What the Tide Takes: The Long Drive Back

The off-ramp curved away from I-95, and Elias Crown's hands locked at ten and two before he had decided to take it. His knuckles had gone the color of old rope. He noticed this the way he noticed the salt haze gathering along the road ahead, distantly, as though observing a thing that belonged to someone else. He flexed his fingers against the leather wrap of the steering wheel. The trembling continued. He had not planned to be here. His foot had simply drifted toward the brake when the green sign appeared, his body remembering what his eyes refused to acknowledge. Eighteen years since he had driven this road. Eighteen years since the last time he had turned his mother's key in the lock of the front door and walked out without looking back. The asphalt unspooled beneath the hood of his truck, cracked and patched in places where the salt had gotten underneath and done its slow work. Tufts of witch grass pushed through the seams. The road narrowed after the third telephone pole, dropping from two lanes to one where the yellow center line had faded to a rumor. Elias let the truck idle down to thirty, then twenty-five, his foot hovering above the brake as the first clapboard houses appeared between the spruce. A woman in a flowered housecoat was pulling in a lobster trap from the back of a station wagon. She did not look up. A dog regarded him from a porch railing, its tail still, its eyes following the truck with the patience of a thing that had outlived its curiosity. The bungalow sat at the end of a gravel turnoff his mother had never bothered to grade. Beach plum had overtaken the mailbox, and the white paint had weathered to the gray of old bone. Elias killed the engine and sat for a moment with his hands still on the wheel, listening to the tick of the cooling block and the faint, kettle-whistle complaint of a gull somewhere over the marsh. The kitchen window was dark. The curtains in the front room had been pulled to within an inch of meeting. He stepped out onto the gravel. The sound of his boot on the stones was louder than he expected, and he caught himself moving lighter, the way he used to when he came home late from the docks and did not want to wake her. The screen door had swollen in its frame. He put his shoulder into it and felt the hinges give with a long, reluctant creak. The smell hit him first. Lilies, heavy and sweet, layered over furniture wax and something underneath that he did not want to name. The parlor opened to his left, and the morning light came through the drawn curtains in two pale bars that fell across the closed lid of a coffin set up on the parlor's low catafalque. The wood was pine, unfinished, the kind of cheap pine box that the funeral homes tried to disguise with satin lining and brass tacks. His mother would have hated it. She would have called it gauche and then written the check. Arthur Vogel was sitting in the wingback chair by the cold hearth, a tumbler of something amber balanced on his knee. He rose when Elias came in, and the movement was slow and formal, the kind of rise that men of a certain generation had been taught in their fathers' parlors. He was wearing a dark suit that had been pressed within the last day or so, and his face had the particular dryness of someone who had not slept properly in a week. "Mr. Crown," he said. "I was not certain you would come." Elias did not answer. He crossed the room in three steps and stopped at the foot of the coffin. The satin inside was the color of weak tea. He could not bring himself to look at her face. Instead, he looked at her hands, folded over the breast of her best black dress, the knuckles swollen, the wedding ring missing because she had willed it to his sister in Portland, who would not be coming. "When," he said. "Friday evening. Peacefully, insofar as I am told these things are ever peaceful." Vogel set his glass down on the mantel. "There was a neighbor. Mrs. Whalen. She found her in the morning." "And you opened the house." "I have a key, Mr. Crown. I have had a key for thirty-one years." The old man's voice carried the faint rasp of a man who had spent decades arguing in courtrooms. "Your mother was a particular woman. She did not wish the funeral home to come until the reading of the will. That was her instruction. I honored it." Elias turned from the coffin. The lilies in the corner were already beginning to brown at the edges, the pollen dusting the velvet of the chair beneath them. He looked at Vogel and felt the old suspicion rise in him like a tide, the same one he had felt as a boy when the lawyer came to the house to discuss his grandfather's affairs and left with the family ledger under his arm. "Where is the will." "In time." Vogel reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and drew out a single envelope, manila, legal-sized, the flap sealed with a disk of red wax that had been pressed with a thumb. "Your mother left instructions. This was to be placed in your hand, and in your hand only, before any other business. She was very precise about this." Elias took the envelope. It was lighter than he expected. He turned it over and saw his name written across the front in his mother's careful script, the downstrokes of the L and the C pressed deep enough to dimple the paper. "She wrote this when." "That I cannot say. The postmark will tell you what I know." Vogel