The boot came up first, black leather bloated and crusted with a greenish film that caught the weak light of a lantern swung low over the pier. One boy had the heel, the other had the toe, and both of them were pulling with the desperate, lopsided strength of children who had bitten off more than they could chew.
"Hold on, I almost got it," the smaller one hissed. His name was Jamie Coen, though no one had told the marsh that. He was twelve, missing a sneaker, and his socks were soaked through to the skin. "Just hold on, Cal."
Cal Coen, his older brother by two years, braced his feet against the warped planks and hauled backward until the tendons in his neck stood out like dock rope. He said nothing. He had the quiet of a boy who had learned that words cost effort and effort cost time and time was something you never had enough of on the Carrion Falls pier at four in the morning.
The boot broke the surface with a sound like a wet palm striking a table. A black slick of water rolled off it and pooled between the slats. It was a woman's boot, that much was obvious, the kind with a low heel and a pointed toe and a single decorative buckle that had gone matte with months of submersion. Laces dangled from it like drowned eels.
"What the hell," Cal whispered.
Jamie laughed, nervous and too loud, the way kids laugh when they know they are standing at the edge of something they do not understand. He tugged the laces to pull the boot toward him, and the laces pulled back.
"What the," Jamie started.
Something moved beneath the surface. Not with the sluggish drift of debris but with the stiff, mechanical motion of a thing that had been dead long enough to learn a new way of being moved. The water over the shallows dimpled and then parted, and what rose into the lantern light was a length of swollen nylon stocking the color of a bruise, and beneath that a curve of ankle that was the greenish-white of candle wax left too long in a window.
Jamie's hand dropped.
Cal did not let go.
For three seconds he stood there with the boot in his grip, the laces wrapped twice around his fist, his brother's face going slack beside him, and the thing that was attached to the boot turning slowly in the black water as though it were considering whether to climb up onto the pier or sink back down into whatever had been holding it. The ankle was a woman's. Cal knew that with the certainty of a boy who had spent his summers watching his mother pull on her boots by the back door. The shape of it, the fine bone of it, the way the foot tapered into the ruined toe of the shoe. It was a woman. It was a woman who had been in the water long enough that the skin had gone the color of fish belly and the stocking had begun to merge with the flesh beneath it.
Cal released the laces.
The boot sank three inches and stopped, held by the angle of the ankle against the muck of the shallows. The lantern light trembled on the surface. Somewhere out on the cove a heron barked once and fell silent.
"Run home," Cal said. "Get your shoes on. Get Mom. Tell her to call the sheriff."
Jamie's mouth opened and closed. His teeth chattered once, twice. Then he turned and pelted up the pier, his bare feet slapping the wet planks, and Cal was alone with what he had found.
He did not run. He stood at the edge of the pier and looked at the boot and the ankle and the slow working of the tide around them, and he thought, with the strange clarity that comes to children at certain hours, that he would remember the smell of this water for the rest of his life. It was the smell of pennies left in a jar, and creek beds in August, and something else beneath both of those that he could not name and did not want to.
He waited.
From the bluff above the cove, half a mile along the marsh road and through a stand of dead cypress, Eliza Morrow lowered the borrowed binoculars and pressed her knuckles against her mouth.
She had not come to the bluff to find a body. She had come to the bluff because the bluff was the one place in Carrion Falls where a person could stand and look down at the town without being seen, and Eliza needed, at four in the morning on a Tuesday in October, to look at the town without being seen. She had driven up from Raleigh the night before in a car that smelled of old coffee and the lavender sachets the previous owner had tucked beneath the seats. She had taken a room at the Tidewater Motor Lodge, where the night clerk had not recognized her and had charged her cash and had not asked for a name. She had slept for two hours. She had woken with the particular alertness of a woman who had spent the last eleven months waiting for a thing she could not yet describe, and she had driven to the end of Marsh Road and walked the half-mile path through the cypress to the bluff with the binoculars she had borrowed from a colleague who had not wanted to know why.
The binoculars were good. They were a Leica pair with rubber armor and a focusing knob that moved with the precision of a small machine. They were not the kind of thing one bought for a weekend at the shore. They were the kind of thing one bought when one intended to look very carefully at something one had been told not to look at, and Eliza's colleague had understood that, and Eliza had understood that he had understood, and neither of them had said a word about it in the office that afternoon when she had lifted them off his desk and slipped them into her bag.
