The Saltwood Inn sagged against the harbor wind like something that had forgotten how to stand.
Maren Thorne pulled her rental car into the gravel lot and killed the engine. Through the windshield, she watched a gull wheel past the neon VACANCY sign, its bulb half-dead, flickering a tired Morse against the dark. The paint on the inn's clapboards had gone the color of old bone. Shutters hung crooked. Somewhere inside, a television murmured to no one.
She sat for a moment with both hands on the wheel, feeling the engine tick as it cooled, the salt-thick air pressing against the closed windows. The dashboard clock read 9:47 PM. She had driven six hours from the funeral home in Portland, and her back ached from the seat, and the particular exhaustion she carried had nothing to do with driving.
She reached for her grandmother's brass key on the passenger seat. Greta Thorne's key. The attorney had pressed it into her palm that afternoon, still warm from his own grip, and said the house at 14 Harbor Lane would need airing before she set foot in it. Pipe smell, he said. Mouse. Maybe mildew. He had not said: ghosts. But his eyes had.
The inn's front door was unlocked. A bell above it gave a thin, apologetic jingle when she pushed inside. The lobby smelled of carpet cleaner and something fried hours ago, a residue that clung to the curtains and the upholstered chairs arranged around a dead television set. A man behind the counter glanced up from a racing form, then back down.
"One night," Maren said. Her voice came out rougher than she meant, the rasp of it catching on the lobby's stale air. She cleared her throat. "Just one."
"Room four," the man said. He slid a key across the counter, the brass tag catching the overhead light. "Top of the stairs, end of the hall. Breakfast is from six to nine. Coffee's terrible."
Maren nodded. She took the key. The man's gaze stayed on his paper.
The stairs complained under her feet, each step a different pitch. A carpet runner the color of dried blood had been worn through at the center, exposing raw wood. At the top, the hallway stretched narrow and dim, three doors on her left, one on her right. A framed print of a schooner hung crooked between the second and third doors. The glass in its frame was cracked in one corner, a spiderweb of damage she had not seen as a girl.
Room four waited at the end. She turned the key, felt the old tumblers grind, and pushed the door inward.
The room was small and plain. A double bed with a chenille spread the yellow of old teeth. A dresser missing one knob. A window that looked out over the parking lot and, beyond it, the dark shape of the harbor. She could hear water out there, the soft slap of waves against pilings, and the creak of boats at their moorings. Familiar sounds. Too familiar.
Maren set her duffel on the bed and shrugged off her coat. The radiator clanked twice, then settled into a low, metallic hum. She stood for a moment in the middle of the room, unsure what to do with her hands. The funeral had been that morning, a small affair at the cemetery overlooking the marsh, just the attorney and the minister and two cousins she had not seen in years. The cousins had spoken of Greta in the careful, distant language of relatives who had not visited in decades. The attorney had produced the will in a manila folder and read it aloud, his voice moving over the bequests like water over stones.
To Maren Thorne, my granddaughter, I leave 14 Harbor Lane in its entirety, with all its contents, including the record books in the attic and whatever else she finds there.
She had read the words twice. The minister had patted her arm. The cousins had looked at her with something between pity and curiosity. Then she had driven six hours to the coast, and now she stood in a room at the Saltwood Inn because the house, the attorney said, would need a day of airing and a locksmith, and she was not yet ready to sleep under Greta's roof.
She sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped beneath her. She unzipped her duffel, took out her toothbrush, set it by the sink in the small bathroom with its chipped tub and its shower curtain printed with faded blue lobsters. She ran the tap until the water went cold, then cold-er, then filled her mouth and spit.
When she came back into the room, she saw it.
A manila envelope on the carpet, half beneath the door.
She crossed the room in three steps and picked it up. The envelope was unsealed. Inside, a single photograph. She drew it out carefully, by the edges, the way she had been taught to handle archival material in graduate school, and felt the matte paper's weight before she looked at it.
Two girls at the county fair. She recognized the Ferris wheel behind them, the striped awning of the dairy barn, the exact angle of the late-afternoon light. One of the girls was herself, younger by twenty-two years, her hair longer, her face unmarked by the thing she would learn a week later. The other was a girl she had not thought about in a long time. A girl with brown hair cut in bangs and a missing front tooth and a denim jacket with patches on the elbows.
Jenna Marsh.
Maren's hands had gone cold. She turned the photograph over. On the back, in blocky typewriter print, five words:
Ask Ezra what he paid for.
