The phone vibrated against the nightstand at 2:14 AM, its screen casting a pale rectangle of light across the ceiling of Wren Halliday's Boston apartment. She had been asleep for perhaps an hour, the kind of shallow sleep that came from staring at spreadsheets until the numbers blurred into one long column of red. The city pressed against her window glass, a permanent twilight of streetlights and the sodium glow of the Pike, and somewhere below a taxi horn sang once and went quiet.
Her hand found the phone before she was fully awake. The name on the screen stopped her breath.
MAE.
She answered on the third pulse. The voice that came through was not the voice she remembered, or rather it was, but stripped of everything Wren had counted on: the brisk practicality, the sharp-tongued humor, the particular way Mae said "Wren" like a name she was still deciding whether to keep. This voice was stripped down to the studs.
"Wren. Thank God. I need you to listen to me."
Mae's words came quick and clipped, the cadence of someone rationing air. In the background, Wren could hear the low hum of a refrigerator, a radio tuned to weather, and beneath that the faint hiss of wind coming off water. Tideline. Mae was calling from the shop, then, or the cottage. The old cottage with its salt-warped window frames and the woodstove that never quite drew right.
"Mae. What time is it?"
"I don't have time to argue about time. Are you sitting down? I need you to hear me, okay? Actually don't sit down. Stand up. I need you awake."
Wren swung her legs over the edge of the bed. Her feet found the cold floorboards and the sensation traveled up through her ankles, her shins, the backs of her knees. She pressed her palm flat against the mattress as if to confirm she was real.
"I'm awake. Talk to me."
A pause. Mae breathed. Wren heard the wet click of her sister swallowing.
"Lila Reyes is gone."
The name landed in the room like a dropped glass. Wren waited for the rest of the sentence, but Mae had gone quiet in the particular way she went quiet when she was trying not to cry, which was to say her breathing became too measured, too deliberate, each inhale a small victory.
"Gone how?" Wren asked. "Gone where?"
"Gone from the festival. Founders' Day. She was there with her friends, the whole crowd down by the bandstand, and then she wasn't. Nobody saw her leave. Nobody saw anything." Mae's voice cracked on the last word and she rode over it, pressing forward. "The police have been at it for hours, Wren. Hours. They've walked the cove, they've checked the parking lot, they've talked to her friends twice. Nothing. The sheriff says kids run off sometimes. The sheriff says she probably took a walk to clear her head."
"But you don't believe that."
"I don't believe that."
Wren closed her eyes. In the darkness behind her lids she saw the bandstand in Tideline, white clapboard peeling, strung with the paper lanterns the town put up every August for the founders' parade. She saw the bay beyond it, flat and black at that hour, the lighthouse on the point blinking its slow semaphore. She saw a girl of seventeen, dark-haired, laughing, slipping between the bodies in the crowd and then simply not being there anymore.
"How old is she?" Wren asked, though she knew.
"Seventeen. She's seventeen. She just started her senior year. She's the mayor's niece, Wren, she lives with Cal and Etta, they have eyes on her, she's a good kid. She's not the kind of kid who runs off."
Mae was talking faster now, the words tumbling out in the old rhythm Wren remembered from childhood, the way Mae would narrate emergencies: a broken window, a sick gull, their father's truck sliding off the wharf in a nor'easter. Wren had always teased her for it, the way her sister turned every crisis into a story she could manage by sheer velocity.
"Mae."
"And Lila's been fine. She's been helping at the festival all week, she's been setting up the booths, she's been. She's a good girl, Wren."
"Mae."
"She volunteers at the marine station. She likes tide pools. She's the one who found that injured cormorant last month and wrapped it in her own jacket and carried it to Etta."
"Mae." Wren said it a third time and this time her sister stopped. "I'm listening. I'm here. Tell me what you need."
The line went quiet except for the weather radio. Then Mae said, very softly, "I need you to come home."
The word home caught in Wren's throat. Tideline had not been home for ten years. Home was this apartment, this narrow bed, this view of the expressway on-ramp where the red taillights bled together into a single arterial smear. Home was the place she had built from the raw materials of leaving, brick by careful brick.
But Mae was not asking about geography. Mae was asking about blood.
"I don't know what good I'd do," Wren said, and she heard her own voice doing the thing it always did when she was frightened, which was to become reasonable, to gather the facts into neat rows and offer them up as a kind of shield. "The sheriff has people on it. The state police, probably. I'm a forensic accountant, Mae. I read spreadsheets. I don't know anything about finding people."
"You're a Halliday."
