I thought."
He came to stand beside her. He smelled the paper, the faint chemical sweetness of fresh ink over older ink, and beneath it, the ghost of her perfume, something floral he could not name.
"Ellerby was at the signing," he said. "Why would Ellerby be at a signing for a parcel in Calder's estate? He's not family."
"He's not family," Wren said. "He's a buyer. Or he's a broker. Or he's something else."
She turned the page again. More entries. More names. More coordinates. He recognized one. His own address, give or take a digit. He did not say anything. Wren saw his face, and did not say anything either.
"There's more," she said. "At the back."
She flipped ahead. The last dozen pages were different. Denser. The handwriting cramped and slanting. Little diagrams, boxes with arrows. A word circled, with a line drawn out from it and three exclamation points. The word was MAREK.
"Marek," he said.
"Marek Properties," Wren said. "Out of Portland. They've been buying up parcels along the southern shore for the last eighteen months. Iris's firm brokers them."
"And she was keeping track."
"And she was keeping track."
He looked at the notebook, and then at the window, and then at the door. The cottage felt smaller than it had a moment ago. The shadows in the corners had thickened. A board somewhere in the floor ticked as the wood adjusted to the temperature.
"We take this with us," he said.
"We take this with us," Wren agreed.
She closed the notebook, held it against her chest with one arm, and used her free hand to take a small photograph from the desk, a snapshot of Iris at maybe sixteen, squinting into the sun, a halter of daisies around her neck. She put it in her jacket pocket. Then she straightened the folders. She put the stone back on the desk. She stepped back and looked at the room.
"Anything else?" he said.
"One thing."
She went to the closet. She opened the door. Inside, on the floor, a cardboard box, taped shut. She crouched, ran a finger along the tape. The seal was broken. She folded the flaps back.
Inside, more notebooks. Five of them. Black. Identical.
"All of them," she said.
She did not touch them. She looked at him. He looked at her.
"We can't carry five," he said.
"No," she said. "We can't."
The wind rose again. The bayberry scratched against the glass. Downstairs, a door that had not latched fully swung open and banged softly, once, twice, against its frame.
Luis Ardent stood in the doorway of the bedroom and watched Wren Halloran stand very still in front of the open box. The light from the window was thinning. The bayberry against the glass had stopped moving, and the house felt like a held breath.
"Leave them," he said.
"Leave them," she said, and closed the box, and closed the closet door, and the room went back to being only a room.
They went down the stairs. The door that had not latched banged once more as they passed, and Wren stopped to push it shut, her shoulder taking the weight of it. Luis waited on the porch. The air had changed. There was a wet edge to it now, the first salt warning before the fog rolled in.
"Where next?" he said.
"Mara," Wren said. "Iris's mother. She lives out past the old nursery. She'll be in the greenhouse this time of day."
He nodded. They did not speak in the truck. The road narrowed past the harbor and turned to gravel, and the trees closed in on both sides, spruce and alder, and the light went green and then gray. Wren drove with one hand on the wheel and the other on the notebook in her lap, and he watched her knuckles and did not say anything.
The nursery appeared on the left, a long low building with plastic sheeting gone milky and a hand-painted sign that read LEMAYS HERBS, EST. 1947, the paint faded so the seven looked like a one. Wren pulled in and parked beside a rusted Civic with a New Hampshire plate. She cut the engine. She did not get out yet.
"She'll be careful," Wren said. "She's always been careful. Her husband died when Iris was seven. Freak accident on the boat. After that, she raised the girls on her own, kept the nursery going, kept the grief out of the yard. People around here call her a saint. I call her someone who knows how to keep a door closed when she needs to."
"You know her well?"
"I knew her. I was a kid. My mother used to buy starts from her in May. I haven't been back here in fifteen years. But you don't forget a woman who can tell you the Latin name of a plant and the year her husband died without changing her voice."
Luis looked at the greenhouse. Through the milky plastic he could see a shape moving, slow and deliberate, a person among the tables.
"She knows why we're here," he said.
"She knows why we're here," Wren agreed. She got out of the truck.
He followed. The gravel crunched under his boots, and the smell hit him before they reached the door, loam and rosemary and something sharper underneath, the green acid of cuttings. The greenhouse door was propped open with a brick. He ducked in after Wren and the heat folded over him, wet and vegetal, and the air was so thick he could taste it.
Mara Lemay was at the far table, half-turned, her hands in the soil of a flat of seedlings. She was a tall woman, made taller by the way she held herself, shoulders back, chin level, and her hair was white and cut close to her skull, and her face was the kind of face that had been handsome once and was now something more interesting, all the softness gone and the bones left to do the work. She wore a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and a pair of canvas gloves that had seen a hundred Aprils. She did not look up when they came in.
