The headlamps cut a pale seam through the thickening dusk as Wren Ashby eased the rented SUV off the coastal highway. The turn came faster than she remembered, or perhaps she had only ever taken it from the other direction, leaving. Now the road dipped, shoulderless, between a stand of stunted pines and a low stone wall, and her hands locked at ten and two on the wheel in a grip that had nothing to do with the curve.
She had sworn she would not come back this way.
The pines gave up their hold on the land, and the marsh opened to her left, a wide flat breath of salt grass gone silver under the last of the light. The tide was going out. She could tell by the smell first, that thin mineral tang of exposed mud and rotting eelgrass, then by the dark lace of channels stitching through the flats. Gulls wheeled above the channel markers, their cries a high thin sawing that came through the cracked driver's window along with the cold. She had left it cracked. The recirculated air in the SUV smelled of someone else's cigarette and a pine-shaped air freshener that had long since surrendered its scent to something older, mustier. She rolled her window down another inch rather than touch the controls.
The speedometer needle hovered near forty. She told herself the road demanded caution. Salt spray and winter weather had pitted the asphalt, and frost still lingered in the shadowed troughs where the late afternoon sun never reached. She told herself that. Her knuckles, though, had gone the color of peeled coconut, and the tendons stood out along the backs of her hands like guy wires on a small boat in a big wind.
The first landmark she had promised herself she would not look for came and went almost before she could name it. A wooden piling, half-submerged, with a faded red buoy chained to its top and a rusted iron cleat that her father had welded sometime in the previous century. It marked the channel into the old harbor. Once, on summer afternoons, her mother had spread a blanket on the hood of their station wagon and read library paperbacks while Wren and her brother stripped to their underwear and dove for sand dollars in the shallows around that piling. The buoy had been orange then. She did not slow down.
The second landmark was harder.
The cannery hove into view on the right, long and low against the darkening sky, its corrugated metal roof gone the bruised purple of a bruise three days old. A chain-link fence sagged around the property, and a FOR SALE sign hung crooked on the gate, the kind of sign that had been there long enough for the listing agent's phone number to fade to a pale blur. The windows on the loading dock were boarded with plywood, and someone had spray-painted a tag across the boards in silver letters she could not read at speed. The parking lot had returned to the marsh. Tall grass grew up through the cracks in the asphalt, and a heron stood statue-still in the deeper of the potholes, watching her pass with one cold yellow eye.
Wren had worked the cannery one summer, between her sophomore and junior years of college. She had stood on the loading dock in rubber boots and a rubber apron and sorted the morning's catch into bins marked by species and size while the men in the processing room hooted at each other across the line. Her supervisor had been a woman named Margie something, with hands like cured leather and a mouth like a drawbridge. Margie had called her Bird because of the binoculars Wren wore around her neck on her breaks, when she walked the tide pools and catalogued what the harbor pulled in and pushed out. She had not thought of Margie in years. Now she thought of nothing else for a long half mile, and the wheel creaked under her grip.
She downshifted. The road climbed a low rise, and the whole of Hollow Cove unfolded below her in the blue hour light, a small cluster of rooftops and chimney smoke gathered at the foot of the harbor. The church steeple stood at the center, white paint gone gray, the weathervane on top frozen in a position she could not read from this angle. The marina stretched to its left, masts tilting at slightly different angles, and somewhere among them a halyard knocked against aluminum in a slow, metronome rhythm. To the right, climbing the hill away from the water, the older houses sat on their stone foundations with their back porches facing the road. One of those houses, near the top, had been her mother's. Her mother's house.
Her foot found the brake without her permission. The SUV slowed, and she sat for a moment with the engine idling rough, watching a thread of wood smoke rise from a chimney two houses down from her mother's. Someone was home. Someone had lit a fire. The windows across the cove glowed in clusters of amber and pale blue, television light, kitchen light, and Wren felt the old and familiar sensation of being observed by a town she had never quite escaped, even in absentia.
She pulled her hand from the gearshift and flexed her fingers. The blood came back into them in a slow sting.
The lawyer's letter had been precise, the way lawyers' letters were when they had to be. Estate of Elaine M. Ashby. Real property located at 17 Harbor Heights Road. Personal property to be inventoried and disposed of according to the will. Her brother had been copied. Her brother had not answered. The lawyer, a young woman whose voice had been carefully neutral, had told her that as next of kin and, per the will, sole executor, she would need to come in person to sign certain documents and to clear the house before it could be listed. The lawyer had paused, then added, almost as an afterthought, that the neighbors had reported a smell. Wren had booked the SUV that afternoon.