"That's not a qualification."
"It's not nothing, either." Mae's voice had steadied. She had found the ground she needed and she was standing on it. "You know the town. You know the cove, the rocks, the ledges. You know how the tide moves through there because Mom taught us, both of us, and you were better at it than I ever was. You know the back ways. You know the people."
"I haven't been back in ten years, Mae. The people don't know me."
"They remember you. Believe me, they remember you." There was something careful in the way Mae said it, something she was not saying. "And there's something else."
Wren waited.
"When they searched her room, they found a note."
"A note."
"Written on the back of a festival flyer. It said, 'Meet me at the lighthouse, ten o'clock, don't tell anyone.' And it was signed with the letter K."
The room tilted slightly, or Wren did. She pressed her free hand against the wall and felt the cool plaster under her palm, the faint vibration of the radiator ticking in its casing.
"Who's K?"
"That's what I'd like to know." Mae's laugh was short and unhappy. "That's what the sheriff would like to know, too, except he seems content to wait for her to wander back from whatever teenage lark this is."
"Mae."
"I'm not being fair. He's doing his job. But Wren, the lighthouse. The lighthouse at ten o'clock at night. You know what that means. You know what the tide was doing last night. You know that anyone standing on those rocks at that hour, if they didn't know the water, if they didn't know where the ledges drop away."
She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't have to. Wren saw it: the black water, the slick granite, the current that pulled south along the point and then curled back on itself in a way that took experienced fishermen by surprise. She saw it because her mother had taught her. She saw it because her mother had died in that exact configuration of rock and tide and darkness, ten years ago, a hundred yards from where Lila Reyes had apparently agreed to meet someone whose name began with K.
"Have they searched the water?" Wren asked.
"They're starting at first light. The coast guard is coming up from Portland. Etta's down at the cove with the sheriff's wife, organizing the volunteers."
"Etta Vance?"
"Who else. She's got half the town in her kitchen right now, feeding them coffee and assigning search grids. She's been on the phone with Cal, with the marina, with the harbormaster. You know Etta. She doesn't sit still."
Wren did know Etta. Etta had been the closest thing Tideline had to a mother after Iris drowned, a stocky woman with red raw hands and a laugh that could be heard across three lobster pounds. Etta, who had taught both Halliday girls to gut their first fish, who had stood at the back of the church at the funeral and sobbed without making a sound.
"The lighthouse," Wren said again, slowly. "Lila was supposed to meet someone at the lighthouse."
"I know."
"And the sheriff isn't treating that as a crime scene."
"He's treating it as a teenage girl being dramatic." Mae's voice had gone flat and hard. "I'm telling you, Wren, something is wrong. I can feel it the way I could feel the nor'easters coming when we were kids, the way my knees would ache before the barometer dropped. Something is wrong."
Wren looked at the window. The city was quiet now, that particular false quiet of three in the morning when even the taxis had stopped and the only sound was the low groan of the heating system in the walls. She thought of Tideline: the way the fog sat in the cove in the early hours, the way the foghorn sounded every thirty seconds like a held breath, the way the rocks at the base of the lighthouse were covered with slippery kelp and the tide came in faster than anyone from away would believe.
She thought of her mother's hands, paint-stained, tracing the currents on a chart in the kitchen.
She thought of the cottage, dark and cold now, with the woodstove unlit and the salt air coming through the cracks.
She thought of a seventeen-year-old girl who liked tide pools, who had wrapped a bird in her own jacket, who had written a note in handwriting that Wren could not see but could imagine: hurried, hopeful, a little bit scared.
"I'm booking the six o'clock flight to Bangor," Wren said. "I'll be in Tideline by noon."
The sound Mae made was not quite a sob and not quite a laugh. It was the sound of someone who had been holding a very heavy thing for a very long time and had just been told she could set it down.
"Thank you," Mae whispered. "Thank you, Wren."
"Don't thank me yet."
"I will anyway. Drive careful from Bangor. The coastal road is a mess this time of year."
"I remember."
"And Wren?"
"What?"
"Come to the cottage first. Don't go down to the cove, don't go to the festival grounds. Come to the cottage. I have something to show you before you talk to anyone."
"Mae, what does that mean?"
"It means what I said. Just come to the cottage. I'll have coffee on."
The line went quiet. Wren listened to her sister breathing, to the weather radio murmuring about rain, to the small mechanical heartbeat of the connection between two towns three hundred miles apart.
"Mae."
"I'm here."
"I'll find her."
"I know you will." A pause. "You sound like Mom when you say things like that."
