The Drowning Season: Letters From The Deep

The flash on Margot Calder's camera popped twice, bleaching the obituary clipping white before the image resolved back into faded newsprint. She moved the phone a quarter inch to the left. Pop. Pop. Twenty-seven years of newsprint, and she photographed every scrap of it.

Nora Ashby's apartment smelled of cinnamon and something older, something underneath the sachets and potpourri. Brine, maybe. The salt that crept into every wall in Gull Harbor no matter how often you painted over it. Margot's knees ached from crouching on the carpet. She adjusted the folded towel beneath them and kept shooting.

She worked the way she did everything. Methodical. Slow. She did not skip a single thing in the apartment. Coffee rings on the side table: photographed. The crossword puzzle half-finished on the kitchen counter, the same pen Nora had used for thirty years parked in the crease of the spine: photographed. A grocery receipt from the day before Nora drowned, the ink still legible: photographed. Margot catalogued the dead woman's life in bursts of white light, and she did not think about the drowning. Not yet.

She thought about her camera angles.

She thought about the angle of the kitchen window, how it faced the marsh, how the morning sun would have hit the sink at a certain slant. She thought about how light moved through a place, and how light told the truth about where a body had stood.

The bedroom was worse.

Margot stood in the doorway for a long moment before she crossed the threshold. The bed was still made. The pillow still held the faintest dent. Nora had slept here the night before she went into the water. Margot remembered Nora in the grocery store two days before, remembered the woman reaching past her for a tin of coffee, remembered how Nora's hand had trembled and how neither of them had mentioned it.

She did not think about Harlan Briggs. She did not think about what Reverend Theodore Briggs might have said at the service. She did not think about Wes Calder, her own boy, sitting in the back pew with his jaw set.

She photographed the dresser.

Every drawer. Every folded sweater. Every pair of reading glasses tucked into a case with a cracked hinge. She photographed the prayer card from Saint Brendan's tucked into the mirror frame, the one with the saint in his coracle, the one Nora had carried since she was a girl.

Margot was a woman who believed in signs. She carried a bone in her pocket, a fragment of rib from some long-dead aunt, and she never went onto the water without it. She believed the marsh remembered. She believed the marsh judged. She believed certain things should not be moved from where they lay.

So when her fingernail caught on the bottom edge of the second dresser drawer, she did not yank it open. She stopped. She listened. The radiator ticked. A moth beat against the lampshade. Somewhere down the hall, a neighbor's television murmured through the wall.

She pulled the drawer out slowly.

It was heavier than it should have been. She set it on the carpet and turned it over, careful, the way she handled oyster cages in the off-season. A square of electrical tape, the matte black kind, ran along the underside near the back corner. Margot's hands did not shake. Her hands had not shaken since they pulled Cal's empty boat from the channel fifteen years ago.

She peeled the tape back with her thumbnail.

The SD card was no bigger than her thumbnail, too. Black plastic. No label. She held it up to the bedside lamp and turned it over. There was a faint scuff on one corner, a fingerprint in dust that might have been Nora's.

Margot set the card on her palm and looked at it for a long time.

She did not have a reader. Her phone was older than Imogen's, older than the rent on this apartment, and it did not take the card. She thought of calling Imogen. She thought of waiting until morning. She thought of driving back to the lease and coming back at first light.

Instead, she went into the kitchen and found what she needed.

Nora had left a laptop on the counter, half-buried under a stack of library books. Margot did not ask permission. She never asked permission when the dead were involved. She set the card on the table, found the slot on the side of the machine, and slid it home with her thumb.

The laptop hummed awake. Margot did not look at the screen. She looked at her own hands, folded on the table, and waited for whatever was going to happen next.

The folder opened on its own. There were no subfolders, no other files. Just one folder, named with a sequence of numbers that meant nothing to her. Inside, audio files. Audio 001 through Audio 017. The first file had been modified last. Nora had been adding to this thing right up until the end.

Margot pressed play.

The tinny speakers of Nora's laptop gave Nora's voice the sound of someone calling from the bottom of a well. There was a faint wash of static, the sound of a recorder held too close to the mouth, and then Nora's voice came through, and Nora was saying the words Margot had been waiting fifteen years for someone to say.

"If you're hearing this, I didn't make it."

