The fluorescent tube above the interview table had been flickering for the better part of an hour, casting the small room in a stuttering half-light that made the coffee in Mara's paper cup look older than it was. Across from her, Pryce set a clear evidence bag on the scarred Formica. Inside, the spine of a softcover book caught the buzz and threw it back as a dull bronze sheen.
She knew the cover before she read the title. Black ink on bone-colored cardstock, a small woodcut of a gull, a sigil of crossed quills at the foot. R.M. Tindall's The Harrowing , second printing, the one with the erratum slip tipped in at page forty-three. The smell of the ink reached her through the plastic, that particular library paste and linseed scent she'd catalogued so many times her fingers remembered it.
The return address label on the back of the book read, in her own handwriting, M. Voss, Archival Services, P.O. Box 114, Spruce Harbor, ME 04854 .
Pryce settled into the metal chair opposite, palms flat on the table. He wore his volunteer firefighter jacket, the one with the char-burned cuff, and beneath it a Rockland Marine Supply polo that had seen better seasons. His face carried the particular tiredness of a man who had stopped being surprised by the week but had not yet learned to be bored by it. "This ring any bells," he said. Not quite a question.
Mara set her cup down. The coffee inside it was already tepid, the sugar not yet dissolved. "I didn't send it."
"Label says different."
"I didn't send it." She kept her voice level. "That's my label, my box number, my handwriting. I didn't put it there."
"Could you have, and forgotten?"
"I don't forget my own postage."
He considered that. Outside the interview room, the station's old radiators ticked and groaned through another cold cycle. Someone two rooms over was laughing into a telephone. The radiators smelled of dust and something chemical, radiator paint gone tacky in the heat. Mara could taste the metallic edge of it at the back of her tongue.
Pryce slid a photocopy of the envelope across. Same return address. Different postmark. Portland, 04 14. "Dropped in Eaves's box eight days before she went missing. No other correspondence in the stack. Just this. We lifted it from her study, the one she'd been working in the morning of."
Mara studied the postmark. April fourteenth. Three days after Alma's call, the one where Alma had told her not to come home yet and then hadn't picked up again. Mara had come anyway. "You didn't open it," she said.
"Sealed bag, didn't open. Procedure." A small apology in the corner of his mouth. "I'm running it the way I'm supposed to, Mara."
She nodded. The flicker above them buzzed in a rhythm she couldn't quite count. Tock. Tick-tock. Tock. "The book in there. I catalogued it. Twice. Once for the publisher, once for the maritime collection at the university library. Tindall sent me a galley proof in February. I never solicited a copy of the finished edition."
"And somebody knows your business address."
"Somebody does." She looked at the label. Her handwriting. Her box number. The box she paid three years in advance to keep, because she liked having an address that wasn't her apartment in Baltimore, because she liked the idea of being somewhere she hadn't earned the right to be yet. "I've been getting odd submissions. Manuscripts I didn't ask for. I've been returning them unopened. I assumed it was a vanity press scraping rosters. Old habits on somebody's part."
"What kind of odd?"
"Local subjects. Coastal ones. A history of the lime kilns at Rockport. A memoir by a lighthouse keeper's wife, somebody I've never heard of. A book of folklore from around here, the kind an aunt would self-publish and hand out at the post office." She paused, aware of how thin each of those descriptions sounded out loud. "And this one. Tindall's. A novel I catalogued, that I held in my hands and stamped, but that no one had any reason to send me at home."
Pryce rubbed the back of his neck. He had a habit, when he was a boy, of pulling his collar over his ears when he thought too hard about something. He had grown into the gesture but not out of it. "And you just kept returning them. Didn't call us."
"I returned them with a printed slip. Unsolicited, return to sender. I didn't think it was a police matter. People mail things. It's a country."
"It's a country," he agreed. The radiator kicked. He glanced at the ceiling as if he might be able to will the tube to behave. "Eaves is missing, Mara. That makes anything with her name on it a police matter. Anything with your name on hers."
"I understand that."
"And you're sitting in front of me telling me a stranger is writing your address onto packages you didn't authorize."
"A stranger, or a friend of hers. Or a collector. Eaves knew every archivist on this coast by name. She used to send people copies of books she'd found in attics, just to make sure somebody had a record. Maybe somebody thought the favor was due back. Maybe she did it herself."
Pryce was quiet for a moment. Outside, the laughter two rooms over had stopped. The radiators had stopped ticking, replaced by a low, all-over hum that lived in the walls. The smell of burnt coffee was stronger now. Someone, somewhere in the building, was brewing a fresh pot.
