The wind found the cottage before she did.
Wren Hollister woke to a sound she could not place, something between a moan and a crack, and lay still beneath two wool blankets while the offshore gale threw itself against the north wall. Her rented cottage sat on a granite shelf above Wild Harbor's coldest reach, a saltbox with a tin roof and a stove that only behaved when the dampers were coaxed. She had been here eleven days. She had not yet unpacked the photograph box.
The second sound was louder. She sat up.
Salt spray misted the window. The sill trembled. Somewhere outside, a wooden chair lifted off the porch and rolled, bumped, rolled again, and was gone. The ceiling above her bed gave one long groan, then another, the timbre dropping the way a ship's hull drops when the keel finds sand.
She swung her legs down. Her bare feet found the floorboards, cold enough to make her flinch. She pulled on boots, grabbed the wool coat from the hook, and crossed to the kitchen in three steps because the cottage was that small. The front door rattled. She pressed her palm flat against it and felt the house breathe, shudder, lean a half-inch off its bones.
The roof came off at 2:14 in the morning. She would learn the time later, from Gus Harlow, who had watched the whole thing from his porch across the cove and counted by the clock on his wall. She only knew the moment. A ripping sound, vast and textile, as though some enormous hand had taken hold of the tin and simply torn. Cold air dropped on her like a dropped cloth. Insulation drifted down, pink and fibrous, catching the battery lantern's pale circle. Rain followed, hard and horizontal, and struck the exposed rafters with a sound like gravel poured onto a drum.
She did not scream. She thought about screaming, then thought about the stairs, then moved.
Wren crossed the kitchen in two strides. She hooked the photograph box from the counter, pressed it against her ribs, and ducked through the back door into the kind of weather that took the breath before it took anything else. The nor'easter had stacked the swells high enough to hear from the cottage. Now she heard them and felt them, the ground itself vibrating under her boots. The path to the road was a sluice of black water over slick grass. She walked it the way you walk a deck in a sea, one hand out, weight low, eyes on the next step.
Her car was a quarter mile up the hill. She reached it soaked through, panting, the photograph box clutched so tight the corners dug into her forearms. She started the engine. The wipers could not keep up. She drove anyway, following the white line down the center of the road because the shoulders had disappeared under the surge, and reached the village of Wild Harbor proper in seven minutes that felt like seventy.
The inn sat at the bend in the road where the harbor turned inland, a low clapboard building with a widow's walk and a sign so weathered the lettering had gone the color of driftwood. Every downstairs window blazed. Every upstairs window was dark. She killed the engine and sat for a moment, listening to the wind push the car sideways in small increments, and then she pushed open her door and ran.
The lobby smelled of pine oil and cold coffee. A radiator ticked somewhere out of sight. A woman behind the desk looked up from a crossword, took in the wet coat, the soaked hair, the white box under one arm, and reached for a key without being asked.
"Two oh seven," the woman said. "Up the stairs, end of the hall. It's the only one with the heat still working. The boiler's half-cottoned, but Margaret keeps that room warm as toast. She always did."
Wren took the key. Her fingers were too numb to feel the metal. She climbed the stairs.
The second floor smelled of dust and cedar and the faint, sweet rot of old wallpaper paste. Her boots left damp prints on the runner. She passed three closed doors, four, five, and at the end of the hall found a door with a small brass 7 nailed to it at an angle. The knob turned. The room opened.
It was small. A double bed with a patchwork quilt. A dresser with a pitcher and basin. A straight chair. A window that looked out over the harbor, glass beaded with condensation. The radiator under the sill hissed and clanked and threw off a heat so generous it fogged the air. Wren stood in the middle of the floor and let it touch her face, her hands, the front of her coat where the wool had gone black with rain.
She set the photograph box on the dresser. She sat on the edge of the bed. She did not cry. She had not cried in eleven days, and she was not going to start now, in a strange inn, in the dark hours, with the whole north end of her rented life spread across a hillside in pink insulation and twisted tin.
The radiator ticked. The window shuddered. Somewhere down the hall, closer than she would have liked, a door opened.
Boots on the floorboards. Heavy, deliberate, the kind that came off boats and never quite lost the pitch of a wet deck. She heard them stop just on the other side of the wall she shared with the room next door. Then she heard a workbench scrape across pine. Then a toolbox set down with a dull clang. Then nothing, just the sound of a man breathing and the wind counting off the seconds outside.
