The morning tide was on the turn when Naomi Pruitt came up the hill at the south end of Wharf Street, and the smell of it came up with her, brine and weed and a faintly sweet rot that the October gulls fed on without shame. The cobbles under her boots were still dark with the night's damp. A man in oilskins was hosing down the fish-shop awning two doors down from the bookshop, and the water ran black into the gutter before it reached the harbor.
She had not walked this street in eleven years. She had been seventeen the last time, the summer she left for Bangor to take a job at the textile office, and she had walked down this hill with her father's old duffel on her back and not looked up once. That was the arrangement she had made with herself, and she had kept to it.
Now she walked up.
Wharf Street had not put on much weight in the years since. The buildings leaned a little further toward each other, the awnings hung a little lower, the paint on the clapboards had peeled a little further into the grain. A new sign for the chandlery down the way. A fresh coat on the trim of the coffee place where the hardware used to be. Otherwise the street looked like a photograph of itself left too long in a drawer.
Tate's Books was at the second bend. The front window was full of the kind of books that did not move much from one season to the next, old hardcover novels with cracked spines and a row of regional histories with the same gold lettering she remembered. A small hand-lettered card in the corner read, in Hollis Tate's careful block print, IF YOU CANNOT FIND IT, ASK. IF I CANNOT FIND IT, I WILL TELL YOU SO.
She stood a moment on the sidewalk and watched the plate glass for any sign of him. There was no one. The interior of the shop was a soft brown dimness, the kind only rooms with too many shelves and not enough lamps could manage. She took one breath, two, and crossed the sidewalk.
The brass bell above the door gave one thin, surprised note as she pushed it open, and the sound startled a gull off the awning across the street. She stepped onto a board floor that groaned once beneath her boot heel, then settled. Old books. Old wood. Old salt in the air that had never quite left this part of Wharf Street, no matter how many summers blew through it. The shop smelled of paper and pipe tobacco and something faintly musty she could not name, something that lived in the bones of the place the way lichen lives on stone.
A bell on the counter rang twice as she let the door fall shut. From somewhere in the back, a chair scraped, and then the sound of a man's flat, unhurried tread.
"Morning already, is it," a voice called from behind a curtain of strung beads. "Or near enough."
The beads parted. Hollis Tate came through them with a pencil tucked behind one ear and a folded newspaper under his arm, his reading glasses pushed up onto his forehead. He was a tall man made shorter by the slight forward stoop of a body that had spent fifty years leaning over counters and creaking up from low chairs. His face was the color and texture of the cedar shingles on the wharf houses, weathered into something that did not change much anymore.
He looked at her a moment. Then he set the newspaper down on the counter.
"Naomi."
"Hollis."
He came around the counter the way he did everything, slowly and without seeming to notice the slowness. She had watched him cross this same floor since she was a girl tall enough to see over the glass case of fishing lures by the door. He had not changed in the ways people usually change. The same shirtsleeves rolled twice at the cuff. The same thick wrists, the same hands with knuckles that clicked softly when he straightened his fingers.
"You look like you slept on a boat," he said.
"I slept on a bus."
"From where."
"Boston. Then the coastal line. Then the jitney from the junction."
"All that way to come here."
"I wrote you."
"I got the letter."
"I got the letter." He repeated it, the way he repeated things that mattered, letting the words settle between them like a stone dropped into still water. Then he reached beneath the counter and produced a cup of coffee that must have been poured ten minutes before, set it in front of her, and went back around to his side without asking whether she wanted it.
She wrapped her hands around the cup. The ceramic was chipped along the rim and cool on the sides, but the coffee inside had held its warmth, and the first sip was the color of creek water and tasted of chicory and the iron from the old percolator he had never replaced.
"I came as quick as I could," she said.
"Reckon you did." He pulled the stool out from behind the counter, the one with the cracked leather seat he had been meaning to re-cover since the last century, and sat. His knees popped when he lowered himself. He did not remark on it. "Takes all day on those jitneys."
"Most of it."
"And you didn't write what it was about. Just that I should expect you."
"I didn't know how to write what it was about." She looked at him across the counter. The morning light came in from the front windows at an angle that turned the dust motes into slow gold, and in that light Hollis Tate looked every year of his age and a few more. The lines at the corners of his eyes had deepened since she had last seen him at the funeral. The skin along his jaw had gone slack in a way that made him look, for the first time in her life, like a man who had somewhere to be but no longer remembered what for. "It's about Lila."