"You and Eaves talk lately?"
The question landed in her chest like a dropped stone. She thought of Alma on the porch of the salt house, Alma turning the pages of a ledger she had not opened in years. She thought of her sister's face in the rearview of a car she had not been inside. "Last fall. Briefly."
"About what?"
"About home."
He nodded, as if the word home were a container with contents he was afraid to spill. He wrote something in a small notebook, the pen slow across the page. "I'm going to release you," he said. "On your own recognizance. Nothing formal yet. You stay reachable."
"I have a place at the estate."
"I know you have a place at the estate."
"Then you know where to find me."
He closed the notebook. Then he reached under the table and brought out a manila envelope, sealed, unmarked. He set it in front of her next to the evidence bag. "The original. The thing in that bag. Photocopied first, logged, and replaced." He paused. "Yours, if you want it. Or it stays in evidence. Either way it gets fingerprinted before it leaves this building."
Mara looked at the envelope. She didn't reach for it. "Why are you giving it to me?"
"Because it's your address on it. Because if somebody's using your name to send things into this town, I want you reading what they're sending you." He gave her a small, careful look. "And because you asked me, when we were seventeen, if I'd ever read a book called The Lighthouse . I said no. You said, you should, it's about a man who keeps a light he can't see . I've thought about that more than I want to admit."
She didn't know what to say to that. She looked at the flickering tube, at the ceiling, at the small crack in the plaster above the door that she'd been tracing for the past hour. "Owen."
"This isn't a favor," he said. "This is me, asking you to do me the favor. You call if anything else shows up. You call if you remember something. You call me before you call Cyrus Beckett." A beat. "You have my number still."
"I have your number still."
The diner's screen door banged shut behind her, and the salt air came up off the harbor like a hand laid flat against her face. Mara stood on the wooden walkway a moment longer than she needed to. Behind her, through the clouded glass, she could see Owen Pryce still sitting at the booth, his shoulders squared, his untouched coffee going cold in its ceramic mug. He was looking at the manila envelope he had not let her take.
She walked back to the estate along the cliff road. The fog had lifted off the water but not off the grass, and her shoes came away dark with it. The Voss house stood at the end of the lane, gulls crying in the eaves, the paint on the shutters flaking off in long pale scrolls. She let herself in through the kitchen door and stood with her back against the cool enamel of the old stove, listening to the house tick and settle. Somewhere above her a shutter worked loose in the wind and tapped, once, twice, three times against the frame.
She did not open the envelope she had not yet been given. She waited, because that was what he had asked her to do, and because waiting, after eighteen years of not waiting for anything, was its own kind of muscle she had forgotten she had.
Two days passed. The rain came in on the Wednesday, blowing sideways off the slate-colored water, drumming the windows of the east parlor so loudly that Helena Marsh, who had arrived at six with her usual basket of eggs and a face like a closed ledger, raised her voice an entire register to be heard across the kitchen table.
"He's been on the phone most of the morning," Helena said. She was standing at the sink, peeling a hard-boiled egg with fingers that were precise and quick and disapproving. "Whoever it is, they're keeping him."
"I didn't ask," Mara said.
"You didn't have to. You never did." Helena set the peeled egg on a small blue plate. "Your mother would have asked."
"Yes. She would have."
Helena's mouth pressed into a line that had nothing to do with eggs. She turned back to the sink.
On Thursday morning, at twenty minutes past nine, Mara heard the familiar rattle of Owen's truck coming up the drive. She was in the library, cataloguing a crate of her mother's ledger books that had been waiting since the funeral for someone willing to look at them. The smell of them was dense and a little sweet, like old apples left in a cellar too long. She set down her pencil.
He came to the kitchen door without knocking. He never had knocked. He stood on the threshold with his coat dark from the rain and a manila folder under one arm, and he looked, she thought, like a man who had not slept well in a week.
"Come in," she said. "You're letting the weather in."
He came in. He set the folder on the table between them and unbuttoned his coat but did not take it off. "Sit down," he said. "Or don't. It doesn't matter. But I'm going to talk and I'd rather not do it to the side of your head while you stand there being stubborn."
She sat.
He sat across from her and opened the folder. The pages inside were dense with single-spaced type and the occasional color photograph. He pushed the folder toward her and put one finger on the first photograph, a side view of a typewriter carriage. Even in the photograph, she could see the soft, warm green of the metal. The keys were round and slightly yellowed at the tops. The body had a small dent near the roller.
