Saltwood Cove announced itself in salt and diesel long before the gangplank struck the pier.
Margot Thackeray stood near the ferry's stern as the vessel slowed, her hand resting on the salt-stiffened rail, her boots planted against the pitch and sway of the harbor's last chop. The fog had thinned to a gauze that clung to the lighthouse on Widow's Head, a white column she had climbed twice a week for fourteen years before she left. Three years gone now. The cove did not look smaller, as she had secretly hoped. It looked exactly the same, and that was worse.
The engine dropped to a mutter. Gulls screamed their lazy, territorial cries overhead. Somewhere amidships a halyard clinked against an aluminum mast, a small bell-tone she had learned to read in childhood. The sound threaded straight through her chest and pulled.
When the gangplank dropped, the metal boot struck the pier with a clang that bounced off the fishhouse across the slip. Margot was the third passenger off, behind an old man with a canvas tote and a teenage girl in rubber boots who kept turning to take photographs of nothing in particular. Margot stepped onto the planking and felt the give of it, the soft shudder of old pilings, and the unmistakable smell of creosote and low tide.
She paused at the end of the gangplank with one hand on the worn post that marked the pier's edge. A faded sign read NO MOORING OVER 30 MINUTES WITHOUT HARBORMASTER PERMIT. Beneath it someone had taped a smaller notice, half-peeled now, advertising a lost tabby cat named Buttons. Margot remembered taping it there herself, the summer Iris had stopped speaking to the upstairs neighbor about his birdfeeder.
The book in her bag was the weight that mattered. Margot adjusted the strap on her shoulder and felt the hard rectangle of it press against her hip. She had packed it the night before, after the call from Ellis Dane's office, in the small hours when the cottage she rented outside Portland was so quiet she could hear the surf breaking three streets away. The book was Iris's favorite, an old library copy of The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett, soft at the corners, foxed at the edges, with a cracked spine that fell open of its own accord to the chapter called "The Waiting Place." Between pages forty-one and forty-two, pressed flat like a dried heart, Margot had found an iris blossom when she had cleared out Iris's sitting room. She had slid it back where it lay and closed the book and carried it home.
She had not yet decided whether to bring it to the reading of the will. It seemed the kind of thing a lawyer would frown at, and Ellis Dane's voice on the telephone had been the voice of a man who frowned at things. But the iris had been Iris's, and the book had been Iris's, and Margot had been unable to leave either of them behind.
The pier stretched ahead of her in salt-grayed planks. A pickup truck waited at the far end, its engine idling. She could see the driver tapping a thumb against the wheel, a man she did not recognize. Behind him, the village climbed the slope in its usual order: chandler's shop, the post office, the Episcopal chapel with its leaning steeple, the row of fishermen's cottages with their blue and rust-colored shutters. Smoke lifted from two chimneys. A dog barked once, twice, and stopped.
Margot began to walk. Her suitcase wheels caught on a warped board and she tugged it free. The suitcase was canvas and navy, bought at a tag sale in Kennebunk the autumn she moved out of her marriage. She had packed it that morning with the careful inventory of a woman who did not expect to be back for a while: two pairs of jeans, three flannel shirts, her good black sweater, the brown loafers she had not worn since the funeral, and a photograph album she had not opened in five years.
At the foot of the pier, she stopped.
The bench where Iris used to sit was gone. In its place stood a newer model of weathered plastic, the kind that came in flat boxes from the hardware store. The hardware store, she remembered, had been Cal Boucher's, and Cal had died the winter before Iris. There was a new owner now. There was always a new owner now.
She turned her collar up against the sea breeze and breathed in. The cove smelled of wrack and low tide, of diesel and tar, of the particular blend of fish scales and boot polish that the working pier carried into the cooler months. Beneath those familiar notes, faintly, came wood smoke and someone frying onions somewhere up the lane. Her stomach answered, hollow and tight.
The pickup truck at the end of the pier belonged to a man she had never seen. He climbed out when she approached and tipped an oil-stained cap at her.
"Miss Thackeray?"
"Mrs.," she said, and then, "Margot. Yes."
"Dane sent me." He had the look of a man who had been sent for many people, to many piers. "He said to tell you the reading starts at four, at his office on Main. Said to tell you he's sorry about your trouble."