She did not go out. She did not knock. She sat in the only warm room on the second floor of the Wild Harbor Inn and listened to her neighbor put his things away for the night.
At first light, the storm still up but easing, she went down.
The lobby was empty. The crossword woman had been replaced by a man with a gray beard and a wool watch cap, standing behind the counter with both hands flat on the wood. He was small and weathered in the particular way of men who had spent fifty years on the water, and he was watching her with an expression that was not quite concern and not quite appraisal, more the look of someone who had decided long ago how people behaved in storms and was now waiting to see if she would prove him right.
"Up from the cottage?" he said.
"Yes."
"Saw the roof go. Saw it from my porch, two in the morning, give or take."
"You must be Gus."
"Gus Harlow." He tipped the cap back an inch, not quite a greeting, not quite a salute. "You're Hollister's girl. From the city."
"Wren."
"Wren." He said the name once, the way he might say the name of a halyard or a particular knot, to feel its weight. "You eat yet?"
"I haven't."
He pushed a folded paper bag across the counter without ceremony. Inside, two hard-boiled eggs, a slab of brown bread, and a piece of cheese wrapped in wax paper. The cheese smelled sharp and a little ammoniac, the way good cheese smells when it has been left to itself.
"There's coffee on the stove," Gus said. "It's bad coffee. I won't pretend otherwise. But it's hot."
She ate standing up. The bread was dense and a little stale and it was the best thing she had tasted in a week. Gus watched her eat with the patience of a man who had nowhere to be.
"The woman who ran this place before me," he said, after a while. "Margaret Voss. Died in March. Left the inn to her boy, and he ran it about as well as a man runs a boat with no engine. Closed the rooms. Kept the bar. Sat out the season, if you take my meaning."
"The man next door," Wren said. "His workshop."
Gus glanced at the ceiling.
"Declan Voss," he said. "Margaret's boy. Lobsterman. Runs the family boat since his father passed. Takes the old billiards room for his rigging work in the off-season, so he doesn't have to listen to the lines slap the mast all night in the wind. Sets up in there, oil lamp, vise, the works. Quiet, mostly."
"Mostly."
Gus gave her a look that had a small, dry smile hidden somewhere in it.
"He's an early riser," he said. "And he doesn't love company. But he's fair. He leaves you be, you leave him be. That's the whole of it."
Wren wiped her fingers on the paper bag. The coffee was, in fact, terrible. She drank it anyway, standing at the counter in a damp wool coat, looking out the front window at the harbor where the swells were still running shoulder-high and the boats strained at their moorings like animals at a leash.
"I'll pay for the room," she said.
"Pay Margaret," Gus said. "When she turns up." He paused. "That was a joke. Sort of."
She almost smiled.
"I'll have a word with Declan," Gus said. "Let him know you're up there. He don't love surprises."
"I can introduce myself."
"You can," Gus agreed. "You can also let an old man do the talking, which he's better at anyway, and which would save you the trouble of getting your head bit off before breakfast." He considered her for a moment, then nodded to himself, as though some small private ledger had been balanced. "Sit down, Wren. Eat the second egg. The storm's not done. Nobody's fixing any roof today."
She sat. She ate the second egg. The lobby warmed slowly around her, and the radiator upstairs ticked on through the floor, and somewhere above her head, behind the plaster, a man she had not yet met was putting his tools away in a room that used to hold billiard tables and now held the work of his hands.
The storm broke on the second morning.
Wren knew it before she opened her eyes. The quality of the silence had changed. The wind had stopped dragging at the eaves. The harbor had settled into a long, slow breath. She lay still under a quilt that smelled of cedar and faintly of pipe tobacco, and she listened to the world get quiet.
She dressed in the cold room. Her breath made small ghosts in the air. The radiator ticked, then gave up. On the dresser, the thermos sat with its cap off, waiting.
Downstairs, Gus had left the food store again. Two eggs, hard-boiled this time. A heel of bread. The same battered thermos, washed and refilled. A note in blocky pencil read: Up at the inn by eight. He says he'll be on the north wall.
She wrote a reply on the paper bag. Thank you for the eggs. I will pay when Margaret comes back.