cleared his throat. "It was mailed to my office seventeen days ago. It had been sitting in a dead letter office in Hartford for nineteen years before that. Addressee unknown. Return address illegible." Elias looked at him. "Margot Aldridge," Vogel said. "The week she vanished, your mother received a letter from the girl. Or so I have to suppose. The postmark is from the week in question. The handwriting is not your mother's." The parlor went very quiet. Elias heard the tick of the clock on the mantel, a sound he had not heard since he was nine, and the sound of his own breathing coming harder than it should. He broke the wax with his thumb and drew out a single sheet of paper, folded once, the creases soft with age. The note was written in a looping hand he did not recognize. The ink had gone the color of rust in places where moisture had gotten to it. He read it standing up, and then he read it again, and then he sat down on the piano bench because his knees had decided for him. Arthur Vogel did not ask what it said. He waited, one hand resting on the back of the wingback chair, his face arranged into the patient, faintly sorrowful mask of a man who had delivered a great many blows in his life and had learned not to enjoy any of them. "Does it name her," Elias said at last. "It does not." "Does it name me." Vogel's mouth twitched. "It names the judge." Elias folded the letter along its original crease and slid it back into the envelope. His hands were steady now, which surprised him. Outside, the gull screamed once more over the marsh, and somewhere down the lane a dog began to bark and did not stop. "I want the will," he said. "You shall have it. Tomorrow, at my office, at ten." Vogel reached for his coat, folded across the foot of the coffin like a stole. "I would suggest you do not spend the night here, Mr. Crown. The house has not been opened in some time. There is a motel in town that will do." Elias looked past him at the coffin. The brass tacks caught the light from the curtains and threw it back at him in small, bright points. "Go on," he said. "I'll lock up." Vogel hesitated at the door. Whatever he saw in Elias's face, he kept it to himself. He nodded once, set his hat on his head, and let himself out. The screen door whispered shut behind him, and then there was only the clock and the lilies and the slow, sweet decay of the room. Elias sat for a long time with the envelope in his lap. He did not open it again. He did not need to. The words were already in him, each one a hook set in the soft tissue of a thing he had spent eighteen years pretending did not exist. The clock in Lillian's parlor struck the hour. Elias did not count the strokes. He rose from the chair with the envelope in his hand and crossed to the hall, where his coat still hung on the peg by the door. The wool was cold when he put it on. The brass tacks of the coffin caught the last of the day's light through the curtains, and the room smelled of lilies and dust and the faint, mineral scent of the marsh coming up through the floorboards. He stood in the doorway for a long moment. The screen door was still. Beyond it, the lane was empty. Vogel's sedan had gone. The rain had begun again, or perhaps had never stopped, a thin persistent veil that made the far trees blur into a single dark mass. Elias looked once more at the room behind him, at the coffin, at the chair where he had been sitting, and then he stepped out and pulled the door shut and did not lock it, as he had told Vogel he would. Let the house breathe. Let the dust settle without him. The box of ashes sat on the porch rail where the funeral director had set it that morning. Elias took it under his arm. It was heavier than he expected, or perhaps his arms were weaker. He walked down the lane toward the road, his boots finding the ruts by feel, and the rain settled on his shoulders like a second coat, cold and patient. In the truck, he sat for a minute with his hands on the wheel. The envelope lay on the passenger seat, weighted down by the box. The wipers beat a slow measure across the glass. He started the engine and turned onto the lane, and the tires hissed through the puddles, and the headlights found the road only in pieces. The cemetery was on the far side of the village, behind the Methodist church and the old stone wall where the schoolyard used to be. He had not been there in eighteen years. He had not been anywhere near it in eighteen years, had circled it the way a man circles a house where someone he loves is sleeping, not wanting to wake them. He had thought, at times, that he would never go back. He had thought, at other times, that he would have to. The gate was iron, green with salt, and it swung inward at his touch. He parked on the grass beside the drive and sat for a moment listening to the rain on the roof. Then he took the envelope and the box and walked through the gate and along the gravel path toward the Crown plot, near the back, under a row of Norway maples that had been planted by his grandfather and were now larger than the church. The headstones were weathered to a soft gray. He read the names as he passed them, his lips moving without sound. The Aldridge stones were there, and the Ashford stones, and the Crown stones, side by side in the long row, three families that had shared a stretch of coast for three hundred years. He did not stop at the Ashford stones. He