She nodded. "Thank you."
"Car's got a box of tissues in the glove if you need one."
The kindness of it landed strangely. Margot thanked him again and climbed into the passenger side, and the man drove her up the lane past the post office, past the chapel, past the white house with the painted dory in the front yard, to the squat brick building that had been Ellis Dane's father's office before it was Ellis Dane's. The brass plate beside the door read DANE AND DANE, ATTORNEYS AT LAW. Margot remembered when it had read DANE, DANE AND THACKERAY. Her grandfather's name had been on that plate for thirty-two years, until the year Iris moved it into a drawer and never spoke of it again.
She asked the driver to let her out at the foot of the lane. She wanted to walk the last quarter mile alone. He nodded, unsurprised, as though he had driven many people to many lawyers and learned that some needed the last few steps for themselves.
Margot set her suitcase by the side of the road where the gravel met the wild strawberries, and she walked. The lane climbed the slope past the abandoned bait she'd with the red door that had not been painted in forty years. She had once painted it with Iris on a Saturday in July, Iris standing on a step stool, Margot on a stepladder beside her, both of them laughing at the way the color bled into their hair. That had been a long summer, the last summer before Margot's mother died and Iris stopped laughing at the small red door.
The lane turned toward the sea, and there it was. The cottage.
It sat on a low bluff above a cove within the cove, a saltbox shape with a single chimney and a porch that wrapped the south side. The clapboards were the color of skim milk, peeled now in places to the bare cedar. The window boxes were empty. The flag Iris had flown every Fourth of July since the Bicentennial hung still and limp on its brass pole. Margot stood at the gate and looked at it for a long minute.
She had grown up in this cottage. She had learned to read by the oil lamp in the parlor, to shuck clams at the kitchen table, to mend nets in the side yard when the weather broke. Iris had taught her all of it, between long silences and longer stories, in the way of women who lived alone and learned to make a conversation out of weather and birds.
Margot unlatched the gate. The hinges protested, and she made a mental note to oil them before she left, if she left. The path to the porch was overgrown with sea lavender and the leggy remnants of last year's roses. The door key was where it had always been, under the third brick of the left-hand step, beneath a scrap of wax paper to keep the rust off. Iris had shown her the hiding place when Margot was nine, and Margot had shown no one since.
Inside, the house smelled of cold ash and cedar and the faint, sweet ghost of the lavender sachets Iris tucked into every drawer. Margot set her bag on the porch bench and did not turn on the lights. She stood in the doorway and let the gray of the afternoon fill the parlor.
The rocking chair was where Iris had left it, angled toward the window that looked out over the cove. The afghan Margot had crocheted the year she turned twenty was folded across its arms. On the small table beside it lay a pair of reading glasses, a pencil, and a crossword puzzle book opened to a page that was only half finished. Iris had died on a Wednesday. She had been working a Tuesday crossword. Margot had not been able to bring herself to throw the book away.
She crossed the parlor to the kitchen and found the kettle where it had always hung, above the butcher block beside the cold stove. She filled it from the tap, lit the burner, and set it on the flame. The blue ring of gas caught and hissed. She found a teabag in the jar by the sink, chamomile, and a single clean mug on the drainer. The rest of the mugs were where Iris had left them, in the cabinet above the stove, neatly stacked.
While the water heated, Margot took the book from her bag and laid it on the kitchen table. She opened it gently, letting the spine fall where it wished. The chapter was "The Outer Island," as it happened, not "The Waiting Place." She smoothed the iris with her thumb and looked at it. It was still purple at the heart, faded to the color of old bruises at the petal's edge. She did not know who had given it to Iris, or when. There had been no card. There had been no mark on the page. There had been only the flower, lying between two passages about a woman waiting to be rowed across a bay.
The kettle began to whisper. Margot poured the water over the chamomile and carried the mug and the book to the parlor. She sat in Iris's rocking chair and pulled the afghan across her lap, and the chair began, as it always had, to rock.
From the window she could see the cove, and the ferry already pulling away from the pier, a small white shape against the gray water. A lobster boat was moving out toward the bell, its wake a slow V behind it. A heron stood on the breakwater in the patient attitude of a heron. Margot watched the heron and sipped her tea and tried, very hard, not to think about four o'clock.
