The wipers dragged across the windshield in slow arcs, each pass buying two seconds of clarity before the fog swallowed the road again. Margot Calder downshifted, the diesel pickup grumbling beneath her boots as she took the bend where Route 1 curled along the granite shoulder of Harrow Bay. The cove opened below her like a held breath, grey water folding over grey rock, the breakwater posts barely visible as dark stitches through the mist.
Forty-one years. Forty-one Octobers since her mother first pointed the car down this same stretch of asphalt, two girls wedged in the backseat with a cooler of clams and a bag of bread already going stale. Margot had been twelve. Nora had been eleven. The windows had fogged from their breath and from the boiled lobsters wrapped in newspaper, and Nora had drawn a rabbit in the condensation with one finger, then laughed and wiped it away before Margot could see.
Margot's hands on the wheel were the same hands that had gripped that steering wheel in the summer of 1971, the summer of the red tide, the summer they had found the drowned calf in the channel and her father had made her look at it. She had been made to look at many things since. She had made herself look at more.
The foghorn at Gull Harbor mourned its low note across the water. Margot took her foot off the accelerator and let the truck idle down the long grade into town. She passed the granite marker for the Harrow Bay Historical Society, a boulder with a bronze plaque so weathered the date had gone to lichen. She passed the old cannery, its windows boarded with marine plywood, a tenant of gulls and rust. She did not pass the public landing because she had not yet reached it. She passed the Methodist church with its squat steeple, the sign out front announcing its hours in hand-painted letters, and the parsonage next door where Reverend Theodore Briggs had lived for thirty-one years and where, some said, he was dying by inches of a thing the doctors would not name.
She did not slow down to look. Looking was for later.
In the passenger seat sat a brown cardboard box, the kind liquor stores used to ship cases before they switched to plastic. Inside the box, nested in tissue paper, were the things Margot had brought to bury with her friend. A jar of pickled eggs from the Calders' own brine, because Nora had loved them and because the church ladies would never have thought to offer them at the reception. A braided loaf of bread from the bakery in Portland, because Nora had always said the bread in Gull Harbor tasted of regret. A folded square of bedsheet from the room Nora had slept in every summer of Margot's girlhood, white cotton with a blue hem, laundered so many times the thread had gone soft as spider silk.
Margot did not consider these sentimental. They were practical. The dead appreciated practical things. The dead who had been alive appreciated them more.
The truck's heater rattled. She had not yet turned it on, even though the cab held the particular chill of October in Maine, the kind that worked its way through wool and into bone. Margot did not mind the cold. Cold kept a person honest. Her mother had said that, the morning they had driven the same road to bury Margot's father, and her mother had said it again at the cemetery, and then her mother had never said it again because her mother had followed Margot's father into the ground fourteen months later, and Margot had been nineteen and Wes had been fifteen and the oyster lease had been three years past due on its taxes and no one had come to the funeral except the banker and the pastor.
The banker had brought a casserole. The pastor had brought a Bible. Margot had eaten neither and had kept both.
The truck rounded the bend above the post office and the town of Gull Harbor opened below her like a stage set with the curtain half drawn. The harbor was empty at this hour except for three lobster boats and a single sailboat that had dragged anchor and gone up on the rocks near the breakwater, its hull canted to one side like a man too tired to stand. Margot had seen that boat yesterday on the news. She had turned the volume up. She had watched the coastguard try to free it for forty-five minutes before the tide took it.
Nothing in Gull Harbor held against the tide for long.
She parked in front of Dahlgren's General Store, where she had always parked, and cut the engine. The wipers died in mid-arc, leaving a comma of water across the glass. The fog pressed against the cab. A gull screamed somewhere over the cannery roof, a long descending note that ended in a hiccup of static.
Margot sat for a moment. She took her hands from the wheel and laid them in her lap, palms up, and looked at them. They were the hands of a woman who had worked the lease for forty years, the knuckles swollen, the right thumb bent permanently inward from the time she had caught it in a winch when she was twenty-three and had set it herself against the galley counter because the hospital had been an hour by boat and her father had been too drunk to drive. The scar was a white comma on the pad of her thumb, the same shape as the water on her windshield. Margot did not believe in signs. She believed in patterns. There was a difference, and the difference mattered.