did not look at them longer than he had to. He went on to the Crown plot, where his father was, and his father's father, and his mother's people, and the small flat stone that marked where his brother had been laid in 1987, before Elias had ever left, before he had ever come back. He set the box down on the grass. The rain had thinned to a mist. He could hear the marsh beyond the wall, the small birds moving in the reeds, the distant complaint of a buoy out in the channel. He knelt. The grass was wet and cold against his knees. He opened the box and took the inner vessel in his hands and unscrewed the lid, and the ashes were a pale, fine gray, almost silver in the low light, and they smelled of nothing at all. He thought of Lillian as she had been, in the kitchen, with the kettle on. He thought of her hands, which had been strong and quick and never still. He thought of the letter in his pocket, the words he could not unread. He thought of the name the letter had not named, and the name it had. Then he tipped the vessel, and the ashes fell out into the rain, and the rain took them, and the grass was darker where they lay. He stayed kneeling. The mist gathered on his eyelashes and on the shoulders of his coat. He did not pray. He had never learned the words. He only stayed, and breathed, and let the quiet settle into him the way the rain settled into the soil. "Elias." He looked over his shoulder. A cruiser had pulled up behind his truck, its lights off, the engine running. Vera Hensley was standing at the gate in a yellow slicker, her hair pulled back under a hat that had gone limp in the weather. She was not in uniform. She had on jeans and rubber boots, and she held a folder under one arm, and she was looking at him with the expression she had always had when she had come to tell him something he was not going to like. "I didn't mean to disturb you," she said. "I saw your truck." He rose, slowly, his knees stiff from the wet ground. He brushed the grass from his trousers and picked up the empty vessel and set it back in the box. "I'm scattering her," he said. "I see that." She came through the gate and walked over the grass toward him, her boots making no sound in the rain. She stopped a few feet away, near the Ashford stones, and did not step any closer. "I'm sorry about Lillian. I meant to come by the house. I heard she was failing." "You didn't come to the cemetery to tell me that." "No." She shifted the folder from one arm to the other. "I came because I was on my way out to the lighthouse, and I saw your truck, and I figured you'd want to know." He waited. "The construction crew," she said. "The state ones, doing the foundation survey for the new walkway. They started Monday, out at the point, where the old keeper's quarters used to be. They brought in a backhoe." She paused, and the rain filled the silence between them. "The rain filled the silence between" - I'll continue from this exact point. Vera shifted her weight in the mud, and the yellow of her slicker caught the last gray light from the harbor side of the sky. "They were digging test pits," she said. "Standard procedure, they said. Four feet down, eight feet down, just to check the substrate before they pour the new foundation. And at the third pit, the backhoe hit something it wasn't supposed to hit." She stopped, as if waiting for him to guess. He did not guess. He had stopped guessing about what lay under the Crown property decades ago, when he was a boy and his mother had first told him that some ground on the point should never be turned over. He had thought, at the time, that she meant the garden. He had thought, later, that she meant the marsh. Standing now in the rain with the empty vessel in his hand and the last of his mother's remains soaking into the sod, he understood that she had meant all of it. "Bones," Vera said. The word landed on the grass between them and lay there, plain and awful. "Human bones," she said. "Or what the state archaeologist says are probably human. There's a crew coming up from the university on Monday to confirm. In the meantime the site is taped off and the survey is paused and the walkway project is, quote, on hold pending review." Elias looked past her shoulder, toward the road. The cruiser's engine idled, the exhaust drifting sideways in the wind. "Who called you?" he said. "Nobody called me. I was already on my way out there. Arthur Vogel rang me last night. He said you'd want to be the one to hear it from me and not from the paper." "Arthur," Elias said, and the name came out flat. "Arthur knows what was buried there, Elias." "I know he thinks he knows." Vera came a step closer. The rain was running off the brim of her hat in a steady sheet, and her face beneath it was pale and set with the particular expression she had always worn when she was about to say the thing she had come to say. "Your mother asked me, years ago, to keep a record," she said. "I told her I would. She said if anything ever turned up on that point, I was to come to you first. Before the state, before the press, before anyone with a backhoe and a clipboard. She said you would understand what it meant." The box of vessels sat on the grass behind him, the lids askew, the small velvet bag empty now in his hand. He turned it over once, then twice, then set it carefully down on the top of one of the Ashford stones. The stone took the weight of it