"Mrs. Lemay," Wren said.
"I heard the truck," Mara said, and her voice was low and even, a Maine voice, the vowels rounded and the consonants soft, and she did not look up. "I haven't seen a Halloran truck up this road in a long time."
"No," Wren said. "You haven't."
Mara's hands stilled in the soil. She brushed them together, the gloves leaving a dark stripe down each palm, and then she turned and looked at Wren, and then at Luis, and her face did not change.
"You're the Ardent boy," she said. "Your father fished with my husband."
"My grandfather," Luis said. "I'm Luis."
"I know who you are." She pulled off the gloves and laid them on the table. "You're here about Iris."
It was not a question. Wren glanced at Luis, and he gave her the smallest nod, the kind a man gives a woman he is working with when he is saying go ahead, and she went forward.
"We found her boat," Wren said. "Yesterday morning. Towed into the harbor. She wasn't on it."
Mara's mouth moved, a small motion, the kind of motion a person makes when they are swallowing something that has no shape. She put her hand flat on the table beside the flat of seedlings, and her fingers spread, and the soil was dark under her nails.
"I thought it might be that," she said. "When you didn't call first."
"Mrs. Lemay," Luis said, and she looked at him, and he kept his voice even. "I'm sorry to bring this to your door."
"You're not bringing it," she said. "It was already here." She pulled out a wooden stool and sat on it, and the stool's legs were sunk into the gravel of the greenhouse floor, and she did not wobble. "Sit down, both of you. There are stools behind the potting bench. And if you're going to ask me about my daughter, you're going to do it sitting down. I'm too old to look up at people while my heart is breaking."
Wren went and got the stools. She brought one back for Luis and kept one for herself, and the three of them sat in a loose triangle at the end of the greenhouse, among the seedlings and the shears and the small clay pots. A radio was playing somewhere in the back, an old AM station, the voice of a man reading the tide tables, and the numbers came through the plastic walls muffled and strange.
"Iris was here three days ago," Mara said. "Tuesday evening. She came through the back gate and she didn't knock. She never knocked. I was in here, doing the same thing I'm doing now. She stood right where you're standing, Ms. Halloran, and she said, Mom, I need to tell you something, and I said all right, and I put down my trowel, and then she didn't say it."
Wren did not move. Luis watched her hands in her lap, the notebook closed, the fingers laced.
"She stood there," Mara went on, "and she looked at the door, and she looked at the window, and she looked at me, and then she said, never mind, I just wanted to see you, and she hugged me, which she doesn't do, not since she was a girl, and then she left through the back gate, and I watched her from the door, and she got in her car and she sat there for a long time before she started the engine."
"Did you follow her?" Luis said.
"No," Mara said. "I should have. I've been telling myself I should have every hour since Wednesday morning." She looked down at her hands. The dark soil was in the creases of her knuckles. "I thought she was going to tell me she was leaving town. She's been talking about leaving for years. I thought it was that."
"It wasn't that," Wren said.
"No. It wasn't that." Mara's voice did not change. "When I didn't hear from her Wednesday, I called her. No answer. Thursday, no answer. Thursday night I drove into town and went to her office. The lights were on but the door was locked. I went home. Friday, I called you, Ms. Halloran. I called the number Iris had given me, the one she said I should call if I ever needed someone who was good at finding things."
Wren nodded. "She gave you my name."
"She said, if anything happens, call Wren Halloran. She said it like she was reading off a list. I asked her why anything would happen. She said, Mom, I just want you to have the number."
Luis felt the heat of the greenhouse settle against the back of his neck. The radio read the high tide. The plastic walls moved faintly with the wind outside, and the light inside shifted and resettled.
"Mrs. Lemay," he said. "In the weeks before Tuesday, did you notice anything different about her?"
Mara looked at him for a long moment. Her eyes were the color of the sea in winter, gray-green, and they did not waver.
"She was frightened," she said.
The word sat in the air. The seedlings did not move. The radio read the low tide.
"She was frightened," Mara said again, slower. "I don't mean she was nervous. I don't mean she was busy. I mean she was frightened the way a person is frightened when they have heard something and they cannot stop hearing it. She came for supper three weeks ago. She ate half her plate. She jumped when the dog barked. She asked me if the locks on my doors were good. I said they were the same locks your father put on, Iris. She said, Mom, are they good, and I said yes, and she nodded, and then she changed the subject."