Wren pressed the phone against her ear until the plastic warmed. She did not answer. She could not answer, because the sound her sister had just made, that comparison, had opened a door in her chest she had spent ten years nailing shut, and through the door she could smell salt and linseed oil and hear a woman singing in the kitchen, and if she opened her mouth now what came out would not be words.
"See you tomorrow," Mae said softly, and ended the call.
Wren sat on the edge of the bed in the dark. The phone screen dimmed and went black. Somewhere below her window a sanitation truck ground through its gears, and the radiator clanked once and fell silent, and the city pressed its face against the glass and watched her not move.
clanked again, and Wren did not move. The dark pressed close. She listened to the silence the way you listen to a room after someone has walked out of it and not returned, the way a body learns to listen when it is fifteen years old and sitting at a kitchen table with a phone pressed to its ear and a sister three thousand miles away saying come home.
She had not thought about Marrow Cove in a long time. She had not thought about the back door. She had not thought about the sandal.
The radiator clanked a third time.
The smell came first. It always did, the smell, the way the past walked into the present through her nose and then her mouth and then the backs of her knees. Linseed oil. The faint green bite of turpentine. The warm wet of dog fur, because they had had a dog then, a black Lab named Gulliver who slept on the braided rug and she'd on everything and was, in September of 1987, just eleven months old and still chewing the legs of the kitchen chairs.
She was fifteen. She had a geometry textbook open on the table and a No. 2 pencil tucked behind her ear and the side of her hand smudged with graphite from an earlier proof she had not yet erased. The kitchen window was open. The screen had a tear in the lower corner that their father kept saying he would patch and never did. Through the tear came the sound of the gulls, the low thump of surf against the breakwater, and, faintly, the radio from the bait shop down the road where their mother worked the late shift on Tuesdays.
She did not hear the back door open.
She heard it close.
That was the thing she remembered most clearly in the years that followed, the sound of the door closing, the soft particular click of the latch catching, the way the kitchen seemed to exhale a little when the draft died. She remembered looking up from the geometry proof because the screen door made a sound like that only when someone used it, and the kitchen was empty, and her mother was at work, and her father was in the parlor reading, and her older sister Mae was upstairs in her room with the door shut and her headphones on and the particular silence of a seventeen-year-old who did not wish to be disturbed.
The kitchen was empty. The screen door had swung shut on its own weight.
Wren got up. She did not know why she got up. There was nothing to see. There was no one in the kitchen. The dishes were stacked in the drying rack. The dog's water bowl was half full and beginning to show a skin of dust. The clock above the stove said six forty-two, which meant it was still light outside, still summer-light, the long Maine dusk that lingered past nine and made the grass smell like cut hay and the air like iodine.
She crossed the kitchen. She opened the screen door. The wooden steps of the back porch were the color of a wet tongue. The yard stretched down toward the cliff path. The cliffs. Marrow Cove.
At the bottom of the steps, a single sandal sat in the grass.
It was a brown leather sandal, the kind with the woven straps across the top, the kind their mother bought at the church fair in June because their mother believed in church fairs the way she believed in linseed oil and the smell of cedar shavings and the small mercy of a thing bought by other hands. It was Iris's sandal. Wren knew it was Iris's sandal the way she knew her own name, without looking, without thinking, the way a body knows.
Iris was not on the steps. Iris was not in the yard. The path that led down through the switchbacks to the cove was empty. The cliff grass bent and rose. The gulls cried.
Wren stood on the porch for a long moment. The screen door drifted shut against her back. She held the sandal in her hand. It was still warm. It was still warm from a foot.
"Iris?"
She said the name quietly, the way you say a name when you are not yet afraid. Then she said it louder. Then she went back inside and set the sandal on the kitchen table beside her geometry book and stood in the middle of the linoleum with her hands at her sides and the screen door drifting shut and the smell of turpentine still in the air and waited, because she did not know what else to do, because no one had told her yet what you do when your sister walks out the back door on a September evening in 1987 and leaves behind a single sandal and the smell of turpentine and the latch catching and the screen door swinging shut on its own weight.
Her mother came home at nine. Her father looked up from his book at nine fifteen. Mae came downstairs at nine thirty and stood in the doorway of the kitchen and said, in a voice that already had the shape of what it would be for the rest of her life, sharp and practical and scared:
"What is that."
"A sandal."
"Whose sandal."
Wren did not answer. She looked at Mae. Mae looked at the sandal. The kitchen clock ticked. The dog came in from the parlor and put his head on Wren's knee because he was young and did not understand yet that some nights a knee is not a place to lean on.
