The cafeteria smelled of floor wax and reheated macaroni, that particular institutional staleness Pip knew down to her bones. She pushed through the double doors at 2:47 in the afternoon, her boots squeaking on the tile, and saw Wren Halliday already seated at the long table near the windows.
Wren had her notebook open, a ballpoint pen turning between her fingers. Three chairs waited across from her, still empty.
Pip dropped her backpack on the bench and dropped herself beside it. "They coming?"
"They're coming." Wren's voice was unhurried, the vowels stretching out the way coastal Mainers did when they were trying to look calm. "Coach Bryce said they'd be down from study hall in five minutes."
Pip sat. She watched Wren's pen turn. It was a nervous habit, she guessed, though Wren's face gave nothing away. The woman had been back in Hollow Bay less than a week and already she looked like she belonged to the place. Same sandy hair as the photographs on the Tideline walls. Same steady eyes that took in everything and gave back nothing.
"I should introduce myself, right?" Pip asked. "I'm not just lurking."
"You can lurk if you want." Wren's mouth twitched at the corner. "You're doing me a favor just being here. I don't know these kids."
"They know me. Mostly." Pip tugged at the cuff of her sleeve, where she'd rolled it twice. "I'm in the building all the time. People wave. They don't always remember my name."
"They'll remember you today." Wren's gaze flicked to the door. "You'll be the one taking notes."
"I thought you were taking notes."
"I'm taking the important notes. You're taking the ones that look unimportant." Wren slid a second notebook across the table, the cheap composition kind, its cover already soft from use. "Write down anything that surprises you. Anything that doesn't fit."
Pip took it. She unzipped her pencil case and found a mechanical pencil. The lead was dull, but it would do.
They waited. Pip heard the cafeteria clock tick. She heard someone drop a tray in the kitchen, the bright clang of metal on metal. She heard her own heart doing something complicated, because this was about Lila, and Lila was dead, and here they all were anyway, three days after the body had washed up in the kelp beds off Marrow Cove.
The first girl came through the door at 2:51. She had dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, a Tideline High letterman jacket, and the kind of tired eyes Pip recognized from the funeral.
"Maya Beck," Wren said quietly, for Pip's benefit. "Co-captain of the soccer team with Lila."
Maya sat. Her hands folded on the table like she was waiting for a teacher's lecture. She did not look at Pip. She did not look at anyone.
Then came the second girl, smaller, with one side of her head shaved and a sweater that looked hand-knit in colors Pip's grandmother would have called dust and moss. She sat next to Maya without greeting, eyes on her own shoes.
"June Halse," Wren murmured. "Lila's best friend since middle school."
The third girl arrived last, almost shy, sliding into the chair at the end. She had a sketchbook under her arm, and when she opened it on the table, Pip saw half-finished drawings of hands, fingers curled around nothing.
"Sasha Reade," Wren said. "Art kid. They shared a studio."
Three girls. Three girls who had known Lila Reyes better than almost anyone alive. Wren laid her pen down and folded her hands, and the small sound seemed to settle the room.
"Thank you for coming," Wren said. "I know this isn't easy."
Maya spoke first. "Is this about the police report?"
"This is about what you remember." Wren's voice was careful, the way Pip imagined a marine biologist might speak to a creature she did not want to startle. "I'm helping Detective Hallorann put together a timeline. The official version says Lila fell. We're trying to understand the unofficial version."
The three girls exchanged glances. Something passed between them that Pip couldn't read, some private language of shared grief that did not require translation.
"The festival," Wren said. "Saturday night. The clambake down at Tideline Park. When did you last see Lila there?"
Maya answered. "Around eleven. She said she was going to get her jacket from her car."
"Her car?"
"Her mom dropped her off. Mrs. Reyes left around nine, I think. Lila was supposed to drive herself home later."
Wren made a note. Pip watched the pen move. "Did she come back?"
"No." Maya's voice tightened. "We waited. We texted. She never came back."
"Did she seem upset when you saw her?"
Maya hesitated. June, the smaller girl, lifted her head for the first time.
"She got a phone call," June said. Her voice was low, almost hoarse. "Around quarter to eleven. She walked away from the bonfire to take it. When she came back, her face was..."