"Changed it to what?" Wren said.
"To the weather. To a woman at her office she didn't like. To nothing." Mara put her hands on her knees. "She came by again the following Tuesday. She didn't stay. She stood in the kitchen and drank a glass of water and she looked at the back door the whole time she was drinking, and when she set the glass down she said, Mom, I love you, and she left, and I stood at the sink and I thought, that is a woman who is saying goodbye to her mother."
"Did you ask her what was wrong?" Luis said.
"I asked her if she was in trouble. She said no. I asked her if she was safe. She said, I'm safe, Mom, I'm always safe, and I heard what she didn't say, which was, I am not safe and I cannot tell you why."
Wren opened the notebook. She did not write. She held the pen above the page and looked at Mara.
"Did she say anything about her work?" Wren said. "About the properties she was handling?"
"She said she was in over her head." Mara's mouth did something that was almost a smile and was not a smile. "She said it like a joke. She was always like that. She would say a thing that was true and pretend it was a joke so you wouldn't ask her to say it again."
"Anything else?" Luis said. "Anyone she mentioned? Anyone she was worried about?"
Mara looked at the floor of the greenhouse, at the gravel, at the small green shoots in their clay pots. When she looked up, her face was different, the bones sharper, the eyes more still.
"She mentioned a name once," Mara said. "She didn't mean to. She was on the phone in the kitchen and she thought I was in the greenhouse. I was in the pantry. She said, Grant, I can't, and she said, Grant, I won't, and then she hung up and came into the greenhouse and talked to me about a perennial I'd ordered and her voice was the same voice as always, and I never said to her, I heard you."
Wren's pen touched the page. She wrote the name. Luis watched her write it, the letters small and even, and he felt the name land in the room the way a stone lands in still water.
"Grant," Wren said. "Did she ever say a last name?"
"Ellerby," Mara said. "Grant Ellerby. She said it to me once, the week before, when she was leaving. She said, I have to meet with a man named Grant Ellerby, and she said it the way you say a name when you want to remember it, and I have remembered it."
Luis looked at Wren. Wren looked at him. The radio read the time, 4:47 PM. The fog was coming in off the bay, he could feel it through the plastic walls, a thickening of the air.
"Mrs. Lemay," Wren said. "One more thing. Did Iris keep a knife in her bedroom?"
Mara looked at her. For the first time, her face changed. The composure did not break, but it shifted, the way a coastline shifts in a storm, not falling apart but revealing what had been there all along.
"How do you know that?" Mara said.
"Her cottage," Wren said. "We were just there."
"She started that two months ago," Mara said. "I was at her cottage helping her paint a bedroom. I was putting a sheet on the bed and I felt it, under the pillow, the shape of it, and I pulled it out and it was a kitchen knife, a good one, the one she'd bought when she moved in. I said, Iris. She said, Mom, don't. I said, Iris, you are not sleeping with a knife under your pillow in a town where the biggest crime is someone's dog getting into someone's garden. She said, Mom, I need you to trust me, and she took the knife from me and she put it back, and I have not been back into that bedroom since."
The greenhouse was very quiet. The radio had gone to static. The fog pressed against the plastic.
"Thank you, Mrs. Lemay," Luis said. He stood. The stool scraped against the gravel.
Mara did not stand. She sat on her stool and looked at the two of them, and her face was the face of a woman who had been holding a door closed for a long time and was now watching it open.
"Find her," she said. "Whatever it costs. Whoever it is. Find her."
"We will," Wren said.
They left her in the greenhouse, among the seedlings and the shears and the radio reading the tide. The fog came in off the bay and swallowed the gravel road, and the truck's headlights made two yellow tunnels in the white, and neither of them spoke until they were back on the paved road, and then Wren pulled over and put the truck in park and sat with her hands on the wheel and looked out at the fog.
"Grant Ellerby," she said.
"Grant Ellerby," he said.
The fog pressed against the glass. The notebook lay open on the seat between them. Somewhere down the harbor, a bell rang once, low and iron, the way bells ring when the sea is coming in.
The bell kept ringing. Low, iron, patient. The sound came across the water the way fog comes, in pieces, and Wren sat with her hands on the wheel and listened to it the way she had listened to bells all her life, the way you listen to something that is not going to stop until whatever it is announcing has arrived.
Luis reached for the notebook between them. He did not pick it up. He let his hand rest on the page, on the blue pen, on the careful handwriting she had kept while Mara talked.
"Iris went out at night," he said. "In a rowboat. With a camera."
"She went out to meet the ship," Wren said. "To get pictures."