Through them, the pier was close enough to touch. She could see the grain of the planks, the rusted nail heads, the lantern set down on its side with its flame guttering in the offshore breeze. She could see the boy, a small figure in a sweatshirt too large for him, standing at the very edge with his hands at his sides. She could see, just at the waterline, the dark shape that had drawn him there.
She adjusted the focus.
The shape resolved into a boot, and the boot resolved into an ankle, and the ankle resolved into the rest of a leg that disappeared into the black water of the shallows with the gentle insistence of a thing that was not finished being seen.
Eliza lowered the binoculars. She raised them again. She made herself look.
She had been in this town for less than twelve hours. She had told no one she was coming. She had told no one, because the last time she had told someone she was coming to Carrion Falls, that someone had been her sister, and her sister had driven down from Charlottesville three weeks later and had not driven back, and eleven months of phone calls and police reports and unanswered emails had taught Eliza that telling people what you were about to do in this town was how you disappeared from it.
The boy on the pier turned his head. Even at this distance, even through the glass, she could see that his face was the face of a child who had just understood that the world was larger and colder than he had been told. He looked up the beach, toward the road, toward the help he had sent for. Then he looked back down at the water.
Eliza sat on the cold ground of the bluff, her back against a deadfall cedar, and watched him watch.
The first county cruiser came down the beach road at four forty-one. She knew the time because she had begun counting, the way she always counted when she was waiting, the way she had counted the months since her sister's phone had stopped ringing and the weeks since the last useless meeting with a state police detective who had told her, with the careful sympathy of a man who had already closed the file, that people disappeared all the time and most of them did not want to be found.
The cruiser was a Ford Interceptor, white with a green stripe, and it came down the access road with its light bar already on, though there was no one on the beach to signal. The door opened before the engine died.
Sheriff Dale Hatcher got out the way he did everything, with the unhurried economy of a man who had spent twenty years making sure that the most exciting thing to happen in Carrion Falls was a parking ticket. He was fifty-six. He was broad through the shoulders and narrow through the waist in the way of men who had been fit once and had then made a series of small accommodations with gravity. He wore a canvas jacket over his uniform, and the jacket had a coffee stain on the left breast that he had stopped trying to clean sometime around the second Clinton administration.
He stood for a moment at the back of the cruiser with one hand on the roof, looking at the pier. Then he walked down to the boy.
Eliza watched through the binoculars. She could not hear what was said. She could see Hatcher's posture change, the slight forward lean of a man who had been told something he had hoped not to hear. She could see the boy's hands moving, one of them pointing down at the waterline. She could see Hatcher take a flashlight from his belt and walk to the edge of the pier, and she could see, even at this distance, the way his shoulders drew up toward his ears when the beam found what was waiting there.
He was on his radio in under a minute. She could see his mouth moving, short and sharp, the way a man talks when he does not want to be overheard. Then he turned and looked up the beach, scanning the tree line, the bluff, the access road.
Eliza lowered herself flat against the ground. The cedar bark pressed into her shoulder blades. The binoculars dug into the heels of her hands. She did not breathe.
The beam swept past her position and kept going.
When she raised her head again, Hatcher was kneeling at the waterline with the flashlight held low. Deputy Owen Pyle had arrived in a second cruiser, this one with a dent in the rear quarter panel and a bumper sticker for a bait shop that had gone out of business eight years ago. Pyle was younger than Hatcher by thirty years and taller by six inches, and he moved with the particular energy of a man who had just been woken from a sound sleep and was trying very hard to pretend that he had not been.
He came down the beach at a half-jog, his hand on his belt, his hat already on crooked.
"What've we got?" she heard him call out, and then, softer, when he got close enough to see: "Jesus, Dale."
"Tape," Hatcher said. He did not look up. His voice was flat and unhurried, the voice of a man who had seen enough of what the water gave up to know that the first thing you did was not the thing you felt like doing. "Tape and a perimeter. Get the tape out of my trunk. I want this whole cove closed."
"Dale," Pyle said again, and stopped.
"Do it, Owen."
Pyle went.
Eliza pressed her forehead against the cedar and let out a breath she had been holding for what felt like a full minute. She could feel her pulse in her wrists, in her throat, behind her eyes. The binoculars were slick in her grip.
A boot. An ankle. The tide working at it like a slow hand.