Then she pulled on her coat, buttoned it to the throat, and went to find Declan Voss.
The lane up to the inn was glazed with a thin skin of ice. She stepped carefully. The harbor lay flat and gray below her, the color of old pewter, and the boats stood in their slips like sleeping dogs. A single gull wheeled once and vanished.
The inn was a tall, gray clapboard thing with a widow's walk and a chimney that listed slightly to starboard. It looked as though it had been built by people who did not expect to be questioned. The front steps creaked under her boots. She tried the door. It was unlocked.
Inside, the lobby was dim and smelled of wood polish and lemon rind. The grandfather clock ticked, offbeat, like a man who had somewhere better to be. A woman stood behind the front desk, broad and ruddy, wearing a green cardigan and reading glasses on a beaded chain.
"Looking for the man upstairs?" the woman said.
"If he's expecting me."
"He don't expect anybody. He tolerates them." She tipped her head toward the stairs. "Second floor, north end. Mind the third step. It talks back."
Wren climbed. The third step groaned and complained, exactly as promised. The second floor corridor ran long and narrow, carpeted in a pattern of dark roses that might once have been red. Most of the doors were closed. From the far end, she heard the soft, deliberate sound of a trowel on plaster.
He was working with his back to her when she came through the doorway. He did not turn around.
"You Gus's strays," he said.
It was not a question.
"Gus said you'd be on the north wall."
"Gus talks too much." He set the trowel down on a square of wet canvas and straightened, slow, like a man pulling anchor. He turned.
Declan Voss was taller than she had pictured from Gus's description. Lean and weathered, the kind of brown that did not come from sunlamps. His hands were large, scarred across the knuckles, dusted white at the wrists with plaster powder. His hair was dark and pushed back, and his eyes were the color of the harbor she had just walked up from.
He looked at her the way a man looks at weather.
"You know plaster," he said.
"Some."
"Some," he repeated, in the tone of a man putting a small, dry thing on a shelf for later. He nodded toward a bucket in the corner. "Suit up. I'll talk while we work."
She did not point out that he had not yet talked. She crossed the room, found a pair of rubber gloves that had seen better days, and pulled them on. The bucket held a pale, sluggish mix. She picked up the trowel he had set down and tested the weight of it.
"Patching the lath first," he said, indicating a long strip of exposed wooden skeleton along the inside corner. "Then the brown coat. Then the finish. Three hands. You do the brown, I'll do the rest."
"Why not the other way around?"
"Because mine is better."
She almost smiled. Almost. She bent to the work instead.
The morning went by in the language of small trades. Trowel for hawk. Hawk for margin trowel. Margin trowel for the wide putty knife. They did not speak much, but what they said was clean and useful.
"More on the left."
"Holding."
"Light pressure."
She felt the rhythm of it settle into her shoulders, her wrists, the small muscles of her forearms. The plaster was cool and faintly gritty under her fingers. It smelled of chalk and old water. The light in the room was gray and even, the kind of light that did not flatter anything but did not lie either.
Declan worked the way Gus had said he would. Quietly. Methodically. He did not narrate. He did not explain. When he wanted her to adjust, he said so in two or three words, and the words were never wrong. When she wanted him to adjust, he listened once, and either did it or did not, and if he did not, he told her why in a single sentence.
Around ten, he reached for the thermos without looking and held it out to her.
She took it. The cap was loose. She drank. The coffee was not quite as bad as yesterday's. It was the same coffee, but colder.
"You make this?"
"Gus makes it."
"It grows on you."
"It does not," he said, and went back to work.
She took one more swallow and set the thermos on the windowsill, where the light caught the dented aluminum and made it shine. Then she forgot about it. Then he forgot about it. By noon, when they broke to eat the bread and eggs she had brought, the coffee was the temperature of the room, and neither of them mentioned it.
They ate sitting on the floor, backs against the wall, a few feet apart. He peeled an egg with one hand and ate it in three bites. She ate bread. The harbor was visible through the tall window, and for a moment, between gusts, the sun came through and lit the water and the boats, and the world looked almost kind.
"Where'd you learn," he said, after a while.
"Patching plaster?"
He nodded.
"My mother kept a house that was older than she was. Things kept falling out of the walls. You patch one, another comes loose."
