What the Pines Remember: What The Tide Took

The camera shutter clicked, then clicked again.

Eli Marsh lowered the old Canon from his eye and studied the framed collage on the community center's south wall. The 1998 senior portraits stared back at him in rows of varnished smiles, each face captured in the brief, terrified hopefulness of eighteen. Dust motes drifted through a column of late afternoon light from the high windows, catching the gold in the wooden frames and making the whole wall seem to breathe.

He had not intended to come here today.

But Eunice Bell had called at dawn, her voice thin and urgent over the static of the landline, and had said only that she needed him to see something. Something about a photograph. Something she could not describe over the telephone for reasons she refused to explain.

Now he stood in the empty hall, carpet threadbare beneath his boots, and he did not know what he was meant to see. The collage held forty-seven faces. Most he recognized. Most he had known since childhood, since the long summers before the accident, before Margaret, before the slow unmooring of everything he had thought would last.

He lifted the camera again and photographed the third row from the top.

The shutter sound bounced off the corkboard walls and disappeared into the ceiling tiles. Somewhere in the kitchen a refrigerator compressor droned on, a sound he had grown up with, the sound of Tuesday suppers and basketball tournaments and his mother's quiet humming as she set out the pudding cups.

Sadie Quinn stood between Dale Brennan, then a young deputy with a crew cut and a chipped front tooth, and Owen Pace, then a visiting medical student home from University of Oregon for the summer. Sadie wore a green blouse and a tentative smile, and her hands were clasped at her waist the way she always held them in photographs, as though she were trying not to take up too much space.

Eli zoomed with his eye pressed to the viewfinder.

In the frame, his sister's face looked out at him across twenty-six years.

He lowered the camera. Set it on the folding table beside a stack of stamped envelopes. Ran a thumb along the wedding band he still wore on a leather cord around his neck, the habit so old now that the cord had become part of his body.

The door behind him opened with a long creak of hinges.

"Mr. Marsh."

He turned.

Eunice Bell stood in the doorway, her cardigan buttoned wrong, a manila folder clutched against her chest. Her hair was pinned up with two knitting needles that had worked themselves loose, and her reading glasses sat crooked on the bridge of her nose. She looked, as she often did, like a woman who had stepped out of one century and into another by accident and was still deciding which to live in.

"Eunice," he said. "You called."

"I did. I did call." She shuffled forward, her slippers whispering on the carpet. "I am sorry about the hour. I could not sleep. I have not slept since Friday, Mr. Marsh. Not properly. I have been through my journals, all forty-three of them, and I have made a list." She held up the folder. "It is not a short list."

He watched her approach. He had known Eunice Bell all his life. She had taught him to read. She had let him hide in the library stacks the summer his father drank. She had been the first person to send a card after the accident, and the only person who had not asked him how he was.

"Take your time," he said.

She did not take his meaning. She stopped at his elbow, peering up at the collage with eyes that had gone rheumy but not dim. Her mouth worked silently for a moment.

"There," she said, and raised one knuckle to tap the glass over Sadie Quinn. "There is my girl. Between the sheriff and young Mr. Pace. You notice how she holds her hands."

"I noticed."

"She always held her hands like that. As if she thought the camera might steal something from her if she did not keep them locked."

He did not reply. The refrigerator hummed. A gust rattled the flagpole outside the front of the building, and somewhere a screen door slammed shut and no one went to close it.

Eunice opened the folder and drew out a photograph, smaller, creased along threefold lines, the color gone the color of weak tea. She held it out.

"I found this in the back of the library donation box. June of 1998. Someone had tucked it behind a paperback of, I believe, a John Grisham novel. I do not know who donated the novel. There was no card."

Eli took the photograph.

It showed the same group of young people, but not in studio lighting. It was taken outdoors, in the slanting gold of late afternoon, on what he recognized as the breakwater by the cannery. Sadie stood at the center again, but this time she was laughing, her head thrown back, and on either side of her were Brennan and Pace, also laughing. Behind them the tide was out, exposing the black stones slick with kelp and the rusted iron ribs of something long submerged.

He turned the photograph over.

On the back, in pencil, in a careful script he did not recognize: The three of us, before.

Before what, he did not say.

"Who took this photograph," he asked.

"I cannot tell you. The script is not from anyone I have indexed." Eunice's voice fell into the slow, rolling cadence of someone used to reading aloud from very old books. "I have shown it to four people. Sheriff Brennan said he did not remember. Mr. Pace said he did not remember. Mrs. Margot Voss said she did not remember, which is interesting, Mr. Marsh, because Mrs. Voss is in the photograph."