"Different," Sasha finished. She hadn't looked up from her sketchbook. "Like someone had turned a light off inside her. Like she was already somewhere else."
Wren wrote something. Pip's pencil hovered over her own notebook.
"Did you hear who it was?" Wren asked.
"No." Maya shook her head. "She didn't say. She just said she had to go."
"And she went." Wren's voice stayed level. "Toward the parking lot?"
"Toward the cliffs." June's voice cracked. "Her car was parked up by the lighthouse road. She said she'd walk. She said the air would do her good."
Pip felt something cold settle in her chest, a kind of weight that had nothing to do with temperature. The cliffs at Marrow Cove. The same stretch of ragged coastline where, three nights later, Lila's body would be found tangled in the kelp.
"What was she wearing?" Wren asked.
"Blue jacket," Sasha said. She finally looked up. Her eyes were red-rimmed, the kind of red that comes from days of not quite crying. "Her blue jacket with the patches. The one with the whale on the sleeve."
Pip knew that jacket. She'd seen it in the school hallway a hundred times. Lila Reyes had worn it like a flag, like armor, the way some kids wore their grief on the outside because they did not know how to carry it any other way.
"Did she say anything else?" Wren asked. "Anything at all before she left?"
June's hands were shaking in her lap. Maya put her arm around the smaller girl's shoulders without looking at her, the gesture automatic, practiced.
"She said, 'I'm sorry,'" June whispered. "She said it to nobody. Just to the air. And then she walked away."
The cafeteria clock ticked. Somewhere in the kitchen, a pot clanged. Pip thought of her aunt Maren, of the deposition tapes stored in the Tideline basement, of all the voices in cold recording that said things they never got to unsay.
"Was anyone with her when she walked off?" Wren asked.
Maya shook her head. "We thought she'd be back in ten minutes. We thought she just needed air."
"We didn't think," June said flatly. "That's the whole problem. We didn't think. We let her walk into the dark by herself."
Wren closed her notebook. She did not write anything for a long moment. Outside, the October light was already beginning to fade the way coastal light did, slow at first and then all at once, as if someone were turning a dimmer switch on the whole bay.
"Thank you," Wren said again. "If you remember anything else, you have my number."
The three girls stood. Maya pulled June up gently. Sasha gathered her sketchbook and held it against her chest like a shield. They walked out together, shoulders touching, and the cafeteria felt suddenly enormous and empty.
Pip let out a long breath. "Eleven o'clock. Angry phone call. Walking toward the cliffs."
"In a blue jacket," Wren added. "Alone."
"That's not a fall," Pip said. "Falls happen to people going down. Lila was going up."
Wren's pen tapped the table once, twice. "Tell me about the cliffs."
Pip blinked. "You're the one who grew up here."
"I grew up here and left. You're the one who's been paying attention." Wren gestured at the notebook. "Write it down. What do you know about Marrow Cove that the police report won't say?"
Pip wrote. The pencil moved slow at first, then faster.
"Black rock. Tidal pools on the west side. A path that runs along the cliff edge until it peters out near the old quarry road. No lights. No railings. The drop is about forty feet at the highest point, sixty at the lowest." She looked up. "Locals don't go up there at night. Not unless they want to be alone."
"Did Lila want to be alone?"
Pip thought about that. She thought about the blue jacket, about the phone call, about the words I'm sorry spoken to no one. "I don't know. Maybe. Or maybe she wanted someone to follow her and nobody did."
Wren nodded slowly. She tucked her notebook into her jacket and stood, the chair scraping against the tile.
"Where do we go now?" Pip asked.
"Now," Wren said, "we find out who called her. And we find out what she had to be sorry about."
Pip gathered her backpack and followed Wren toward the door. The hallway beyond the cafeteria was quieter than usual, the kind of quiet that came in the last hour of the school day, when most students had already drifted toward the parking lot or the field.
"My aunt has the festival committee's contact list from that night," Pip said. "She files everything. It's probably in the Tideline basement."
"Your aunt files everything."
"She once found a rental agreement from 1987 under a box of typewriter ribbons."
Wren made a small sound that might have been a laugh. "Then we start in the basement."
Outside, the sky over Hollow Bay had gone the color of old pewter, and the gulls were already wheeling toward the harbor. Pip thought of Lila walking along that clifftop three nights ago, the blue jacket bright against the dark, the phone call still ringing in her ears.