He considered this.
"That's how it is," he said.
"What?"
"The older the house, the more it asks of you."
She looked at him. He was not looking at her. He was looking at the window, at the harbor, at something she could not see.
"You knew this place before," she said.
"I grew up three doors down." He turned the eggshell between his fingers. "My father drank here. Saturday nights. He'd carry me in on his shoulder. I'd fall asleep under the bird game to the sound of men laughing about men."
"The bird game?"
He almost smiled.
"Billiards," he said. "Felt was green. Balls were ivory. Margaret's mother used to let me chalk a cue if I promised to be still." He set the eggshell down carefully on the canvas. "I'm being still now."
She did not push. She ate her bread.
The afternoon wore on. The light began to fail around three, and Declan put up a trouble lamp on a hook in the ceiling, and the room turned the color of old gold. They worked under it like two people digging in the same field.
Around four, he asked her to hand him the corner trowel. She picked it up off the canvas and reached across him to pass it. His fingers came around the handle at the same moment hers did. The brush of his knuckles against her palm was brief, dry, warm. Neither of them said a word about it. He took the trowel. She turned back to her hawk. The plaster on it had begun to set. She worked it loose again.
His voice, when it came, was even.
"Tomorrow," he said, "the south wall."
"Tomorrow," she said.
Around six, he called it. He cleaned his tools with a brush and a rag and put them back in a long wooden box that sat under the window. She cleaned hers and set them on the canvas to dry. The thermos, when she picked it up off the windowsill, was the temperature of her palm, which was the temperature of the room.
She unzipped her coat. Her shoulders ached. Her wrists ached. There was plaster in the cuffs of her sweater and a streak of it along her jaw where she must have pushed her hair back with the wrong hand.
Declan stood at the window, looking down at the harbor. The boats were black shapes against a gray sea. A light was burning in the kitchen of a house across the way.
"You want to see the south wall now," he said, "or in the morning."
"In the morning."
"Good." He did not move from the window. "Gus told me you're a writer."
"He talks too much."
"So I've heard." A pause. The harbor rose and fell behind him. "What do you write."
She considered lying. She considered not answering. She stood very still in her dusty coat with the thermos in her hand and her shoulders aching and the taste of cold coffee in her mouth.
"People," she said. "Mostly. What they do when they think no one is watching."
He nodded slowly. He turned from the window. He looked at her for a long moment, and his face did not change, but something in the harbor of his eyes shifted, the way water shifts when a boat moves somewhere out of sight.
"All right," he said. "Get some rest. Tomorrow's longer."
She climbed down the stairs. The third step complained. The woman at the desk looked up from a crossword, considered her dusty boots, and said nothing. The lobby was dim. The grandfather clock ticked on, offbeat, faithful to nothing in particular.
Outside, the air had the sharp clean smell of a harbor after a storm. The ice on the lane was softening. She could hear it weeping under her boots as she walked back down toward the harbor, toward the room with the quilt that smelled of cedar, toward the desk where she would sit for an hour before she slept and try to put down, on paper, the exact weight of a trowel and the exact temperature of a thermos nobody had remembered to drink.
Behind her, on the second floor, a man she had met that morning was standing in a room he had spent his life learning to read, looking at the place on the canvas where her hand had been, and then he turned off the trouble lamp, and the room went dark, and he locked the door behind him, and he went down the lane toward his boat.
The room smelled of cedar and something underneath the cedar, something older, like wool that had been packed away in a trunk for years and only just remembered how to breathe. Ellie lay still beneath the quilt and watched the shadows on the ceiling move as a truck passed on the lane outside, its headlights sweeping the wall like a slow lantern.
She had been awake for two hours. She had tried the breathing exercise her sister taught her, four counts in and seven counts out, and it had worked for approximately ninety seconds before her mind snagged on the day's last image: the canvas propped against the workbench in the watch room, the wet paint still beading where she had rested her hand.
She had touched a painting. Not the wall, not the brass lantern, not the cool iron of the railing. The painting itself. She had put her hand on someone else's unfinished work and left a print of her palm in the wet pigment, and the man whose work it was had looked at the place where her hand had been and said nothing, and she had climbed down the stairs feeling like someone who had walked into the wrong pew at a wedding.