She did not know yet whether this was her sister. She knew, with the cold certainty of a woman who had learned to read the shape of things before she could name them, that it was not. The stocking was wrong. The boot was wrong. The shape of the calf was wrong. She had spent eleven months memorizing the shape of her sister from photographs and memories and the single time she had borrowed a pair of her boots in high school and worn them home because they fit better than her own.
It was not Nora.
But it was a woman. And a woman in the water of Carrion Falls in October was not, could not be, an accident. Not here. Not in the town where her sister had last been seen getting into a car with a man whose name no one would give her and whose face no one would describe.
Hatcher was standing now, the flashlight aimed down at the water, and Pyle was unspooling crime scene tape from a dispenser that made a metallic clicking sound in the still air. The boy, Cal, had been moved to the back of the first cruiser and sat inside it with his hands in his lap, watching through the rear window.
Eliza raised the binoculars one more time. She found Hatcher's face in the glass. He was older than she remembered. The lines around his mouth had deepened into something that looked less like age than like a slow accumulation of things he had chosen not to say. He was looking at the boot the way a man looks at a letter he has been expecting and has hoped would never arrive.
She held the glass steady.
On the bluff above the cove, in the dark, she began to write in her head the way she always wrote when she was seeing something she intended to remember. Not the words yet. Just the shapes of them. The bones of the story she would have to tell when the time came, if the time came, and if anyone was still listening.
The tide turned. The heron barked again. The crime scene tape caught the first light of dawn and shone like a thin silver thread drawn across the mouth of the cove.
The search widened. By half past six the light had turned the color of weak tea, and the cove wore it badly. Pyle moved along the waterline with his hands gloved and his shoulders set at an angle that suggested he was trying to remember something his father had once told him about how to walk a scene.
Eliza watched him from the bluff. She had put the binoculars down. There was no need for them now. From this angle, with the dawn rising behind her, she could see the boy in the cruiser, the shape on the stones, and the deputy working the reeds with the slow, deliberate care of a man who understood that whatever he found here would be looked at twice.
Pyle's boots left dark prints in the silt. He stepped where he had to, avoided where he could, and every few feet he paused to let his eyes adjust to the tangle of stems around him. He was methodical. He was also, she could see, a little frightened. His hands trembled when he crouched.
Twenty yards from the body he stopped.
He did not call out. He did not raise his hand. He simply went down on one knee in the shallow water, his right hand hovering, and his face took on the expression of a man who has come upon something he is not certain he is meant to find.
Eliza sat forward.
Whatever it was, it lay half-buried in the reeds at the water's edge, the way a thing lies when the tide has only just now decided to give it back. Pyle reached for it with two fingers, as though he had been told, or had read somewhere, that one should always touch a thing at its edges first. He lifted it clear of the water. A thin stream ran from it and fell soundlessly back into the cove.
He stood. He turned toward Hatcher.
"Sheriff."
His voice carried, even across the distance. It was a young man's voice, carefully leveled. Eliza heard the effort in it.
Hatcher crossed the rocks to him. Whatever was in Pyle's outstretched palm, Hatcher did not touch it. He looked at it for a long moment. Then he took a small evidence bag from his belt pouch, held it open, and nodded.
Pyle dropped the object into the bag. The plastic crinkled. Hatcher sealed it and held it up to the light.
From the bluff, even without the glasses, Eliza could see the shape of it. Small. Oval. The particular pale shine of a thing meant to be worn against skin.
Her breath caught somewhere behind her sternum and stayed there.
She knew that shape. She had seen it, or one exactly like it, less than twenty-four hours before. She had seen it resting in the hollow of a throat, catching the light of a porch bulb, while she stood on the wrong side of a chain-link fence and pretended she was not there at all.
Maren Holt had been wearing it in a photograph. Not in a photograph taken that night, no. In a photograph older than that, the kind of photograph that gets slid into the back of a frame and then forgotten until someone comes along looking for exactly the kind of thing that photograph contains. Eliza had found it in a box of papers in the office above the feed store, where Maren Holt's father had kept the records of his boat until he could not keep them any longer. The photograph had been taken at a dock. Maren Holt had been a girl in it, perhaps fifteen, smiling the way girls smile when they have not yet learned to be careful about smiling. The locket had been a glint at her throat, half-obscured by the collar of a heavy sweater, but unmistakable.
