Tideline: Iriss Shadow

The basement stairs began at the back of the sheriff's processing room, behind a door painted the same tired beige as the walls, and descended into a cold that smelled of wet stone and forgotten paper.

Wren paused at the top, one hand on the metal rail, and listened. Somewhere below, a pipe ticked. A slow drip hit concrete in a rhythm she could almost count. The air that drifted up the stairwell carried the particular staleness of a space that had not been properly aired in years, the kind of smell that lived in old carpets and cardboard boxes pressed against basement walls.

"Basement's got lights on the left," Sheriff Dale Mercer had told her, fifteen minutes earlier, when she had walked into the front office and asked about her mother's file. He had not asked why she wanted it. He had not looked surprised. He had only lifted one heavy hand toward the hallway that led to the processing room, and said, "Box should be marked. I'll be up here."

She had thanked him. He had nodded and turned back to his computer, where a game of solitaire was paused on the screen. His eyes had been the color of shallow harbor water, and they had held nothing she could read.

The first step creaked under her weight. The second was quieter. The third gave nothing at all. She counted seven steps to the bottom, where the concrete floor was patched and older than the rest of the building, and the single bulb in its wire cage threw a yellow circle that did not quite reach the corners.

Two metal shelving units stood against the far wall, each loaded with banker boxes, some brown, some grey, all of them stamped with dates in black marker. The earliest she could read in the half-light was 1987. The most recent was last spring.

She walked the length of the first shelf, running her fingertip along the box edges. Dust puffed up with each touch, fine and pale, and it settled on her sleeve and stayed. The temperature in the basement sat somewhere just above what her grandmother used to call the kind of cold that finds the bones.

Cold case, she thought. Not what he had called it. He had said missing persons.

The boxes were organized chronologically, then alphabetically. She found the H stack on the second shelf, third row down. HALLOWAY. HALL. HALLIDAY.

The HALLIDAY box was small. Brown cardboard, no tape, the flaps folded into each other the way someone had packed it once and never reopened it. A strip of label tape ran across the top in handwriting she did not recognize, and on it, in blue ballpoint, was written: HALLIDAY, IRIS. 2014. ACCIDENTAL DROWNING.

She pulled it down. It weighed almost nothing.

Upstairs, through the floorboards, she heard Dale's chair creak. The slow tick of a wall clock. The faint murmur of a radio tuned to a station that played country oldies between weather reports.

She set the box on the floor and crouched beside it. Her knees pressed against the cold concrete. She worked her thumb under the flap and peeled it open.

Inside, a single manila folder, three hole-punched sheets of typing paper clipped to its left edge. Seven pages total, she counted, fanning them with one careful finger. Three of those pages were statements, transcribed in the same blocky print that had marked the box label. One page was a death certificate. One was a missing persons report. One was a tide chart for the week of the drowning. The last was a hand-drawn sketch of the cove, copied from a larger nautical chart, with a small X marked in pencil.

No photographs. No lab work. No map of the shoreline. No list of items recovered from the water. No autopsy beyond the death certificate, which named the cause as accidental drowning and listed no secondary factors.

She read the first statement twice.

Statement of witness Etta Vance, age 63, taken June 14, 2014, at the Tideline Sheriff's Station, by Deputy D. Mercer. Witness states that on the evening of June 12, 2014, at approximately 8:45 p.m., she observed Iris Halliday walking along the cove path toward the water. Witness states that Ms. Halliday appeared to be in a normal state of mind and walking at a normal pace. Witness states that she called out to Ms. Halliday, who waved and continued walking. Witness states that she did not see Ms. Halliday enter the water. Witness states that she returned to her residence and went to bed.

Wren turned the page. The second statement was from a man named Lawrence Pickering, a lobsterman who had pulled Iris's body from the water at six the following morning. He had been out checking traps. He had seen her face down between two rocks near the southern point of the cove. He had called it in on his radio. His statement was three lines long and ended with his signature.

The third statement was from a man named Calvin Brookline, who said he had been at the Tideline Inn that evening and had seen Iris at the bar around seven. She had ordered a gin and tonic. She had not appeared drunk. She had left alone at some point he could not pinpoint. He had assumed she had walked home.