It was her father who went down to the cliffs. Her father who came back with his coat smelling of salt and his face the color of old paper. Her father who sat at the kitchen table and put his head in his hands and did not speak. Her mother who knelt on the linoleum and picked up the sandal and held it against her chest and made a sound that was not a word in any language Wren knew, a sound that lived in the throat the way a stone lives in a well.
Wren did not cry that night. She did not cry the next morning. She did not cry for years. She stood at the kitchen window and watched the men with the dogs go down the path toward Marrow Cove and she thought about parallel lines and how they never meet and she thought about the smell of turpentine and she thought about how a sandal could be warm from a foot that was not in it anymore and how a body could be in a room and then not in a room and how the screen door made that sound only when someone used it.
Mae cried. Mae cried for a week and then stopped and began to cook and began to clean and began to answer the phone and began to be the older sister the way a captain becomes a captain, by walking onto a ship that was sinking and taking the wheel.
Their mother painted. That was the other thing. Their mother painted for three days straight without sleeping, canvases she had set up in the back bedroom, the room that smelled of linseed oil and cedar shavings, and when Wren finally went in there on the fourth morning she found seven paintings lined up against the wall, all of them the cliffs, all of them the path, all of them the cove, all of them done in the colors of a sky that was about to break.
Their mother never spoke about the sandal. Their mother never spoke about Iris. Their mother went on painting and volunteering with the marine mammal rescue and going to work at the bait shop and coming home at nine and cooking dinner and setting the table for four and then, after the first month, setting it for three, without comment, without a pause, without the smallest break in the rhythm of the fork against the plate.
Ten years later their mother drowned near the lighthouse.
Ten years after that, on a Tuesday night in October, Wren sat on the edge of a bed in a city apartment and held a phone that had gone dark and remembered the screen door and the sandal and the way the latch caught and the smell of turpentine that had never quite left the Halliday cottage no matter how many times the walls were painted.
The radiator clanked. The city pressed its face against the glass. Somewhere far below, a car alarm began and ended. Wren stood up from the bed. She walked to the window. She pressed her palm flat against the glass.
In the morning she would drive north. She would take the coastal road. She would go to the cottage first, because Mae had asked her to, because Mae had said she had something to show her, because Mae had said do not go to the cove and do not go to the festival grounds and Wren had promised and Wren did not break her promises, not anymore, not since she was fifteen years old and a sandal had been warm in her hand.
In the morning she would drive north and the smell of salt would come through the vents of the car and the radio would lose its signal and the cliffs would rise up out of the fog the way they always had, gray and patient, the way a thing rises when it has been waiting for you to come back to it for thirty-eight years.
In the morning she would go home.
But it was not morning yet. It was still Tuesday. It was still dark. The radiator clanked. The phone was black in her hand. The linoleum smell of her childhood was in her nose and would not leave, and on the other side of the glass the city kept its face turned toward her, and she kept her face turned toward it, and neither of them spoke.
The phone lit up at 4:17 AM. She had not been asleep. She had been standing at the window with her palm against the glass, watching the city breathe, and when the screen brightened she did not startle. She had been waiting for it, the way a person waits for a thing they have been dreading and wanting in equal measure.
Sam Otieno. The name sat in the display like a small, patient lighthouse.
She let it ring twice more. The radiator clanked. A siren wailed somewhere on the avenue, climbing and falling and climbing again, the way sirens do when they are not coming for you but for someone else, and you listen anyway because the sound is older than language and it pulls at something in the chest.
She answered on the fourth ring.
"Wren."
He did not say her name the way most people said it. He said it the way he said everything, with a careful warmth at the edges, the vowels held just a beat longer than they needed to be, as if he were giving each syllable time to be sure of itself before he let it go.
"Sam."
"I have been sitting with this for an hour."
She could make out the room behind his words. The particular hush of a space where someone has been thinking too hard for too long. A clock somewhere, ticking. The soft static of a recording app he had forgotten to close.
"Sit with it some more," she said. "It's good for the posture."
He exhaled. It was almost a laugh. It was not quite a laugh.
"I am serious, Wren."
"I know you are, Sam. That's the problem."
A pause. She could picture him. She could picture him the way she had pictured him since she was nineteen, in the back booth of the diner with a coffee gone cold and a notebook open in front of him and the look on his face that meant he was about to say something he had been rehearsing.