Somewhere in that walk was the truth. Pip could feel it the way she could feel a tide coming in, a slow and certain pull.
She just had to find it before the tide went out again.
The walk from the cafeteria to the Tideline took twelve minutes if Pip cut behind the hardware store and through the empty lot where the summer flea market used to set up. She took that route now without thinking about it, her sneakers finding the familiar cracks in the asphalt, her arms swinging at her sides. Wren walked beside her, slightly out of rhythm, her longer legs forcing a slower pace that made her look like she was wading through something thicker than air.
Pip did not speak. The thing she had remembered in the cafeteria, the pickup truck, sat in the back of her head like a stone she had swallowed and could not cough up. She kept turning it over, trying to read what was written on its underside.
The bait shop came into view, its plywood cutout of a grinning cod swinging on a rusted hinge above the door. The smell of brine and old burlap drifted out across the sidewalk. Pip slowed, then stopped.
"Wren."
Wren turned. Her hair had come loose from its clip, dark strands curving against her jaw. "What?"
"Something I saw. The night of the festival. I think I forgot to mention it."
Wren waited. The street was quiet around them, only the muffled thud of music from inside the shop and the distant clang of halyards against mast at the marina.
"I wasn't going to," Pip said. "I didn't think it mattered. But now I think it does."
They stepped off the sidewalk into the narrow alley that ran between the bait shop and the old five-and-dime, out of the wind and the sightline of anyone who might walk past. Wren leaned her shoulder against the brick wall. Her eyes did not leave Pip's face.
"Tell me."
Pip took a breath. She could see it clearly now, the way you could see a photograph once you stopped squinting at the light. The dunk tank at the Lobster Bake was set up on the east lawn of the pier pavilion, a plywood booth with a cistern of water beneath it and a yellow wooden target. She had been volunteering there since she was twelve, mostly because her aunt Maren had a soft spot for the Rotary club and could always be persuaded to put Pip's name on a sign-up sheet. Pip did not love the dunk tank. The water was always too cold, and the men who threw the baseballs were always too loud, and by the third hour her shoulder ached from retrieving the balls out of the netting.
But three nights ago, around eight o'clock, she had walked around the back of the booth to refill the cooler from the hose bib. That was when she saw Lila Reyes.
The blue jacket. The braid. The way Lila had glanced over her shoulder like she was counting the seconds until she could leave.
Lila had not been at the dunk tank. She had been past it, by the wooden railing that separated the lawn from the gravel parking lot beyond. There was a truck there, parked at an angle with its nose pointed toward the road, the way people parked when they were not intending to stay. Gray. A pickup truck, single cab, with a dent in the rear fender that Pip had noticed because her own father's truck had a similar dent and she always looked at dents.
Lila had walked to the passenger side. She had climbed in. The truck had sat there for another minute, its exhaust curling white in the cool night air, and then it had pulled out onto the harbor road and turned left, away from the festival, away from the crowds.
"I was hiding the hose bib behind the plywood," Pip said. "So I wasn't exactly in view. But I saw her get in."
Wren's mouth tightened. "Did you see who was driving?"
"No. The windshield was too high. And it was dark on that side, the pavilion lights were behind me. But I saw the truck. And I saw the plate."
She could still see it, smeared and partial, the way mud on a mirror made a face half-familiar and half-strange. The first three characters had been clear. M, then E, then another letter she thought was a B but could not swear was not a P. The rest of the plate had been a brown blur, like wet clay dragged sideways.
"M-E-something," Pip said. "The rest was mud. I remember thinking I should write it down, and then someone called from the booth that they needed more balls, and by the time I got back the truck was gone."
Wren was quiet for a long moment. She had taken her notebook back out, and her pen moved in small, precise strokes across the page. The alley smelled of fish oil and cold concrete. Somewhere a radio inside the bait shop shifted from a country song to a weather report.
"M-E-B or M-E-P," Wren said.
"Maybe. Or something else. I only got a real clear look at the M and the E. The third one might have been an eight or a three, I don't know. It was just smudged."
"But the truck itself. You remember the truck."
"Gray. Older model. The dent in the rear fender, on the passenger side. The dent was like a U shape, like someone had backed into a post."