She stood very still. The radiator clanked. A truck passed on the road outside, its headlights sweeping across the ceiling and then gone. The photograph trembled once in her grip before she steadied it.
Jenna Marsh had been eleven that summer. Her older sister Lila had been seventeen. They had come to the fair as part of a church group from the next town over, and Maren had wandered into their group by accident, drawn by the noise of it, and Jenna had attached herself to Maren for the rest of the afternoon the way certain children do, without explanation or permission. They had ridden the Ferris wheel twice. They had eaten cotton candy that turned Maren's lips blue. They had stood in front of a butter sculpture of a cow and laughed until they were sick of it.
The next day, Jenna Marsh had disappeared.
Maren had never forgotten her. She had carried the girl's name in some quiet compartment of herself for twenty-two years, along with the unanswered questions that had accumulated around it. The official story was a stranger in a blue car, a sighting in Portland, a case that went nowhere. Maren's father had driven her past the Marsh house once, weeks later, and she had looked at the front door and felt the loss settle into her like sediment.
And now, in a room at the Saltwood Inn, twenty-two years later, someone had slipped a photograph of that day under her door.
She turned the note over again. The typewriter font was uniform, mechanical, the kind produced by an old manual machine. No signature. No return address. The envelope itself was plain, the kind sold at any office supply store. She held it up to the lamp on the dresser, but there was no watermark, no impression. Just paper.
Ask Ezra what he paid for.
Ezra Blackwood. She had not heard the name spoken aloud in two decades. The Blackwood family had owned the cannery and half the docks and a good portion of the rest of what mattered in this town. Ezra had been a fixture at every school assembly, every church social, every town meeting where money was discussed. He had been older than Maren's father by a few years, younger than Greta by a generation. When Maren was a girl, she had thought of him as part of the landscape, the way you think of a particular cliff or a particular elm.
She set the photograph on the dresser, face up, and looked at the two girls in it. Her own face was younger than she could remember being. Jenna's was caught mid-laugh, the gap in her teeth a bright white wedge. Behind them, the Ferris wheel turned against a sky the blue of old enamel.
Maren sat on the bed again, slowly this time, and pressed her palms flat against her thighs. Her breath came in short, shallow pulls. She could feel her pulse in her throat, in her wrists, a steady thrum that was not fear exactly, but adjacent to it.
She thought about calling someone. The attorney, perhaps. The state police. But the attorney was a man who shuffled papers, and the state police had closed the case on Jenna Marsh before Maren's father finished grieving, and there was no one else. Her mother was gone. Her father was gone. Greta was gone.
She thought about the note. Ask Ezra what he paid for. The grammar was strange, clipped. Paid for what. A silence. A favor. A witness. A body.
She thought about her grandmother's house, sitting empty at 14 Harbor Lane, its record books waiting in the attic. Greta Thorne had been the town clerk for forty years. She had kept the handwritten records of every birth, every death, every property transfer, every marriage license and divorce decree and quiet conveyance in the county. If anyone had known what Ezra Blackwood had paid for, it would have been Greta.
Maren picked up the photograph again. She looked at Jenna's face. She remembered the girl's handwriting, which had been unusually neat for an eleven-year-old, each letter formed with care. She remembered the smell of cotton candy, sugar and something faintly chemical. She remembered her father, that night, telling her that Jenna had gone to visit relatives.
She set the photograph down. She reached for her coat, then stopped, then reached for it again. She checked the lock on the door, turned the deadbolt until it seated with a solid thunk. She pulled the chair from the desk and wedged it under the knob, an old habit from graduate school fieldwork, when she had stayed in cheap hotels in unfamiliar ports.
The radiator clanked. The harbor murmured. Maren Thorne sat on the edge of the bed in room four of the Saltwood Inn and looked at the photograph of two girls at a county fair, and she did not sleep for a long time.
The morning came gray and salt-heavy, the fog sitting on the harbor like wet wool. Maren Thorne had not slept. She had sat in the pressed-linen chair by the window until the light changed from black to charcoal to the pale pewter of a coastal dawn, the photograph of the two girls face-down on the bedside table, Jenna's neat handwriting burned into the back of her eyelids.
She rose. She showered in the narrow bathroom where the tiles were cracked in a pattern that looked, if you stared long enough, like the coastline of Maine. She drank coffee from a chipped mug that said Saltwood Inn in faded blue script. She drove.