Now, here, with the cove laid out below her like a diagram of a life she had carefully not lived for ten years, she could not quite remember what she had told herself about why she was doing this. There were reasons. There were documents that required her signature, and a house that required her presence, and a mother who required burying, even though the burying had happened three weeks ago in a cemetery on the other side of the state, in a town Wren had chosen because no one from Hollow Cove would think to visit it. She had flown in for the service and flown out the same day and told herself that was enough. It had not been enough. The lawyer's letter had made that clear.
She let the SUV roll forward, down the rise, past the white picket fence of the old Hartwell place where someone had hung a string of unlit solar lanterns, past the laundromat that had been the laundromat since her childhood and now bore a hand-lettered sign in the window that read CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. She had not known the laundromat could close. She had not known anything here could change, and yet the streetlights had been replaced with smaller, darker LED models, and the bench in front of the post office had been removed, and the wooden whale that had stood on a pedestal outside the Chamber of Commerce was gone, leaving only a square of cleaner concrete where its weathered feet had been.
She stopped at the four-way stop at the foot of Main. The stop signs themselves were new. She sat in the idling SUV and looked left, toward the harbor, and right, toward the post office, and straight ahead, up Harbor Heights Road, where the houses climbed into the dark.
The post office door opened. A figure came out, pulling a canvas mailbag on a little wheeled cart, and the figure paused on the top step to look at the SUV with the kind of unhurried attention that Wren had forgotten people in small towns could afford. Even at this distance, even in the failing light, Wren recognized the shape of Vera Marsh. She would have known Vera anywhere. Vera had been postmistress of Hollow Cove since before Wren was born, and she had the posture of a woman who had spent forty years standing behind a counter telling other people's secrets back to them in a different order. Vera raised one hand, not quite a wave, more a recognition, and stood there on the step with her cart as if she intended to wait all night.
Wren did not wave back. She turned the wheel to the right, away from the post office, away from Vera Marsh, and began the climb up Harbor Heights Road.
The houses here had been built in the eighteen hundreds by fishermen who wanted to see the water from their kitchens and by merchants who wanted to see who was coming up the road. They sat close to the street, shoulder to shoulder, with low stone walls in front and privet hedges gone leggy in the gaps between. Number 17 was the second from the top. She saw it before she was ready to.
It sat dark. The porch light was off. The storm door, which her mother had kept closed in winter because of the drafts, hung slightly ajar, and she could see, through the glass of the inner door, the faint outline of the hallway and the hat rack where her mother's coat had always hung. The rhododendron that bracketed the front walk had grown up over the front walk. One branch, heavy with wet leaves, pressed against the porch railing like the arm of someone leaning into a window to look out.
Wren pulled the SUV to the curb. She put it in park. She turned off the engine, and the silence that came in was enormous, full of gulls and the soft lap of water far below and the tick of the cooling engine and the faint, sweet smell of woodsmoke from the neighbor's chimney and, beneath all of it, something else, something older and saltier, drifting from the house itself, slipping through the cracked storm door into the cold dusk air.
She sat with her hands still on the wheel and breathed it in. She had not been ready. She had not, in any honest sense, become the person who would be ready for this. But the lawyer's letter was in her bag, and the key to the house was in her coat pocket, and her mother was not coming back to open the door for her, and so Wren Ashby turned off the headlights, and the cove went dark around her, and she sat for one more minute in the driver's seat of a rented SUV on a street she had promised herself she would never see again, gathering what was left of her courage to go inside.
She did not go inside. Not that night. Some hinge inside her, some small and well-worn mechanism that she had thought broken, had refused to swing the door open onto the smell of her mother's absence. Instead she had pulled back onto the coastal road and followed it, half by memory and half by the sweep of the headlights over the familiar curves, until the village proper rose up around her in a constellation of lit windows and salt-stung porch lights.
The Tidewater Inn squatted at the end of Main like a dowager aunt refusing to die. Three stories of peeling gray clapboard, a widow's walk along the roofline, awnings that had faded from red to the color of old brick. The sign above the door had not been changed in her lifetime; TIDEWATER INN, EST. 1894, the g of the last word flickering with a bulb that had been failing since before she was born. She had not been inside since the spring she turned sixteen, when her mother had driven her to the bus that would carry her to college and had stopped here, briefly, so that she might use the restroom and buy a Coke from the machine in the lobby.
