The fluorescent tube above the microfilm reader had been flickering for three months, three short blinks and one long one, in a rhythm the maintenance man had never bothered to repair. Maren Holbrook had counted the intervals during her first visit to the Sentinel's public records room, and now she counted them again.
The reader smelled the way all microfilm readers smelled: warm dust and a faint metallic tang from the heated reels. She had not set foot inside the Sentinel's offices since she was nineteen, when the paper had run her high school graduation photograph under the wrong name. That had been one of the smaller grievances between her and her father. The photograph had run, her father had not corrected it, and she had learned something about him that she had carried across the next decade.
She had come home to settle the estate. That was the reason she told the clerk at the front desk, and it was true enough. She had also come home because her nephew Theo had asked, in a voice small enough to slip under a door, whether his aunt could come and stay with him while his parents worked overseas. The request had arrived on a Tuesday, written in pencil on lined paper, the letters careful and slightly crooked.
So she was here, in the Sentinel's back room, because a sheriff's incident report could not lie, and she was beginning to suspect that someone had asked it to try.
The spool clicked into place. The screen above the reader washed grey, then resolved slowly, the way a photograph develops in solution. She turned the focus knob until the lines sharpened. COUNTY OF KENNEBUNK. OFFICE OF THE SHERIFF. INCIDENT REPORT. CASE NUMBER 09-4471-B.
She had requested the file two days earlier, walking into the clerk's office during the lunch hour when the front counter was unmanned. The clerk, a woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain, had not asked why she wanted the file. People in this town rarely did. Holbrook was a name that opened drawers.
The report filled the screen. Maren leaned forward, the wooden edge of the reader's hood pressing into her forearms. She had read the report once already, the previous afternoon. Now she was looking for the parts she had skimmed.
INCIDENT TYPE: Found Deceased Accidental Drowning. LOCATION: Black Point, north cliff trail. DATE: 09 14 2009. TIME OF DISCOVERY: 0645 hours. REPORTING OFFICER: Sheriff's Office, Winslow Meacham.
She let the spool advance. The next page was the witness list. She read it again, although she already knew it by heart.
WITNESS 1: Theodore Holbrook. Address: Holbrook Estate, Tideline Road. Statement: Subject observed the victim at the base of the cliff at approximately 0631 hours, called 911 at 0642 hours.
WITNESS 2: Felix Durr. Address: 12 Harbor Lane. Statement: Subject located on the cliff trail at approximately 0623 hours, descended to the rocks below, confirmed the victim was deceased, remained at the scene until Sheriff's arrival.
WITNESS 3: Delia Ashford. Address: Ashford Cottage, Tide Pool Lane. Statement: Subject located approximately one-half mile inland at the tide pools; reports no observation of the incident.
So Felix had been there. So had Theo. So had Delia, who claimed she had seen nothing at all from a position no more than a half mile from where the body lay.
Maren turned the focus knob slightly. The text wobbled, then steadied.
The reel on the screen now was the original. It was a year older than the photocopied version anyone could request through the front desk, misfiled after the new scanner came in. The clerk had muttered something about old reels getting shuffled. The clerk had been willing, after a coffee from the place on Main Street that put a cinnamon stick in the cup, to walk back into the cabinet and pull the correct spool.
The original report carried a timestamp in the upper right corner, printed in the small blocky type of the dot-matrix printer the sheriff's department had used before the budget improved. The timestamp read: REPORT GENERATED 09 14 2009, 1422 HOURS.
Below that, in the box marked ARRIVAL TIME FIRST RESPONDER, the original report read: 0558 HOURS.
She sat back. The fluorescent tube completed another cycle, three blinks and a long one, and the spool ticked gently as it idled.
Theo had said he called 911 at 0642. The dispatch log confirmed that. The sheriff's first responder had arrived at 0558.
Forty-four minutes before the call.
She turned the spool again, page by page, until she found the supplementary sheet. A single page, attached to the back of the original report with a brass brad that had left a small greenish stain on the paper. The supplementary sheet contained the tide charts from the harbormaster's office.
HIGH TIDE: 0714 HOURS. LOW TIDE: 0048 HOURS. MEAN TIDE RISE: 9.2 FEET.
Theo had arrived at the cliff at 0631. High tide had come at 0714.
Forty-three minutes.