He didn't move. The pencil behind his ear stayed where it was. His hands, folded on the counter, stayed where they were. Only his eyes changed, a small contraction like a man bracing against a wave he had already seen coming.
"Lila Calloway," he said.
"Yes."
"Wren's girl."
"Yes."
The bell on the counter gave a small chime as the door breathed in a gust of salt wind from the harbor. Somewhere outside, a halyard slapped against an aluminum mast, the rhythm of it like someone knocking at a door that no one intended to answer.
Hollis looked down at his hands. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, and the words came more slowly, each one set down like a foot on uncertain ground.
"Sit down, Naomi. The stool's there. The good one, not that broken thing by the seed catalog."
She sat.
"What did they tell you up the coast," he asked. "When you rang. When you heard."
"They told me she was dead. They told me there had been an accident. They told me Wren hadn't left the house in three days and couldn't be reached, and that I was listed as the next of kin on whatever paperwork Lila had signed, and that someone ought to come."
"And you came."
"And I came."
He nodded once. Then he reached under the counter again, this time pulling out a manila folder, thin, with a paper clip bent at one end. He did not open it. He set it on the counter between them and rested one hand flat on top of it, as though to keep it from sliding off or from flying open of its own accord.
"Official word," he said, "is she slipped on wet rocks down by the south point. The tide was coming in. She'd been out walking, they figure, after dark, alone, which she did sometimes. They found her at the base of the cut, below the second flight of stairs going up to the path. The water had moved her some. There were scratches on her hands, on her knees, what you'd expect. They took her up to the county and the county sent her on."
"Slipped," Naomi said.
"That's what they wrote."
"And what did they not write."
Hollis's mouth drew thin. He looked at her the way he had looked at her when she was eleven and had tried to return a fishing reel she had broken behind his back, with a measuring kind of patience that was not unkind.
"Two men saw her alive," he said. "Past midnight. The Calloway boys, the ones with the green hull out past the breakers. They were coming in late with a hold of keepers, and they spotted her on the road that runs along the cliff toward the lighthouse. Walking steady. Not stumbling. Not hurrying either. They thought about hailing her, and then they didn't, because they figured she had her reasons for being out at that hour and not in her truck."
"Which Calloway boys."
"Andrew and his nephew. The one with the bad knee."
"Andrew's word is good."
"Andrew's word is good."
She turned the coffee cup in her hands. The chicory had cooled enough that she could taste the staleness of it, the way reheated coffee always tasted of the pot it had come from and the morning it had been left there. Outside, the slap of the halyard had steadied into a slower beat. A gull screamed somewhere out over the water.
"If she was walking toward the lighthouse," Naomi said, "and the rocks where they say she slipped are on the south point, that is the wrong direction."
"Yes."
"And if she was walking steady, and it was past midnight, and there was no moon, that's a long walk to be taking alone unless she meant to take it."
"Yes."
"And the rocks where they say she slipped, I've walked them. I've walked them in good light with both hands free. They're not treacherous unless the tide's coming in high and the spray has made the lichen slick. Even then, you don't slip. You scramble."
Hollis looked at her a long moment. He lifted his hand from the folder and folded both hands in his lap, beneath the counter, where she could not see them. She knew he was working his thumbs together, the way he did when he was thinking about how much of something to say.
"The official word is what I told you," he said. "I don't make the official word. I sell coffee and nails. That's the extent of what I do."
"But you didn't just sell me the official word."
"No."
"Then sell me the rest."
He was quiet for a time. The beads at the back of the shop clicked against each other in the draft from the door, a small dry sound like seeds rattling in a gourd. She could smell the lumber yard next door through the wall, the pine resin and the old creosote, and beneath that the brine that got into everything on this part of the coast if you left a window cracked for half an hour.
"There's talk," he said at last. "I won't say whose. There's talk that she had been to see her father that evening. That she came back from his place late, and that's why she was out on the road. And there's talk, Naomi, and this is the part I'd as soon not say, that she had asked him about some things in the days before. Asking after money. Asking after accounts. Asking after the kind of things a girl doesn't ask her father unless she's got a reason to think there's something to ask about."
Naomi set the cup down. The ceramic clicked against the counter with a small clean sound.
"What kind of things."
"The kind of things you keep in a ledger."
She stared at him.