Three statements. Seven pages. A death certificate and a tide chart.

She sat back on her heels and looked at the folder in her lap. The basement was very quiet. The pipe had stopped ticking. The drip had slowed to once every several seconds, a soft punctuation that came and went.

Seven pages, she thought. That was all that was left of her mother's death on paper.

She had expected more. She had not known she had expected more until just now, when the size of the folder had registered as a kind of insult, the kind of thing that lived in the back of the throat and would not come up.

Statement of witness Etta Vance. Her mother's closest friend, the woman who had stood beside her at the funeral and held her hand for an hour afterward in the back pew of the Tideline Methodist Church, had given three short paragraphs and called it a night.

Calvin Brookline. She did not know the name. She turned the statement over in her mind, looking for a face. Nothing surfaced.

She read the tide chart. High tide on the night of June 12, 2014, had been at 9:12 p.m., four feet eleven inches above mean lower low water. The wind had been out of the southwest at twelve knots. There had been no storm. There had been, according to the chart's margin notes in someone else's handwriting, a half-moon and calm seas.

She closed the folder and rested her hand on top of it. The cardboard was cool and pocked with tiny bumps where the glue had not set evenly.

From upstairs, the radio changed songs. A woman began to sing about a heart that would not mend. Dale's chair creaked again. He had not come down to check on her. He had said he would be up here, and he was.

She opened the folder again. She wanted to see the death certificate more closely.

Name of deceased: Iris Marie Halliday. Date of birth: March 3, 1962. Date of death: June 13, 2014. Cause of death: drowning. Manner of death: accident. Place of death: Tideline Cove, Tideline, Maine. Pronouncing physician: Dr. Samuel Greene, Tideline Family Medicine. Medical examiner: Dr. Lydia Fossett, Maine Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

Dr.

Dr. Lydia Fossett, Maine Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. The name was printed in block capitals, uniform and official, the ink a slightly different blue than the rest of the certificate, as though the typewriter ribbon had been changed for that line alone. Pip read it twice. She did not know Dr. Fossett. She did not know Dr. Greene, either, though the Tideline Family Medicine practice had been on the corner of Harbor Road and Elm for as long as Pip could remember. She remembered the green awning, the brass bell over the door, the small reception desk where a woman with reading glasses had once given her a cherry lollipop when she was six and had come in for a splinter.

Pip looked up. The attic room smelled of cedar and old newsprint, and somewhere beyond the wall behind her, a floorboard ticked as it cooled. She bent again to the certificate.

Funeral establishment: Haskins and Sons, Tideline. Disposition: cremation. Date of disposition: June 18, 2014.

Cremation. Pip had not known that. She had not been to a funeral. She had been twenty-three and in her second year at the Portland Press Herald, and Wren had called her on a Wednesday morning in the middle of June, and Pip had driven up to Tideline that same afternoon, and the service had been on Friday at the Tideline Methodist Church. She had stood in the back pew beside Etta Vance and watched the closed casket at the front, draped in white linen, and she had not questioned it. She had assumed, as one assumes about such things, that there was a body inside. She had assumed wrong, or she had assumed nothing, and now, eleven years later, she was reading the truth of it in a stranger's neat block capitals on yellowing paper.

There had been no body. There had been identification made by dental records, according to a smaller slip clipped to the back of the certificate, a single sheet typed on different paper, lighter, with a different machine. The slip gave the date of identification as June 14, 2014, the day after the death certificate was filed, and it named the identifier as Dr. Greene.

Dr. Greene had identified a body that was not a body, by teeth. Pip set the slip down.

The folder beneath it was thinner. It was a different color, manila rather than gray, and the tab at the top read, in pencil, in a hand she did not recognize, Witness Statements. She opened it.

There were three sheets. The first was dated September 16, 1987, and the typed header at the top of the page read, in spaced capitals, TIDELINE POLICE DEPARTMENT, WITNESS STATEMENT. The name of the witness, in the box at the top left, was Ruth Pickering. The address given was 14 Marrow Lane, Tideline, Maine.