without complaint, the way old stones always do. "Margot Aldridge," he said. Vera was quiet for a moment. The rain filled the space where the name should have been answered, and after a while she nodded, just once. "You knew," he said. It was not a question. "I knew there was a story. I didn't know the whole of it. Your mother kept the whole of it in a tin in the linen closet, wrapped in one of your father's old shirts. I helped her wrap it, the summer after he died. She said if anyone ever found what was out there, I was to bring you the tin and not let the state boys get to it first." "And you didn't bring it to me." "I wasn't supposed to bring it to you until something turned up. That was the arrangement. That was her word. She was very particular about the words she used." Elias turned away from her and looked out toward the marsh. The tide was coming in, the brown water pushing slowly up the channels between the hummocks, the way it had done every evening of his life. Somewhere out past the breakwater, the bell buoy was moaning its low mechanical note, the sound carried in on the rain like something that had been postponed for years and had only now remembered to arrive. "Is she in there?" he said. "Is that what my mother was waiting for? For somebody to find her?" "I don't know," Vera said. "I don't know what your mother was waiting for. I know what she told me, and I know what she asked me to do, and I know that Arthur Vogel is sitting in the parking lot at the library right now with a key to a safety deposit box in Portland that he has been sitting on since the day your mother died. He is waiting for you to ask him to open it. He is waiting, Elias. He is a very old man and he is tired of waiting." The wind shifted and the rain came at them sideways for a moment, peppering the stones, drumming on the lid of the empty vessel box. Elias turned the velvet bag over in his hands again. The wool of it was dark with the rain, and the small drawstring ends hung limp against his knuckles. "Tell Arthur I'll meet him at the library at seven," he said. "Tonight?" "Tonight." "And the tin?" "Bring the tin," he said. "Bring whatever my mother wrapped up in my father's old shirt. Bring the folder under your arm. Bring anything you've kept that I should have had ten years ago and didn't, because she thought it was better that I didn't have it." Vera looked at him for a long moment. The rain had flattened her hair against her skull and the yellow slicker hung heavy from her shoulders, and she looked, for a moment, exactly as she had looked the summer she had come to help his mother wrap a tin in an old shirt in the linen closet on the Crown estate. She had been a young woman then. He had been a boy. The marsh had been higher, and the bell buoy had been louder, and his father had still been alive to complain about the noise of it. "Seven o'clock," she said. "Seven o'clock." She turned and walked back across the grass toward the gate, her boots leaving shallow prints that the rain was already beginning to soften. At the gate she stopped and looked back at him over her shoulder, and she lifted one hand, briefly, the way she had always lifted it when she was leaving and did not know when she would be back. He watched her climb into the cruiser and pull the door shut. The headlights came on, and the car rolled forward onto the road, the tires hissing in the wet. The sound of it faded. The rain came back, heavier now, and the bell buoy kept on with its low note out in the dark. Elias Crown stood for a long time at the edge of the Ashford stones, the empty velvet bag in his hand, the box of vessels open on the grass behind him. The tide was still coming in. The point was out there somewhere beyond the breakwater, taped off now, a backhoe's tooth in the old ground, the state archaeologist coming on Monday, and his mother, who had known all of it, lying under the sod at his feet with nothing left of her but the rain and the roots and the long, slow patience of the marsh. He closed the box. He picked it up under one arm. He walked back through the gate and down the lane toward his truck, and the rain followed him all the way, and the bell buoy followed him all the way, and somewhere ahead of him, at the library on the harbor, an old man with a key was waiting. The truck's heater worked just well enough to keep the windshield from fogging. Elias drove through Marshport with the box of vessels on the seat beside him, the leather cold against his thigh, the rain drumming steady on the cab roof. The wipers beat their metronome. He passed the darkened fish houses and the ferry landing, the harbormaster's office where he had worked for thirty-one years, and did not turn in. Vera had called an hour after Lillian's funeral, in the middle of the reading of the will, her voice bright and tight on the line. There was a man at the library, she had said. He said he had been waiting for someone in the family to come in, and he had something that belonged to the Crowns. He had given his name, and he had said he was sorry for her loss, and Vera had said she did not know him but she had not liked the way he had said it, and she thought Elias ought to come. He had asked if the man had shown her a card. She had said no. He had said he would come by the library in the morning, on his way to the harbor. She had said she would stay until he arrived. That had been