The radiator ticked. The moth kept beating. Margot sat very still in Nora Ashby's kitchen, in the apartment where the salt crept into the walls, and she did not move. She did not blink. She listened.

"You have to find Imogen. You have to give her this. Not the sheriff. Not the reverend. Not the Calders, whatever you do, not the Calders, and I am sorry for that, Margot, because you and I both know what your family lost and what my family lost is the same thing in different clothes."

Margot's mouth opened. She closed it.

Nora's voice went on. Steady at first, the way Margot remembered her at church basement meetings, the way she had been before she started to fray. "I am recording this on the third of June. I do not know how much time I have. I do not know who is watching the house, but I know they are watching the house. The man in the gray pickup was there again this morning. He was sitting across the street when I came back from Birdie's. Birdie knows everything. Birdie has known for years. If I am gone, you go to Birdie, and you ask her about the summer of nineteen eighty-nine. You ask her about the boys who went into the marsh and the boys who did not come back."

A sound like a swallow. A breath drawn in through the nose.

"I have been a coward. I have been a coward my whole life, Margot. I let them bury this town. I let them bury Harlan. I let them tell me my daughter was crazy. I let them tell Imogen she was grieving and that grief made her see things that were not there, and I let them do it, and I am done letting them."

A pause. When Nora spoke again her voice had changed. It had gone down into her chest, and there was something in it Margot had only heard once before, the morning Cal's empty boat had drifted against the pier and Nora had walked into the marsh alone and come back with mud to her knees and nothing in her hands.

"There is a place in the marsh. South of the old channel marker, where the eelgrass makes a dark line in the water. There is something there. There has been something there since I was a girl. I am going to go and look at it one more time, and if I do not come back, then you will know that I went and looked and I did not come back, and you will know that I should not have gone alone, but I am the only one left who knows how to find it, and I cannot make Imogen go. I cannot make my daughter carry this. I cannot make my daughter walk into that water."

The recorder clicked. Static. A long silence. Then Nora's voice came back, fainter now, as if she had turned away from the microphone, as if she had been speaking to someone in the room.

"I am going to go anyway."

The file ended.

Margot sat in the kitchen and listened to the silence that followed. She listened to the radiator. She listened to the neighbor's television murmur through the wall. She listened to her own blood in her ears, and the sound was louder than she remembered it being.

She thought of her husband. She thought of Cal.

She thought of the morning she had gone out onto the lease and the marsh had been glass-still and the heron had been standing in the shallows with its head down, the way herons did when they were watching something beneath the surface, and she had thought then that the marsh was keeping a secret and that someday she would have to go and ask it for what it had taken.

She had not gone.

She had not gone for fifteen years.

Margot reached across the table and pressed play again. The static filled the kitchen. Nora's voice came back, the same opening, the same words, and this time Margot wrote them down on the back of a grocery receipt with a pencil she found in the drawer by the refrigerator.

She wrote until her hand cramped. She wrote until the lamp on the counter began to flicker. She wrote until she had copied down the names Nora had said and the dates Nora had said and the phrase about the dark line in the eelgrass, and then she sat back in the chair and looked at what she had written.

She picked up her phone. She did not call Imogen. She did not call the sheriff. She did not call Wes.

She called Birdie Shaw.

The phone rang four times. Five. Six. Margot listened to it ring in a house three blocks away, in a house where the lights would still be on, where Birdie Shaw would still be sitting up with her glasses on her nose and her cardigan buttoned to the throat and her answering machine blinking with messages she had not yet deleted.

Seven rings. Eight.

Then Birdie's voice, reedy and quick, half-asleep and all-awake, the way she always sounded when Margot called her at any hour of any night.

"Margot Calder. I have been expecting this call since Tuesday. I have been expecting this call since nineteen eighty-nine. What did Nora leave you?"

"I have a recording," Margot said. Her voice sounded thin in her own ears, like it had been left out in the salt air too long. "She left it in a tin. Birdie, I need you to listen to it with me."

A long pause. Margot heard the clock ticking in Birdie's kitchen the way she always heard it when she was on the phone with Birdie, that small brass clock with the cracked glass that Birdie kept on the wall above the stove and wound every Sunday whether it needed it or not.

"Where are you?" Birdie said.

"Home."

"Stay there. I will be over in ten minutes. Do not listen to the rest without me. Do you understand, Margot? Promise me."