Driftwood Lane lay three miles inland from the harbor, set back from the main road behind a screen of pitch pines and white birches whose leaves had gone the color of old parchment. The houses there were modest, the kind built in the fifties for shipyard workers and their families, Cape Cods and saltboxes with aluminum siding and chain-link fences. The lane curved once, twice, then straightened toward a small cul-de-sac where the pavement ended and a gravel turnaround began.
Number seventeen sat at the elbow of the curve. It had been her father's house. It had been her father's house since before she was born, since before he married her mother, since before the divorce and the quiet years and the slow slipping away. She had not been inside it in eleven years. She had not been inside it on the day they buried him. She had been in Lisbon, cataloging benthic samples, and by the time her flight had landed he had been three days in the ground.
She parked at the curb. She sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel, listening to the engine tick as it cooled. The house was smaller than she remembered, or perhaps she was larger. The aluminum siding had gone from cream to the gray of dead mussels. The porch light was on, though it was midday. The mailbox had a small American flag decal, faded, and a sticker for a local pharmacy that offered free blood pressure checks.
She got out. The air smelled of pine resin and wet bark and, faintly, of the harbor. A dog barked somewhere down the lane. A screen door slammed. Maren walked up the three concrete steps, each one edged with a metal strip that had come loose and now curled like a lip. She rang the bell.
Footsteps. Slow. The particular shuffle of someone who has made a decision not to hurry, perhaps because hurrying costs more than it returns.
The door opened.
Greta Thorne stood in the frame, small and straight as a mast, her white hair pinned up in the braided crown she had worn for sixty years. She wore a housedress of blue cotton, lace at the collar, and a cardigan the color of dried lavender. Her hands, veined and precise, rested on the door as if she were holding it in place against a wind only she could feel.
"Mrs. Thorne," Maren said. "It's Maren."
Greta looked at her. The eyes were clear, pale blue, the color of the sky over the harbor in winter. They did not blink. They did not soften. They remained the eyes of a woman appraising a stranger on her porch, perhaps a solicitor, perhaps a missionary, perhaps someone who had come to read the meter.
"I'm sorry," Greta said. Her voice was thin, warm as a wool blanket left too near a fire. "You have me at a disadvantage."
Maren felt the words land in the center of her chest. She had expected something, she realized. She had rehearsed this moment on the drive over, had prepared a sentence about the weather, about the fog, about the long drive, about the inheritance and the paperwork and the records in the attic. None of those sentences were correct.
"I'm Maren," she said again. "Your granddaughter."
Greta tilted her head, the way a tern tilts when it sights a fish. "I don't believe I have a granddaughter," she said. "I had a daughter-in-law, once. She left. She had the good grace to leave."
"You had a son," Maren said. "Daniel. He died eleven years ago."
Something moved across Greta's face, quick as a shadow of a gull on sand. Then it was gone. "People die," Greta said. "I keep the records. I know who has died. You are not on my list, young lady. I would remember."
She began to close the door. Maren put her hand against it, gently.
"Mrs. Thorne. I'm his daughter. I'm Daniel's daughter. I came about the house."
The door stopped. Greta looked at her hand on the wood, then at her face.
"Daniel's girl," Greta said. The voice had not changed, still thin, still warm. "She went away. She sends a card at Christmas, sometimes. Not always. Sometimes the card comes after the New Year, which is rude, but I suppose the post is not what it was."
"Yes," Maren said. "That's me."
Greta studied her for a long moment. Then she opened the door wider and stepped aside. The hallway smelled of lemon polish and bacon grease and, beneath both, the faint astringent sweetness of incontinence pads. The wallpaper was the same pattern she remembered, small blue flowers on a cream ground, though the cream had yellowed.
"You'd better come in," Greta said. "I've just put the kettle on. I don't have any of those biscuits you like, the chocolate ones. I never remember to buy them."
"That's all right," Maren said. "Tea is fine."
They sat at the kitchen table, which was formica and chrome and older than Maren's mother would have been. Greta poured from a brown Betty Crocker pot, the tea so strong it was nearly black. Maren wrapped her hands around the cup. The heat felt like a small mercy.
They spoke of small things. The weather. The price of scallops at the fish market. The new stop sign at the corner of Harbor and Main, which Greta considered an eyesore and an admission of municipal cowardice. Maren watched her grandmother's hands as she spoke. They did not tremble. They were not the hands of a woman who had lost her mind.