"Hermes 3000," Owen said. "Portable. Swiss-made. They stopped making them in the late nineties. Ninety-eight is what the techs are calling it, give or take. The serial number is partially filed down, which is a thing people do when they're trying to make a machine harder to trace. Whoever did it did not do it very well. There's enough left to narrow the production run to somewhere between nineteen seventy-eight and nineteen eighty-one. So the machine itself is old. Forty-something years old at least."
Mara looked at the photograph. The green of the typewriter was the green of the kitchen walls in the room above the summer parlor, the room where her mother had kept the ironing board set up year-round because she did not trust the laundress in the village to press a collar correctly. The keys, in the photograph, looked like the tops of small white mushrooms.
"The ink," Owen said, "is more interesting."
He turned the page. The next photograph was a strip of black ribbon held in a clear plastic sleeve. Under magnification, the ribbon looked almost geological, a layered thing with the slow striations of a tide-cut cliff.
"The lab pulled the ribbon. What they found is that the ink on the manuscript pages is fresh. Less than six months old. The ribbon itself is older, and the typewriter hasn't been used much in the intervening years. Maybe a few test pages. Maybe a few letters. But the document you brought me was inked within the last half year. So someone typed the manuscript recently, on an old machine they've been keeping."
"Salt," Mara said. She had not meant to say it. She said it because the word had been sitting in her mouth since the photograph came into focus.
Owen looked at her a long moment. "How did you know that?"
"I don't know. I just. I could taste it in the photograph."
He nodded, slow, the way he nodded when she said something he wasn't going to argue with. He turned the page again. This one was a lab printout, two columns of chemical analysis with small bars of color running down the right side like a torn ribbon.
"Trace sodium chloride," he said. "Sea salt. And trace graphite. Not the kind that comes off pencil lead. The kind that comes from machined parts that have sat in a humid, salt-heavy environment for a long time. The tech described it as consistent with a machine that has been stored, unused, in a coastal building for years. Possibly decades. She said the graphite had oxidized in a particular way you only see in damp air with high salt content."
He tapped the page with the side of his thumb. "This isn't an attic in Kansas. This is here. Whatever house that typewriter is sitting in, it's within spitting distance of salt water. And it's been sitting there for a long time before someone turned it back on."
Mara stood up. She walked to the kitchen window and looked out at the rain coming down off the slate roofs of the outbuildings. The garden was a washed gray. The fountain in the center of the walled garden had filled to its brim and was spilling slowly over the edge onto the flagstones. She thought of her mother, who had hated the fountain, who had wanted it torn out the year Mara was seven. Judith Voss had not torn it out because Cyrus Beckett had advised against it, and Judith Voss, who questioned very little in this world, did not question Cyrus Beckett.
"You don't have to say anything," Owen said from behind her. His voice was careful. "I'm not going to ask you to say anything."
"There's salt in every house on this coast," she said.
"There is."
"There is salt in this house."
"There is."
"So that's not a thing. That's just where we are."
He did not answer that. She heard him get up. She heard him come to the window and stand beside her, not too close, his reflection a smudge in the wet glass beside her own.
"There's one more thing," he said.
She turned her head.
"The tech flagged a hesitation pattern in the typing. You can see it in the spacing on certain pages. Where the typist paused. Where they backed up to retype a letter. It's not random. It's not a typo rate. It's somebody typing slowly, deliberately, the way you type when you're thinking about every word before you put it down."
"Like a draft."
"Like a draft. Like somebody writing in real time."
He reached into his coat pocket and took out a smaller envelope, this one sealed with a red evidence sticker. He held it out to her across the small distance between them. She did not take it immediately.
"What is it?"
"A second page. It came in the mail this morning. No return address. Same block lettering on the envelope as the first. Same postmark. The same hand."
"To me?"
"To you."
She took the envelope. It was the same weight as the first one had been. She could feel, through the paper, the slight unevenness of a typewriter impression pressed too lightly to be read through. She turned it over in her hands.
"Owen."
"I know."
"I didn't send the first one."
"I know that too."
She slid her thumb under the flap of the envelope and stopped. She looked at him. The kitchen was quiet except for the rain on the glass and the slow tick of the clock above the stove. In the next room, somewhere, a shutter tapped against its frame, three times, the way it had been tapping all week.
"If I open this," she said, "I'm going to have to read it."
"You don't have to open it tonight."
"I'm going to have to open it sometime."
"Yes," he said. "You are."