At ten to four she stood, brushed the cat hair from her black sweater, and picked up the book. She left the iris where it lay, pressed and faded, between the two pages, and she closed the book and held it against her chest.
She locked the cottage behind her and walked down the lane toward Main Street, the book under her arm, her suitcase still waiting in the grass at the foot of the hill.
The lane opened onto Main Street, and the salt wind met her at the corner like an old dog that remembered her smell. Margot stopped, one hand on the low stone wall that bordered the churchyard, and let the book drop to her side. She breathed. The air was different here than at the lighthouse, thinner in some way, threaded with wood smoke and the green vegetable smell of the tidal flats rather than the iodine and cold iron of open water. She had forgotten this. Or she had not forgotten, exactly; she had simply let the memory go the way one lets a sand dollar go, back into the surf.
The Sand Dollar Inn stood at the far end of Main Street, a white clapboard building with a porch that ran its full length and a cupola on the roof where, in summer, a flag was raised to mark the days the ferries ran on schedule. Today the flag was at half-mast, though no wind troubled it. The parking lot was nearly full. Margot counted the cars without meaning to, an old habit from the lighthouse where the count of strange vehicles on the access road could mean a tourist in distress or a journalist or, once, a man who had come to ask her about a lightkeeper from 1903. There were eleven cars. She knew none of them.
She walked up the porch steps. The boards gave under her weight in the same places they always had, near the post where the railing met the roof and halfway down where some long-ago repair had used a softer plank. Inside, the door was propped open with a rubber wedge, and the smell of coffee and lemon polish and, beneath those, the particular warm-cardboard-and-old-lilac smell of a room full of people trying not to cry, reached her before she had crossed the threshold.
A woman in a gray dress took her coat. The woman said her name. Margot said, "I am sorry, I do not think we have met." The woman said, "I am Brenda, dear, I worked with your grandmother at the library, you would not remember me." Margot said, "Thank you, Brenda." She smoothed her black sweater. She had brushed the cat hair off it twice already. There was still a single white hair on her shoulder. She picked it off and held it in her fist until she could reach a wastebasket.
The reception filled the front room and spilled into the back. There were perhaps forty people, most of them standing with small paper cups of coffee, a few sitting in the wing chairs by the bay window with plates of sandwich on their laps. The sandwich was egg salad on white, cut into triangles, with the crusts off, exactly as Iris would have specified. Margot saw the detail and felt something twist behind her sternum, not grief exactly, but the recognition that her grandmother's preferences had survived her by a day and were now in the hands of strangers.
A man in a blue blazer detached himself from the group near the cold table and came toward her. He was sixty, perhaps, with a red face and a careful handshake. "Margot," he said. "I am Frank. Frank Pelletier. I knew your grandmother from the historical society." She said, "Thank you for coming, Frank." He said, "It is a sad day. It is a sad day for the whole town." He paused. "It is good you could come down from wherever it is you are now."
She did not say where she was now. She said, "It is good to be back."
Frank nodded. He did not let go of her hand for a moment longer than was comfortable, and then he did, and he said, "Your grandmother spoke of you often," and he went back to the cold table, and Margot stood for a moment in the small cleared space he had left behind and wondered what Iris had said, and to whom, and how often, and whether she would ever know.
She moved through the room. She accepted condolences from people whose names she could not attach to faces and faces she could not attach to names. A woman with a perm and a cashmere sweater said, "You have your grandmother's hands." A man in a plaid shirt said, "She was a fixture." A teenager in a dark suit, whose relationship to Iris Margot could not begin to guess, said, "Sorry for your loss," in a tone that suggested he had rehearsed it in the car. Margot said thank you to each of them. She sipped coffee she did not want. She ate half a sandwich because a woman she did not know pressed a plate into her hands with such force that refusal would have required more energy than compliance.
The silences were the worst.
They came in the spaces between the words, in the half-beat after a name was offered, in the glance that traveled from Margot's face to her left hand and back again. The town knew she had left. The town knew she had not come back. The town knew, in the way small towns know, that her marriage had ended and her mother had died and she had chosen, or seemed to have chosen, the rock and the salt and the long gray winters of the lighthouse over the warmer geometries of home. The town did not say any of this. The town simply looked at her, and the looking was the saying.