Wren parked in the small lot beside the building. The engine ticked itself cool. She could hear, very faintly through the closed windows, the sound of someone playing piano somewhere upstairs, a halting, half-remembered tune that might have been "Send in the Clowns." She sat with her hands on the wheel for another moment, and then she gathered her bag from the passenger seat, and she went inside.
The lobby was smaller than she remembered, and warmer, and it smelled of lemon polish and the faintly stale breath of wool rugs. A grandfather clock ticked in the corner, the pendulum swinging behind a face of yellowed glass. A fire had been laid in the small fireplace but not yet lit; the kindling sat in a careful pyramid waiting for a match. Above the mantel, a framed print of the harbor in summer, sailboats leaning, gulls wheeling under a sky too blue to be believed.
Behind the registration desk, a woman was reading a paperback novel with the spine cracked open to a place that must have been somewhere near the middle. She was perhaps sixty, perhaps a little older, with hair the color of iron filings and a face that had the weathered, handsome severity of a coastline seen from far out at sea. Her reading glasses sat low on her nose. She did not look up when the door opened, but turned a page, and then turned another, and only when Wren had come to stand at the desk did the woman speak.
"Help you."
Not a question. The two words arrived flat, ground down by decades of repetition. The woman laid the paperback face-down on the counter, leaving the open pages bent back like the wings of a dying moth. She looked up. Her eyes, pale gray and set deep in folds of tanned skin, traveled from Wren's boots to the crown of her head in a single sweep that missed nothing.
The smile Wren had been preparing died in her mouth.
"Evening, Mrs. Marsh."
It came out before she could stop it, the old form of address, the childhood name. The woman behind the desk did not smile back. She raised the glasses on her nose with one finger. She looked, again, this time more carefully.
"Wren," she said.
"Just for a night or two."
"Wren Ashby."
"If you've got a room available."
The woman did not answer right away. She removed her glasses and laid them down beside the paperback, with the same unhurried deliberation. Then she drew a leather-bound register from under the counter and laid it open on the blotter. She set a pen beside it.
"Sign in."
Wren picked up the pen. It was heavier than it looked, a brass thing gone dull with the years. The register was thick with the ghosts of other names, travelers and salesmen and summer people, their arrivals and departures logged in the spidery hands of the inn's former owners. She turned to the most recent page, which bore only a single entry from early September, and wrote, in her careful, slanted hand:
W. R. Ashby. Anchorage, AK. Sept. 17.
She did not hesitate over the maiden name. She did not lift the pen. She slid the register back across the counter without looking up.
"One night," she said. "Maybe two."
"Mm." Vera Marsh drew the register toward her and studied the entry with the squinting attention of a notary public. Then she closed it and tucked it under the counter. "Room seven. End of the hall. Last door on the right." She reached beneath the counter and brought up a key on a tag of wood shaped like a whale. The number 7 was burned into the wood in neat figures. "View of the cliffs. Margaret always liked that one."
The mention of her mother's name landed like a dropped glass. Wren's mouth opened, but nothing came out. She took the key.
"There's a kettle in the room," Vera went on, in the same brisk, unhurried cadence. "Cupboards beside the wardrobe. If you want tea, you'll find it in the tin with the roses on the lid. Don't use the blue tin. That belongs to the Whitcombs and they've got a peculiarity about their tins."
Wren nodded.
"Bathroom's attached. Hot water takes a minute to come up. Towels in the cupboard over the sink. Breakfast at seven. I won't knock. If you want it, you'll come down. If you don't, you won't." She looked at Wren once more, and this time something shifted behind the pale eyes, something that might have been memory, or pity, or simply the recognition of one form of grief by another. "There's extra blankets in the wardrobe if you get cold. The wind off the cliffs at night can be bitter, this time of year."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me." Vera picked up her paperback and her glasses. "Room seven. End of the hall. Don't lose the key. Last guest who lost a key had to climb down the fire escape in her nightgown in February."
She turned the page of her novel and did not look up again.
Wren carried her bag down the hall.
The runner underfoot was a dark, heavy weave that swallowed the sound of her footsteps. The walls were hung with framed photographs of the harbor as it had been in earlier decades, sail-rigged ketches at anchor, a fish weir out on the flats, the inn itself in some long-vanished summer with white paint and awnings of unbleached canvas. At the end of the hall the photographs gave way to a single small window that looked out, as promised, onto the cliffs and the dark water beyond.
Room seven was at the very end. She turned the key in the lock. The door opened onto a space that smelled faintly of lavender and woodsmoke and the faintly mineral breath of old plaster.