She thought about that for a moment. She thought about the body at the base of the cliff.
She thought about that for a moment. She thought about the body at the base of the cliff. She thought about what the deputy had written in the margin of the original report, in handwriting that looped and slanted like cursive practiced by a left-hander using a right-handed pen: "Subject deceased, cause consistent with fall from height, no signs of foul play."
Consistent with. Not confirmed.
She pressed her thumb against the edge of the spool and turned it once more, until she reached the last page, the coroner's preliminary note, stamped in blue ink at the bottom corner: SIGNED, HARLAN G. PENCE, M.D., CORONER, 09 15 2009.
Pence. The name was familiar. She tried to place it and couldn't.
She rewound the spool, slid it back into its cardboard sleeve, and tucked it under her arm. Then she locked the cabinet, turned out the light, and let the door close behind her with a soft click.
Outside, the rain had stopped. The parking lot of the public records office glistened under a sky the color of weak tea. Across the street, the brick facade of Elden Cove Funeral Home sat in a row of older buildings that had survived the fire of '78, their cornices still sharp, their brass kick-plates green with age. A pair of urns flanked the front steps, filled with chrysanthemums so dark they looked almost black in the flat morning light. A small placard in the window read: VISITATION HOURS, 9 TO 4. PLEASE ENTER THROUGH THE SIDE DOOR.
Maren crossed the street. The asphalt was still wet, and her boots left shallow prints that faded as she watched. A car passed on the road behind her, tires hissing on the damp surface. Somewhere a screen door banged twice and went still.
She rang the bell at the side door. A chime sounded, three notes descending, muffled by the wood. Footsteps approached from within, slow and deliberate, the careful steps of someone who did not wish to slip.
Dr. Eliot Pratt opened the door.
He was smaller than she remembered. The years had compressed him the way seasons compress a branch, drawing him inward, polishing him down. His face was narrow, his eyes pale and set deep, and his hair, what remained of it, was combed across the crown in three careful strokes that ended in a thin tail just above the collar. He wore a charcoal vest over a white shirt, and a tie the color of dried lavender, knotted with the precision of a man who had tied the same knot for forty years.
"Maren." His voice was soft, slightly nasal, measured in the way a man measures his words when he has spent a long career choosing them. "I saw your name on the sign-in sheet at the post office. I wondered if you would come by."
"I need to talk to you, Eliot."
He stepped aside without answering, gesturing her into a hallway that smelled of beeswax and lilies and, beneath those, the faint chemical sweetness of embalming fluid. The walls were hung with small framed photographs of deceased veterans, each one captioned in the same neat cursive: name, rank, dates of service. A grandfather clock at the far end of the hall ticked with a sound like a fingernail tapping on glass.
He led her into his office. It was a small room, lined with bookshelves, the spines labeled in his hand: CORONERS MANUAL, 1987. BURIAL CUSTOMS OF THE COASTAL TRIBES. THE PATHOLOGY OF DROWNING, 2ND ED. A desk of dark wood stood beneath the clock, and on its surface a single lamp was on, casting a yellow circle across a blotter the color of rust.
"Sit, please." He pulled out the chair with both hands. "Can I offer you tea? Coffee, perhaps. I have a small machine in the back. It makes a tolerable cup."
"I'm fine, thank you."
He did not sit. He stood behind his desk and placed his hands flat on the blotter, fingers spread, as if bracing himself against a surface that might tilt. He looked at her, then at the lamp, then back at her.
"You want to talk about Vincent."
"Yes."
"I thought as much." He nodded, twice, the nods small and precise. "I saw the request for the old files. The clerk at the records office called me to ask if I had any objection. I told her I did not. There is nothing in those files that was not already in the public record."
He was being careful. She could see it in the way he kept his hands flat, the way his weight shifted from one foot to the other without lifting either.
"Eliot," she said. "I'm not here to embarrass you."
"No."
"I'm here because my brother is dead, and I want to understand how."
He was quiet for a long time. The clock ticked. A car passed outside, its headlights sliding across the blinds and painting a brief stripe of light across the spines of his books.
"I signed the death certificate," he said at last. "Cause of death: traumatic injuries consistent with a fall from a height. The manner of death: accident."
"The head wound."
He did not move.
"The report says there was a laceration on the left temple. I read it in the file."