"To get pictures," he agreed. He looked at the fog. "She told her mother she went out to take pictures of the freighters. She did not tell her mother why. She did not tell her mother about the sludge. She did not tell her mother about Grant Ellerby."
"She told me."
"She told you. Yes."
Wren turned her head and looked at him. The dashboard light made a green oval on her face. Her eyes were tired and her mouth was set and she looked, for a moment, like the girl who had sat on his father's stern at six, holding a line she was too small to hold, refusing to let go.
"She trusted me," Wren said. "She came to me with it. Before she ever went out to that ship. She brought me the first pictures. She brought them here, to the shop, and she spread them on the counter, and she said, Luis, look at this. She said, Luis, what do I do."
"You said," Luis said, "go to the police."
"I said go to the police. Yes."
"And she said."
"And she said, Luis, the police are not going to do anything. She said, the chief of police is a man named Cal Drumm, and Cal Drumm plays golf with Grant Ellerby. She said, Grant Ellerby sits on the board of the hospital. She said, Grant Ellerby is the man who built the new library. She said, if I take these pictures to Cal Drumm, Cal Drumm will call Grant Ellerby, and Grant Ellerby will call his lawyers, and the lawyers will call the judge, and the judge will seal the photographs, and I will disappear into a filing cabinet in Augusta, and the freighter will keep coming back."
Wren laughed. It was a short sound, with no joy in it.
"She was sharp," Luis said.
"She was sharp," Wren said. "And she was afraid. And she was right."
The bell rang again. The sound moved across the water and faded. Somewhere down the harbor a dog barked once and stopped, as if it too had heard the bell and decided it was not its business.
"I told her to be careful," Wren said. "I told her not to go out alone. I told her to call me before she went and call me when she got back. She said she would. She called me at eleven. She said, I am going out. I said, Iris, do not go out. She said, Wren, I have to. I have a window. The freighter comes in at one and it leaves by three and if I miss it I miss it. She said, I will be back by four."
"And," Luis said.
"And she was not back by four."
The truck idled. The fog pressed. The notebook lay open under Luis's hand and he could feel, through the page, the faint impression of the pen, the way you can feel the shape of a thing written even when the ink is dry.
"I went out," Wren said. "I went out in the skiff. I went out to the place she always went, the place off the breakwater where the freighters pass close. She was not there. The rowboat was not there. The camera was not there. The fog was so thick I could not see the bow of my own boat. I called her name. I called her name until my throat was raw. I called the Coast Guard. I called her mother. I sat in my skiff until the sun came up and the fog burned off and the bay was empty."
"And then," Luis said.
"And then," Wren said, "I went to Grant Ellerby."
Luis lifted his hand from the notebook. He turned on the seat and looked at her. The dashboard light caught the line of her jaw, the set of her shoulders, the way a woman sits when she has been carrying something for a long time and is about to put it down.
"You went to him," Luis said.
"I went to his office," Wren said. "I sat in his waiting room. He has good chairs. Leather. He has a painting of a schooner on the wall. I sat under the schooner and I waited, and his secretary brought me coffee in a cup that did not match the saucer. He came out at eleven. He shook my hand. He said, Ms. Halloran. He said, I was sorry to hear about your brother's situation. He said, how can I help you."
"What did you say."
"I said, Mr. Ellerby. I said, I think you know what happened to Iris Lemay. He said, I am very sorry, I do not. He said, if you have information you should take it to the police. He said, Chief Drumm is a good man. He said, Chief Drumm will do the right thing."
"And."
"And I said, Mr. Ellerby, I have pictures of your ship dumping sludge in the bay. I have the registration number. I have the date. I have the time. I have the captain's name. I said, I think Chief Drumm will be very interested in those pictures. I said, I think the newspaper will be very interested in those pictures. I said, I think the people who live on this bay will be very interested in those pictures."
Wren stopped. The truck idled. The fog pressed against the glass.
"He smiled," she said. "He smiled at me under his schooner. He said, Ms. Halloran, please come into my office. He said, let us talk like two adults."
"And."
"And I went into his office. And we talked. And he said, Ms. Halloran, I think we can find a way to make this go away. He said, the pictures are a misunderstanding. He said, the ship was discharging ballast, not sludge. He said, ballast is regulated, and the regulations were followed. He said, your friend Ms. Lemay has a vivid imagination, and she has been under a great deal of stress."
"What did you say."