Greta Thorne had been the town clerk for forty years. She had kept the records in her own hand, in ledgers bound in green cloth with her name tooled in gold on the spine. She had known every birth and death and marriage in the county. She had known which properties had changed hands, and to whom, and for how much, and on what date. She had known which families owed which families, and which secrets had been paid for in land, and which had been paid for in silence.
She had known, Maren was certain, what Ezra Blackwood had paid for.
"Mrs. Thorne," Maren said, when the tea was half gone.
"Grandmother," Greta said. "If you are Daniel's girl, you will call me Grandmother."
"Grandmother. I came about the house. And the records."
Greta set her cup down precisely in its saucer. The click was small and definite. "The records are in the attic," she said. "In the cabinet. Your father put a lock on it after the incident. I have the key somewhere."
She rose. She went to the drawer beside the sink, the one that held rubber bands and a screwdriver and a pad of paper with the local funeral home's name embossed at the top. She rummaged. She produced a key on a length of red yarn.
"You'll find what you need," she said. "I don't go up there anymore. The stairs are steep and I am not as young as I was."
She handed the key to Maren. Their fingers touched. Greta's hand was dry and cool, the knuckles swollen, the skin thin as wet paper.
"Thank you," Maren said.
Greta looked at her. For a moment, just a moment, the pale blue eyes softened, and Maren saw something flicker there, recognition or grief or both, something that had been waiting behind the door of pretended amnesia.
Then Greta smiled, a small, precise smile. "Your father kept everything," she said. "He was a hoarder of paper. Like his mother."
She turned back to the stove. "There's soup on the back of the burner if you want it. I won't take no for an answer."
Maren climbed the stairs.
The stairs were steep and narrow, the treads worn in the center to a pale channel. At the top was a door, painted shut decades ago and only partially opened now, the paint cracked in a spiderweb around the knob. She turned the knob. The hinges protested.
The attic was low-ceilinged and hot, the air thick with dust and the smell of old cardboard and mothballs. A single bulb hung from a cord in the center of the room. She pulled it. The bulb threw a yellow circle on the floor.
She found the cabinet against the far wall, under the eaves. It was a tall oak filing cabinet, the kind sold in the seventies, with a single lock on the upper right drawer. The wood was scarred. A label, hand-printed in her father's blocky capitals, read: LEGAL 1999.
She used the key.
The drawer slid out with a long, slow groan. Inside, manila folders stood upright in a row, each labeled in her father's hand. DIVORCE. PROPERTY. TAXES. There was a folder marked J. BLACKWOOD. There was a folder marked E. BLACKWOOD. There was a folder marked SETTLEMENT.
And behind them, leaning against the back of the drawer, a large manila envelope, unsealed, the flap tucked in. Across the front, in handwriting she did not recognize, neat and careful and older than her father's, was written a name.
JENNA L. MARSH.
Maren's hand stopped. The attic was very quiet. She could hear, distantly, her grandmother moving in the kitchen below, the click of a spoon against a pot.
She drew the envelope out. It was heavy. There was paper inside, more than one sheet. She slid her thumb under the flap.
The first page was a photocopy of a birth certificate. County of Saltwood. Date of birth: June 14, 1987. Name: Jenna Lorraine Marsh. Mother: Naomi Marsh. Father: left blank.
Maren sat down on the floor of the attic, among the dust and the old cardboard, with the envelope in her lap and the yellow bulb swinging slowly above her.
From the kitchen below, the spoon clicked against the pot.
Maren Thorne, who had not slept, who had driven three miles inland through the fog, who had been called rude about her Christmas cards, turned to the second page, and her hands, at last, began to shake.
The second page was a death certificate. The same county, the same neat official typeface. Date of death: September 9, 2001. Name: Jenna Lorraine Marsh. Cause: drowning. Location: Blackwood Spit, Saltwood County. Contributing factors: none listed. The signature at the bottom was Ezra Blackwood's.
Maren read the line again. She read it a third time. She turned the page over, as if there might be something on the back, but there was only the faint impression of a staple.
The third sheet was a single page of her father's handwriting. The blocky capitals she had known all her life. The ink was black and the pen had pressed hard.
E.B. admits to settlement paid 1999. Witness: N. Marsh. Money came from E.B. personal account, not company. He knew where she was. He paid to keep her quiet. She had a daughter. J.L.M. born June 1987. He paid Naomi Marsh to leave town. She did. Girl stayed. Girl drowned. No inquest. He paid D.A. too. I have the canceled checks.