The room was smaller than she had expected, and it was perfect. A narrow bed under the window, made up in white. A small writing desk with a straight chair. A wardrobe of dark wood, taller than she was. A hooked rug of braided rags in faded blues and greens. A window seat with a cushion the color of old paper. A glass oil lamp on the bedside table, its chimney dusty and empty. A door to a bathroom she did not yet look into.
She set her bag on the bed. She did not unpack. She crossed to the window and unlatched the shutter and pushed it outward. The wind off the cliffs came in, brisk and briny, smelling of wet stone and iodine and the cold green pulse of the tide far below. The cliffs were out there, black against the lighter black of the sky, their faces faintly luminous where the last of the dusk still clung to the rocks. The sea moved below them, a long slow breath, in and out, in and out, and beyond the sea there was nothing but the dark and the stars.
She stood at the window for a long time. The piano had stopped playing. Somewhere below her, a floorboard creaked as Vera Marsh moved through her evening rounds. The grandfather clock ticked its patient, indifferent count.
Her phone buzzed in her coat pocket. She drew it out. The screen showed two missed calls from a number she did not recognize and a single text from her editor in Anchorage: any update on the field report?
She put the phone facedown on the writing desk. She did not answer. She crossed back to the bed and sat on its edge, her coat still on, her hands in her lap.
The kettle on the tray beside the wardrobe gleamed dully in the light from the window. The tin with the roses was where Vera had said it would be, on the second shelf. The blue tin sat beside it, slightly larger, with a faded label in a hand she did not recognize.
She did not make the tea. She did not light the lamp. She sat in the dark on the edge of the unfamiliar bed and listened to the sea rise and fall and rise and fall, and she thought about her mother, and about Margaret Vance, and about the lawyer's letter in her bag, and about the house on Pilgrim's Lane that she had not entered, and about the long way she had come to stand in this particular window, looking out at this particular view.
Far down the hall, a door opened and closed. Footsteps passed, soft and hesitant, paused for a moment outside her door, then moved on toward the stair. A voice, very young and very breathy, was asking the front desk if there were any messages, if anyone had called, if anyone at all had come looking.
The grandfather clock struck nine.
Wren pulled off her boots and lay back on the bed without pulling the coverlet down. The brass key on its wooden whale still in her hand. She set it on her chest and felt its weight, small and foreign and final. The wind moved through the open shutter and touched her face. She closed her eyes.
She did not sleep. But she did not rise, either. She lay there in the dark with the smell of the sea coming through the window and the faint, lingering hum of the young woman's voice in the corridor, and she waited for the morning, and for whatever it would bring.
Morning came gray and reluctant, the kind of morning that seemed to apologize for the night before it. Wren woke, or rather rose, because she had not truly slept, only drifted in the shallow water of half-consciousness where the brass key on her chest became first a locket, then a coin, then a small cold hand pressed flat against her sternum.
She showered. She dressed. She laced her boots tight, as if she expected to need the grip.
Downstairs, the lobby of the Saltwood Inn was empty. The same man was behind the desk, or a different man who looked so much like the first that Wren suspected the town kept a small stable of them, bred for politeness and early hours. He wished her a good morning. She wished him the same. Neither of them meant it.
Outside, the town of Cold Harbor lay under a sky the color of pewter. The air smelled of brine and diesel and something underneath that, vegetal and dark, the smell of low tide over rockweed. A fog clung to the upper stories of the buildings on Main Street, softening the cornices, blurring the signage.
Wren turned left out of the inn and walked the half block to Becker's, the corner store. She had not smoked in eleven years. She had quit on a beach in Costa Rica the morning after a man she had loved told her, very kindly, that he did not love her. She had not touched a cigarette since. But Vera had said, in the peremptory way Vera said everything, that Wren ought to have cigarettes in the house for the weeks of clearing out her mother's things, and Wren had agreed, because Vera's certainty had a way of making one's own small rebellions seem foolish.
She was crossing the intersection at Main and Harbor when she saw the first one.
It was stapled to the telephone pole at the corner, a sheet of copy paper gone soft at the edges from the damp. A photograph took up most of the page, a young woman's face, unsmiling, eyes looking slightly off camera as if the photographer had called her name just before the shutter fell. Across the top, in a thick sans-serif that wanted to be bold but had been printed on a printer that had run out of true black, were the words HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
Wren stopped. The wind was coming off the ocean, salt-laden and steady, and it caught the corner of the poster and lifted it a quarter inch from the wood. The paper shivered. The young woman's hair in the photograph lifted too, or seemed to.