Nora had drowned on the first Tuesday of October, two weeks ago, at the place where the channel narrowed between the inner and outer kelp beds. The tide had been going out. The body had been found at dawn by a lobsterman named Pete Ouellette who had not wanted to find it and who had not spoken more than six words to the sheriff afterward. The official story was that Nora had gone down to the water in the small hours, as she sometimes did, to collect specimens for the folklorist project she had been working on for thirty years, and that she had slipped on the slick rocks and the tide had taken her before she could right herself.
Margot did not believe the official story. Margot had not believed the official story about her father's drowning, either, or her mother's quiet decline, or the fire that had taken the old hatchery in 1991. The official story in Gull Harbor was always a door painted to look like a wall. You did not walk through it. You walked around.
She opened the driver's door. The cold came in like a guest who did not knock. Salt. Diesel. The wet-rot smell of the pilings under the boardwalk. Beneath it, faint and vegetal, the iodine tang of kelp exposed by the receding tide. Margot breathed it in. It was the smell of her whole life, the smell she had once tried to wash out of her hair on her wedding day and had given up on, because the smell of the marsh was in her skin and would be in her coffin when they laid her down.
She stepped down onto the asphalt. Her boots landed heavy. The cardboard box she took from the passenger seat, balancing it on her hip the way she had once balanced a toddler, and she crossed the sidewalk to the general store's front door, where a hand-lettered sign hung from a nail: CLOSED FOR FUNERAL.
Dahlgren's closed for nothing. Dahlgren's had been open during the blizzard of '78, when the power had been out for nine days and Margot's father had walked the three miles into town to buy a tin of tobacco and had walked home again with a bottle of whiskey tucked inside his coat. Dahlgren's had been open on the day Wes was born and the day her mother died, the day the bank foreclosed on the Larsen place, the day the cannery shut its doors for good. Dahlgren's was open because Mr. Dahlgren believed that a store that closed invited the devil to count its inventory, and Mr. Dahlgren was not a man who invited the devil to do anything.
But Dahlgren's was closed today. For Nora.
Margot turned the knob. The bell above the door gave its thin brass cough. Inside, the store smelled of wood polish and floor sweep and the cinnamon gum Mr. Dahlgren kept by the register for children who asked politely. The aisles were dim. The radio behind the counter played a Red Sox game at low volume, the announcer's voice flattened by the fog that had somehow gotten inside the speaker as well.
Mr. Dahlgren was not behind the counter. Mrs. Dahlgren was, and she was not alone.
Imogen Ashby stood at the end of the candy aisle in a black coat that did not belong to Gull Harbor. The coat was city-cut, the wool too fine, the shoulders too sharp. Beneath it she wore dark trousers and flat shoes and a silk scarf the color of dried blood that she had tied with the deliberate carelessness of a woman who had learned to dress in Baltimore and had not unlearned it. Her face was thinner than Margot remembered. Her eyes were Nora's eyes, though, and that was the worst part. The same grey-green, the same watchful tilt, the same way of looking at a person as if the person were a sentence she was deciding whether to read.
Imogen saw Margot and did not smile. Margot did not smile either. Smiling was for the living who had not yet been asked to bury someone.
"Margot," Imogen said. The word came out smooth, the coastal lilt worn down to a faint burr under the educated vowels. She had not been back to Gull Harbor in eleven years. Margot had counted.
"Imogen." Margot set the cardboard box down on the counter. The pickled eggs shifted inside it with a wet sound, like a throat clearing. "You look like your mother."
"That's not what people usually say."
"People usually lie. I don't."
Mrs. Dahlgren, who had been watching the exchange the way a woman watches a fire from the next field, put both hands flat on the counter and cleared her throat. "Margot. You came in from the cold. There's coffee on the stove in back. I'll get a cup."
"Don't trouble yourself."
"It's no trouble. It's already made." Mrs. Dahlgren said this the way she said everything, as if the world had already decided and she was only ratifying it. She disappeared through the curtain that separated the store from the back room, and the curtain swayed on its rings for a moment after her, smelling of soup and floor wax and the lavender she kept in the drawer by the register.