A woman in a green dress, whose perfume was too strong and whose hug was too long, said into Margot's shoulder, "We had hoped you would come for the summer, at least. Your grandmother had hoped." Margot said, "Yes." The woman withdrew. Her eyes were dry and bright and absolutely merciless. "She kept your room exactly as it was," the woman said. "She kept the lavender in the sachet. She said you would know what to do with it." Margot said, "Thank you." The woman nodded and walked away, and Margot stood with her coffee and her half-eaten sandwich and understood that the room was full of people who had loved Iris and who blamed her, just a little, for the fact that Iris had died alone.
She set down the cup. She set down the plate. She crossed the room toward the door that led to the back parlor, which was the room where the lawyer had set up.
Ellis Dane was standing behind a card table near the fireplace. He was a tall man, thin, in a dark suit that fit him across the shoulders and fell a little loose at the waist. His hair was gray at the temples and brown elsewhere, and he wore it short. His shoes were polished. He had a leather portfolio under one arm and a paper cup of coffee in his hand that he held as if he had forgotten it was there. When he saw Margot he set the cup down on the mantel and came toward her with his hand out.
"Margot Thackeray," he said. His voice was smooth and low, a Maine voice that had been sanded down by years of conference calls and county-seat boardrooms but that still carried, beneath the polish, the slight rise at the end of a sentence that meant the speaker was from the coast. "I am Ellis Dane. I represented your grandmother for the last eleven years. I am very sorry for your loss."
"Thank you," Margot said. His hand was cool and dry and his grip was correct.
"I would like a few minutes alone with you," he said. "When you are ready. There is no rush. The reading of the will is not required by law for an estate of this size, and there is only the one beneficiary. Your grandmother left instructions that I should speak with you privately, and that the conversation should not be hurried."
Margot looked at him. "Now," she said.
"If you prefer."
"I prefer."
He inclined his head. He picked up his cup, thought better of it, and set it down again. He gestured toward the back parlor, where a smaller card table had been set up with two chairs and a pitcher of water. The mourners had, by some unspoken agreement, left that room empty. Margot walked ahead of him and sat in the chair that faced the window. He sat opposite. He opened the leather portfolio and took from it a single manila folder and a smaller envelope, also manila, that was about the size of a paperback book and that had been sealed with a circle of brown wax. The wax bore the impression of an anchor.
"Your grandmother," Ellis Dane said, "left her entire estate to you. This includes the Victorian inn on Harbor Lane that has been in the Thackeray family for four generations; the contents of the inn, with the exception of certain specific items that have been bequeathed to the Saltwood Historical Society and to one Mrs. Winnie Cabell, of this town; a modest savings account at the Camden National Bank; and the contents of a safe-deposit box that I have not yet opened in your presence." He paused. He did not, Margot noticed, read from any document. He knew all of this by heart. "There are also some outstanding debts, which are small, and a number of small bequests to individuals, none of them of more than sentimental value. The inn itself is, of course, the principal asset. The appraisal we did last spring put it at something over seven hundred thousand dollars, though of course the appraisal of a property like that is more art than science. The town has been after your grandmother for years to sell the front parlor as a tea room, and she refused every time."
Margot said, "She would have refused until the tide came in."
Ellis Dane smiled, briefly, the way a man smiles when he has heard a thing said about a person he respected and finds the saying exact. "She would have," he said. "Yes."
He set the manila folder on the table between them. He did not open it. He placed his hands, palm down, on either side of it, and looked at Margot. His eyes were pale blue and they did not move from her face.
"There is one further item," he said. "This envelope."
He set the wax-sealed envelope beside the folder. The wax caught the light from the window and threw a small bright coin of reflection onto the surface of the table.
"It was given to me by your grandmother three years ago," Ellis Dane said. "She asked me to hold it in my office safe until such time as her estate had been settled and her sole heir had, in my judgment, returned to Saltwood with the intention of remaining. She was very specific about the conditions."
Margot said, "What conditions."