Below that, in smaller letters, as if added later, almost apologetic: Lila knows. She will not speak.
The attic smelled of cardboard and old wool and the faint green must of something once wet, dried and forgotten. The yellow bulb swung on its cord. Maren's hands had gone still. She laid the pages out on the floor in front of her, in the order she had read them, and she looked at them for a long time.
She thought of her father's handwriting. She thought of her father's boots on the stairs. She thought of her father driving out to the marsh road in the dark, parking at the bend, walking the half mile down to where the tide was coming in. She thought of him bending, in his good coat, to pick up a small shoe from the wrack line, and then straightening, and then walking back to his car, and then driving home. She thought of him putting the shoe in a drawer in the attic of his mother-in-law's house, and she thought of him never telling anyone, and she thought of him dying without telling anyone, with the canceled checks folded into a manila envelope in a locked drawer.
She gathered the pages. She put them back, in order, in the envelope. She slid the envelope into the inside pocket of her jacket. She stood up. Her knees cracked. The bulb swung.
From the kitchen below, the spoon had stopped clicking.
Maren descended the attic stairs slowly, the envelope pressed flat against her ribs. The kitchen was warm and smelled of onions and butter. Greta Thorne stood at the stove with her back to the room, her shoulders narrow under the lavender cardigan, her white hair still pinned with the tortoiseshell comb. She did not turn.
"You found something," Greta said. It was not a question.
"Yes," Maren said.
Greta ladled soup into two bowls. She set them on the table. She pulled out a chair and sat. She folded her hands.
"Eat first," she said. "Whatever it is, it will keep."
Maren sat. She picked up the spoon. She ate. The soup was leek and potato and very hot, and it tasted of salt and thyme, and Greta watched her eat without speaking, and outside the kitchen window the fog had begun to thin, and somewhere beyond the fog the tide was turning.
After she had eaten, Maren said, "I need to go down to the Spit."
Greta's hands unfolded and refolded. "Today."
"Yes."
"Alone."
"Yes."
Greta looked at her for a long moment. The clock ticked. The fog moved at the window like something breathing.
"Take the brown coat," Greta said. "And the path through the gorse, not the road. The road is watched."
Maren drove inland two miles, then turned onto the unmarked lane that ran behind the dunes. She parked where the lane ended at a stone wall. She climbed the wall. She crossed the gorse field, the brown coat catching on the yellow-flowered spines, and she came out at last onto the beach.
Blackwood Spit lay north to south in a long pale crescent. The sand was the color of old bone. The sea was the color of slate. The fog had thinned to a low haze that moved like smoke across the wrack line. The tide was going out. There were seabirds crying somewhere out of sight, and the sound of small waves drawing back over shingle, and the deeper sound of the larger swell beyond the bar.
Maren walked north along the hard wet sand at the tide line. She passed a wooden groyne, weathered to silver. She passed a rusted iron ring set in a block of concrete. She passed a patch of dark weed that smelled, faintly, of iodine and rot. She kept her eyes on the sand.
She did not know exactly where the shoe had been found. Her father's note did not give a location. The newspapers from 2001 had said only "the wrack line near the second groyne." The second groyne was the one she had just passed, or the next one, a hundred yards further on. She walked toward it.
The second groyne was older than the first, its timbers split, its top plank missing. At its base, half-buried in shingle, was a length of frayed blue nylon rope, the kind used on small boats. Maren stood above it and looked out to sea. The haze shifted. A cormorant flew low across the water, its neck extended. A boat moved somewhere far out, the sound of its engine coming and going on the wind.
She crouched and laid her palm flat on the sand. It was cold. It was the same sand, she thought, the same grains, that had lain under a small bare foot twenty-two years ago. She could feel nothing. She could feel everything.
She stood and walked on. Forty or fifty yards past the second groyne, the beach curved slightly inland and there was a low bank of shingle, and at the top of the bank a low fence of weathered posts and rusted wire. A wooden sign, set at an angle, read PRIVATE PROPERTY - BLACKWOOD ESTATE. NO TRESPASSING.
Maren stopped. She looked at the fence. She looked at the land behind it: a flat field of pale grass and, further back, a line of low bare trees, and beyond the trees, the slate roof and white chimneys of a large house. The house was closed. No smoke came from the chimneys. The windows were shuttered. But the lawn, even in winter, had been mown. Someone was maintaining the property. Someone was always maintaining the property.