Wren wrote that down too. Her hand paused over the page. She looked up, and Pip saw something cross her face that she could not name, something between hunger and dread.
"Pip. You didn't tell the police this."
"No."
"Why not?"
Pip felt the heat rise in her cheeks. She had asked herself the same question a hundred times since Lila's name had been in the paper, and the answer had only gotten worse with the asking. She had not told the police because she had been afraid. Not of being disbelieved. Of being believed, and of what that would make her. She had been the last person, as far as she knew, to see Lila alive. She had seen Lila get into a stranger's truck. If she told anyone that, the next question would be the one she could not answer: why had Lila gotten into the truck. And after that would come the question she could not even bear to think about: what had happened next.
"I don't know," Pip said. It was the truth and not the truth. "It didn't seem important then. It seemed like she just knew someone from town."
"But you remember the plate."
"I remember the plate."
They looked at each other. The wind shifted, bringing a sharper bite off the water, and Pip smelled the harbor the way she always did at this time of year, cold and iron and faintly of weed rotting on the rocks at low tide.
"We need to find that truck," Wren said.
"It's been three days."
"Trucks last longer than people."
Pip did not know if that was meant to be a joke or a kind of bleak observation, but it sent a small, cold wave down her back. Wren folded the notebook shut and tucked it into the pocket of her jacket. She pushed off the wall and started walking again, and Pip followed, her mind still turning over the image of the gray truck and the mud-smeared plate and the curve of Lila's braid disappearing behind the passenger door.
The Tideline Historical Society occupied the first floor of an old bank building on Center Street, its facade of cracked granite lit by a single brass lantern that had not worked since Pip was a small child. Her aunt Maren had a key on a long leather cord that she wore around her neck when she was working, and another one on a steel ring that lived in a ceramic bowl shaped like a cod, just inside the front door. Pip let them in. The smell of the place hit her as soon as the door swung open: old paper, lemon oil, the dust that gathered on the spines of books nobody opened.
The front room was dim. Afternoon light filtered through two tall windows that faced the street, falling in pale rectangles across the floor. Display cases lined the walls, holding lobster traps, sepia photographs of fishing crews, a glass jar of scrimshaw Pip had once been forbidden to touch. Behind the front room, a door led to a narrow stairwell that went down into the basement.
Pip led the way down. The stairs creaked under their feet, each step announcing itself with a different pitch. At the bottom, Wren flicked the light switch, and a long fluorescent tube stuttered to life along the ceiling, casting everything in a slightly greenish, underwater light.
The Tideline basement was not really a basement. It was the old bank vault, its walls three feet thick, its ceiling low and ribbed with iron beams. Maren Ostlund had turned it into an archive. Filing cabinets stood in rows along the walls, some metal, some wooden, each one labeled in her aunt's careful, slanted hand: FESTIVAL RECORDS, TOWN MEETING MINUTES, CEMETERY PLOT INDEX, CENSUS 1900-1940, TIDELINE PRESS CLIPPINGS. There were cardboard boxes too, some labeled, some not. A wooden table stood in the middle of the room with two folding chairs and a lamp that did not work because the bulb had burned out and Maren had forgotten to replace it.
"Festival committee contact list," Wren said.
"Festival committee contact list," Pip agreed.
She went to the cabinet labeled FESTIVAL RECORDS and pulled the second drawer. It resisted for a moment, then slid open with a metallic groan. Inside were manila folders arranged by year, each one tagged with a small printed label. Pip ran her finger along the spines: 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023. She pulled the 2023 folder and set it on the table.
Inside were meeting minutes, a budget spreadsheet printed on green paper, a flyer for the dunk tank that someone had drawn a cartoon lobster on, and a single sheet of typing paper with the committee contact list. Twenty-three names. Local numbers mostly, one or two cell numbers, addresses where listed.
Pip set it in front of Wren. Wren pulled the desk lamp closer and bent over the sheet, her hair falling forward.
"Gray pickup, M-E-something," Wren murmured. "That's going to narrow it down."
Pip sat down in one of the folding chairs. The metal was cold through her jeans. She watched Wren's finger travel down the list, name by name, and she thought about the truck sitting in the dark behind the pavilion, the mud on its plate, the way Lila had glanced over her shoulder before she opened the door.