Eliza had not thought about that locket in the years between then and now. She had not thought about it when she packed her bag in the city and drove the long way back to this coast, telling herself she was coming home to write about the town, to put her sister's name into print one more time, to do the thing she should have done when she was eighteen and had not yet learned how.
She thought about it now.
The locket, sealed in its bag, hung from Hatcher's fingers. He studied it the way he studied everything: slowly, with a kind of patient disinterest, as though he were waiting for the object to explain itself before he had to do anything at all.
"Pyle," he said, and the name in his mouth sounded almost fond. "You check the reeds another twenty yards either way. We don't want to come back to this in the morning and find we missed something obvious."
"Yes, sir."
"And if you find anything else, you holler first, before you touch it."
"Yes, sir."
Pyle moved off along the shoreline, his shoulders set again, his gloves dark against the pale reeds. Hatcher stood with the bag for a moment longer, then turned and carried it up toward the cruiser, where the second deputy had begun to set up a small table for the camera and the notebook. The heron had gone. In its place, the gulls had started their slow circuits above the cove, dipping and rising on the offshore breeze.
Eliza's hand was in her coat pocket. Her fingers had closed around her phone without her telling them to. She took it out. The screen was smudged with the salt of her own skin. She considered, for a moment, taking a photograph of the scene below her, then did not. There would be no photograph that would survive cross-examination, and she had not come back to this town to lose her credibility on the first morning by handing someone a picture that had been taken at a distance and in bad light.
She put the phone away.
On the stones below, Hatcher had reached the cruiser. He opened the passenger door, set the bag on the seat with the care of a man setting down a glass he is not entirely sure he can afford to break, then closed the door again. He did not put the locket in the trunk. He did not put it in the back with the boy. He set it on the passenger seat of his own cruiser, where he could see it through the windshield, and where no one else could get to it without going through him.
Eliza felt the cold of the morning begin to work its way through the soles of her boots. She had been on the bluff for nearly an hour. The sun, when it came, would not be a warm sun. It would be the kind of October sun that lights a scene without warming it, that shows a person exactly what is in front of her and offers no consolation about it.
She thought of Maren Holt. She thought of the photograph. She thought of the girl smiling at the dock, fifteen years old and unknowing, the locket resting above her collarbone like a small bright secret.
She thought of her own sister.
The two women had not been friends. They had not been enemies, either. They had been the kind of people who moved in the same circles in a town that had only one set of circles to move in, and who had known each other well enough to nod across a room and not well enough to speak when they passed on the street. Maren Holt's family kept to the north end of the harbor. Eliza's family had kept to the south end, in the shadow of the cannery that was no longer a cannery. They had been, in the way of small towns, both visible and invisible, like two stones in the same field that no one ever bothered to pick up and examine.
But the locket was Maren Holt's locket. Eliza was certain of it. The shape of it, the way the light ran along its surface, the particular worn place at the hinge that she had noticed in the photograph and that she could see now, even at this distance, through the windshield of Hatcher's cruiser.
She stood. Her knees objected. She ignored them.
She had work to do. She had to get down off this bluff before the scene was closed off entirely, before Hatcher remembered to look up at the ridge and wonder who had been watching from above. She had to find a telephone that was not her own, and a person she could trust with what she had just seen, and a way to put Maren Holt's name into the conversation without putting her own safety at the bottom of it.
Below her, Pyle had stopped again. He was crouched at the water's edge, his head bent, his hand once more hovering. He was taking his time. He was being thorough. He was doing, she thought, the thing his father would have done.
She turned from the bluff and began to pick her way down the back side of the ridge, moving through the scrub pine toward the road. The town waited there, and the questions she would have to ask in it, and the answers she was not at all certain she wanted.
The gulls wheeled above the cove. The tide, having turned, was beginning to come back in.
iza took the back route down the bluff, the one that switchbacked through the old logging cut and came out behind the cannery parking lot. She had walked it a hundred times as a girl, following her sister through the high grass when the marsh mosquitoes were bad and the only path was the one the deer had made. The ground remembered her boots. Her boots, unfortunately, did not remember the ground, and twice she caught her heel on a root and had to catch herself against the trunk of a birch that leaned at an angle no birch should lean.
She did not hurry. Hurrying made noise. Noise made witnesses. Witnesses made telephone calls to the sheriff's office, and the sheriff's office, she was learning, was a place where telephone calls went in and certainties came out wrong.