She took one step over the fence line. She only took one step. She set her boot down on the grass on the other side.
"Ma'am."
The voice came from behind her and to her left. She turned. A young man was standing at the corner of the fence, where it met the path she had taken down from the gorse field. He wore a dark blue jacket and a dark blue cap. He was holding a phone up at chest height, the camera lens pointed at her. The red recording light was on.
"I'm going to need you to step back across the fence line," he said. His voice was calm, trained, the vowels flattened by somewhere midwestern. He did not lower the phone.
Maren did not move. "I haven't done anything."
"You've crossed onto private property, ma'am. I'm required to document any incursion. I'm required to ask you to leave. If you don't leave, I'm required to call the county sheriff and let them handle it."
"Required by who," Maren said.
The young man blinked once. He did not answer. He adjusted his grip on the phone. He kept the lens on her.
"The Blackwood estate," Maren said. "Mr. Ezra Blackwood."
"I'm required to protect the property, ma'am. I can do that or the sheriff can do that. Your choice."
Maren stepped back across the fence line. The sand under her boot was colder than the grass had been. She brushed her hand against her jacket, against the outline of the envelope in her inside pocket.
The young man lowered the phone. He turned it in his hand, showed her the screen. There was her own face, in the haze, in the brown coat, looking out at her from the small bright rectangle. He swiped. There were other photographs behind hers. She could see, briefly, the corner of one: a brown boot on pale grass. Another: a dark car parked at the end of the stone wall.
"Photo gets uploaded to the client portal," the young man said, almost apologetically. "Anything that happens on the property, anything that looks like it's about to happen, it goes straight to him. That's how the system works."
Maren looked at the house beyond the trees. No smoke. No movement at any window. The slate roof was wet with the haze. The chimneys stood up against the pale sky like two fingers raised.
She looked back at the young man. He had put the phone into his jacket pocket. His face was young and tired and very careful.
"How long have you been out here," Maren said.
"I'm not permitted to discuss that, ma'am."
"You saw me cross the gorse field."
"Ma'am."
"You saw me park at the wall."
The young man looked at her for a moment. Then he unzipped his jacket slightly, as if the air had become warmer, and zipped it again.
"The system flags movement on the lane," he said. "I drove down to confirm. That's all I did. I confirmed."
Maren looked once more at the house. The windows stayed shuttered. The lawn stayed mown. Somewhere inside that house, or somewhere in a room in another town, a man was looking at the photograph of her face on a small bright screen.
She thought of her father's note. He knew where she was. He paid to keep her quiet. She had a daughter. The girl stayed. The girl drowned.
She thought of Lila Marsh, who had not spoken. She thought of Naomi Marsh, who had taken the money and left. She thought of the district attorney who had been paid, who had allowed no inquest, who had let a death certificate sit in a manila envelope in a locked drawer for twenty-two years.
She thought of the canceled checks, folded into the envelope now pressed against her ribs. She thought of the photograph of her own face, traveling at that moment through some wire or some signal, into a client portal, into the hands of Ezra Blackwood.
She turned away from the fence. She began to walk back along the wrack line toward the gorse field. Behind her, the young man stayed where he was, his hands in his jacket pockets, watching her go.
The fog was lifting. Further up the beach, a figure had come out of the haze and was standing at the tide line, looking out to sea. The figure was slight. The figure wore a dark coat. The figure did not turn.
Maren slowed. The figure did not turn. Maren kept walking. As she drew level, she saw, at the figure's feet, half-buried in the shingle, a small dark shape. The shape did not move. The figure did not bend to pick it up.
Maren stopped, three paces away. The figure turned its head. It was an old woman, very thin, with white hair under a dark felt hat. Her face was weathered to the color of teak. Her eyes were the pale grey of the sea behind her.
The old woman looked at Maren. Maren looked at the old woman.
"You're the Thorne girl," the old woman said. Her voice was thin and hoarse, like a hinge that needed oil.
"Yes," Maren said.
The old woman looked down at the small dark shape at her feet. Then she looked back up at Maren.
"Don't touch it," she said. "Let the sea take it back."
She turned and walked away along the tide line, her dark coat brushing the pale grass at the margin of the beach. In a few steps the haze took her. Maren stood alone on the sand, with the small dark shape at her feet, and the house with the shuttered windows behind her, and the fog lifting, and the tide going out, and the sound of a boat engine far out on the water, coming and going, coming and going.
She did not touch the shape. She let the sea take it back.