The wipers dragged across the windshield in a stubborn arc, pushing salt spray from one side to the other and back again. Nell Stride downshifted, and the hire car's engine note dropped into a complaint as the road curved around a stand of black spruce. Beyond them, the first lights of Hollow Point blinked on against a sky the color of a bruise.
Her phone lay face-up in the cupholder, screen dark except for the time. 18:47. Seven missed calls, all from the same number she had never bothered to save. One voicemail, eleven seconds long, that she had listened to twice without absorbing a single word. And a single text, received ninety-three minutes ago, that she had read enough times to have memorized the exact kerning of the period at the end.
She's gone. You need to come.
She had been in the back of a cab on the Farnsworth Street off-ramp in Portland when it came in.
The turn onto Saltwind Lane came quicker than she remembered, the hedgerow taller, the tarmac patched with newer black. Nell cut the headlights and let the hire car coast on its own weight, the engine ticking into silence as the salt mist swallowed the last of the day. A gull, or something gull-shaped, lifted from a chimney pot three houses down and wheeled away without sound.
Margot's house sat at the end of the terrace the way it always had, narrow and white-painted, the clapboards swollen with another winter's damp. The downstairs light was off. The upstairs light was off. But a faint amber glow leaked from somewhere at the back, the kind of glow a reading lamp throws when left on its lowest setting, and Nell's hands tightened on the steering wheel for a reason she could not yet name.
She killed the engine. The wipers stopped mid-arc, leaving a comma of brine across her view of the front path. She did not move to clear it.
The houses here had always leaned toward the lane like old women trading gossip. Their windows were small and watchful. The one to the left of Margot's, the Milburn place, had a Christmas wreath still up in February, the plastic needles gone grey. The one to the right, where old Mr. Crouch had lived before he didn't anymore, had its curtains drawn tight, the net yellowed to the colour of weak tea.
Nell let her breath out and reached for the door handle. The metal was cold enough to bite. She stepped out onto the pavement and the sea-smell came up from two streets away, sharp and mineral, the same smell she had carried in her hair the morning she left for the train to Leeds and never properly came back from.
The key under the third flagstone was where Margot had always kept it, beneath the one with the chipped corner shaped like a worn tooth. Nell crouched and felt for it without looking, her fingers reading the cold edges of stone the way a child reads the spine of a familiar book. The metal was there, and a thin skin of grit, and the faint sweet tang of rust.
She stood and fitted the key into the lock. The Yale turned with a small obedient click.
Inside, the hallway smelled of paper and furniture polish and something faintly sweet she could not place, maybe the dregs of Margot's paraffin heater, maybe just the house itself exhaling after a long day without her. A pile of post sat on the doormat, mostly circulars, the edges of one envelope darkened where a cup had been set down and forgotten. The carpet was the same muddy green it had been when she was eleven.
Nell did not call out. She stood very still and listened.
The house ticked the way old houses do, joists settling, pipes cooling, a clock somewhere she could not see. But there was no other sound. No radio from the kitchen. No clatter of a kettle being filled. No voice, not even a television's murmur through the ceiling from upstairs.
She stepped past the umbrella stand with the cracked handle she had broken at sixteen and let herself into the front room. The curtains were half-drawn. The streetlamp outside threw a ladder of orange bars across the carpet and up onto the far wall where Margot kept her framed prints, a row of them, mostly botanical illustrations lifted from old issues of Country Life, all slightly crooked, all at different heights.
And then Nell saw it.
The sash window at the far end of the room was cracked open. Not much. Maybe four inches. Enough to let in the salt air and the distant complaint of a foghorn out beyond the headland. Enough to make the curtain nearest it breathe in and out like something sleeping. On the sill, placed with the kind of deliberate neatness Margot brought to everything, were her reading glasses, folded at the hinges, the tortoiseshell arms tucked parallel, the lenses facing up toward the ceiling as though she had just lifted her head from a chapter and meant to come straight back.
Margot never left the window open. Margot never left the house with her glasses behind.
Nell crossed the room in three long strides, her shoes sinking into the carpet without sound. She bent and looked at the sill. No water marks. No dust disturbed except where the frame had shifted. The latch was the old brass kind with the crescent moon on the turn, and it sat in the half-cocked position Margot always left it when she wanted a breeze but didn't want the whole street hearing her business.
She picked up the glasses. They were warm. Not from a heater, not from the sun, which had been gone for an hour. Warm from a face. Warm from skin.
Nell closed her hand around them carefully, the way she had learned to handle evidence on stories she could not print, and stood very still in the dark room with the salt coming in over her knuckles.