"I said, Mr. Ellerby. I said, Iris is missing. I said, the pictures are not a misunderstanding. I said, Iris went out in a rowboat to take those pictures and she has not come back. I said, if anything has happened to her, I will hold you responsible. I said, I will hold you responsible in this world and I will hold you responsible in the next. I said it, Luis. I said it to his face, in his office, under his schooner."
The bell rang again. The sound came in low and steady, like a pulse.
"And what did he do," Luis said.
"He stood up," Wren said. "He walked to his window. He looked out at the harbor. He said, Ms. Halloran, I think you should go home. He said, I think you should take care of your shop. He said, I think you should let the police do their job. He said, Chief Drumm is a good man. He said, the tide is coming in."
"And."
"And I left," Wren said. "I left his office. I drove home. I sat in the shop. I waited for the phone to ring. The phone did not ring. The tide came in. The tide went out. The tide came in again. I have been sitting in that shop ever since."
She turned the key. The engine caught. The headlights cut two yellow tunnels in the fog.
"I went to Chief Drumm," she said. "I told him what I told Ellerby. He listened. He took notes. He said, Ms. Halloran, we will look into it. He said, we will follow up. He said, thank you for coming in. He said, have a good day."
"And."
"And nothing," Wren said. "That was three months ago. Three months, Luis. Three months of him saying we will look into it and we will follow up and have a good day."
She put the truck in gear. The gravel crunched under the tires. The fog parted around the hood and closed behind them.
"I am tired," she said. "I am tired of looking into it. I am tired of following up. I am tired of sitting in a shop waiting for a phone to ring."
The road curved along the harbor. The water was not visible. The boats were not visible. The breakwater was not visible. The fog was a wall, and the truck moved through it like a ship moving through a narrow channel, and Luis sat beside Wren and watched the wall and thought about Iris in a rowboat, alone, with a camera, in the dark, with the fog coming in, and the freighter coming in, and the sludge coming in, and the whole long machinery of a man like Grant Ellerby grinding on, indifferent, patient, oiled with money.
"I went out," he said.
Wren did not answer.
"I went out," he said again. "Before you. Before you went to his office. Before you went to Drumm. I went out the night she disappeared. I went out in the Mary K. I went out to the place she always went. I did not find her. I did not find the rowboat. I did not find the camera. I did find the buoy."
"The buoy."
"The green buoy. The one off the breakwater. The one with the bell."
Wren slowed the truck. She did not stop. She let it idle down to a crawl and she looked at him.
"The buoy was not ringing," Luis said. "The bell was not working. The chain was cut. The buoy was drifting. I pulled it in. I tied it to my stern. I brought it back to the shop. I put it in the float. I have been looking at it for three months."
"Why," Wren said. "Why did you not tell me."
"I did not know," Luis said. "I did not know what it meant. I thought it meant nothing. I thought the chain had rusted. I thought the bell had failed. I thought it was an old buoy and the harbor master had not gotten around to fixing it."
"But you did not think that."
"No," Luis said. "I did not think that. I thought, someone cut that chain. I thought, someone did not want that bell to ring. I thought, Iris went out to meet a freighter in the fog, and someone cut the bell so no one would hear her if she called for help."
The truck stopped. The engine idled. The fog pressed against the glass.
"I should have told you," Luis said.
"Yes," Wren said. "You should have told me."
"I am telling you now."
"Yes," Wren said. "You are telling me now."
She put the truck in park. She turned off the engine. She sat with her hands on the wheel and looked out at the fog, and the fog was the fog, and the bell was the bell, and somewhere down the harbor the buoy was drifting on its cut chain, and the chain was the chain, and Iris was out there, or Iris was not out there, and the tide was coming in.
"We are going to see him," Wren said.
"Yes," Luis said.
"We are going to see Grant Ellerby."
"Yes."
"We are going to his office. We are going to sit under his schooner. We are going to tell him what we know."
"Yes."
"And if he calls his lawyers. And if he calls the judge. And if he calls Chief Drumm. We are going to tell him anyway."
"Yes," Luis said. "We are going to tell him anyway."
Wren turned the key. The engine caught. The headlights cut the fog. The road ahead was a gray ribbon and the fog was a wall and the tide was coming in, and somewhere in the wall, somewhere in the fog, somewhere in the machinery of a man like Grant Ellerby, there was a door, and behind the door there was a girl who had gone out in a rowboat with a camera, and the camera had a flash, and the flash had gone off, and the picture had been taken, and the picture was somewhere, and the girl was somewhere, and the tide was coming in.
The truck moved forward. The fog closed behind them. The bell rang once, low and iron, and then it stopped, and the silence that followed was the silence of a bay that has swallowed something and is holding it, patient, in the dark.