She sat up. The floor was cold under her bare feet. She found her boots by the door and did not bother with the laces. She took the stairs down one floor at a time, the wood giving a little under each step, and followed the faint smell of coffee toward what she hoped was a kitchen.
The kitchen was small and warm and lit by a single bulb over the stove. An older man sat at the table with his back to her, his shoulders hunched inside a wool sweater the color of old rope. He was reading a leather-bound book by the light of the bulb, and beside him, on a saucer, a cup of coffee steamed without being touched.
"I'm sorry," Ellie said from the doorway. "I didn't mean to wake anyone."
"You didn't," the man said without turning around. His voice was thin and dry, like wind through a screen door. "I don't sleep much either. Pull up a chair. There's coffee on the stove."
"Gus Harlow?"
This time he turned. His face was tanned and creased the way only salt air and decades of it can crease a face, and his eyes were the pale blue of a January sky over open water. He looked at her the way Gus Harlow probably looked at everyone, which was to say, like he already knew the answer and was giving her the courtesy of saying it out loud.
"You're the one who's been in the tower," he said.
"Word travels."
"Word doesn't travel. I saw the light on from my dock stool. Only one person in this town leaves a trouble lamp burning that long and doesn't know how to switch it off."
Ellie sat down across from him. The book in front of him was open to a page of small, neat handwriting and a sketch in the margin. The sketch showed a man in a yellow slicker standing on the deck of a boat, and the man in the sketch had his arms raised as though he were arguing with the sky.
"Who's that?" she asked.
"Me," Gus said. "Forty years ago. Margot Voss drew it."
"The keeper's wife?"
"The keeper's daughter. She drew everybody. Drove us all mad. Couldn't sit through a cup of coffee without her pulling out a pencil." He pushed the book toward her across the scarred wood of the table. "She drew Walter Pendleton fishing off the breakwater with his hat over his face. She drew Theo Marlowe the morning his boat came back without him. She drew the dog we had at the station. She drew me arguing with the weather on the morning of the '84 storm, which is what that one is, and which I will tell you, for the record, I was winning."
Ellie laughed. It came out before she could stop it, a real laugh, the first one since she had climbed into the truck that morning in Portland. Gus watched her laugh with his coffee still untouched, and the corner of his mouth moved just enough to count.
"You sound like her," he said. "Margot. Same laugh. Came out the side of her mouth like she didn't entirely approve of it."
"You knew her well?"
"I knew everybody in this harbor well. That's what happens when you don't leave." He turned the page carefully. There were more sketches, and below each sketch, a few lines of Margot's handwriting, and below the handwriting, a date. "These are her journals. The inn keeps them in a glass case in the front hall. I asked to borrow them six months ago and haven't given them back yet, which makes me a thief, but a careful one."
Ellie looked at the sketch of Gus. The man in the slicker did look angry, his mouth open, his hands fisted at the ends of invisible ropes. But his eyes, even drawn in pencil, even forty years ago, were the pale, watching eyes of someone who was more interested in what was coming than in what was already there.
"She had
She had drawn him the way he looked when he thought no one was watching, which was the only face Gus Harlow ever wore when he thought someone was.
Ellie turned the page carefully, the way Gus had been turning them, one corner at a time, the paper rustling like the wings of something pinned. The next sketch was a house. Not the Voss house, not quite, but a house she recognized from the photograph in the parlor, the one her mother had sent her in the hospital after her father died. A small house with a widow's walk and a chimney that leaned a little to the left, the way chimneys leaned in Wild Harbor because nothing here stood truly straight for long.
"This is the place," Ellie said. "This is the house."
"That's the Hollister place," Gus said. "Before it was the Hollister place. Before your family bought it. Margot drew it the summer she was sixteen." He paused and sipped his coffee for the first time, a long sip that made a small sound in the back of his throat. "She drew it the summer she worked at the inn and fell in love with the wrong Voss, if you want the whole story."
Ellie looked at him. He looked back at her over the rim of his mug, the pale eyes patient, the rest of his face arranged in the kind of stillness that came from waiting out storms for seventy-odd years.
"I don't know if I want the whole story," she said.
"Most people don't. Most people want the parts they can stand on." He set the mug down on the bench beside him. "Margot wanted all of it. That's what made her trouble."