She thought about the dent in the rear fender. U-shaped, like someone had backed into a post.
She thought about the boardwalk, the blue jacket on the rail, the phone pressed to Lila's ear. I'm sorry.
Something in her chest tightened, the way a rope tightens when you pull on it without meaning to. She wanted to tell Wren about the feeling she had at the cafeteria, the way the words had risen in her throat like a tide. But the words were not ready yet. They were still forming, somewhere below the surface, in the cold dark water.
Wren looked up from the list.
"Twenty-three names," she said. "And one of them is going to know something about that truck."
Pip nodded. The fluorescent tube above them buzzed faintly, and somewhere above their heads the floorboards of the Tideline creaked once, as if the building were shifting in its sleep.
Pip watched Wren's finger pause on the committee list, then move to her phone lying face-up on the desk. The screen had gone dark. Wren tapped it awake and scrolled through something with her thumb, her lips moving slightly as she read.
"I asked Etta to pull Lila's cell records an hour ago," Wren said. "She knows a guy at the sheriff's office. Nothing official, just the kind of favor people do when someone's dead and nobody wants to wait."
Pip said nothing. She understood that kind of favor. The small-town machinery that turned when grief turned the gears.
Wren turned the phone so Pip could see the screen. A log of texts, times, numbers. Most were to known contacts: Etta, a sister in Portland, a coworker at the Tideline. But one entry sat near the bottom, time-stamped in pale gray numerals.
11:14 PM. Unknown number.
Wren tapped the message thread. It opened to a single outgoing text from Lila's phone, sent at that minute, to a number with no name attached.
I know what the Pierces did.
Pip read it twice. The words did not change. They sat on the screen like stones dropped into still water, and the stillness they made was the kind that happened before a wave came back.
"The Pierces," Wren said. Her voice had gone flat. Not angry. Not yet. Something before anger, something that had not decided what shape to take.
"Who are the Pierces?" Pip asked.
Wren set the phone down on the typing paper, beside the committee list. She pressed her palms flat on the desk, the way you press your hands against a wall when the room tilts.
"Old family," she said. "Been here longer than the granite. Half the harbor frontage, half the moorings, the cannery that shut down in ninety-eight. Lila had been digging. I didn't know how deep until now."
Pip thought of Lila at the boardwalk, the phone pressed to her ear. I'm sorry. The words had not been a confession. They had been a warning.
"What did they do?" Pip asked.
"I don't know yet." Wren picked up the phone again, turned it over in her hand. "But Lila did. And somebody on the other end of that text knew she knew."
The fluorescent tube above them buzzed, and the floorboards creaked again, higher up this time, as if someone were walking the Tideline's second floor in shoes that did not fit. Neither of them moved to check. Some sounds you leave alone.
Wren straightened. She slid the phone into her back pocket, gathered the committee list, folded it once, and tucked it into the front of her jacket.
"We need to go back," she said.
"Back where?"
"The festival grounds. Before it gets light."
---
The drive took seven minutes. Pip sat in the passenger seat of Wren's old Subaru with her knees pulled up, her chin resting on them, watching the road unspool in the headlights. The radio was off. The heater clicked and sighed. Somewhere past the cannery, a dog was barking in a way that sounded like it would never stop.
Wren did not speak. Her hands were steady on the wheel, but her jaw worked once, twice, the way a jaw works when someone is keeping words behind their teeth.
Pip thought of the silver earring she had noticed three days ago on Etta's desk, the one Etta had said belonged to her mother. She thought of Iris Halliday, twenty-six years gone, the woman Wren would not talk about except in the small oblique ways people use when they are not ready to speak directly. Pip had seen the photograph in the Tideline archive, Iris standing on the town dock in a yellow slicker, her hand raised against the salt glare, smiling in the way people smile when they do not know what is coming.
The harbor rose into view, then the parking lot, then the dark hump of the festival grounds beyond. Wren pulled in beside the chain-link and killed the engine. The quiet that followed was the kind that has texture, the hum of insects in the grass, the slow knock of halyards against a mast somewhere down at the marina.
They got out. The air smelled of fryer oil and wet canvas and the faint vegetal rot of late summer. Pip's sneakers were cold through the cuffs of her jeans.