Pip read the date twice. September 1987. Twenty-seven years before Iris Marie Halliday had drowned in Tideline Cove. Twenty-seven years before Wren had stood at the back of the Tideline Methodist Church and held Pip's hand so tightly that Pip had felt the bones of her fingers through the skin.

The statement was short. Ruth Pickering, age sixty-three at the time of the statement, had reported that on the evening of September 14, 1987, she had been walking her dog along the cliff path above Marrow Cove, the same path that ran past the Halliday cottage, at approximately eight o'clock. She had seen a young girl standing near the wooden railing at the overlook. The girl had been alone. After a few minutes, a man had approached her from the direction of the parking area. The man had been wearing dark coveralls. The girl had gone with him. They had walked together along the path toward the cove, and Ruth Pickering had watched them until they disappeared around the bend in the trail near the old boathouse.

Pip turned the page. The second sheet was a typed transcript of a follow-up interview, dated October 3, 1987, conducted by an officer whose name was struck through with a single line of black marker. The witness had been asked to describe the man in greater detail. She had said he was tall. She had said he was broad through the shoulders. She had said his hair had been dark. She had said she had not seen his face. She had said the coveralls had been the kind worn by men who worked on boats or in garages, and that there had been something in the breast pocket, but she had not been able to make out what.

The witness had been asked whether the girl had appeared distressed. She had said no. She had said the girl had walked beside the man as though she knew him. She had said they had been walking at an even pace, not hurrying, not lingering. She had said the dog had barked once, and the man had looked back over his shoulder, and the girl had put her hand on his arm as though to reassure him, or to reassure the dog, or both.

The third sheet was a missing persons form. The name at the top was Iris Halliday. The date of birth was given as March 3, 1973. The age was fourteen. The date last seen was September 14, 1987. The location last seen was Marrow Cove overlook. The reporting person was listed as Jonas Halliday, father. The case number, in red ink at the top right, was 87-0419.

Pip set the page down on the floor beside her. The wood was cool through the thin cotton of her slacks. From downstairs, she heard the radio shift again, a man this time, singing something about a long road and a hard wind. Dale's chair creaked once and then was silent.

March 3, 1973. Iris Halliday, age fourteen, missing from Marrow Cove on the night of September 14, 1987, last seen in the company of a man in dark coveralls whose face the witness could not describe. A lead never followed, or so the absence of any further pages in the folder suggested. No arrest. No charge. No follow-up interview with the man. No second witness. No body.

The Iris Halliday who had drowned eleven years ago had been born in 1962. She had been fifty-two when she died. She had been twenty-five in 1987, the year the girl at Marrow Cove had vanished. The two women could not have been the same person.

Pip looked at the folder in her lap. She looked at the certificate on the floor. She looked at the slip of paper that said cremation, the slip that said identification by dental records.

She picked up the missing persons form again. The reporting person was Jonas Halliday, father. Pip did not know a Jonas Halliday. She had known Wren's grandfather only as Granddad Halliday, a quiet man with a white mustache who had died when Wren was nine and who had smelled, in Pip's single clear memory of him, of pipe tobacco and of the wool of the sweater he had always worn, even in summer. Jonas. The name on the form was Jonas.

She thought of Wren's mother, the Iris she had known, who had been slight and fair and who had painted seascapes on scraps of driftwood that she sold at the Saturday market in summer. She thought of the closed casket at the front of the Tideline Methodist Church. She thought of the dental records, of the body that was not a body, of the certificate that had been filed the day after the identification had been made.

She thought of the 1987 girl, fourteen, vanished from the same cliffs. She thought of the man in the dark coveralls, broad through the shoulders, dark-haired, whose face no one had been able to see.

From below, the song ended. The radio hissed for a moment in the silence between stations, and then a woman's voice came on, calm and professional, beginning to read the noon news from Bangor. Pip heard Dale's chair creak as he stood. She heard his footsteps cross the kitchen floor, slow and heavy on the old boards. She heard the tap run, and a glass fill, and the tap shut off, and the footsteps again, this time toward the foot of the attic stairs.

She gathered the pages together and put them back in the manila folder. She put the folder back in the cardboard box. She closed the lid.