Margot looked at Imogen. Imogen looked at Margot. Between them, on the counter, the cardboard box sat with its flaps folded shut, and Margot's pickled eggs waited inside it, and Nora waited under the kelp two miles out in the channel, and the town of Gull Harbor waited around them all like a congregation that did not know the hymn.
"Where is she," Margot said. Not a question. A request for coordinates.
"The funeral home in Harrow Bay," Imogen said. "They brought her up yesterday. The service is at two. At the church."
"I know where the church is."
"I know you know."
The bell above the door coughed again. A man came in from the fog, stamping his boots on the mat. He was tall, rawboned, with a face that looked as if it had been carved from a piece of driftwood and then left out in the weather. His coat was salt-stained at the hem. He had a lobsterman's hands and a lobsterman's squint and the particular quiet of a man who lived on the water and had learned to speak only when the wind was low.
"Wes," Margot said.
"Margot," he said. He nodded to Imogen. "Imogen."
"Wes Calder," Imogen said. "It's been a long time."
"Eleven years," Wes said. He did not say it like a reproach. He said it like a man reading a number off a board.
Mrs. Dahlgren came back through the curtain with a single cup of coffee, black, no sugar, because she had known Margot was coming and she had known what Margot took. She set it on the counter beside the box. Steam rose from it and disappeared. Margot looked at the cup. She did not pick it up.
The three of them stood in the dim store, the Red Sox game murmuring behind the counter, the fog pressing at the windows, the smell of salt and kelp and something older working its way in under the door. None of them sat down. There were no chairs. Dahlgren's had never had chairs. Chairs invited people to linger, and lingering invited talk, and talk in Gull Harbor had a way of getting under your skin and laying eggs.
Margot finally picked up the coffee. She drank half of it in one go. It was strong enough to stand a spoon in, the way Mr. Dahlgren made it, the way his father had made it, the way the men who worked the harbor in the twenties had made it on the boats when the seas were too high to come in for breakfast.
"Where's the sheriff," she said, to no one in particular.
"Up at the cemetery," Wes said. "He's been up there since dawn. Putting up the tent."
"For rain."
"For the family."
Margot looked at him. He did not look away. Lobstermen did not look away. Lobstermen who were also Calders looked away even less.
The fog held all morning. It thinned for an hour around ten, then came back thicker than before, the kind of fog that did not burn off but settled in, that got into the wool of your coat and stayed there for the duration. By the time Margot walked up the path from the road to the Ashby cottage, the world had shrunk to the width of her boots and the sound of her own breath.
The cottage sat on a low rise above the marsh, white clapboard that had gone the color of old bone, the shingles patched in three places with tar paper the color of bruises. Nora had not had the money to fix it properly. Nora had not had the money for most things. She had taught fourth grade at the Gull Harbor elementary for thirty-one years and had lived on that salary and her small inheritance from her own mother, and she had died in the cottage with the kitchen faucet still dripping and the back porch light still burned out.
Margot had not been inside the cottage in eleven years. She had not been inside it since the afternoon she had come to tell Nora what the marsh had done to Cal, which was worse than what the water had done, because the water only kept what it took. The marsh had given pieces back, and the pieces had been wrong.
She climbed the three wooden steps. The paint on the railing flaked under her glove. She could smell the wake before she opened the door: coffee, ham, the faint sweetness of lilies someone had brought that morning, and under all of it the cold mineral smell of a house that had been closed up and reopened too soon.
Imogen met her at the door.
Imogen Ashby was Nora's daughter in the way that some daughters are their mothers: same cheekbones, same way of holding her shoulders, same direct gaze that could feel like being weighed. But where Nora had been soft around the edges, Imogen was pared down. She lived in Baltimore. She wrote for a paper that Margot had never heard of, something with a long name and a small readership. She had come back for the funeral and she had not yet left, and Margot suspected she would not leave for a while.
"Mrs. Calder," Imogen said. "Thank you for coming."
"Margot," Margot said.
Imogen hesitated, then nodded. "Margot."
They stood for a moment in the doorway, neither moving. The fog moved behind Margot, pressing at her back. The house breathed out at her, warm and close and smelling of grief arranged on platters.