"She wrote them down. I have them here." He took a single sheet of paper from the folder and read it aloud, his voice even, unadorned. " 'This envelope is to be delivered to my granddaughter Margot Thackeray, in person, by my attorney Ellis Dane, only after she has lived in the town of Saltwood, in the house known as the Victorian inn on Harbor Lane, for a period of not less than thirty consecutive days. The envelope is not to be opened before this condition has been met. If Margot chooses not to remain in Saltwood, the envelope is to be returned to me unopened, and the contents are to be considered null. If Margot is, in the opinion of my attorney, present in Saltwood only briefly or under duress, the envelope is to be retained in his office safe until such time as the condition has been met or I have instructed him otherwise in writing.' "
He set the paper down. He looked at Margot.
"The condition has not yet been met," he said. "You arrived yesterday. The thirty days will be measured from the date of your arrival, assuming you remain in the house. I am required to retain the envelope until that time."
Margot looked at the envelope. The wax seal was old, or made to look old, and the manila had yellowed at the edges. She could see, just barely, the impression of a thumb at one corner, where Iris had held it, or someone had held it, before the wax was set.
"What is in it?" Margot said.
"I do not know," Ellis Dane said.
"You have not opened it."
"Your grandmother asked me not to. I did not."
"Three years you have had it."
"Three years," he said. "It has been in my office safe. I have moved it twice when we renovated. I have never opened it. I have, at various points, considered opening it, and decided each time that I would rather not know what your grandmother wished you to have in private than to know and to have betrayed her trust."
Margot sat back in her chair. The springs of the chair, old as the inn was, creaked under her.
"My grandmother," she said, "was not a woman who made idle requests."
"No," Ellis Dane said. "She was not."
"And she knew, when she wrote this, that I had not been back in eleven years."
"I cannot speak to what she knew," Ellis Dane said. "I can tell you that she wrote this three years ago. I can tell you that she asked me, more than once, whether I had heard from you, and that when I told her I had not, she did not seem surprised. She seemed to be waiting."
"For what?"
"I did not ask her," Ellis Dane said. "I respected the privacy of my client."
Margot looked at the envelope again. The little circle of reflected light from the wax had moved with the sun and now lay on the edge of the folder. She had the strongest impulse, which she did not act upon, to reach across the table and take the envelope in her hands.
"If I do not stay," she said. "If I take the inn and sell it and leave."
"The envelope is to be returned to me unopened," Ellis Dane said, "and the contents are null."
"She would disinherit me twice," Margot said. "Once from the inn, and once from the letter."
"I do not think that is quite right," Ellis Dane said. "I think she would have left you the inn regardless. The inn is not contingent. The letter is."
Margot looked at him. "Why?"
Ellis Dane was quiet for a moment. He folded his hands on the table. He looked, for the first time, not like a lawyer but like a man who had known an old woman for eleven years and had been sorry, in his own dry way, when she died.
"Your grandmother," he said, "believed that some things could only be given in person, and only to someone who had chosen to receive them. She believed that if you were here for the funeral, and only for the funeral, you were not yet ready to receive what she had to give. She believed that if you stayed, you would know why, and that if you did not stay, it was better that you did not know."
"She is dead," Margot said. "She cannot know whether I stay or not."
"No," Ellis Dane said. "But I can. And I am instructed to use my judgment. I am instructed to retain this envelope until I am satisfied that you have chosen to remain in Saltwood, in the house, of your own will, and not under duress. I will not retain it forever. I will retain it for thirty days. At the end of thirty days, if you are still in the house, I will deliver it to you, unopened, and you may do with it as you wish. If you leave before the thirty days are up, I will consider the condition unmet and the envelope will be destroyed, unread, in my presence, with a witness, and a notation will be made in the file."
Margot sat very still. The window behind Ellis Dane framed a rectangle of gray sky and, at the bottom of the rectangle, a sliver of the cove. A gull passed across the rectangle, white, slow, its wingbeats lazy.
"Thirty days," she said.
"Thirty consecutive days," Ellis Dane said.
She looked at the envelope. She looked at the manila folder. She looked at her own hands, which were folded on the table in a way that Iris had folded hers, the left hand over the right, the thumb of the left hand tucked under the knuckle of the right.
"I am staying at the lighthouse," she said. "I have a position. I have a life there."
"I understand," Ellis Dane said.