At the bottom of the cut she paused and listened. The cannery was quiet. The canning season had ended three weeks ago, and the place had the hollow, ransacked feeling of a theater after the last show. A stray dog nosed along the chain-link fence at the far end of the lot. It looked at her. She looked at it. Neither of them offered anything useful, and the dog went back to whatever it had been doing, which appeared to be nothing of consequence.
She crossed the road at the place where the guardrail had been knocked out by a drunk driver four winters ago and never replaced. Then she cut through the alley behind the old Strand Theater, past the boarded-up ticket window, past the mural someone had painted in better years of a marlin leaping out of green water. The marlin's eye had been vandalized into something that looked almost religious. She did not stop to consider it.
What she needed was a telephone. What she needed was a man who kept his mouth shut. What she needed was Ezra Cull.
Cull ran the only undertaking parlor in Harrow Bay, had run it for thirty-one years, and had buried every person Eliza had ever loved in this town except her mother, whom he had buried as well, now that she thought about it. He had buried her father before that. He had buried Maren Holt's husband the year Eliza was fifteen. He had buried, if the stories were true, a good portion of whatever it was that had happened on the marsh in the winters of her childhood, though he had never spoken of it and no one in town had ever been brave enough or foolish enough to ask.
Cull was also, by any reasonable measure, half a bottle into the afternoon by two o'clock on most days of the week, which meant that approaching him required either patience or a kind of bluntness he could not deflect.
Eliza chose bluntness.
The undertaking parlor stood on Locust Street in a low clapboard building that had been a church in some earlier life. The steeple was gone, replaced by a weathervane in the shape of a trout that had stopped turning sometime during the Clinton administration. The windows were curtained in heavy green velvet that no one had ever opened, as far as Eliza knew, and the front door bore a small brass plate that read CULL in letters so worn they had become more suggestion than fact.
She tried the door. It was unlocked, as it always was, because Ezra Cull had never in his life believed that a dead person was going to steal anything.
The bell above the door did not ring. It had been removed years ago and never replaced. The silence of the place took her like a hand laid across the mouth.
The viewing room was empty. The caskets on display along the walls had the look of furniture in a room no one intended to sit in. The carpet was a deep oxblood red, worn to threadbare in the paths between the door and the back office. The air smelled of furniture polish and, underneath it, something older and less specific. Cedar. Formaldehyde, though she imagined that was imagination. And something sweet, almost floral, that she could not place.
Ezra Cull sat behind his desk in the back office with a glass in his left hand and a pencil in his right. He was filling out a death certificate. The pencil moved with the slow, deliberate patience of a man who had been writing the same kind of sentence for thirty years and saw no reason to hurry.
He did not look up when she came in. He did not have to. The floorboards in the hallway had told him everything he needed to know.
"Morrow," he said. Just the name. A fact.
"Cull."
He finished the line he was writing. He set the pencil down. He took a drink from the glass. Then he looked at her, and his eyes were the pale, bloodshot blue of a man who had been drinking in low light for a long time.
"You look like hell," he said.
"Thank you."
"That wasn't a compliment."
"I know."
He set the glass down. He folded his hands on the desk. He waited.
"I need to see her," Eliza said.
Cull did not ask who she meant. That was one of the things she had always respected about him, though respect was not exactly the word she would have chosen this afternoon. He did not perform ignorance. He did not give people the chance to construct a lie in front of him. He simply assumed that whoever walked into his office had come about the same thing everyone walked into his office about, and that was the matter at hand.
"The sheriff says no," he said.
"The sheriff isn't in the room."
"The sheriff's name is on a piece of paper on my desk that says no."
"Ezra."
"Don't Ezra me." He picked up the glass again. He did not drink from it. He turned it in his hand, watching the light pass through the whiskey like a man watching the minutes pass through an afternoon he had no intention of improving. "You come in here after eight years and you want me to do something that will end with me in a conversation with Hatcher that I do not want to have."
"She was my sister."
"She is your sister," he said, and the correction landed harder than he had any right to make it land. "Celia is your sister. The woman on my table is not Celia Holt."
Eliza felt the floor of the room shift under her, though the room itself did not move. She gripped the back of the wooden chair in front of the desk and held on.
"Show me," she said.
Cull looked at her for a long moment. He was reading her the way he read the bodies on his table, looking for the thing that had ended her, the thing that had brought her to this room at this hour on this day. Whatever he saw, he did not share it. He finished his drink in a single swallow, set the glass down with the care of a man setting down a thing he intended to pick up again, and stood.