Inside, the kitchen was full but not crowded. Two folding tables had been set up along the far wall, covered with white cloths and weighted down at the corners with Nora's good china, the set she had inherited from her mother and never used except at Christmas. A ham sat in the center of one table, sliced down to the bone, surrounded by potato salad and a tray of deviled eggs that someone had sprinkled with paprika in the old-fashioned way. A percolator bubbled on the stove. The counter held a row of cups and a stack of paper napkins and a framed photograph of Nora that had been taken, from the look of it, at her retirement party six years ago.
Wes stood by the window with his back to the wall and his coffee in his hand and his hat in his other hand, because you did not wear a hat in a wake, not even in a kitchen, not even if the dead woman had not been a churchgoer. He looked at Margot when she came in. He did not smile. He did not need to. The fact of him being there was its own statement.
Margot nodded to him. He nodded back.
She took a cup of coffee from the counter, poured it black, and stood near the back door where she could see the whole room and the door at once. This was something she had learned to do at her own husband's wake, which had been held in this same kitchen eleven years ago, and which she had not stayed long for because the room had been too full of people who wanted to tell her what they knew about how Cal had died, and all of what they knew had been wrong.
Imogen moved through the room with the careful attentiveness of a hostess who had not been hostessing in this house for a long time. She refilled cups. She straightened the cloth on the ham table. She spoke in low tones to the three older women who had come from the church circle, and to the man from the hardware store who had known Nora since he was a boy, and to the postmistress, who had walked the half mile down the lane because she said her car would not start and which was, Margot suspected, a lie.
The fog pressed against the kitchen windows. The clock above the sink ticked in a way that sounded louder than it should have. Someone had set a vase of dried sea lavender on the sill, and the smell of it, salt and dust, mixed with the lilies and the coffee and the ham.
After a while the other mourners began to leave. The church women left first, with their coats buttoned to the throat and their condolences already rehearsed for the next house they would stop at. The hardware man left next, with a promise to come back tomorrow with something to fix the porch step. The postmistress lingered longest, but she left too, and then it was just Margot and Imogen and Wes, and the room was quieter and larger than it had been.
Imogen closed the door behind the last of them. She stood with her hand on the knob for a moment, her back to Margot, and Margot could see the line of her shoulders tighten.
"She kept the cottage better than I expected," Imogen said, to the door. "I thought there would be more dust."
"Nora was a tidy woman," Margot said.
"She was." Imogen turned around. "She was also lonely in a way she never told me about. I am still finding that out."
Margot said nothing. She drank her coffee. The clock ticked.
Wes set his cup down on the counter by the sink, gently, the way you set things down in a house that is not yours.
"I'll be outside," he said, to no one in particular. He took his hat from where he had set it and went out the back door, and the screen door banged softly behind him, and the room got larger.
Imogen looked at Margot. Margot looked back.
"You came," Imogen said. "I was not sure you would."
"Nora was my friend," Margot said. "Before all that."
"Yes." Imogen was quiet for a moment. "Before all that."
She went to the table by the wall, to the small leather purse she had set there earlier. She opened it and took out a photograph, the size of a playing card, slightly bent at one corner. She held it for a moment, looking at it, the way people do when they are deciding whether to show you something they have already decided to show you.
"I need you to look at this," Imogen said. "And I need you to tell me what you see."
She handed the photograph to Margot.
Margot took it.
The photograph was of Nora. It had been taken outside, on the back porch of the cottage, in the kind of flat overcast sun that coastal towns get in October. Nora was standing by the railing, looking slightly off-camera, at whoever had taken the picture, and she was smiling, but the smile did not reach her eyes in the way that smiles are supposed to reach the eyes. She was wearing a blue cardigan that Margot had seen her wear a hundred times. Her hair was pulled back. She looked like Nora. She looked, Margot thought, like Nora on a day that had been harder than most.
Margot turned the photograph over. On the back, in Nora's careful handwriting, was the date. Three days before she died.
"She took this herself," Imogen said. "She had it developed at the drugstore in town. I found it in the drawer of her desk, under a stack of bills."
Margot looked at the photograph again.
The bruise was not the first thing you saw. It was not the kind of bruise that announced itself. It was along Nora's jawline, on the left side, a dull purple that was already going yellow at the edges, the color of something three or four days old. It curved from the corner of her chin up toward her ear. In the photograph it was partly in shadow, and partly hidden by the fall of her hair, but it was there. It was unmistakably there.