"My father is in the assisted living in Camden," she said. "I visit him on Tuesdays. I cannot stay thirty days."
"You cannot," Ellis Dane said. "Or you will not."
She looked at him. He met her gaze. There was no challenge in it. There was only the steady, patient attention of a man who had been hired to do a thing and who intended to do it.
"I will think about it," Margot said.
"Take your time," Ellis Dane said. "You have thirty days."
She laughed, in spite of herself. It was a short, surprised sound, more breath than voice, and she put her hand over her mouth. "You have just told me I have thirty days," she said, "and you are telling me to take my time."
"I am telling you," Ellis Dane said, "that the clock does not start until you are in the house. You are not in the house now. You are in the Sand Dollar Inn, in the back parlor, at a funeral reception, drinking coffee you do not want."
Margot set the cup down. "How did you know I did not want it."
"Your grandmother," Ellis Dane said, "also drank coffee she did not want at events she did not want to attend. She always held the cup in her left hand. You are holding yours in your right. The cup is for show."
Margot laughed again. This time the sound was less surprised. She looked at the man, and the man looked at her, and for the first time since she had stepped off the ferry she felt as though she were in the presence of someone who had actually known Iris, and not merely of someone who had come to pay respects.
"I will think about it," she said again.
Ellis Dane nodded. He stood. He gathered the folder and the envelope and the paper and put them back into the portfolio. He closed the portfolio and set it under his arm.
"The keys to the inn," he said, "are in my office. I will bring them to you tomorrow morning, if you would like, or you may pick them up. The house has been closed since your grandmother's death. It will need to be aired. There are, I am told, a number of cats."
"There are cats," Margot said.
"I am told three," Ellis Dane said. "I am told one of them is large and indifferent. I am told one of them is small and affectionate. I am told one of them lives in the cellar and has not been seen by human eyes in several years, but that your grandmother left food for it regardless."
"There are cats," Margot said.
"There are cats," Ellis Dane agreed. He inclined his head. "I will leave you to the reception. There is, I think, more coffee."
"There is more coffee," Margot said.
He turned to go. At the doorway he stopped, with his hand on the frame.
"Your grandmother," he said, without turning, "asked me, the last time I saw her, whether I thought you would come back. I told her I did not know. She said, 'She will come back. She will be angry about it, and she will come back.' "
He walked out. The door swung softly behind him.
Margot sat at the card table for a long time. She did not drink the coffee. She did not go back into the reception. She sat and she looked at the rectangle of gray sky and the sliver of cove and the gull that had come back and was riding the same thermal, in the same place, as if it had never moved.
At last she stood. She smoothed her sweater. She pushed the chair back under the table. She picked up the book, which she had set on the floor beside her chair when she came in, and she held it against her chest, and she walked out through the reception, past the people whose names she did not know and whose kindnesses she could not yet repay, and out onto the porch, and down the porch steps, and along Main Street, past the churchyard and the corner where the wall was low and the lane began, and up the lane, and into the cottage, where the kettle was still warm and the cat was still on the bed and the suitcase was still in the grass at the foot of the hill.
She locked the door behind her. She set the book on the table. She sat down in the rocking chair. She did not rock.
She thought about thirty days. She thought about her father in Camden. She thought about the position at the lighthouse, and the keeper who was covering for her, and the boat that would need to be hauled before the first snow, and the lens that needed cleaning, and the log that needed writing. She thought about Iris, who had kept her room exactly as it was, and the lavender in the sachet, and the iris pressed between two pages of a borrowed book.
She thought about the envelope.
She did not know what was in it. She would not know for thirty days, if she stayed. She would never know, if she did not.
The kettle ticked as it cooled. The cat came down the hall and jumped onto her lap and settled, with the absolute certainty of a creature who has always been welcome, into the warm place between her folded hands. She stroked its ears. She did not rock.
Outside, the ferry had come back to the pier. The heron was still on the breakwater. The town was quiet in the way towns are quiet when the visitors have gone and only the residents remain, and the residents are tired, and the season is turning, and the light is leaving the water by degrees, so slowly that you cannot see it go but you can feel, if you pay attention, the way the air begins to thicken and the gulls begin to settle and the bell out in the channel begins, very faintly, to toll.