The festival grounds were empty. The rides were still. A string of pennants hung slack from the pavilion roof, the colors gone to gray in the dark. The dunk tank sat at the near edge of the midway, its seat raised, the water inside it a black mirror that gave back nothing.
Wren walked the perimeter with her flashlight, the beam skating across trampled grass and crumpled napkins and the bright cellophane of something that had been a lollipop. Pip drifted toward the dunk tank, not sure why. Her feet knew before her head did. They carried her along the side of the tank, past the wooden ramp where the thrower stood, to the strip of trampled grass that ran along its back.
She crouched. The flashlight from across the way caught the chrome of the tank and threw a slice of white light across the grass at her feet. In that slice she saw it. A small bright shape caught between two blades, half-hidden in the thatch.
She reached down and picked it up.
A silver earring. A small hoop, the kind you sleep in, the kind you forget you are wearing. Tarnished slightly at the clasp but otherwise plain. No stone. No ornament. The kind of thing a woman puts on in the morning and does not think about again until evening.
Pip stood up with it pinched between her thumb and forefinger. The metal was cold. It smelled of nothing.
Wren came over, her flashlight beam dropping to Pip's hand. She did not say anything for a long moment. The light held the earring steady, and the earring held the light back, and somewhere in the harbor a bell on a buoy began to ring, faint and even, the way bells ring when there is no wind to carry them away.
"Where was it?" Wren asked.
"Beside the tank. In the grass."
Wren took the earring from her. She turned it over in her fingers. She looked at it the way her mother must have looked at specimens, the way you look at a thing when you are trying to read what it has swallowed.
"This isn't Lila's," Wren said. "Lila wore studs. Tiny gold ones. I've seen her at committee meetings for two years."
Pip thought of the woman in the blue jacket on the boardwalk. The earring she had not seen, because the woman had been turned half away, and the phone had been pressed to her ear, and the jacket had been pulled up at the collar as if the woman were cold.
"Who wears hoops like this?" Pip asked.
"Everybody," Wren said. "Every woman in town over forty." She closed her fist around the earring. "Which means it means nothing. And it means everything."
A car passed on the road behind them, its headlights sweeping once across the midway and then gone. In that brief illumination Pip saw the pavilion clearly, the closed booths, the dented trash cans, the puddles from the spilled lemonade catching the light like small flat coins. Then the dark came back, and the dunk tank was a black shape again, and the grass at their feet was only grass.
"Iris wore hoops like that," Wren said.
Pip looked at her. Wren's face was turned away, toward the harbor, where the first gray suggestion of dawn had begun to gather along the waterline.
"My mother," Wren said. "She wore a pair every day of her life. Silver. Small. She lost one the summer she drowned. I remember because I found the other one in her jewelry box years later, and I kept it, and I do not know why."
The buoy bell rang again, faint and even. Pip thought of the photograph in the Tideline archive, Iris in the yellow slicker, her hand raised. She thought of Lila Reyes on a tape somewhere in a filing cabinet, her voice flat and recorded, saying what she knew. She thought of the earring in Wren's closed fist, cold and ordinary and twenty-six years old or maybe three days old, she could not tell.
"What do we do?" Pip asked.
Wren opened her fist. She looked at the earring lying in her palm, the way a person looks at a key when they are not sure which door it fits.
"We start at the beginning," she said. "We find out what Lila knew. We find out who she told. We find out what the Pierces did that was worth killing for." She closed her hand again. "And we do it before whoever she texted that night decides we are next."
They walked back to the car without speaking. The dawn was coming in slow, gray and salt-heavy, the way dawn comes to a harbor town when the tide is going out. Pip climbed into the passenger seat and pulled the door shut. The Subaru smelled of coffee and old wool and the faint green of the sea.
Wren started the engine. The heater clicked and sighed. The headlights came on and cut two pale channels through the dark.
Pip looked back once, at the festival grounds shrinking in the side mirror, the dunk tank a small black shape against the gray. She thought of a hand reaching for a railing and missing. She thought of a text sent at 11:14 PM to a number with no name. She thought of a silver hoop caught in the grass, waiting to be found by whoever knew to look.
The road ahead was empty. The buoy bell rang once more behind them, and then the sound fell away, and there was only the engine, and the heater, and the slow brightening of the sky.