"Yes."
"The report says the laceration is consistent with impact against a rock at the base of the cliff."
"Yes."
"And is that what you believe?"
His hands lifted from the blotter, just an inch, and settled again. He blinked twice, quickly, the way a man blinks when he has been asked a question he has been waiting for and dreading in equal measure.
"Maren."
"Eliot."
"What I believe," he said, "is not what is in the report."
She did not speak. She waited. The clock ticked. Somewhere in the building, a door closed softly, and footsteps receded down a distant corridor.
"The wound," he said, "is not consistent with a fall."
"No."
"The laceration begins above the zygomatic arch, just at the hairline, and extends posteriorly in a line that is, in my professional opinion, angled. Not vertically. Angled."
He swallowed. She could hear it.
"A fall from a height, onto a rock face, would produce a wound whose long axis is roughly perpendicular to the surface of impact. The wound on your brother's head was not perpendicular. It was oblique. Approximately thirty degrees from vertical."
"What does that mean?"
"It means," he said, and his voice dropped, becoming softer still, more nasal, "that the force was not applied from below. It was applied from the side. A glancing strike, perhaps. The kind of strike one might sustain from a moving object. A fist. A tool. A piece of timber caught by the wind."
He looked at her.
"It means the wound was incurred before the fall. Not during it."
The clock ticked. The lamp hummed. The chemical sweetness in the hallway was stronger here, behind the closed door, layered with the dust of old books and the faint salt smell of the man himself, Eliot, who had attended to the Holbrooks for so long that the scent of his office had become, in some strange way, the scent of her own family's history.
"Why didn't you write that?"
He sat down, finally, in the chair opposite her. The chair creaked under him. He folded his hands in his lap, and she saw that they were trembling slightly, the tremor of a man who had held something for sixteen years and felt the weight of it now.
"Because I was asked not to."
"Who asked you?"
He looked at the blotter. He looked at the clock. He looked at the photographs on the wall, the veterans, the dates of service.
"Winslow," he said.
The name landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water. Maren felt her jaw tighten, the muscles along her cheekbones drawing in, the way they had drawn in when she was a girl and her father had said something she knew she would have to answer for later.
"Winslow Meacham," Eliot said, as if confirming it for himself. "He came to see me. The morning after. Before the body had been released. He stood in this very room. He put his hand on my shoulder. He said, Eliot, this is a tragedy, but it is a simple one, and the family does not need complications. He said the report would read as I had written it. He said that was best for everyone."
He looked up at her.
"I was a younger man then, Maren. I had a practice to think of. I had a wife. I had children. Winslow was a powerful man in this town. He is still a powerful man in this town."
"And you never told anyone."
"I never told anyone."
"Not even my mother."
"Not even your mother."
"Not even Theo."
"No."
The clock ticked. She could feel her breath in her chest, the rise and fall of it, the way the air tasted faintly of lilies and chemicals and the dust of his books.
"The glancing strike," she said. "Could it have come from the fall itself? From a piece of debris? From a rock that struck him on the way down?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because the wound is on the left temple. If he fell from the cliff at the point where he was found, he would have struck the rock face with the right side of his body. The geometry does not support a fall-caused wound on the left."
"He could have turned."
"He could have turned. But the wound is not consistent with a turning fall. The angle is wrong. The depth is wrong. There is a small bruise, subdermal, beneath the laceration, that suggests impact with a rigid object of relatively small surface area. A rock would leave a broader pattern."
She was quiet for a moment.
"A piece of timber," she said. "You said a piece of timber."
"Yes."
"Or a fist."
He looked at her. He did not answer.
"You don't know which," she said.
"No."
"But you believe it was a blow."
"I believe," he said, "that the wound was sustained before the fall. I believe the wound was sustained by something that struck him from the side. I do not know what."
"And Winslow knew."
"Winslow knew the wound was there. He saw the body before I did. He was there when they brought him up."
"He was there."
"Yes."
She stood. The chair scraped softly against the floor. Eliot remained seated, his hands still folded, his eyes on the blotter.
"Eliot."
"Yes."
"If I were to ask you to sign an amended report, would you?"
He did not answer immediately. The clock ticked. The lamp hummed. The chemical sweetness was almost sweet enough to taste.
"I would have to think about that," he said at last.