"Her father," Naomi said. "Ezra."
"Yes."
"Ezra keeps a ledger."
Hollis looked at her, and for the first time since she had come in, something in his face moved past the careful stillness. It was not quite worry. It was the look of a man who had said more than he had meant to and was not sure how to take it back, or whether he wanted to.
"I shouldn't be the one to tell you this," he said. "It isn't my place. He told me once, a long time back, when we were both younger and there was more beer in the world, that he kept books for the boats and books for the crew and a separate book that was just his. For himself. He said it the way a man says something he doesn't intend to explain, and I didn't ask, because I never have asked Ezra Calloway about the things he doesn't intend to explain. He's not the sort you ask."
"But you remembered."
"I remember most things people say to me once. It's a curse. Ask anybody."
She could feel the warmth of the cup against her palms even after she had let it go, the way the body holds the ghost of a heat source. The dust motes in the front light had begun to settle. The gulls had gone quiet. The whole shop seemed to be holding itself very still, the way shops do when someone has said something that needs a minute to be absorbed.
"Where is he now," she asked. "Ezra."
"At the boathouse, far as I know. He's always at the boathouse."
"Has he been to see Wren?"
"Wren won't see him. Wren won't see anyone. You know what Wren's like when she gets a hold of something. She gets a hold of it and she does not let go until it has eaten through her hand."
Naomi stood. The stool scraped. The sound of it was sharper than she had meant it to be, and it startled her, the way a sudden noise in a quiet place always does, the way her own small noises in this shop startled her because they were her noises and she had not yet learned the acoustics of the morning.
"Hollis."
"Naomi."
"If I'm asking you later what you told me, and you don't remember saying any of it, I'd understand."
He looked at her, and his face did something that might, in another man, have been a smile. On Hollis Tate it was just a softening around the eyes, a slight easing of the weathered lines, like a door cracked open an inch and then closed again.
"I don't remember anything," he said. "I'm an old man. My memory's the first thing to go and the last thing to come back."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. Just be careful down at that boathouse. Those floorboards are slicker than they look."
She went out through the beads, and the bell chimed once behind her, and then the salt wind hit her face with the force of a hand laid flat against her cheek, and the morning was all in front of her, gray and bright and smelling of low tide and diesel and the cold iron of the pilings under the wharf.
She did not go back to the jitney stand. She did not go to her aunt's house, where she had planned to drop her bag. She turned left out of Hollis's door and went down along Water Street, past the closed-up tackle shop with the hand-painted sign, past the empty lot where the chandlery used to be, down the gravel slope that ran behind the fish houses and ended at the last of the working piers, the one where Ezra Calloway had kept his boats since before she was born.
The boathouse sat at the end of the pier like a she'd that had grown tired of standing up and had decided to lean a little instead. Its clapboards were the same gray as the schist in the cliffs above the cove, and its roof was a patchwork of tar paper and rusted tin that rattled in any wind stronger than a whisper. The smell of it hit her from twenty feet off, the thick marine smell of old rope and diesel and the sweet rot of wood that had spent fifty years breathing salt air.
The door was not locked. Ezra never locked the boathouse. There was nothing inside worth stealing, he liked to say, unless you counted the smell, and the smell you could get for free anywhere on the pier.
She pulled the door open on its salt-warped hinges and stepped inside.
The light inside was thin and gray, coming through the single window at the back and the cracks between the boards, and it took her eyes a moment to find their bearings. The boat was up on blocks to her left, a twenty-two-foot lobster boat with a patched hull and a name she could not read from the angle. The bench seats had been pulled out and stood on end against the far wall. A coil of new line hung from a nail. A pot of buoys stood by the door in a crooked tower. The workbench ran the length of the right wall, deep and scarred and dark with years of use, its surface a topography of cut marks and gouges and old paint that had been scraped off and not quite gotten clean.
She stood in the doorway a moment, listening. The building creaked around her. Somewhere under the floorboards, water lapped against the pilings in a slow, patient rhythm, like a hand tapping out a tune it did not expect anyone to learn.
She went to the workbench.
The top of it was a clutter she expected. A pair of pliers with rust on the jaws. A coffee can full of screws and washers, the labels long gone. A folded square of sandpaper, gray with use. A wooden mallet with a chip out of one side of the head. A stub of a pencil, the kind carpenters carry, with no eraser and the paint worn off in the middle where a thumb had held it for years.