"I promise."

Margot hung up the phone and sat back in the chair. The cassette tape was still in the recorder on the table. She did not touch it. She looked at the pencil writing on the back of the grocery receipt and read the names she had copied down.

There was a name at the bottom of the list that she had not written. It was not in Nora's voice from the first part of the recording. It was in a different voice, scratchy and far away, the kind of voice that came through on a recording when someone had spoken into a microphone held too far from their mouth. The voice said a single sentence, and Nora had not paused the recorder afterward. She had let it run, and the sentence sat in the recording like a stone at the bottom of a jar.

Margot did not want to hear that sentence again. She knew she would have to.

She got up from the table and put the kettle on. She took two mugs down from the shelf above the sink, the blue ones with the chipped rims that she and Cal had bought at the church rummage sale in 1981, the year they got married. She set them on the counter and waited.

Birdie Shaw arrived in seven minutes, not ten. She came through the back door without knocking because she never knocked. She had a cardigan over her nightgown and her reading glasses pushed up onto her forehead and a small notebook in her hand, the kind she always carried, the kind with the marbled cover and the elastic band.

She sat down at the table across from Margot and looked at the recorder and looked at the receipt with the pencil on it.

"Show me," Birdie said.

Margot turned the receipt around and slid it across the table. Birdie read it. Her face did not change. Margot watched Birdie's face the way she had watched it for forty years, looking for the small movements that told her what Birdie was thinking, the slight tightening at the corner of the mouth, the way her eyes flicked left when she was making something up and right when she was telling the truth.

Birdie's eyes did not move.

"Well," Birdie said, and then she did not finish.

Margot poured the tea. They sat with the mugs between their hands. The clock on the wall behind them ticked and the wind moved through the marsh grass outside the kitchen window, and the house creaked the way the house always creaked at night, the way it had creaked when Cal was alive and the way it had creaked when he was gone.

"I found it in the she'd," Margot said. "Behind the shelf with the boat paint. In a tin of mints that used to sit on the dresser in our bedroom. She must have put it there when I was not looking. Years ago."

"She came in your house," Birdie said.

"She came in my house."

"And you never knew."

"I never knew."

Birdie set her mug down. She looked at the recorder the way a woman looks at a thing she has been warned about.

"Play it," Birdie said. "From the beginning. And let me write."

Margot pressed play.

Nora's voice came back into the kitchen, warm and low and careful, the way Nora had spoken when she was working something out, the way Nora had spoken on the dock the morning she came to ask Margot about the lease and about Cal and about the things that had happened in the marsh fifteen years before.

"My name is Nora Ashby," Nora said, "and I am recording this because I do not know how much longer I will be able to keep notes on paper. I am seventy-three years old. My hands shake when I am tired. I have been investigating the drowning of Ruth Cavendish for the past eleven years, and I am close to something. I want someone to have this if I cannot finish it."

Birdie wrote. Her pencil moved fast across the marbled notebook.

Nora's voice went on. She told them about Ruth Cavendish, the schoolteacher who had come to Gull Harbor in the summer of 1996 and rented a room above the hardware store on Harbor Street. She told them about how Ruth had walked the beach every morning before work and how she had befriended a girl named Lucy who collected shells and how Lucy had followed her around like a small dog. She told them about how Ruth had started asking about the drowning of a man named Arthur Penn in 1988, a fisherman who had gone out alone one night and come back without his boat. She told them about how Ruth had started asking about the drowning of a woman named Hannah Lee in 1993, a nurse who had been found in the channel near the old lighthouse. She told them about how Ruth had asked questions at the library and questions at the post office and questions at the bait shop and how the questions had made certain people in Gull Harbor uncomfortable in a way that the questioner could feel even when she did not know the shape of the discomfort.

Then Nora's voice changed. It got lower. It got slower.

"In June of 1997," Nora said, "Ruth Cavendish was last seen alive at approximately nine forty-five in the evening on the dock behind the Gull Harbor Inn. She was seen by two witnesses, one of whom has since died, arguing with a young man who was the son of the local pastor. The pastor was Reverend Theodore Briggs. The son's name at that time was Owen Briggs. He was nineteen years old. He worked summers on the oyster lease that was then held by a man named Harlan Briggs, his uncle."