"Margot," she said, and her voice sounded wrong in the empty house, too soft, too hopeful, the voice of the girl who used to sleep in the box room at the top of the stairs on long summer visits when her mother needed her out from underfoot.
Nothing answered.
She set the glasses back on the sill, exactly as she had found them, and went to look for the rest of the house.
She moved through the downstairs the way she had been trained to move through other people's houses in other towns, weight on the balls of her feet, hands loose at her sides, eyes working the corners first. The kitchen was tidy in the way Margot's kitchen was always tidy, surfaces wiped, the dish rack empty except for one mug with a tea bag still in it, the string draped over the rim like a small collapsed tongue. The milk was on the worktop in a bottle with a blue cap, full, unrefrigerated. It had been there for a while. The butter dish was closed.
The fridge hummed. A calendar hung beside it, the kind with a pen on a string, and the date circled in red was two days ago. Wednesday. No annotation.
In the scullery, the back door was locked. The key was in the keyhole, turned to the right. Margot never locked the back door. Margot, who had grown up in a village where people still left their doors on the latch for the postman, who believed that locking a door was an insult to the neighbour across the lane, had locked hers.
Nell noted it. She noted the back door's lock and the milk on the worktop and the circled Wednesday and the glasses on the sill and the open window and she made a small mental list, the way she made lists when she was working, when the story was still in the bones of it and she was gathering the shape.
Upstairs then.
The stairs creaked on the fourth and ninth step, the same steps they had always creaked on, and Nell took them without trying not to. There was no one to wake. The bathroom door was open. The mirror above the basin was spotted with age. A towel hung on the rail, damp, used once and not rehung, and on the edge of the bath sat a small pile of books, paperbacks with cracked spines, all of them with the dust jacket creased the way Margot creased them, dog-eared at the chapter she had been reading.
The bedroom was the room Nell had once shared with her aunt during those long summers when her mother worked the double shift at the fish processing plant and needed someone to take the girl. The bed was made. The pillow had the dent of a head. The eiderdown was pulled up smooth. On the bedside table sat a cup of tea, cold, a skin forming on its surface, and beside it a paperback splayed open to a page near the end, and beside that a pair of cotton gloves folded into a square, the kind Margot wore to handle the first editions in the back room of the shop.
The glove lay there on the bedside table, folded into a precise square, and Nell did not pick it up. She stood in the doorway and looked at it the way she had learned to look at things in ten years of looking, the way she would describe for a reader who could not be in the room: the dent in the pillow, the skin on the tea, the cotton glove with its ghost of talc, and the small open window through which the morning was beginning to come.
Downstairs again. She did not lock the door. She closed it. She stood for a moment on the flagstones and felt the house settle itself around her, the way old houses did, with small sounds that were not sounds at all but the breath of timber and lime, and she thought of Margot at seventeen, Margot at twenty-five, Margot at thirty-eight behind the bookshop counter, Margot with a teacup and a paperback and a pair of cotton gloves she had folded into a square on the morning she had gone out.
Nell walked.
She walked the way she had walked the day before, the way she had been walking since she had crossed the county line and felt the land flatten and the sky open, with her hands in her coat pockets and her eyes on the road. The lane climbed. The lane narrowed. The tarmac gave up and became a track, then a path, then a ribbon of grass and stone between two banks of bracken that were already turning the colour of a bruise. The gulls came over in ones and twos, white slashes against a sky the colour of old pewter, and the wind off the sea smelled of salt and something else, something colder, something that tasted of iron if you opened your mouth.
She came to the path where the cliff began to fall away and she saw him.
Felix Ryce stood where the path bent, his back to her, his camera in his hands but not raised. He was looking down at something on the ground. He had the posture of a man who had been standing for a long time, his weight on his back foot, his shoulders set against the wind. The collar of his coat was turned up. His hair, when she drew closer, was the same, thinner at the temples, longer at the back, and there was a new scar along the line of his jaw she had not seen when they were seventeen.
He heard her before she reached him. He turned. Their eyes met, and for a moment there was nothing between them but ten years and a wind that carried the sound of the sea up the cliff like a long held breath.
"Nell," he said.
"Felix."
He did not move toward her. She did not move toward him. They stood six paces apart on the cliff path, and the wind moved between them, and the gulls moved overhead, and the path fell away at their feet to a long grey slope of grass and heather that ended, a hundred feet below, at the lip of nothing.
"I heard you were back," he said.
"I heard you were still here."
He almost smiled. The smile did not quite arrive. It sat in the lines around his mouth and the particular way he held his shoulders, the way a smile holds in a man who has learned not to trust it.