She moved the coffee can. She moved the pliers. She ran her hand along the front edge of the bench, where a man would have knelt and rested his weight while he worked. The wood there was darker than the wood elsewhere, darkened by years of contact with skin and oil and sweat. Her hand found a seam. She pressed along it. The seam ran the width of the bench, just below the lip, and when she pressed at a certain spot along it, about a foot from where the bench met the wall, something clicked, and a narrow panel swung down on a hinge she had not seen.
Inside, in the dark of the hollow space beneath the bench top, there was a book.
She drew it out. It was a ledger, the same size as the one her father had used for the salt works, bound in a stiff marbled cover the color of a bruise, held shut with an elastic band gone slack with age. There was no name on the cover. There was no year. The corners of the cover were soft with handling, the boards slightly bowed from being carried in the same pocket for a long time.
She eased the elastic band off and opened it.
The first pages were what she expected. Dates down the left margin, in Ezra's neat block print, the kind of hand a schoolteacher would have praised and a fisherman would have considered adequate. Columns across the page. Bait costs. Fuel. Ice. What the catch brought at the dock, pound for pound, day by day. The kind of figures any man who worked the water kept, because the water did not forgive a man who did not keep them.
She turned the pages. Some of them were dog-eared. Some of them had coffee rings. Some of them had a small X drawn in the corner, the way a man marks a page he has come back to more than once, and she paused on each of those, running her eye down the columns, looking for anything that broke the pattern.
She did not find anything that broke the pattern. Not on the first third of the pages. Not on the second.
Then she turned past the middle, and the hand changed.
It was still Ezra's hand. She knew his hand. She had watched him sign receipts and write out haul reports and chalk up the daily count on the slate by the dock office for as long as she could remember. The letters were the same height. The pressure of the pen was the same. But the script itself was different. The block print had given way to something quicker, something that leaned forward and ran together at the joins, the letters tripping over each other like men hurrying down a ladder.
She turned more pages. The new hand filled them. Dates still ran down the left margin, but they were not dock days. They were evenings. They were late nights. They were hours that did not belong to the boat.
She bent closer to the page. The light from the window at the back of the boathouse had strengthened as the sun climbed, and a long pale bar of it fell across the workbench now, falling just short of where her hands held the book open. She tilted the page into the light.
The shorthand was not any shorthand she had ever seen Ezra use. It was not the coastal code the lobstermen used to mark their buoys, the little colored slashes that meant traps-per-string and color-of-season. It was not the navy tick-tack the older captains had learned in the war. It was not the simple column-tally a man might use to keep his own books from prying eyes.
It was a private system. She could see that at once. The same symbol recurred. A small open loop, like a fishhook without the barb, came at the end of certain lines. Other symbols were more complex. A vertical line crossed by two horizontals. A numeral that might have been a 7 or might have been something else entirely, depending on which way he had been holding the pen. Some entries had a single word in plain English under the symbols, names or amounts, and some entries had nothing but the symbols, line after careful line, written with a hand that had taken its time even as it hurried.
She turned another page. The dates ran back through the last two months. The last entry she could read the date of was the night Lila died.
Her throat was dry. She could taste the chicory of Hollis's coffee at the back of it, and beneath that the salt of the air coming through the cracks in the boathouse, and beneath that something else, something older and less specific, the taste of a thing she had not yet named and was not yet ready to.
She held the book in both hands. The marbled cover was warm under her thumbs, warm the way wood gets when it has been held in the same dark place for a long time. The elastic band lay coiled at her elbow on the bench like a small sleeping snake.
Outside, the halyards were quiet. The gulls had gone out beyond the breakwater to look for what the boats had left them. The water under the pier went on tapping its patient rhythm against the pilings, and the whole boathouse breathed around her, in and out, in and out, the way a chest breathes when it is hiding something.
She closed the book. She put it back in the hollow. She pressed the panel up until it clicked. She set the coffee can back where it had been, and the pliers, and the mallet. She wiped her thumbs on the sides of her trousers, where the marbled cover had left a faint dark residue.
Then she went out into the morning and pulled the door shut behind her, and stood on the pier with her hands in her pockets and the wind in her face and the taste of the coffee and the salt and the unnamed thing all together in her mouth, and she did not go back to Hollis's store, and she did not go to her aunt's house, and she did not go to the jitney stand, because there was nowhere to go now that she had not already been.