Margot's hand went still on her mug.

"Owen Briggs is now Harlan Briggs," Nora said. "He took his uncle's name when his uncle died in 2004. He runs the lease today. He runs the lease that Margot Calder's husband Cal worked on for almost twenty years. He runs the lease that Cal died on. He runs the lease that Nora Ashby went out to ask about, the morning that Nora Ashby drowned."

Birdie stopped writing. Her pencil hovered above the page. She looked up at Margot.

Margot did not look at Birdie. She looked at the recorder. Nora's voice kept going. It was the same voice. It was the same woman who had sat on the dock that morning and asked her questions and then gone out in a boat and not come back.

"Ruth Cavendish was seen by the second witness, a woman named Doris Pell who ran the laundromat on Front Street, walking down the dock toward the channel in the company of Owen Briggs. They appeared to be arguing. Doris Pell heard Ruth say the words 'I know what you did' and she heard Owen Briggs say the words 'you do not know anything.' Then Doris Pell went inside the inn to use the ladies' room and when she came back out, both Ruth and Owen were gone. Ruth Cavendish's body was found the next morning in the channel near the old lighthouse. Owen Briggs told the sheriff at the time that he had left Ruth at the end of the dock and gone home. He was never charged. The sheriff at the time was a man named Dale Mercer. Dale Mercer retired in 2009."

Margot closed her eyes.

"Ruth Cavendish was not the only one," Nora said. "There was Arthur Penn in 1988. There was Hannah Lee in 1993. There was Ruth Cavendish in 1997. There was a boy named Eddie Tully in 2002. There was a man named Roy Pemberton in 2009. There was Nora Ashby in 2019. Six people. One channel. One name that keeps surfacing in the records. Owen Briggs. Harlan Briggs. The same man. The man who runs the lease."

Nora paused. There was a long breath on the recording, the kind of breath that meant she was about to say something she had been holding for a long time.

"I have been asking questions about this man for eleven years," Nora said. "I have asked the librarian. I have asked the postmistress. I have asked the woman who runs the bait shop. I have asked the sheriff, who is no longer the sheriff but who still lives in town. I have asked his wife. I have asked his daughter. I have asked the men who work for him on the lease. None of them will answer me. None of them will look at me when I ask. The last time I went out to the lease to speak with Margot Calder, I was told things that I had not known before. I was told about the dark line in the eelgrass. I was told about the way the current moves when the tide goes out. I was told about the man who was keeping a secret. I came home from that conversation and I packed this recorder into this tin and I walked to the back door of the Calder house on Wharf Street and I let myself in because Margot had given me a key years before, when I was writing something about the oyster war of 1973, and Margot never asked for it back."

Margot opened her eyes. She looked at the tin on the table. She looked at the recorder.

"I put the tin behind the boat paint on the shelf in the she'd," Nora said, "because Margot Calder does not go into the she'd. Her husband used to go into the she'd. Her husband has been dead for fifteen years. The tin will sit behind the boat paint until someone finds it. I hope someone finds it soon. I hope the person who finds it is someone who can do what I could not do. I hope the person who finds it is not afraid of the dark line in the eelgrass. I hope the person who finds it knows that the water is deeper than it looks."

The recording crackled. There was a long stretch of nothing, just the sound of the tape moving and the hum of the room Nora had been sitting in and the distant sound of wind.

Then the other voice came through. The scratchy one. The one that had been recorded from far away, the one that Nora had not paused for. A man's voice. Low and rough and familiar in a way that Margot could not place at first and then could place exactly.

"Mrs. Ashby," the man's voice said. "You ought to be careful out on that water."

Then the tape ended.

Margot sat in her kitchen with Birdie Shaw across the table and the clock ticking on the wall behind her and the wind in the marsh grass and the recorder going click, click, click as the tape ran out. She did not speak. Birdie did not speak.

Birdie wrote the man's words down in her notebook. She wrote them in capital letters. She underlined them twice.

Then Birdie closed the notebook and put the elastic band around it and set it on the table and looked at Margot with her reading glasses still pushed up on her forehead.

"Well," Birdie said, and this time she finished. "I have known that voice since I was nineteen years old. I have known it in church. I have known it on the dock. I have known it in this kitchen. That is the voice of Harlan Briggs."