The footsteps on the stairs stopped halfway up.

on the stairs stopped halfway up. Pip sat very still on the floor of the attic, the cardboard box beside her, the manila folder inside it, her hands resting on her knees. The attic smelled of cedar shavings and mouse droppings and the faint sweet decay of old wallpaper paste. A draft moved through the louvered gable vent, and somewhere below a door banged softly against its frame.

"I know you're up there," Dale said. His voice was flat, unsurprised, the voice of a man who had not been fooled by a minute of silence. "I can see the dust you kicked up on the stair. Etta's place hasn't had a footprint on those treads in six years."

Pip did not answer. She listened to the boards creak as he shifted his weight, and then the creaking resumed, and he came the rest of the way up. He filled the narrow stairwell, his shoulders brushing both sides, and when he stepped into the attic his head ducked under the crossbeam. He stood there in his shirtsleeves, the glass of water still in one hand, and looked at her. He looked at the box. He looked at the lid that was not quite flush.

"You're Etta's girl," he said. Not a question.

"Her niece."

"She told me you were coming. Said you'd want to settle the cottage. Said you wouldn't make trouble." He took a sip of the water, watching her over the rim of the glass. "She was wrong about one of those things, I figure."

"I haven't made any trouble. I was looking for the deed to the property. The one Etta mentioned isn't in the downstairs file box."

"The deed's in the dresser. Bottom drawer, under the quilt." He said it without hesitation, the way a man says something he has been asked before. Then he set the glass down on a stack of National Geographics and crossed his arms. "But you didn't come up here for the deed."

Pip said nothing.

"You came up here because you heard me on the radio. Because you wanted to know what was in those boxes. And because you're Etta's niece, and Etta's niece has a name I haven't heard spoken out loud in this house in thirty-one years."

He waited. The attic vent whined in a gust.

"Halliday," Pip said.

Dale nodded. The creases at the corners of his mouth deepened. "Wren Halliday came to see me this morning. Walked into the station with salt on her boots and a question in her mouth that she'd been carrying on the bus from Portland. Asked me about her mother's case. Asked me why the boxes were in my attic instead of in the clerk's vault where they belonged." He paused. "Asked me why nobody ever found a body."

"And what did you tell her?"

"I told her what I tell everybody." His voice was level, practiced, a man's voice that had learned long ago to keep its edges tucked. "That Iris Halliday went swimming off the north cliffs on the night of October fourteenth, 1987, and that the tide took her, and that we searched for three days and found nothing because the sea gives back what it chooses and keeps what it chooses, and that what it kept that night was a woman who had no business being on those rocks in the dark."

"You didn't search the cove."

"We searched the cove. We searched the tidal flats. We dragged. We walked the shoreline for a mile in either direction. The Coast Guard came out from Boothbay with their helicopter and their sonar and they found nothing."

"You didn't search inside the cave."

The silence that followed had weight. It pressed against the sloped ceiling of the attic, filled the spaces between the cardboard boxes, made the dust motes hang motionless in the slanted light. Dale's face did not change, but his eyes did. They went flat, the way a man's eyes go flat when he has been waiting for a question he knew was coming and had hoped would not.

"Which cave?" he said.

"The one at the base of the north cliffs. The one the locals call the Throat."

"There is no cave marked on any chart of that stretch."

"There is no cave marked on any chart because the entrance is underwater at high tide and the chart was drawn in 1953 when the datum was different. But there is a cave. I know because I was in it when I was nine years old, and because Pip Halliday was in it when she was seven, and because a man in dark coveralls came out of it the night that Iris went in the water and nobody has ever asked him what he was doing there."

Dale set his glass down very carefully on the stack of magazines. He did not look away from her. "Who are you?"

"I'm the girl who watched the man in the coveralls walk away from the cliffs. I'm the girl who has spent thirty-one years deciding she was wrong about what she saw. I'm Etta Vance's niece. And I'm here to settle the cottage, which I intend to do, and while I'm here I intend to look at the contents of those boxes, with your permission or without it, because you have just admitted to a federal investigator that you kept evidence out of the clerk's vault for thirty-one years, and that admission is on a recording that is being transcribed as we speak."