Margot did not say anything for a long moment. She held the photograph with the tips of her fingers, the way you hold something that might break, or might burn.
"The sheriff never mentioned this," Imogen said.
"No," Margot said.
"The medical examiner never mentioned this. The police report says her injuries were consistent with what the water did. There is no mention of any prior trauma. There is no mention of any bruise."
"No," Margot said again.
Imogen's voice stayed level. That was the thing about Imogen. She could have been reading a weather report.
"I have been back here for nine days," Imogen said. "I have spoken to Sheriff Mercer twice. I have spoken to the medical examiner by phone. I have read the police report three times. No one has mentioned this bruise. No one has asked me if I knew of any reason my mother might have had a bruise on her face three days before she died in the marsh."
Margot set the photograph down on the table beside the ham. She did not set it down gently. She set it down the way you set something down when you need your hands free.
"Does Wes know about this," Margot said.
"No," Imogen said. "I have not shown it to anyone."
"Why me."
Imogen looked at her. Her eyes were Nora's eyes. They had the same way of holding still.
"Because you are the only person in this town who will tell me the truth," Imogen said, "even if the truth is that they do not know yet."
Margot looked at the photograph on the table. The bruise stared up at her from the white cloth, purple and yellow and wrong.
"Who took this picture," Margot said.
"I don't know," Imogen said. "She did not write it down. There is no one else in the frame. The angle suggests she held the camera at arm's length, but the bruise is on the side of her face away from the camera. Which means she knew it was there. Which means she wanted it seen."
"Or she wanted to see it herself," Margot said.
"Yes," Imogen said. "That too."
The clock ticked. The percolator had stopped bubbling. The smell of the lilies was heavier now, sweeter, the way flowers get when the room they are in has been closed up for too long.
Margot picked up the photograph again. She held it closer to her face. The bruise was worse the closer you looked. It was not the kind of bruise you got from walking into a door. It was not the kind of bruise you got from falling down the porch steps. It was the kind of bruise you got from a hand, or from something that had been swung, or from something that had hit you with intention.
"Nora would not have told me," Margot said, quietly. "If someone had hurt her. She would not have told me."
"No," Imogen said. "She would not have. She would have told me. She did not tell me. Which means either it happened after the last time we spoke, which was eight days before she died, or it happened and she chose not to say."
Margot folded the photograph along its existing crease and handed it back to Imogen. Imogen took it and held it for a moment, then put it back in her purse and closed the snap.
"I am not leaving Gull Harbor," Imogen said, "until I know what happened to her. The police report is wrong, or it is incomplete. Either someone hurt my mother three days before she died, or someone hurt her and no one is saying so."
Margot looked at the door. The fog pressed against the window. Somewhere outside, on the porch, she could hear Wes shifting his weight, the soft creak of the step under his boot.
"You should not say that out loud," Margot said. "In this town. To anyone but me."
"I am saying it to you," Imogen said.
Margot nodded once.
"Then I will think on it," she said.
Margot left Imogen at the cottage door. Wes walked the journalist out to the black sedan, and Margot stood on the porch in the fog and watched the taillights until the road swallowed them. Wes came back up the steps and stood beside her, his hands in his jacket pockets, his breath a pale ghost in the wet air.
"Ma," he said.
"Not now," she said.
He nodded. He knew better than to push. He went inside, and she heard the soft thud of the icebox door, the clink of a glass, the small domestic sounds of a house making its peace with evening. Margot stayed on the porch. She did not go in. She turned, after a while, and walked down the steps toward the harbor.
The fog had come in thick by then, the kind of fog that smelled of brine and old rope and the sweet rot of low tide. She took the old road, the one that curved along the marsh and came out at the boat launch, her boots loud on the packed sand of the path. The world had gone small. She could see twenty feet in front of her and nothing more. The lighthouse on the point was a rumor. The breakwater was gone. The bell buoy out beyond the sandbar rang once, mournful, and the sound was swallowed by the wet air before it reached her.
She sat down on the lowest piling of the old pier, the one that had been there since before she was born, and looked down at the water.