Wren stepped closer. At the bottom of the page, smaller, in a font that had been chosen for clarity and had achieved something close to despair, were the words: LILA VANCE, AGE 24. LAST SEEN ON PILGRIMS LANE ON THE EVENING OF SEPTEMBER 14TH. PLEASE CALL THE COLD HARBOR POLICE DEPARTMENT WITH ANY INFORMATION.
Pilgrim's Lane. The house on Pilgrim's Lane.
She turned, and there, on the next pole, was another. Same face. Same words. The wind was stronger here, where the buildings fell away and the street opened toward the harbor, and the poster was pulling at its staples, one corner fully free, the paper ballooning out like a small, frantic bird trying to fly.
Wren walked to the next pole. Another. And the next. Another. They were stapled at every junction, every lamppost, every available vertical surface. The face repeated itself down the street like a sentence spoken too many times. LILA VANCE. HAVE YOU SEEN ME? LILA VANCE. HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
The salt wind moved through them and they rustled and tugged, a soft papery chorus, and Wren stood in the middle of Main Street with her hands in her pockets and her mother's lawyer's letter folded inside her jacket and she thought: of course. Of course it would be Pilgrim's Lane. Of course the house her mother had left her, the house she had not yet entered, the house she had been pointed toward like a ship toward a headland, would be the same house from which this soft-faced girl had vanished.
She thought of the young woman's voice in the corridor last night, breathy and hesitant, asking if anyone had come looking.
She thought: she is asking. She has been asking. She is here in this town, in this same inn perhaps, asking everyone she meets, and no one has seen, and no one has called, and the posters have been going up and coming down and going up again, and the wind has been moving through them.
Wren crossed the street and went into Becker's. A bell over the door rang, a small bright sound that belonged to a different decade. The store smelled of coffee that had been on the burner too long and floor wax and the faint sweet chemical tang of cheap candy displayed in a glass case near the register. Behind the counter was a young man with a shaved head and a tattoo of an anchor on his forearm and the kind of face that suggested he had worked the dawn shift for several years and intended to work it for several more.
"Mornin'," he said.
"Good morning," Wren said. "Cigarettes, please. Any kind. Whatever you have in the most plain packaging."
He looked at her, briefly, the way a person looks at another person when they are trying to place them, and then he reached under the counter and brought up a green plastic tray. "Marlboro, Camel, Pall Mall, American Spirit."
"American Spirit," Wren said.
He rang her up. She paid in cash. He slid the pack across the glass and then, after a moment's hesitation that had the shape of a small decision being made, he said, "You're the woman who came in on the bus yesterday. The one with the lawyer letter."
Wren looked at him. "I am."
"You're Wren Ashby."
"I am."
"You cleared out your mother's place yet?"
"Not yet."
He nodded, as if this were an answer he had expected. "Maeve Ashby was a good woman," he said. "My mother worked with her at the library, back in the seventies. Before the library got shut down."
"Thank you," Wren said.
He nodded again and went back to something behind the counter that required his attention. Wren picked up the cigarettes and turned to leave, and then she stopped, and she turned back.
"The posters," she said. "For the missing girl. How long has she been missing?"
"Three weeks," the young man said. "Give or take. Her mother is Margaret Vance, she's the one who runs the flower shop over on Pilgrim's Lane, the one with the green awning. The girl came home, I think, and then one evening she just wasn't there anymore, and nobody's seen her since."
"Pilgrim's Lane," Wren said.
"That's right."
"Thank you," Wren said.
He shrugged. "There's coffee, if you want it. It's burned."
"That's all right."
She left the bell and the floor wax and the burned coffee behind her and stepped back out into the street. The wind had freshened. The posters were lifting and resettling, lifting and resettling, a soft persistent flutter that filled the air around her with a sound like many small wings.
She stood there for a moment and looked down the street toward the harbor, where the fog was thinning and the masts of the fishing boats were beginning to emerge from it like a row of dark, patient needles. Then she turned the other way, away from the harbor, and looked up the hill toward Pilgrim's Lane, where her mother's house sat waiting, and where the missing girl's mother was, presumably, also waiting, and where, somewhere in the middle of all that waiting, the answer to the question on every pole in town was waiting too.
Wren put a cigarette between her lips, unlit, and started walking.
She lit it at the corner. The match flared, and the smoke curled up and away into the salt air and was gone. She had forgotten the taste, or had tried to forget it, and it came back to her now, familiar and faintly obscene, the way the smell of a former lover's apartment is obscene when one is older and different.
She walked. The town unfolded around her in its small, careful way. The bank, closed until nine. The pharmacy, with its green awning.