The clock on the wall behind Margot had been ticking for the past ten minutes and she had not heard it until Birdie said the name. Then she heard it. Tick. Tick. Tick. The sound was coming from a kitchen clock shaped like a copper crab, the kind her mother had bought from a yard sale in 1987, the kind that had outlasted three marriages in this house and would outlast her. The crab had one claw raised and the tick came out of its mouth like a small mechanical cough every other second.

Imogen stood at the counter with her coffee cup halfway to her mouth and she did not move. The cup stayed where it was. Her eyes stayed on Birdie.

"Harlan Briggs," Birdie repeated, slower now, tasting the name the way she tasted every important thing, with the tip of her tongue and the front of her teeth. "There is no mistaking it. Harlan was the harbor master for thirty-one years. He retired in 2003. He still keeps a boat at the public landing, even now. Even at his age. He is eighty-six years old and he still goes out on that water every morning at five o'clock, like he has done since he was twenty-three."

Margot finally spoke. Her voice came out of her the way a rope comes out of a coil, slow and steady and a little rough from the salt.

"Brother to Theodore."

"Brother to Theodore," Birdie confirmed. "The reverend passed in 2019. Heart attack in the pulpit on a Wednesday. But Harlan is still here. Still alive. Still down at the landing most mornings before anyone else is up. He keeps a johnboat named after his mother. He named it Loretta."

Birdie said the name Loretta with a reverence that did not belong to a boat. It belonged to a hymn.

"Loretta Briggs," Birdie continued. "That was his mother. She died when Harlan was seven years old. He was raised by Theodore after that. They were not close in age. Theodore was seventeen when Harlan was born. Theodore practically raised him. That is why Theodore became a reverend, I have always thought. He had the practice."

Imogen set her coffee cup down on the counter. The porcelain made a small clink against the saucer. Outside, the marsh wind had picked up, and the screen door was rattling softly in its frame. The smell of the marsh came through the screen, that particular smell of low tide and rotting eelgrass and the metallic tang of brackish water that had been sitting in the sun.

"What does Harlan Briggs have to do with my mother?" Imogen asked.

Birdie did not answer right away. She took off her reading glasses from where they were pushed up on her forehead and folded them with a small click, the kind of click that comes from cheap metal hinges that have been folded and unfolded ten thousand times. She set them on top of her notebook. She smoothed the elastic band. She looked at Margot, then at Imogen, then back at her notebook.

"Your mother," Birdie said carefully, "rented a slip at the public landing last summer. She kept a little skiff there. A skiff with a red hull. I remember because I walked past it every morning on my way to the library and I thought, that is Nora Ashby's skiff, the journalist from Baltimore, she is back in Gull Harbor after all these years. And I wondered why."

"Why?" Imogen said.

"Because she never came back before," Birdie said. "Not once in twenty years. Not for her father's funeral. Not for her sister's wedding. Not for the hurricane of 2003. And then, last June, she was suddenly here. With a skiff. And a tape recorder. And questions."

Margot shifted in her chair. The wood creaked under her. The kitchen had not been painted since 1994 and the wallpaper was peeling in the corner by the window where the salt air came in. The smell of old coffee and the brackish water outside mixed together. Margot could taste salt on the back of her tongue.

"What kind of questions?" Margot asked.

Birdie's mouth made a small movement. Not quite a smile. Something closer to the look of a woman who had been waiting a long time to be asked. The look of a woman who had kept a thing in a basement for thirty-four years and had begun to wonder if the thing would ever be wanted.

"The kind of questions," Birdie said, "that a person asks when they are looking for a body."

The words landed in the kitchen like a stone dropped into a well. Imogen's hands went still on the table. Margot's hands stayed where they were too. The clock ticked. The screen door rattled. The marsh wind pushed a long, low moan across the water outside, the kind of sound that is not really a sound but a pressure on the eardrums.

"A body," Imogen said.

"Yes," Birdie said. "A body. Your mother did not say the word body to me. She never did. She was too smart for that, and she had been a journalist long enough to know that you do not say the word body in a small town if you do not want the whole town to know you are looking for one within the hour. But I am a librarian. I have spent forty years listening to people ask questions they think they are hiding. I know what a question looks like when a person is digging for something they have already half found. And Nora was digging."