"Shoes off," he said.
She left her boots by the door. He handed her a pair of paper slippers from a stack by the preparation room entrance. They were too big. She shuffled after him down a corridor she had never been down, past a door marked PRIVATE that was closed, past another marked PRIVATE that was closed, and finally to a third door, unmarked, which he unlocked with a key from a ring that hung on a nail by the light switch.
The room was cold. Not the theatrical cold of a hospital or the damp cold of a cellar. A working cold. A preserved cold. The kind of cold that existed for a reason and intended to stay.
The body lay on a steel table under a sheet. Cull pulled the sheet down to the shoulders with the matter-of-fact tenderness of a man who had done it ten thousand times and saw no reason to be squeamish about the ten thousand and first.
The woman was not Celia.
Eliza had known this. Cull had told her. But knowing it and seeing it were different kinds of knowledge, and the seeing went through her like a nail.
The face was unfamiliar. Mid-forties, perhaps. Dark hair cut short. A small scar at the corner of the left eyebrow. No wedding ring, though the finger bore the pale indentation of one worn for a long time and removed recently. She had been in the water, that much was obvious. The skin of her hands and feet had the wrinkled, blanched look of a thing that had soaked.
"Look at the hands," Cull said.
Eliza looked.
The fingernails were packed with dark material. Lake mud, she thought at first, and then she was not so sure. The color was almost black in the overhead light, but when she leaned closer, tilting her head to catch the angle, there was a sheen to it that mud did not have. A blue-black iridescence. The kind of sheen she had seen in old printing inks, in the residue at the bottom of a bottle of India ink when she had been a girl doing pen-and-ink drawings in the back booth of the diner.
She did not touch the hands. She did not need to. The smell was already reaching her, faint beneath the cedar and the chemical cold, a sharp vegetable smell, like the smell of the marsh at low tide, with something else under it. Iron. The smell of old pennies in a drawer.
"Who is she?" Eliza said.
"Don't know." Cull pulled the sheet back up over the woman's face with a gentleness that seemed almost out of proportion with his voice. "Hatcher called me at five this morning. Found her in the reeds off the point. No identification on her. No coat. No shoes. Just her and whatever she was holding when she went in."
"What was she holding?"
"Now that's the question." Cull turned away from the table and walked to the small sink in the corner. He turned the tap on, then off, then on again, as if the gesture of water were something he needed to do with his hands. "When they brought her in, there was a piece of paper in her fist. Or what was left of one. Hatcher took it. Wouldn't tell me what it said. Wouldn't tell me what it was."
"And he told you not to let anyone see her."
"He told me not to let anyone see her. He told me that in front of Owen Pyle, who looked like he wanted to be somewhere else. And then he left, and Pyle stayed for about ten minutes looking at his boots, and then Pyle left too, and I have been here ever since, drinking and filling out paperwork for a woman I cannot name."
He turned back to her.
"Why are you here, Eliza?"
She considered the question. She considered all the answers she could give, and the ones she could not, and the ones that would get her out of this room faster and the ones that would get her into more trouble than she was already in.
"Because my sister is missing," she said, "and because someone in this town knows where she is, and because the woman on your table is not her but might be a piece of her, and because I am running out of pieces."
Cull studied her. He picked up his glass from the desk where he had set it. He looked at the glass. He looked at her. He poured himself another measure from the bottle on the shelf behind him.
"I didn't see you," he said.
"No," Eliza said. "You didn't."
She stepped out of the paper slippers at the door. She put her boots back on. She left the undertaking parlor through the front entrance, and the green velvet curtains did not move, and the weathervane in the shape of a trout did not turn, and the afternoon, which had been holding itself together all day, finally began to come apart in the way afternoons in Harrow Bay always did, with a slow marine fog that rolled in off the water and put a hand over the whole town and said, in its own quiet way, that the day was over now, whether anyone was ready for it or not.
She walked back to her car. She did not start it. She sat for a long time with her hands on the wheel, thinking about ink and mud and a piece of paper she had never seen, and a sheriff who had taken it away, and a woman on a steel table who had died in the marsh holding whatever it was she had been holding, and what it might have meant, and what it might still mean, if Eliza could only find the way to read it.
The fog closed in. The streetlights came on, one by one, down Locust.
She turned the key. The engine caught. She had work to do.