"Come and look at this," he said. He turned and walked the few paces to the bend and crouched, and she followed him and crouched beside him, and the wind pressed them flat together for a moment before she shifted her weight to her own heels.
There was a place in the heather where it had been walked on. Not recently. The bruised stems were brown at the break, the colour of dried blood, and lay in a flat oval a metre across, the pattern of feet pressing and shifting, the pattern of someone standing in one place for a long time and then not standing anymore. At the edge of the oval, a single stem of heather had been bent but not broken, and on its tip, caught in the small fork of its leaves, there was a thread of cotton. White. Faint. Holding the light if you tilted your head.
"Margot was found down there," Felix said. He pointed, not to the trampled oval, but past it, past the edge where the path dropped away, past the last stunted gorse that clung to the lip of the cliff. His hand did not shake. His voice did something that was worse than shaking. "Forty feet of scrub, then the fall. They got her down with ropes and the coastguard boat."
He paused. He looked at the oval.
"She hadn't been here before. There were no prints of hers any other time. I checked. I checked because I thought I should, because I had been up here that morning, because I had a roll of film finished and I wanted the light at the edge." He paused again. "I was up here at six. I saw the path was empty. I came back at ten. The heather was down."
Nell said nothing. She crouched with her hands on her knees and her coat pressed flat by the wind and she looked at the oval and at the cliff beyond it, and she thought of Margot and Margot's books and Margot's tea and the small cotton glove folded on the bedside table, and she thought of Margot coming up the cliff path in the morning, alone, to a place she had never been.
"They called it suicide," Felix said.
The sentence lay between them on the path. The gulls passed overhead. The wind moved the heather at the edges of the oval.
"It was in the inquest. Open verdict first, then suicide. Margot had been under the care of the doctor for something she would not name. Margot had withdrawn her savings a fortnight before, in cash. Margot had written a letter." He stopped. He reached down and lifted the stem of heather with the thread on its tip and held it out for her to see. "Margot had written no letter at all. I asked her sister. I asked Tom. I asked the postmistress, who sees what the postman doesn't. There was no letter. There was no cash withdrawn. There was no appointment with the doctor in the week before. She had been in the shop every morning that week, bright as a button, selling a first edition of Hardy to a man from Skipton. She had rung her mother on the Wednesday evening to ask if she wanted anything from the chemist."
He let the stem drop. It sprang back into place, the thread still in its fork.
"It was ruled a suicide, Nell, and it has never felt like one to me."
She did not ask him why he was telling her this. She did not ask him who he thought had done it, or why now, or why her. She looked at the oval and at the cliff and at the sky and at the man beside her, and she understood, with a feeling like the floor of a house giving way under a quiet step, that this was what the envelope had been.
Not a summons. An invitation.
Margot had not sent the letter. Someone had. Someone who knew that Nell had once been a girl in this village, someone who knew that Nell had spent ten years learning the shape of things that did not quite fit, someone who knew that there was a place on a cliff above the Atlantic where the heather had been walked on, and that on the stem of one bent plant there still hung a thread of white cotton, and that the man who had photographed the morning and seen the empty path would recognise what he had seen, and tell the woman who would understand him.
Nell stood. She brushed her hands against her coat, palms down, the way she brushed them after handling paper in archives, and she looked at Felix and he looked at her and the wind went on doing what the wind had always done on this cliff, which was to push against anyone who came to the edge.
"Thank you," she said.
"You're not staying."
"No."
He nodded. He seemed to know she would say it. He seemed to have been waiting for it, the way he had waited at the bend, the way he had stood with his camera in his hands and not raised it.
"Come back," he said. "Come back when you have something."
She did not promise. She turned and walked along the path, back toward the lane, back toward the village, back toward the house with the open window and the skin on the tea, and the wind at her back and the thread of cotton still in the heather where she had left it, holding the light in its small fork like a question someone had not finished asking.
Lorna Peck stood at the window of her cottage on the lane that curved up from the harbour, and she watched the path from the cliff road, and the wind came in through the open sash and stirred the curtain she had forgotten to tie back, and the curtain breathed against her wrist like something alive and patient.
Her wrist was thinner than it had been in September. The skin there had the look of paper left too long in the sun, and she knew it, and she did not look at it twice, because looking twice would be the same as saying it out loud, and she was not yet ready to say it out loud, not even to herself in the small room where she had slept for forty-one years and where the wallpaper still carried the shape of the picture her husband had hung above the bed before he died.
The kettle clicked off. She had forgotten she had put it on.