He looked again. Squinted.

In the second row, behind the three laughing figures, half turned away from the camera as though she had just noticed it, stood a young woman with dark hair cut in a sharp bob and a single thick eyebrow. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth was open, as though caught mid-word. She wore a man's coat, navy, too large for her shoulders, and her hand was raised to shade her face, though there was no sun behind her.

Margot Voss.

The real estate developer who had arrived in March with her offer of cash and contracts and her careful, polished questions about the Marsh timberline. The woman who had smiled at him over coffee at the diner and called him by name as though they had met before, though he knew they had not, he would have remembered, he was certain of it.

"Why are her eyes closed," he said.

"That," Eunice said, "is what I have spent four nights trying to answer."

She drew out a second photograph and held it beside the first. Same breakwater. Same tide. Same three figures in front, laughing. But in this one, the woman in the back row was not half turned away. She was facing the camera fully, her eyes open, her smile wide, and her hand was reaching out as though to touch the shoulder of one of the figures in front of her.

The same woman. Two photographs. Two different versions of the same moment.

"I took this one," Eunice said quietly. "With my own camera. I was twenty feet away, on the dock. I remember because I had just bought the roll of film in Seaside and I was so proud of it, and I remember thinking that I should have asked before taking the picture. But they were laughing. I did not want to interrupt."

Eli set the two photographs side by side on the folding table. The Canon sat beside them. The stamped envelopes rustled faintly in a draft from somewhere.

"In yours," he said, "her hand is raised. In the one from the donation box, her hand is raised too, but her eyes are closed."

"Yes."

"And in yours her eyes are open."

"Yes, Mr. Marsh."

He looked at her.

She looked back at him with the patient, careful gaze of a woman who had spent sixty years cataloguing other people's lies and truths and who knew that the difference between them was often only a matter of which page one opened.

"There is a third one," Eunice said.

She reached into the folder again and set it on the table.

In this photograph, taken from yet another angle, the same woman stood in profile, almost entirely turned from the camera, and her hand was not raised at all. She was holding something at her side, a small object, the details lost in the shadow of the navy coat. Her eyes were closed again.

"Three photographs," Eli said. "Same moment. Three versions of the woman in the back."

"Yes."

"And no one else has noticed this."

"I have shown only you. Sheriff Brennan would not interest himself. Mr. Pace is busy. Mrs. Voss is a guest in our town, and I do not wish to accuse a guest of anything without reason." Eunice pressed her lips together. "You have reason, Mr. Marsh. I think you know her from somewhere. I cannot say how I know. It is a librarian's instinct, perhaps. I read people the way other people read books."

He did not respond to that. He held the third photograph closer to the window light. The woman's profile was sharp, the line of her jaw, the angle of her chin, the precise cut of her hair. The object in her hand caught the light and flashed once.

"Coincidence," he said, though he did not believe it.

"It is not."

He set the photograph down.

Eunice fussed with the knitting needles in her hair. She did not look at him. She looked at the collage.

"Your sister," she said, "in this photograph, on this wall, in this building where she once helped me shelve the Nancy Drew collection every other Thursday for four years. She is the only person in this entire hall who is not laughing in the summer I took the second picture. I have looked. I have counted. Forty-six faces. Forty-six smiles. Sadie Marsh alone is not smiling."

"You want to tell me something, Eunice."

"I want to tell you everything I cannot tell you yet. I want to tell you that I have kept a journal entry for every significant thing that has happened in this town since 1962, and that in the entry for the third Friday of June 1998, there is a single line that I have spent twenty-six years trying to understand." She opened the folder. Drew out a single sheet of lined paper, yellowed, the creases soft from being folded and refolded. "It says, and I quote myself, Mr. Marsh, 'The Voss girl came back and the boy from the cliff went with her, and no one saw either of them leave.'"

He read the line twice.

"It is the only entry in all forty-three journals that I have not understood. I have tried. I have reread it every Christmas since. I have shown it to two priests and one retired psychiatrist. None of them could tell me what it meant."

"Who," he said, "is the Voss girl."

"I do not know. I have asked. I have never found anyone who knew a family by that name in this county. There has never been a Voss in our telephone directory. There has never been a Voss in our cemetery. There has never been a Voss in our census." She paused. "Until March of this year."