The kelp came in slow on the tide. Long ribbons of it, brown and yellow and the deep rust color of things that had been in the cold salt a long time. They drifted against the pilings and slid back. They drifted and slid, like hands opening and closing, like the long slow breathing of something that did not need to be alive to be present.
She thought of Nora.
She thought of the summer they were twelve.
The riptide had taken her on a Tuesday. She remembered the day of the week because her mother had been cross about the laundry. Margot had been sent out to hang the sheets, and she had climbed down to the rocks instead, the way she was not supposed to, the way Nora was not supposed to follow. Nora had followed. Nora had always followed. Even then. Even before whatever it was that had put that bruise on Nora's face in the photograph in Imogen's purse.
The current had caught Margot's ankle and pulled. She had not cried out. She had gone under, and the green dark had closed over her head, and she had thought, very clearly, very calmly, that she was going to die. She had not been afraid. She had been annoyed. She had wanted to finish hanging the sheets.
Nora had waded in after her. Nora, who could not swim a stroke. Nora, who was afraid of the water even then, before the years gave her a new thing to be afraid of. Nora had waded in until the water was at her chest, and then she had grabbed Margot by the wrist and hauled her, screaming, back to the shallows. They had both fallen on the rocks. Margot's knee had split open. Nora's nose had been bleeding. They had lain there, gasping, while the tide pulled at their ankles and the gulls screamed overhead.
"Promise me," Nora had whispered, "that you'll always come back."
"I am right here," Margot had said.
"Promise me anyway."
"I promise."
Nora had kept her promise. Nora had always come back. Even after Cal. Even after the years when Margot could not bear to look at her, when the sight of her face was a reminder of every choice that had been made and could not be unmade. Even after whatever it was that had put that bruise on Nora's face in the photograph. Nora had come back, until she had not.
Margot's hands were cold. She put them in her coat pockets and felt the small hard shape of the rabbit's foot she had carried since she was a girl. Her grandmother had given it to her. Her grandmother had told her it would keep her safe. Margot did not believe in it. Margot carried it anyway. A woman who runs an oyster lease in a town like Gull Harbor learns early that belief is a luxury, and that luck, real or otherwise, is a tool you keep in your pocket whether you trust it or not.
The bell buoy rang again. Somewhere out in the fog, a boat engine coughed and then settled to a low mutter, the sound of someone coming home late, or someone going out late, or someone who had no home to go to at all.
Reverend Theodore Briggs had said at the service that Nora was at peace. Margot had stood in the back of the church and listened to him say it, and she had wanted to laugh, or to hit him, she had not decided which. Nora had not been at peace in her life. Nora would not know how to be at peace in her death. The reverend was a kind man. He believed what he said. Margot could not afford to be kind. Kindness, in a town like Gull Harbor, was the thing you used to cover the thing you did not want anyone to look at.
Sheriff Dale Mercer had stood in the back of the church too, in his uniform, his hat in his hands. He had not looked at Margot. He had looked at the floor. Margot had noticed that. Margot noticed everything. It was how she had survived this long.
Harlan Briggs had been there. Harlan, who had not been able to look at anyone. Harlan, who had been Nora's friend, or something more than a friend, or something less, Margot had never been sure. Harlan had stood at the back and left before the hymn was finished. Margot had watched him go. She had watched the way his shoulders moved, the way his hand gripped the back of the pew, the way he did not turn around. She had thought, then, that she would have to talk to him. She had thought it the way you think about a chore you have been putting off.
Margot looked at the kelp. She thought about the photograph in Imogen's purse. The bruise on Nora's face, the one that had not been there eight days before. The police report that said accidental drowning. The words the sheriff had used, back at the cottage, the day he came to tell her. The words that did not fit. The words that fit the way a glove fits a hand that has been working.
She thought about Imogen. Imogen, who had Nora's eyes and Nora's stubbornness and none of Nora's willingness to look away. Imogen, who had come back to Gull Harbor to settle an estate and had found, instead, a question that would not settle. Imogen, who had said, in the kitchen an hour ago, that she was not leaving until she knew. Imogen, who had said it out loud, in this town, to anyone but Margot, and had understood, when Margot warned her, that the warning was the truest thing Margot had said all day.