He did not flinch. He had the stillness of a man who had considered the possibility and weighed it against the alternatives and decided to stand where he was standing. "You are not a federal investigator."

"No. I am a woman who makes phone calls. The federal investigator is in her car, two miles down the road, on a prepaid cell, and she will stay on that phone until I tell her to get off it, or until I stop being able to talk. Which happens soon if you don't sit down."

He looked at her for a long time. Then he pulled a wooden crate from under the eaves and turned it upside down and sat. The boards groaned under him. He put his hands on his knees and he looked at the boxes, all eleven of them, lined up against the knee wall like coffins laid out for viewing.

"Hayes," he said.

"What?"

"Lead detective on the case. Out of the county. Big man, loud voice, wore a hat that was too small for him. He worked the scene for six weeks. He pulled the boxes. He interviewed the witnesses. He was the one who decided to call it an accidental drowning after we found her clothes on the rocks and her shoes paired neatly beside them, because Iris Halliday was a woman who did everything neatly, even the things that didn't deserve neatness." Dale stopped. He rubbed one hand across his jaw. The rasp of stubble was audible in the quiet of the attic. "He retired in February of eighty-eight. Mid-case. Walked into my office on a Tuesday morning and put his badge and his service weapon on my desk and said he was done. Said he'd been advised by his doctor. Said he was moving to his sister's place in Arizona. I never saw him again. I never heard from him again. I have not, in thirty-one years, been able to locate a forwarding address."

"And the file?"

"The file was on his desk the day he left. Half the boxes were in his trunk. The rest were in the evidence locker at the station. I boxed them up myself in March of eighty-eight, because the clerk asked me what I wanted done with them, and because nobody at the state level was returning my calls, and because the family had stopped asking. I brought them here. Etta let me use the attic. That is the whole truth of it."

"Wren Halliday is downstairs," Pip said.

"I know."

"She wants to look at them."

"I know that too."

"And you're going to let her."

Dale was quiet for a long time. The attic vent whined. A car passed on the road below, its tires hissing on the wet asphalt. The sound faded and left the house creaking around them, a wooden body settling into its old age. He looked at Pip, and for the first time she saw something in his face that was not wariness. It was exhaustion. It was the face of a man who had been carrying a particular weight for a very long time and had just felt someone lift one corner of it.

"I'm going to let her look at the boxes," he said. "I'm going to be in the room when she looks at them. And I'm going to tell her the same thing I'm going to tell you, which is that the bay has taken a great deal from a great many people over the years, and that the bay does not like to be reminded of what it has taken, and that the women of this town who have lost someone to the water have a way of finding out about it when somebody starts pulling at old threads, and that finding out does not bring anybody back and does, on occasion, cause harm that cannot be undone."

He stood. The crate rocked on the floorboards and then settled.

"Don't stir the bay," he said. "That's all I ask. Don't stir it."

He walked to the stairs and went down. Pip heard him cross the kitchen. She heard him speak to Wren in a voice too low to make out the words. She heard Wren's voice answer, and Etta's voice after that, and then the back door opened and closed and the kitchen was quiet.

Pip sat in the attic for a long time. The sun moved across the floor in a slow rectangle of light. The boxes waited against the wall. The vent whined. Somewhere outside a gull cried once and then was silent. She thought of Iris Halliday, slight and fair, painting seascapes on scraps of driftwood. She thought of the closed casket. She thought of the cave at the base of the north cliffs with its mouth below the tideline. She thought of the man in the dark coveralls.

She stood. She brushed the dust from her knees. She walked to the top of the stairs and looked down into the kitchen, where Wren Halliday was sitting at the table with her hands wrapped around a mug of tea, and Etta was standing at the counter with her back to the room, and the afternoon light was coming in through the window above the sink and falling on the linoleum in a long pale stripe.

"Come up," Pip said.

Wren looked up. Her face was tired. Her eyes were clear.

"I want to show you what's in the boxes," Pip said. "I think your mother would want you to see."

Wren set the mug down. She pushed back her chair. She stood, and she came to the foot of the stairs, and she put her hand on the newel post, and she began to climb.