Tuesday. It was now Friday, and the man had been sitting in the reading room of the Marshport Free Library every afternoon since, in the same wingback chair by the south window, with a leather satchel on his lap and a patience that Vera said was beginning to get on her nerves. Elias parked on Harbor Street in front of the library. The clock on the bank said 7:14. The bell buoy was still out there, faint through the rain. He sat for a moment with his hands on the wheel, the box of vessels between his knees, and looked at the front of the building where he had spent every Saturday of his boyhood, where his mother had brought him to pick out his first real book, where he had first read the word liminal in a library copy of something he could not now remember. He got out. He locked the truck. He carried the box with him under his arm, and the empty velvet bag in his coat pocket, and he climbed the three stone steps and pulled open the heavy door. The smell of the library came out to meet him, the same as it had always been, old paper and wood polish and the faint salt edge that Vera said came from the books themselves, the ones that had been here since the founding. Vera was behind the front desk, sorting returns, and she looked up at him over the top of her glasses. Her face was tired. She did not smile. "He's still here," she said. "I can see that." "He has a key, Elias." "I know." She set down the book she was holding and came around the desk. She was a small woman, sharp-featured, with gray hair she kept cut short, and she walked the way she always walked, a little too quickly, as though she were late for something only she could see. "I have sat with him for four afternoons," she said. "He drinks tea. He asks me questions about Lillian that I do not answer. He shows me letters he says are from people I have never heard of. He says the most extraordinary things and then he stops, just stops, like a man who has come to the edge of something and decided not to jump." "What kind of things?" "Things about the marsh. About a house. About a man who lived there once, who is supposed to be your family." Elias said nothing. "He says the house burned in the winter of 1918," she said. "He says your great-grandfather was the one who set it. He says there is a record of it in the registry of deeds in Hartford, but the record is sealed, and that he has been trying to unseal it for longer than you have been alive." "Who is he?" "He says his name is Arthur Vogel. He says he was your mother's solicitor. He says he was also the solicitor of the man who used to own the house on the point." "Cornelius Ashford." "He said you would know the name." Elias nodded. "He says Cornelius Ashford was tried for the murder of a woman named Margot Aldridge in the spring of 1918, and that he was acquitted, and that he died three months later in the burning house, and that no one was ever charged with his death." She stopped. She looked at him. "He says your mother knew all of this," she said. "He says she kept a record of it herself, in a place he would not tell me about. He says that when she died, the record went with her, and that he has come to find out what she intended to do with it." Elias looked past her, down the long room, toward the south window. The wingback chair was there, and the figure in it was small and still, and the leather satchel was on his lap exactly as Vera had described, and the man's hands were folded on top of it, and he was looking at Elias with a patience that Vera had been right to find unsettling. "He said there was a box," Vera said. "I have it." She stared at him. "It was under the stone in the marsh," he said. "At the point. Lillian left it there. I went and got it tonight." "Elias." "It's where the house was. Where the house burned. There are vessels in it, from her kitchen, from the Aldridge kitchen before that, I think. And there's a letter in the velvet bag that goes with it. I have not read it yet." She put her hand on his arm. Her fingers were cold. "You should not have gone alone." "I know." "He has been waiting four days." "I know." "Are you going to go in?" He looked at her. She looked back. The clock on the wall ticked once, loud in the empty room. "Yes," he said. "I am going to go in." He walked past her, down the long room, between the shelves, toward the south window. The old man did not rise. He did not smile. He only watched Elias come, and when Elias stopped in front of him, he unfolded his hands from the satchel and opened it, and inside, lying on a square of pale linen, was a second key. "Good evening, Mr. Crown," he said. His voice was dry and papery, like old paper turned. "I have been waiting a long time to give you this. I am sorry it had to be on such a night." Elias looked at the key. "I am sorry too," he said. He sat down across from the old man, in the chair Vera kept for patrons who wanted to read in the afternoon light, and he set the box of vessels on the small table between them, and he took the letter out of his coat pocket, still in its velvet bag, and he put it beside the box, and he said, "Tell me where to begin." The old man looked at him for a long moment, and then he opened his mouth, and the bell buoy kept its slow note out on the water, and the rain kept on the windows, and somewhere in the marsh, under the stones, the bones of Cornelius Ashford kept their long patience. The old man began.