Ellie closed the journal softly and rested her hand on the cover. The leather was cool and a little stiff, like skin that had forgotten what it was for. She could smell the paper inside, a faint green smell of old ink and salt, the smell of a thing that had been waiting in a glass case for someone to come and ask.
"Why did you ask to borrow them?" she said. "Six months ago."
Gus looked out at the water. A lobster boat was coming in, slow, its wake a long white V behind it, and the smell of diesel reached them a moment later, mixing with the kelp and the coffee.
"Because your mother was coming," he said. "I heard it down at the post office. Voss coming back to settle the house. And I thought Margot would have wanted her journals in the room when she did. Margot was particular about that kind of thing."
"My mother," Ellie said. The word felt strange in her mouth. She had not said it aloud in months. "She's not coming back. I came."
Gus turned and looked at her. He did not look surprised. He looked, if anything, like a man whose coffee had finally cooled enough to drink.
"I know," he said. "I saw you get off the boat this morning. I've been sitting on this stool since six. You walked up the dock the way your grandfather walked it. Slow. Like you were checking each plank to see if it would hold."
Ellie laughed again, though it was smaller this time, less surprised out of her.
"That's a Maine thing, isn't it," she said. "Checking the planks."
"That's a Voss thing," he said. "Your grandfather never trusted a plank he hadn't tested. Neither does your cousin."
Declan. She had not expected to hear the name from Gus's mouth, not yet, not before she had figured out what to do about it.
"Is he at the house," she said. "Declan."
"He's on the boat," Gus said, and pointed one finger toward the far breakwater, where the lobster boat was rounding the light. "That's him. He'll be in by four. He always comes in by four. He doesn't know what to do with the hours after four, but he knows what to do with the ones before."
Ellie watched the boat for a moment. It looked smaller than it had from the ferry, smaller and slower, and the figure at the wheel was just a shape in a yellow slicker, indistinguishable from the figure in the slicker Margot had drawn in 1984. A gull screamed somewhere behind her, the long raw note of it rolling down the harbor and bouncing off the fish houses.
"I should go up to the house," she said. "Before he gets in."
"You should," Gus agreed. He did not move to stand, though, and neither did she. They sat for a moment with the journal between them, and the smell of the coffee, and the slow sound of the diesel engine drifting toward them.
"Margot would have liked you," Gus said. "You have her mouth."
"My mother has her mouth."
"Your mother has Margot's eyes. You have her mouth. Same mouth. Same way of looking at a thing like you were trying to decide whether to keep it or let it go." He reached over and patted the journal once, a small pat, the pat of a man who had been patting things for a long time. "You can take this up to the house with you, if you want. Margot would have wanted you to have it before your cousin did."
Ellie looked at the journal. She looked at the boat rounding the breakwater. She looked at the white clapboard of the house above the harbor, with its leaning chimney and its widow's walk and the glass in the front hall windows catching the last of the morning sun.
"Thank you," she said. She picked up the journal and held it against her chest, the way she had held things as a child, the way her father had held the ledgers when he brought them in from the boat at the end of the day. "Thank you, Gus."
"Gus is fine," he said. "Everybody in this harbor calls me Gus. Even the dogs."
Ellie stood. The dock was steadier than it had looked from the ferry, and she did not test the planks on her way up, though she watched her feet do it anyway, the way Vosses watched their feet, the way the harbor had taught her without her noticing.
At the top of the dock she turned back. Gus was still on the stool, his coffee in his lap now, his eyes on the water.
"Gus," she said. "Did she keep any. Did Margot keep anything that wasn't in the journals. Anything she kept for herself."
Gus did not turn around. He lifted one hand, palm out, the way a man lifts a hand when he is acknowledging something he has been waiting a long time to be asked.
"Upstairs," he said. "Top of the house. There's a trunk with a brass lock under the eaves. Margot kept it in the attic of the inn, but it came to the Hollister place when your family bought the house. Nobody's opened it since your grandmother died."
Ellie nodded, though he could not see her.
"Thank you," she said again.
"Don't thank me yet," Gus said. "You haven't opened it."
He lifted his coffee mug in a small salute, and Ellie turned and walked up the hill toward the house, the journal against her chest, the morning sun on the back of her neck, and behind her, very faintly, the sound of a diesel engine slowing as it came in to moor.