He was quiet.

The refrigerator hummed. The flagpole clattered. Somewhere outside, a dog barked twice and fell silent.

"Mrs. Voss," Eunice said. "She arrived in March. She says she is from Portland. She bought the old Hanratty place. She has been seen with measurements and a clipboard out at the Marsh timberline. She has been seen at the diner with the sheriff. She has been seen leaving flowers at the cemetery." She looked up at him now, finally. "She has been seen standing at the breakwater at low tide, alone, looking out at the water as though she were waiting for someone to come back from it."

Eli Marsh picked up the camera. Raised it. Looked through the viewfinder at the collage. He framed Sadie Quinn's face exactly in the center, her tentative smile, her clasped hands, the small mole beneath her left ear that he knew as well as his own heartbeat.

He pressed the shutter.

The sound of it filled the empty hall and faded.

"I need the original of the second photograph," he said. "The one you took. The woman with her eyes open."

"You may borrow it. I have my negatives."

He nodded.

"And the third one. The one from the donation box."

"That one too."

"And Mr. Marsh." She caught his sleeve. "Please do not go to Mrs. Voss alone. I have a feeling about her. I cannot say what kind of feeling. It is the feeling one has in a library when one has mis-shelved a book and cannot find it, and one knows it is there, behind the other books, just out of reach."

He looked down at her hand on his sleeve.

"I will be careful, Eunice."

"I know you will be careful. I am asking you to be more than careful."

The light through the windows had shifted and gone thin. Somewhere in the building a clock ticked, the kind of clock whose ticking one only ever hears when a building is empty. Eli gathered the three photographs, the journal page, the original of Eunice's own shot, and he put them all into the inside pocket of his coat, against his chest, where they sat with the weight of small stones.

He walked with her to the door.

Outside, the flagpole had gone still. The clouds over the bay were low and the color of bruises, and the tide was coming in, slow, the kelp turning as the water covered it, the rusted iron ribs of the old wreck disappearing one by one.

He stood for a moment on the community center steps and watched the water.

He thought of his sister's face in the photograph, hands clasped, mouth barely turned up, the only unsmiling face in forty-six. He thought of the line in Eunice's journal. He thought of a woman in a navy coat, eyes closed in one frame and open in another, holding something small and bright that he could not yet see clearly.

Somewhere across the bay, a buoy bell rang twice.

Eli Marsh turned and walked down the steps toward his truck.

The truck door was cold under his hand when Eunice's voice came from behind him, thin and out of breath, the way a voice gets when a small woman has tried to walk quickly across linoleum in good shoes.

"Mr. Marsh. Eli. Wait."

He turned. She was standing on the lowest step, one hand on the newel post, the other pressed flat against the bodice of her cardigan as if she were holding something in.

"I forgot," she said. "I sat down to put the boxes away and I forgot the only one that mattered."

She came down the step and crossed the gravel to him, her footing careful, the way footing gets careful in October when the light goes. She was carrying a single sheet of newsprint, folded once, the crease browned with age.

"The Lighthouse Dance," she said. "I always called it the dance, the way the old people did. As if there were only one."

She held the clipping out. The paper was heavy in his fingers, the kind of stock that stopped being made sometime in the early seventies. The headline ran in a wood-type font across two columns: COUNTY DANCE TRADITION DAWNS AS ALWAYS; WEATHER HOLDS, CROWDS HOLD. Beside it, in smaller letters, a subhead: MISS SADIE M. MARSH CROWNED DANCE QUEEN.

Below the headline, a photograph.

The hall was the same hall. Eli could see the painted bunting and the paper streamers and the same long tables with the white cloths. The string of lights in the photograph threw a glare into the lens, and someone had leaned too close to the tripod, so the foreground figures were slightly soft. But the faces in the second row were clear enough.

His sister sat on the left side of a three-person throne of papier-mâché, a sash across her chest that read DANCE QUEEN in glitter glue. The crown sat too far back on her head. She was not smiling. Her hands were folded in her lap, the fingers laced tight, and her eyes were on something out of frame, lower than the camera, to the right.

"She had that look," Eunice said, from beside him. She had not asked to look. She was looking anyway. "The look she got when she was working something out. Your mother used to say Sadie was the only person in the county who could look like she was calculating the square root of a chair."

Eli did not reply. He was reading the caption.

Below the group photograph, a smaller one. The caption beneath it read: QUEENS DEPARTURE, 11:40 P.M.