He would be in his apartment in Portland. There would be a lamp on. There would be a mug of tea he had forgotten to drink. There would be a folder on the desk, and inside the folder there would be photographs, and inside the photographs there would be the record of a ten-year absence that had ended in the back of a fish van in a town neither of them had been able to forget.
"Wren," he said again, and this time his voice had the careful evenness he used when he was about to disappoint her. "You should let the local authorities handle this."
"The local authorities," she
"The local authorities couldn't find their own boat dock in broad daylight, Sam. You remember what Sheriff Grover did with the Pelham fishing case? He logged the evidence in the wrong drawer and forgot about it."
"Wren."
"I'm serious. He filed the lead pipe in with the parking violations. We had to send Mae down there to physically point at the cabinet. Mae doesn't point gently."
"Wren." Sam's voice had gone quiet, which was worse than when he raised it. Sam only went quiet when he had stopped trying to convince her and started trying not to hurt her. "They have asked for me specifically. The state police have agreed to reopen the file. If I do this, I do it through channels. Not through the back of a fish van."
She closed her eyes. The kitchen smelled the way the kitchen had always smelled, of salt and old wood and the faint ghost of the lavender sachets her mother had tucked into the drawers, and beneath all of it the deeper brine of the cove coming up through the floorboards. Her mother's things were still in the cottage. Mae had wanted to clear them. Wren had said not yet. Mae had understood, in her sharp Mae's way, that not yet was not never.
"Through channels," Wren repeated.
"Yes."
"With paperwork."
"There will be paperwork."
"I hate paperwork."
"I know," Sam said. "You always have."
That was true. She had hated paperwork since she was nine years old and her mother had sat her down at the kitchen table with a folder of tide charts and asked her to copy out the high and low times for the month of July. She had done it because her mother had asked. Her mother had a way of asking that felt less like asking and more like setting a gentle net across a path you were already walking.
She had not copied out the tide charts in ten years.
She opened her eyes. The kettle had started to tick on the stove, a thin impatient sound, the sound of metal remembering it had once been hot.
"Sam."
"I am here."
"If you come back to Tideline and you do this thing, you are going to turn over every stone my mother ever set a foot on. You understand that."
A pause. She could hear him breathing. She could hear, very faintly, the sound of his apartment window, the particular urban hush of Portland at this hour, not silence but the layered whisper of a city that never quite quit talking about itself.
"Yes," he said.
"And whatever is under those stones is going to be news."
"Yes."
"And I am going to have to stand in this kitchen and read that news."
"Wren." His voice was so even now it almost had no texture. He had sanded it smooth. "You don't have to. You can let it happen and not be in the room."
"That's not how families work, Sam."
"No," he said, and something in him shifted, some wall going up or coming down, she could never tell with him. "I suppose it isn't."
The kettle ticked louder. She got up and lifted it off the burner before it could sing. She poured the water into the blue enamel pot her mother had used, the one with the chip on the spout that Mae kept meaning to replace and never would, because replacing it would mean admitting the old one was gone.
She set the kettle back down.
"When," she said.
"I can be there Saturday."
"That is four days."
"I can be there Tuesday."
"That's still four days, Sam."
"I will be there Monday," he said, and there it was, the almost-laugh again, the exhale that meant he had given her exactly what she had wanted and wanted her to know that he knew it. "Will you meet me at the diner?"
She looked out the window over the sink. The cove was a slate-dark plate tipped up at the far edge where the sky was. A single lamp burned at the end of the fish pier, a yellow smudge in the salt mist. The tide was out. The tide was always out here at this hour. The tide had been out the morning they had found her mother's jacket on the rocks near the lighthouse, folded neatly, the way a person folds a thing they intend to come back for.
"Yes," she said. "The diner."
"And Wren."
"Sam."
"Eat something before then. Please."
She opened her mouth to deflect. She had the line ready. She had three of them ready. They were all variations on the same joke, the joke she always made when Sam told her to take care of herself, the joke that meant she was not going to do it but she was grateful he had thought to ask.
She closed her mouth.
"Goodnight, Sam," she said instead, and it came out quieter than she had meant it to, and she heard him hear it, because he made a small sound, a hum, almost inaudible, the way her mother used to hum when she was listening to something she loved.
She hung up.
The kitchen was very still. The clock over the stove was ticking. The tide, somewhere out there past the window, was on its slow way back in.
She did not move to make the tea.
She stood at the counter with her hand flat on the blue enamel pot and she let the minutes pass, one after another, each one small and definite, each one carrying her toward Monday the way a current carries a leaf, not by pushing it, but by never once stopping.