She went to it, and she poured the water into the pot she had warmed earlier, and the steam rose and smelled of the lapsang she had bought in the town because she had once liked the way it tasted of smoke and because now she liked the smell of it on her hands and on the wool of the cardigan she wore indoors even in summer. The cardigan had been her sister's. The cardigan had buttons that had been her mother's. She did not count the days anymore. She counted the things she could still do. She could still lift the pot. She could still pour. She could still walk to the window and back.
The letter had gone out on a Tuesday.
She had written it in the morning, before the light came fully into the room, at the desk that had been her husband's, with the pen that had been her husband's, and she had not told anyone what she had written, because the thing she had asked for was not the kind of thing you could explain to someone who had not stood on that cliff in the wrong weather and felt what she had felt, which was that the village was not finished with her, and she was not finished with the village, and the only person who might understand that was the girl who had walked out of it ten years ago and never sent a card and never sent a letter and never once, in all that time, turned her car around at the junction of the A1 and come back.
Nell Stride.
Lorna had watched her go. She had watched her from this window, on a morning in late August, with the cases in the boot of a car that was too small for the cases, and a young man standing at the gate with his camera in his hands and not raising it. Lorna had put her hand on the glass then, the way you put your hand on the glass of a hospital cot, and she had not said anything, because there was nothing to say that would not have made it worse.
Now she said, to the empty room, "That's enough of that."
She turned from the window. She went to the table. She sat down. She folded her hands in her lap, and she felt the weight of the cardigan across her shoulders, and she waited, because she had learned, in the last six months, that waiting was the only honest thing left to do, and she had been a woman who had never in her life been honest with anyone, not fully, not even with Tom Belmore, who had mended her fence in November and brought her eggs in a blue pottery dish and not once asked her in.
The door opened.
She did not startle. She had known the door would open. She had known it since the morning, when the post had brought back the silence of no reply, and the silence of no reply had meant yes, because Nell Stride was not a woman who replied to letters. Nell Stride was a woman who came.
Footsteps on the flagstone. A pause. The sound of a coat being unbuttoned, slowly, the way you unbutton a coat when you are not sure yet whether you are staying.
Then her voice.
"Lorna."
It was a small word. It was the only word she said. She said it from the doorway, and she did not come in further, and Lorna looked up and saw her, and Lorna saw that her hair was longer and that her face was thinner and that her eyes were the same, exactly the same, and that there was a thread of white cotton caught in the wool of her coat, just above the second button, and that the thread was the same one she had seen in the photographs laid out on the bar of the pub last winter, when the young man had come in from the cold and his hands were shaking, and he had said nothing, and she had known then what she had to do.
"Sit down," Lorna said. "The tea's done."
Nell did not sit. She came into the room, and she stood by the table, and she looked at the pot, and she looked at the window, and she looked at Lorna, and Lorna looked back, and the wind came in and moved the curtain and the curtain brushed the rim of the pot and the pot did not tip, because Lorna had put it in the centre of the table, in the exact centre, where it had always been.
"Who told you I was here?" Nell said.
"No one told me," Lorna said. "I wrote to you."
"I didn't get a letter."
"No," Lorna said. "You wouldn't have. You never read them. You never have."
Nell sat down then. She pulled the chair out, slowly, the way you pull a chair out
when you know the chair is about to hold something heavier than you are ready for. The legs found the carpet and she lowered herself, and her coat fell open, and the thread of white cotton caught the light from the window, and Lorna looked at it and then away, because she had looked at it enough already, in her own mind, in the long nights, in the mornings when the kettle screamed.
"You wrote to me," Nell said.
"I wrote to you."
"When?"
"August. The week the heather came out."
Nell did not say anything to that. She sat with her hands on her knees, the way you sit when you have forgotten what to do with them, and her eyes went to the window, and then back to Lorna, and Lorna saw her catalogue the room in the way a journalist catalogues a room, taking in the shape of it, the order of it, the way a teapot lives in the centre of a table because someone has decided it will.
"Your hands are shaking," Lorna said.
"Are they?"
"A little."
Nell looked down at her own hands as if they belonged to a stranger. She flattened them on her knees, and the shaking did not stop, but it slowed, and Lorna thought that was honest, at least. She had always been honest about the small things. The large ones had been harder.
"I thought you'd come sooner," Lorna said.
"I got the letter three days ago."
"That was the second one."
Nell looked up. "There was a second one?"
"The postman brought it back," Lorna said. "He said it had been opened and resealed, badly, with the wrong sort of glue. He said he was sorry. He left it on the step in a plastic bag. I burned it in the garden, after. The garden smells of paper, still. If you go out the back way, you'll smell it."
Nell said, very quietly, "Lorna."
"Don't."
"I have to say it."
"Then say it properly. Not that. Not my name in that tone. Say what you came to say."