She looked down at the envelope in her hand. The paper smelled faintly, under the glue and the postmark, of something she could not yet place. She turned it once more, slid it into the pocket of her cardigan, and pressed her palm flat against it through the wool.
"Stay for coffee," she said. "It's the least I can do for wasting your morning."
He almost smiled. "It's ten in the morning. I've been awake since four."
"Then stay for something stronger than coffee."
He pulled out the chair across from her and sat down again, and she went to the stove to put the kettle on.
The kettle took longer than it should have. The burner on the right side of the stove hadn't drawn even heat in years, and Mara stood watching the blue flame sputter and lean, the way her mother used to stand over the same stove in the same posture, hands folded at the small of her back, waiting for water that always seemed to take its time. The thought arrived and she let it pass without chasing it down.
She heard Owen behind her, the soft scrape of him pulling his chair closer to the table, the creak of old wood. When she turned with two mismatched mugs in her hands, he had taken out his wallet and was looking at something inside it, turning it between his fingers the way a man turns a coin when he is thinking about something he has not yet decided to say.
"Old photograph?" she asked.
He closed the wallet. "Something like that."
She set his mug in front of him, sat down across from him, and for a few minutes they drank their coffee without speaking. The rain had not stopped. Somewhere in the house, a pipe ticked in the wall as the temperature changed, and the shutter in the back room kept up its patient three-count.
"Mara."
"Mm."
"You know you don't have to open it."
"I know."
"I mean it. You could put it in a drawer. You could take it down to the post office and ask them to lift a print. You could do any of ten things that aren't opening it in this kitchen at ten in the morning with me watching."
She looked at him over the rim of her mug. His eyes were the same eyes they had been when they were sixteen and he had taught her to back the old skiff out of the harbor without running aground. Patient. A little worried. Willing to wait as long as she needed.
"I'm going to open it," she said. "But not yet."
"Fair enough."
She finished her coffee. He finished his. Neither of them moved to refill the pot, and the silence between them had the particular weight of a silence neither of them wanted to be the one to break.
She was the one who broke it.
"Stay here," she said. "I have to go into town. There's something I need to pick up at the office."
He looked at her for a long moment. He did not ask what it was. He set his mug down.
"I'll hold down the house."
"I know you will."
She took her coat from the hook by the door, and on her way past the table she let her hand rest, for just a moment, on the back of his chair. He did not look up. He did not need to.
The drive to town took forty minutes in the rain. She took the coastal road because the inland road was flooded at the marsh crossing and had been for a week. The wipers beat a steady rhythm against the glass, and the envelope in the pocket of her cardigan pressed against her ribs with every turn of the wheel.
She did not open it.
The Marrow Review occupied the second floor of a converted boathouse at the end of Commercial Street. The stairwell smelled of old rope and printer's ink and, faintly, of the cinnamon candles Helena Marsh kept on her desk to cover the smell of the radiator. Mara climbed the stairs slowly, listening to her own footsteps echo against the painted brick, and at the top she paused with her hand on the brass handle of the door.
Through the glass she could see Helena at her desk, and beyond Helena, through the open door of the corner office at the back, the tall silhouette of a man standing with his hands clasped behind him, looking out at the harbor. She did not need to see his face to know it was Cyrus Beckett. She would have known him anywhere by the way he held himself, as if the room were already his and he was simply waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
Helena looked up and saw her through the glass. The older woman's face did something complicated. She rose, came to the door, and held it open for Mara with one hand while the other hand hovered, as if uncertain where to put itself.
"He's been here since eight," Helena said, low enough that her voice would not carry. "He says he has a personal matter to discuss with you. He won't say what."
"All right."
"Mara."
"I'm all right, Helena."
Helena studied her for another moment, then stepped aside. Mara walked the length of the newsroom, past the long desk where the layout proofs were spread out to dry, past the corkboard with its curling index cards, past the framed front page from the issue that had won the regional press award in 2009. She did not stop until she was standing in the doorway of the corner office, and Cyrus Beckett turned from the window to look at her as if he had been expecting her all morning.
Which, of course, he had.
"Miss Voss," he said. "Thank you for coming in. Please, sit."
She did not sit. "You asked for me, Mr. Beckett. I'm here."
He smiled. It was the smile he had used in the courtroom, the one that had persuaded three separate judges to continue matters in chambers rather than on the record, the one that had talked her mother into signing documents she had never read. It was a smile that had been polished on a wheel for forty years until it was almost too smooth to read.
"I prefer Cyrus," he said. "I've known you since you were a girl."