"Think quickly."
He looked up at her. His eyes, in the yellow light of the lamp, were very pale, and very old, and very tired.
"There is something else," he said.
"What?"
"The supplementary sheet. The tide charts. You saw them."
"Yes."
"They were not in the original file when I signed the report. They were added later."
"By whom?"
"I do not know. The clerk could not tell me. She said the charts had come in with the harbormaster's monthly packet and had been misfiled. She said she had attached them to the back of the report as a matter of course."
"Attached them with a brass brad."
"Yes."
"And left a small greenish stain on the paper."
He nodded.
"Maren," he said. "Be careful."
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she turned and walked down the hallway, past the photographs of the veterans, past the grandfather clock, out into the wet morning where the chrysanthemums sat in their urns, dark as ink, dark as the bruise beneath her brother's wound.
She did not answer him.
She got into her car and sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel, watching a single leaf skate across the asphalt of the parking lot, lifting and settling, lifting and settling, as if it could not decide whether to stay or to go.
The chamber of commerce met in the back room of the public library, a low-ceilinged space that smelled of old carpet and the lemon oil the custodian used on the tables. Maren sat through an hour of budget talk, a presentation on the harbor walk renovation, a spirited debate about the placement of new benches. She nodded when nodding was required. She signed the attendance sheet with a pen that left ink on her thumb. She did not hear a single word.
When the meeting ended, she walked out through the side door into the parking lot behind the building, where the asphalt was still dark from the morning's rain and the sky had gone the color of old pewter. The chrysanthemums in the planters by the library steps had been beaten down by the weather, their petals bruised to a muddy rust. She paused beside her car, fumbling in her bag for her keys, and that was when she heard his voice.
"Maren."
She turned. Caleb Mercer was leaning against the low brick wall that separated the library lot from the alley, his arms folded, a carpenter's pencil tucked behind one ear. He was wearing a flannel shirt the color of dried blood and his hands were rough with dust, as if he had come straight from a job site. He had not been at the meeting. She was certain of it. She had counted the chairs when she came in, a habit she could not seem to break.
"Caleb," she said.
He straightened up from the wall and took a step toward her. There was a smear of something pale on his sleeve, plaster or wood glue, and his boots left faint prints on the wet ground. He smiled. The smile was the same one he had given her the first afternoon he had come to the estate, a slow, careful, country smile, the kind that said I will not be the first to speak ill of anyone. Underneath it, something else was moving.
"You were somewhere else in there," he said. "I could see it from the window."
"Were you watching?"
"I was unloading tile in the alley. There's a delivery door." He gestured vaguely toward the back of the library, where a battered green van sat with its rear doors open, crates of ceramic tile stacked inside. "I saw your car. I thought I'd wait."
"For what?"
He tilted his head. The pencil shifted behind his ear but did not fall. "To see if you'd come out the front or the back. You came out the back."
"Is that significant?"
"Most people come out the front."
She looked at him. The rain had started again, a fine mist that clung to her coat and gathered on her eyelashes. She could smell the wet wool of her own sleeves, the distant salt of the harbor, and underneath it, faintly, the dust of his work and the sharper note of coffee on his breath.
"Caleb," she said, "why are you here?"
"I came to tell you something."
"Then tell me."
He took another step. He was close enough now that she could see the small scar at the corner of his jaw, a thin white line she had never noticed before, and the way the muscle in his cheek tightened when he was thinking of what to say. He had been handsome once, in the way that quiet men are handsome, with a stillness in his face that invited you to fill it. Now there was something watchful in his stillness, and the charm of it had a seam.
"Vincent was my partner," he said.
"I know."
"We built things together. The workshop on the wharf. The deck on the McAllister cottage. The gazebo at the church." He paused. "We were going to bid on the harbor walk job."
"I heard."
"Did you hear we were the only ones who bid?"
She said nothing. The mist thickened. A car passed on the street beyond the lot, its tires hissing on the wet pavement, and the sound receded like a breath drawn away.
"Maren," he said, and his voice dropped into something softer, more careful, the way a man speaks when he is choosing each word for its weight. "Vincent would not want this."
"This?"
"You. Digging. Asking questions." He gestured with one hand, a small, encompassing motion that seemed to include the library, the parking lot, the whole town. "Going to see Eliot. Looking at files."