Margot had told Imogen she would think on it. Margot thought on it now.
The fog moved on the water. The kelp drifted and slid. The bell buoy rang its long, slow note, and the note went
The bell buoy rang its long, slow note, and the note went out over the water and was lost in the fog, the way all sound is lost in Gull Harbor sooner or later. The fog took it. The fog took everything eventually, if you waited long enough. Margot had learned to wait.
She looked down at the boat. At the lobster pot Wes had set that morning, before dawn, the one he had said he was pulling because the season was wrong and he wanted to check the lines. The pot that had come up with the wrong shape inside it. The shape that had not been a shape at all at first. The shape that had been, for one long minute, the shape of Nora Ashby's body.
Margot had not told Imogen about the pot. Imogen had not asked. Imogen had not needed to ask, because the bruise was enough, and the report was enough, and the way Sheriff Mercer had stood in the kitchen with his hat in his hands was enough.
Wes had come up from the dock an hour after the tide turned. He had come into the kitchen and stood with his back to the stove, the way he did when he had something to say he did not want to say. He had looked at Margot. He had looked at Imogen. He had looked at the floor.
We need to talk, he had said.
Margot had set down her cup. She had said, We know, Wes. We know what you saw.
Wes had looked at her then. He had the look he got when he was trying to decide whether to be honest or whether to be careful. He had looked at Imogen again. He had said, What I saw wasn't what the report says.
Margot had waited. Imogen had waited. The clock on the wall had ticked, and a gull had cried outside, and the kettle on the stove had begun to whisper.
Wes had said, She had her arms crossed over her chest.
Margot had not understood. Then she had.
A person who falls into the water does not cross their arms. A person who is thrown does not cross their arms. A person who climbs in, knowing what the water will do, who folds their arms across their ribs the way you fold your hands in a pew, who makes of their body a small and closed and final thing, that person crosses their arms. That is the kind of person who crosses their arms.
Margot had thought of Reverend Briggs. Of the way he stood at the back of the chapel and did not sing. Of the way his shoulders had moved when he left. She had thought of Harlan, of course. Of Harlan she had always thought. She had thought of Harlan the way you think of weather, the way you think of a debt, the way you think of a thing you cannot fix by looking at it.
Reverend Briggs had married her and Cal. Reverend Briggs had buried Cal. Reverend Briggs had stood at the back of the chapel at Nora's service and left before the hymn was finished, and Harlan had followed him out, and Margot had watched them go, and she had not asked because asking was a kind of knowing she could not afford.
Now she stood on the dock and the fog came in and the bell buoy rang its long, slow note, and the note was lost, and the fog took it.
She thought of her grandmother, who had been born in this town and had died in this town and had taught Margot, when Margot was young and the marsh was a place you played in, that the marsh does not lie. The marsh shows you what it has done. You only have to know how to read it. The kelp will tell you which way the body went. The silt will tell you how long. The crabs will tell you whether the hands were bound or free.
Margot had not read the marsh. She had not gone down to where Nora had died. She had not wanted to. She had thought it was cowardice. Now she thought it was something else. Now she thought it was the same thing Imogen had, that same stubbornness, that same refusal to look away, and that she had been keeping it in the bottle the way you keep whiskey for the right occasion.
She turned from the rail. She walked back down the dock. Her boots made no sound on the wet planks, or they made the small soft sound of wood giving way under a body it has carried a hundred times.
Wes was in the kitchen when she came in. He was sitting at the table with his hands wrapped around a mug he had not drunk from. He looked up. He had the look of a man who had been waiting and was not sure, now that the waiting was done, that he wanted to be told.
Margot went to the stove. She poured herself a cup from the pot that was still hot. She sat down across from him. She said, Tell me again. Every detail. From the beginning.
Wes looked at her. He said, Margot. He said it the way you say a name when you want the person to stop.
Margot said, Wes.
He looked at his mug. He said, The pot was set Thursday. I marked it. I always mark my pots. The buoy was green. I tied it myself. He paused. He said, When I pulled it Friday, the buoy was gone.
Margot said, Cut loose.
He said, Cut, yes. Not torn. Cut, with something sharp.
Margot said, And inside.