The photograph was taken from inside the hall, looking out through the open double doors. The parking lot was mostly empty. Three cars were visible, one of them Dale Brennan's cruiser, the roof lights dark. Beyond the cars, the road. The trees on either side of it were black against a sky that had not yet decided whether to be fog or stars.

In the center of the photograph, his sister walked away from the hall. She had removed the crown and was holding it at her side, in her left hand. Her right hand was at her hip, fingers touching something at her waist that the camera could not resolve. The sash was gone. Her hair had been let down, or had come undone, and hung past her shoulders.

She was alone.

"No one went with her," Eli said.

"No," Eunice said. "No one went with her."

He looked at the small clock in the margin of the photograph. The hands pointed to 11:40. He looked at his sister. He looked at the road.

"The photographer," he said. "Who took this one?"

"Man named Whitcomb. Worked for the paper until it folded in eighty-nine. Died in oh-two. He kept the negatives."

"He kept the negatives."

"He kept everything. I have them now. His daughter gave them to me when I started the archive. Three file boxes of the county's entire memory, most of it blurry, all of it in a garage that smelled like turpentine."

Eli turned the clipping over. On the back, in pencil, in handwriting he did not recognize, were three lines.

11:40 P.M. Leaving west on foot. Alone. Road empty by 11:47.

He held the clipping out so Eunice could see.

"I did not write that," she said. "But I know who did. I have seen that hand before, on the back of a different photograph, of a different night, from a different year."

She looked at him.

"Mr. Whitcomb kept notes. He was a careful man. He would have noted what he saw."

"He saw my sister walk out of a dance alone at twenty minutes to midnight."

"He saw a young woman leave a building she had been queen of, alone, on a road that ended at the lighthouse. He would have noted the time, the direction, and whether anyone followed her. He would have done this whether or not anyone came looking afterward."

"And no one came looking."

"No," Eunice said. "No one came looking that I ever saw. Your father did not come to the hall that night. I have a note about that too. He was at the mill, or on his way back from the mill. Your mother was at home with a migraine. Your brother Owen was in Tacoma."

"Owen Pace."

"Owen Pace. He had not yet come back to the county then. He would come back later."

The wind picked up. The bunting at the community center porch stirred and dropped. Eli folded the clipping once more and put it into the inside pocket of his coat, beside the photographs of the woman in the navy coat.

He thanked Eunice. He said it the way he had been taught to say it, which was to mean it. She nodded, and she put her hand briefly on his sleeve again, and then she went back up the steps and through the door, and the door shut behind her with a small sound, like a hand set gently against a mouth.

Eli drove back to the homestead.

He parked the truck in the same place he had parked it the night before. He did not go into the house. He took from behind the seat a small flashlight he kept there, a yellow plastic thing with a cracked lens, and he put it into his coat pocket, and he stood for a moment at the gate and looked up the hill.

The road to the lighthouse began on the far side of the pasture. He had walked it as a boy a hundred times. It was two miles from the county road to the bluff, and the last quarter mile was no longer a road at all but a path of broken asphalt that ended at a turnaround. The turnaround was where the tour buses had once let people off. The turnaround was where the lighthouse sat, white against the trees.

He went through the gate and across the pasture.

The grass was wet and the water came up over the tops of his boots. He walked along the fence line until he reached the gate at the far end, and then he followed the gravel up the hill into the trees. The Douglas firs stood close on either side. The light was failing by degrees. The clouds over the bay had thickened and dropped lower, and the bay itself had disappeared into them.

He smelled the salt before he saw the bluff.

The road curved at the top of the hill and ran out along the spine of a low ridge that dropped away on the seaward side. The railing was old. The railing was made of pipe that had been set in concrete when he was a boy and that had not been painted since. It was rusted now, and the rust bled down the posts in long stripes, and the paint that remained was the green of old money.

He walked to the railing and looked over.

The bluff dropped fifty feet to a shelf of rock, and the shelf dropped another thirty to the water. The water was out beyond the shelf. The tide was low and the rock was dark and wet and empty, and the kelp on it lay in long black ropes that twitched and straightened as the water moved underneath.

He turned on the flashlight and swept it across the railing.

Halfway down, on the second post from the turnaround, a length of ribbon was tied in a knot around the pipe. The ribbon was pink. The pink had faded to the color of a rose pressed for a long time in a book, and the edges of it had frayed into white threads, and the threads had caught on the rust and on the lichen and had gone stiff with salt.