Birdie reached into her canvas bag and pulled out a second notebook. This one was older, the cover soft with age, the elastic band frayed almost to breaking. She set it on top of the first notebook. The two notebooks sat on the table like two small monuments.

"I have been the unofficial archivist of this town since 1978," Birdie said. "I have indexed every birth, every death, every marriage, every rumor, every fire, every boat lost at sea, every person who ever went out into that marsh and did not come back. I have three filing cabinets in my basement and two more in the back room of the Historical Society. And I have been waiting, Mrs. Ashby, since the day your mother came back to Gull Harbor last June, for someone to come and ask me what I know."

She opened the second notebook. The pages were cream colored and soft at the edges.

"On June fourteenth of last year," Birdie said, "your mother came to the Historical Society. She said she was writing a piece about the oyster industry. She asked to see the records from 1987. She asked to see the records from 1989. She asked to see the records from 1991. She asked to see any record that mentioned the name Briggs. She asked to see any record that mentioned the name Mercer. She asked to see any record that mentioned a man named Harlan and a man named Wes."

Margot's hand closed on the edge of the table. The wood was old and smooth under her fingers, sanded by decades of elbows and dishes and the slow rocking of a house that had settled unevenly into the marsh. She did not speak.

"She asked," Birdie said, "about a man named Cal."

The kitchen was very quiet. The clock ticked. The marsh breathed. The screen door rattled once and then was still, as if even the wind had stopped to listen.

"She did not find what she was looking for in the public records," Birdie said. "I could have told her she would not. The records from that era are not complete. There was a flood in 1992 that took out the basement of the old courthouse. Half the deeds and half the death records from the previous decade were destroyed. What survived was what people had copied out by hand and given to me. What survived was what I had kept in my own files. And what I had kept, Mrs. Ashby, was very little about Cal Calder."

Margot finally lifted her eyes. She looked at Birdie across the table. Her eyes were the color of the marsh in winter, gray-green and flat and hard to read.

"You knew my husband," Margot said.

"I knew your husband," Birdie said. "I knew him the way I knew everyone in this town. By sight. By name. By what was said about him at the post office and at the diner and at the IGA. I knew that he went out on the water the night of October seventeenth, 1989, in a johnboat with a thirty-horse outboard, and that he did not come back. I knew that his body was never recovered. I knew that the search was called off after four days. I knew that Sheriff Dale Mercer signed the death certificate and that the cause of death was listed as accidental."

"And what did she ask you about Harlan?" Imogen said.

Birdie turned her gaze to Imogen. The reading glasses were still in her hand. The notebooks were on the table. The clock ticked.

"She asked me," Birdie said, "if Harlan Briggs had been on the water that night. I told her no. Harlan had not been on the water that night. Harlan had been at the church hall with Theodore for a choir practice that ran until nine o'clock. I knew because I was there. I sang in the choir then. I still do, on the high holidays."

Birdie paused. She smoothed the page of the notebook with her palm.

"What I did not tell her," Birdie said, "was that Harlan had been on the water the night before. And the night before that. And the night before that. I did not tell her because I did not know if it mattered. I did not tell her because Harlan had asked me not to. And Harlan had asked me not to because Harlan had seen something that he had not been able to forget."

Margot's throat moved. She swallowed. The salt taste in her mouth was stronger now, almost metallic, almost like the taste of old blood.

"What did he see?" Margot said.

Birdie closed the second notebook. She put the elastic band around it. She set both notebooks side by side on the table, side by side, like two stones set at the edge of a grave.

"What Harlan saw," Birdie said, "is what your mother went out to that marsh to find. And what Harlan saw is what he has been trying to tell her, on that tape, to stop looking for. Because Harlan Briggs is a man who has carried a secret for thirty-four years, and he is tired. And your mother, Mrs. Ashby, was getting close."

Outside, the marsh wind pushed a long, low sound across the water, the sound of the tide going out, the sound of eelgrass bending under a weight that no one could see. The clock ticked. The screen door rattled. The kitchen held its breath.

Birdie put her hand flat on the table. Her hand was small and the knuckles were swollen with age and the veins stood up like blue ropes under the thin skin.

"What I have," she said, "is a letter. Written by Harlan Briggs. Addressed to no one. Dated October twentieth, 1989, three days after Cal Calder went into the water. I have kept it in my basement for thirty-four years.