"You've known the Voss family since before I was born. That's not the same thing."
"No," he agreed, still smiling. "It isn't."
He gestured to the chair in front of the desk. She sat, because standing in a doorway while a man smiled at her was a posture she had decided, years ago, she would no longer tolerate. He remained standing for another moment, a small power he could not resist taking, and then he lowered himself into the chair behind the desk with the deliberate care of a man who wished to remind you that the chair was his.
He folded his hands on the blotter in front of him. The blotter was green leather, cracked at the corners, and it was the same blotter that had been on his desk in his father's office when she was a child. She remembered the smell of it, faintly, and the way the brass corners had caught the light.
"I will not waste your time," he said. "I am told there is a possibility you may be formally charged in connection with the matter of your sister's disappearance. I am here to discuss the implications."
"The implications for whom?"
"For the Marrow Review. For the property at the heart of the trust. For your mother's good name, which I have spent the better part of three decades preserving in the face of considerable difficulty."
He said the last sentence the way a man lays down a card he has been holding for some time.
"I see," Mara said.
"I don't think you do. Not yet." He opened a drawer and took out a single envelope, cream-colored, heavier than the ones in her pocket. He set it on the desk between them and laid his palm flat on it, the way a man lays his palm flat on a deed. "This is a personal check drawn on my own account. Twenty thousand dollars. It is made out to you, and it is yours, with no conditions and no expectation of repayment."
She looked at the envelope. She did not touch it.
"In exchange," he said.
"There is no exchange."
"There is. I would like you to use whatever means are at your disposal to ensure that the matter of your sister's disappearance does not become a matter of formal criminal record. I do not care how that is accomplished. I do not care who is persuaded, who is paid, who is quietly asked to remember the date of something incorrectly. I am asking you to make the problem go away, Miss Voss. For the good of the family. For the good of the magazine. For the good of the village."
He pronounced the word good as if he were placing a small, polished stone on a scale.
"And if I am charged anyway?" she asked.
He removed his hand from the envelope. He folded his hands again. He smiled, and this time the smile was thinner.
"Then I will be obliged, in my capacity as executor of the Voss trust, to take certain steps to protect the assets under my care. The Marrow Review occupies a building owned by the trust. The building is, regrettably, not insured to a level that would survive a prolonged legal proceeding. I would have no choice but to shutter the magazine pending the resolution of the matter. I would find that outcome personally regrettable. I am sure Helena Marsh would find it personally catastrophic. But I would have no choice."
He said the words no choice as if he were reading them off a card, and for the first time she heard, beneath the polish, the cold undertone that had always been there, the way you hear the cold undertone in a stream only when you step into it.
She looked at the envelope on the desk. She looked at the man behind the desk. She thought of Owen in her mother's kitchen, and of Helena at her desk with the cinnamon candle, and of the building inspector who had come to look at the roof last spring and shaken his head for ten minutes before he could bring himself to say what he had to say. She thought of her mother's face in the upstairs window, when there had still been a mother in it. She thought of the envelope in her cardigan pocket, and of the shutter in the back room tapping three times, and of the rain on the glass.
She reached across the desk and picked up the envelope. She did not open it. She slid it into the inside pocket of her coat, on the opposite side from the cardigan, so that the two envelopes hung against her ribs like weights on a scale she had not yet decided to read.
"I will think about what you've said," she said.
"That is all I ask."
"It is not all you ask."
"No," he agreed, and he did not bother to smile. "It is not."
She stood. He did not stand. She walked to the door, and at the threshold she stopped, with her back to him, and spoke without turning around.
"My mother trusted you, Mr. Beckett."
"Your mother was a very great lady, Miss Voss."
"Yes," she said. "She was."
She walked back through the newsroom. Helena did not look up from her desk. Mara did not stop. She went down the stairs, through the boathouse door, out into the rain.
In the car, before she started the engine, she took the cream envelope from her coat pocket and looked at it for a long time. The check inside was for twenty thousand dollars. It was made out to her. It would clear. She tucked it back into her pocket, started the car, and drove back toward the coast road in the rain, with the wipers beating their patient rhythm and the two envelopes lying against her ribs, one on each side, like the two halves of a balance she had not yet decided to weigh.
She did not cash the check. She would not cash the check. She sat in her mother's kitchen an hour later, with Owen across from her and the kettle back on the stove, and she turned the cream envelope over and over in her hands the way she had turned the other one over, and the rain kept falling, and the shutter in the back room kept tapping, and somewhere, at the edge of the harbor, the tide was turning.