Eli put his hand on the railing.

He did not pick up the ribbon at first. He stood with his hand on it and looked at it, and then he looked out at the water, and then he looked at the path behind him, and then he looked at the ribbon again.

He untied it. It took some doing. The knot had been drawn tight and the salt had stiffened it, and the fibers on the underside of the ribbon were gummed with something that might have been pine pitch or might have been something else. He worked at it with his thumbnails and then with his teeth, and the ribbon came free in his hand, and the length of it was longer than he had expected, perhaps three feet, perhaps more.

He folded it once and put it into his coat pocket with the photographs.

The lighthouse was fifty yards further on. It stood at the end of the turnaround, square and white, two stories of clapboard over a stone foundation. The cupola at the top was missing its glass. The gallery rail around it was still intact but the wood had gone soft with rot, and where it had given way entirely there were sharp splinters pointing into the air.

The windows at ground level had been painted shut. The paint was thick and layered. He could see, when he brought the flashlight close, that there had been several coats, and that under the topmost white there was a layer of green, and under the green a layer of blue. The window frames themselves were not rotted. The wood around them was sound. Someone had taken care to keep them sealed.

He tried the front door.

The door was a heavy plank door with a wrought-iron handle and a separate deadbolt set into the stone at shoulder height. He took the handle and turned it, and the latch was free. The deadbolt was not free. He took the flashlight and brought it close to the lock.

Around the base of the deadbolt, in the soft wood of the door frame, there were scratches.

The scratches were fresh.

He could see, in the yellow light of the flashlight, that the wood under the scratches was the color of new-cut kindling, and that the small chips of it had not yet gone brown. He brought his hand up and touched them. The edges were still raised. The edges were still sharp.

Someone, in the last few days, had stood at this door and tried to get in.

Eli knelt and looked at the scratches.

They were not the scratches of a key that had been mis-cut. They were the scratches of something harder than a key, something with an edge. They curved around the bolt in a series of half-circles, and in one place the wood had been gouged deep enough to show the grain, and the grain was still wet-looking under the flashlight.

He stood up.

He did not knock. He did not try the door again. He stood with his back to the railing and his shoulder against the door and looked out at the turnaround and at the path that led back into the trees.

The dusk was thickening. The clouds had come lower. The bay had disappeared entirely, and where it had been there was only a sheet of grey, and the grey was the same color as the sky, and the line where one met the other was not a line at all but a slow gradation, like the edge of a bruise.

He put his hand into his coat pocket and felt the photographs, the journal page, the clipping, the ribbon.

He thought of the photograph of his sister, leaving the hall alone at 11:40 P.M.

He thought of the woman in the navy coat, eyes closed in one frame and open in another.

He thought of the line in Eunice's journal, the one about the feeling of a mis-shelved book.

He thought of the scratches in the wood around the deadbolt.

He turned off the flashlight.

He stood in the dark and listened.

The wind was low. The bay was silent. The trees on the hill behind him made no sound. The buoy bell rang twice across the water, and then it did not ring again.

He put the flashlight back into his pocket and began the walk down the hill.

At the gate at the end of the pasture, he stopped. The homestead was a hundred yards across the field. The light in the kitchen was on. The window of his sister's room was dark. He had not gone into his sister's room in twenty years. He had not gone into the room at the top of the stairs in twenty years. He had walked past the door of it every morning and every night, and he had kept the door closed, and he had not opened it.

He went through the gate and across the field.

At the porch he took off his boots and set them on the rail. The boards of the porch gave under his weight in the same place they had always given. He went inside. He set the photographs and the journal page and the clipping and the ribbon on the kitchen table, and he stood over them, and he did not touch them.

He boiled water and made coffee. He sat at the table with the coffee in front of him and did not drink it. He sat for a long time. The light in the kitchen went from the color of amber to the color of nothing at all.

After a while he reached across the table and unfolded the ribbon.

It lay on the wood between the salt shaker and the napkin holder. It was the color of an old rose. The fibers along its edge were still pale. The knot he had untied had left a crease in the middle of it, and along the crease the dye had worn through to a paler pink underneath.

He touched it with his thumb.

He thought of his sister, at the bottom of a hall, putting on a coat.

He thought of his sister, on a road, alone.

He thought of a door that someone had tried, in the last few days, to open.

He folded the ribbon again and put it back into his pocket.

He would have to ask Eunice who had the keys.