Nell sat for a long moment. Outside, a car passed on the lane, and its headlights swept the ceiling, and then were gone, and the room dimmed again to the small yellow of the lamp, and the kettle ticked as it cooled, and somewhere in the wall a pipe made the sound a pipe makes when the house has settled and is thinking about settling further.
"I came because I read the first letter," Nell said. "The one you wrote in August. The one about the woman in the window."
"Yes."
"You said you had seen her three nights running."
"I had."
"You said she stood at the bedroom window of the house opposite, and that she did not move, and that you had counted the seconds and that she had stood there for the count of two hundred and forty, each time, and that on the third night you had waved, and that she had waved back, and that her hand had been wrong."
"Her hand was wrong."
"You said it had six fingers."
"I counted them. I had the light of the street lamp. I had my reading glasses on."
Nell was quiet again. She reached for the teapot, and Lorna watched her pour, and the tea came out dark, the colour of wet bracken, and the steam rose and made a small cloud between them, and Lorna smelled the bergamot, and the smell of it took her back to her mother's kitchen on a Sunday, and her mother was long dead, and the smell had been waiting all this time, in a tin at the back of a cupboard, for this exact moment.
"Nell," Lorna said.
"I'm listening."
"Drink your tea."
Nell drank. Lorna drank. The clock on the mantel ticked, and the second hand moved, and the minute hand moved, and Lorna thought that time was a thing you could lean against, sometimes, when you had nothing else.
"I've been to the house," Nell said. "This afternoon. Before I came here. I stood across the lane and looked up at the window."
"And?"
"It's empty, Lorna. The house has been empty since March. The owners are in Tenerife. I checked the electoral roll. I checked the water records. I checked with old Tom Belmore at the post office, because Tom knows who pays their bills and who doesn't, and no one has paid a bill at that house since February."
"I know what I saw."
"I know you know what you saw."
"Don't do that."
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're doing the thing you do. The careful thing. The, let us consider all the angles, let us weigh it up, let us be reasonable. I know the shape of it, Nell. I have read your pieces. You are very reasonable on the page."
Nell set the cup down. Her eyes were bright, and Lorna saw that she was hurt, and she was sorry for hurting her, and she was not sorry, and both of these were true at the same time, and she had no time to sort them out.
"I came back," Nell said, "because you wrote and said you were frightened."
"I am frightened."
"I came back because you wrote and said you had stopped sleeping."
"I have stopped sleeping."
"And I came back," Nell said, "because at the end of the letter, you wrote, please, and you have never written please to me in your life. Not once. Not when your father died. Not when the shop nearly went under. Not when we were girls and I broke your teacup and you said, well, it was only a teacup, and you meant it. So when you wrote please, I came."
The wind came up then, sudden, and the curtain drew in across the table, and Lorna put her hand out and caught it, and the fabric was cold against her fingers, and she held it there for a moment, and then let it go, and it swung back, and the window was there, beyond the glass, and the house opposite was there, and the window of it was there, and the room behind the window was dark.
"I didn't ring Vivienne," Lorna said. "I could have. Vivienne is her mother. I didn't."
"Why not?"
"Because Vivienne would have said I was imagining it. And Hattie would have said, well, Lorna, darling, what did you expect, you live alone, you read too much, you always did. And Tom would have come round with a torch and a thermos and looked at the house and said, nothing there, love, get some sleep. And I would have believed them. And then I would have stopped seeing her. And I did not want to stop seeing her."
Nell's cup was in her hand again, halfway to her mouth, and it stopped there. "Her."
"The woman in the window."
"The woman with the six fingers."
"Yes."
Nell set the cup down without drinking. She folded her hands on the table, and her thumbs turned in against each other, and Lorna heard the small dry sound of skin on skin.
"You want me to look," Nell said. It was not a question.
"I want you to come and look with me."
"Tonight."
"Tonight."
"From this window."
"From this window."
The lamp ticked. The clock ticked. The kettle ticked in its cooling. Somewhere down the lane a dog gave one bark and then was quiet. Lorna thought she could hear, if she listened, the sound of someone breathing in a house that was empty, that had been empty since March, that had no bills paid, that had no one home.
But she could not be sure. She had not been sure of anything, since August, except that she had seen what she had seen, and that her hands shook when she wrote the word please, and that the postman had brought the letter back in a plastic bag, and that Nell had come, and that Nell was here, and that the night was coming on.
"All right," Nell said.
She picked up her cup, and she drank, and Lorna watched her, and the wind moved the curtain again, and neither of them moved to fix it, and across the lane the window waited, dark and square, and the night came on, and the night came on.