"I have not been looking at files."
"Now, Maren."
She felt the warmth in her face and was annoyed by it. "How did you know I saw Eliot?"
"I didn't. I guessed." He smiled again, and the smile this time had a different shape, a little thinner, a little more knowing. "You went past his office this morning. I was at the diner across the street. I saw you go in. I saw you come out. You looked like someone had handed you a stone."
The rain found its way down the back of her collar. She shivered, and was not sure whether it was the cold.
"What do you want, Caleb?"
"I want you to let this stay a tragedy."
He said it simply, the way he might say pass the salt, and the simplicity of it was what made her understand that he meant it in every possible sense of the word. A tragedy. A thing that had happened, a thing to be mourned, a thing to be left alone. Not a question. Not a mystery. Not a thing with a shape that could be followed to its source.
"He was your partner," she said.
"Yes."
"You must want to know."
"I know what I need to know."
"And what is that?"
"That he is gone." Caleb's eyes, which were the color of weathered oak, held hers without blinking. "That the funeral was held. That the flowers have been taken down. That the report has been signed and the tide charts have been filed and the clerk has misfiled nothing and Eliot has remembered nothing and you, Maren, can go home to the estate and look after your mother and your nephew and the rhododendrons that are dying along the south wall."
The mist had soaked through her coat. She could feel it on her arms, her shoulders, the tops of her thighs where the fabric had begun to cling.
"That is a great deal for you to know," she said.
"It is a small town."
"It is a small town," she agreed, "and in a small town, people who tell other people what they already know are usually trying to tell them something else."
Something moved behind his face. Not a flinch, not quite. A flicker, like a candle flame touched by a draft from a room no one had noticed was open.
"Maren," he said. "I am not your enemy."
"No?"
"I am asking you. As a friend."
"Are we friends?"
"We were. We could be again." He took a half-step closer. His voice dropped again, and now there was no charm in it at all, only a low, even pressure, the way a hand presses down on a lid. "Vincent was a good man. He did good work. He is remembered well. There is nothing for you to find. There is nothing to be gained by finding it."
"And if I find something anyway?"
He looked at her for a long moment. The rain ran down his face in thin clear lines, collecting at the point of his jaw, falling from the scar.
"Then you will have to decide what to do with it," he said. "And I will have to decide what to do with you."
The words landed somewhere beneath her ribs and stayed there. She did not step back. She had learned, in the years she had been away from the estate and from this town and from the quiet, careful men who ran it, that stepping back was the thing they were counting on.
"I will think about it," she said.
"Don't think too long."
He held her gaze for another beat. Then he nodded, once, the way a man nods when a deal has been struck or when he has said everything he came to say, and he turned and walked back down the alley toward the green van. She watched him climb in, watched the engine turn over with a diesel shudder, watched the van back out of the alley and turn onto the street and disappear toward the harbor, where the boats sat at their moorings and the gulls wheeled and the tide, in its slow and ancient patience, was already beginning to come in.
She stood in the empty lot for a long time after he was gone. The mist thickened into a proper rain. The chrysanthemums darkened. Somewhere in the library, a custodian was running a buffer over the carpet, and the sound came through the walls like a low, mechanical heartbeat.
She thought of the supplementary sheet. The tide charts. The brass brad. The greenish stain. She thought of the clerk who could not remember who had brought the charts in. She thought of Caleb's scar, and of the way the muscle in his cheek had tightened, and of the word he had used.
Tragedy.
A thing that happens. A thing that is suffered. A thing that cannot be undone.
She unlocked her car and sat behind the wheel with her hands flat on the cold plastic, watching the rain stipple the windshield, watching the wipers she had not yet turned on leave a clear arc that filled again almost at once. In the clear arc she could see the reflection of the library door, and beyond it, the dim suggestion of the hallway where the photographs of the veterans hung in their rows.
She turned the key in the ignition.
The engine caught. The wipers began their slow, patient sweep. And Maren drove home through the rain, past the diner where Caleb had seen her that morning, past the harbor where the boats leaned at their moorings, past the turning that led to the old road and the estate, where her mother was waiting and her nephew was waiting and the rhododendrons along the south wall were, in fact, beginning to die.
She did not turn at the turning.
She drove on, toward the water, toward the place where the tide was coming in.