Serena's POV
I manage forty minutes of lunch before I leave the table.
It's a very good lunch. Poached salmon, new potatoes, a green sauce Tessa's cook has made for twenty years. Augustus is gracious. Caleb is funny in the wrong places. Vance eats one piece of fish with surgical care and watches me over the rim of his glass.
I say excuse me, and walk out through the French windows, down the slope, past the boathouse and the long grey pier, and I don't stop until the house is out of sight behind the spruce.
Then I run.
The harbour at Camden is a mile and a half down the coast road. I do it in black court shoes and a funeral dress. Twice I nearly turn an ankle. A woman with a dog stares. A boy on a bike swerves to avoid me.
I don't care.
I could run to Nova Scotia.
At the end of the quay, tied up between a sailing yacht and a battered blue dory, is a dark-green lobster boat with a white wheelhouse and a name in peeling letters.
MARGUERITE.
An old man sits on an upturned crate on the deck, mending a trap.
He doesn't look up.
"Took you long enough, girl," says Abel Thorne.
I can't speak.
Something rises in my chest, large and cold and shapeless, like the swell before a wave.
I step onto the deck. The boat rocks. I put out one hand to the gunwale, and then both hands, and then I'm on my knees on the wet boards with my forehead against the old man's hands.
He doesn't say anything.
His hands are huge. They smell of bait and diesel and tar soap. They're warm, and rough as bark, and they settle, very gently, on the back of my head.
"There, now," says Abel. "There, now. Easy."
"I thought you'd be angry."
"Why?"
"I said I'd write."
"You did."
"I never did."
"You were busy." His voice is a low rumble. "You were being dead, a lot of the time. Takes it out of a person."
A sound comes out of me. It's half a laugh and half a sob. He lets me do it, the way you let a kettle boil.
When it's over, he hands me a rag. It's clean, mostly.
I blow my nose.
"You knew me," I say.
"The minute I saw you."
"How? My face..."
"Your face is a different face." He puts down the trap. "Ruth's a clever woman. She did her best work on you. If I'd passed you in the street, I'd have said, there's a nice lady who looks sad."
"But?"
"But you hold your head like your father." He considers me. "And you did that thing with your hands."
"What thing?"
"The thing where you try to pretend you're not shaking." He smiles, creased and gentle. "I've seen you do it sixty times, girl. In a kitchen. In a bed. You did it the night you came round and asked me where your husband was."
I close my eyes.
"I said he was dead," says Abel quietly. "I said so because the radio said so. I didn't know yet. I'm sorry."
"I know."
"And I never told you the rest."
"What rest?"
He looks at the water.
"That I saw him," says Abel.
The wind is cold off the harbour. Halyards clink against masts. Somewhere a gull is screaming at a bucket.
"I was on the Rockland pier, unloading. Twenty to ten. A man came tearing down the boards with a phone in his hand and the whole sky going white behind him. He didn't ask. He took the Marguerite off her mooring and put the throttle through the floor. My grandson Cal was shouting. I took the harbour skiff and went after."
I can't breathe.
"There was fire on the water for half a mile. And a man standing up in my boat, no jacket, no shoes, screaming a name."
"What name?"
"Yours."
I put my hand to my mouth.
"He went into the water four times. I counted. I got a line round him on the third. He broke it. On the fourth he was down a minute and forty seconds, and I thought, that's it. He came up with something black in his fist, laughing, out of his head. A piece of deck cushion."
"Abel..."
"I had to hit him with a boat hook to get him aboard." He rubs his jaw. "Twice. I've never been sorrier. Cal drove him to the hospital. I went back out alone."
"And at dawn you found me."
"At dawn I found you."
"I thought he'd walked away," I say. "I told myself he'd left."
"He left for eight minutes. He was a fool. But I've known a lot of men who lost something, and I never saw one who lost it like that." He pushes his cap back. "Don't you tell me he did it. Don't you say it in front of me."
"I don't know that he didn't."
"No."
"Someone planted the bomb. Someone with a key. Someone who knew I'd be in the cabin."
"Aye."
"And he knew."
"And he's the only one who dived," says Abel. "Think on that."
I take a long breath.
Under the tar, under the bait, the harbour smells of salt and cold.
"There's more," he says.
"Tell me."
He reaches under the coil of rope beside his crate. He lifts out a tin box, an old biscuit tin, rusted at the corners. He sets it on his knee.
"I kept this three years," he says. "I didn't know who to give it to."
"What is it?"
"The thing that killed you."
My blood goes still.
He lifts the lid.
On a bed of yellowed cloth lies a piece of black plastic the size of a playing card. Charred at one edge. A scrap of circuit board is visible, green, fire-warped, with a tiny copper trace. Three letters stamped into the casing: KRT. A partial serial number. And, in a different print, almost worn away, a string of digits.
"I fished it out of the water when the Coast Guard had gone," says Abel. "It was in a lump of the lower cabin bulkhead. A timer, I think. A very good one. A man who knew his work."
"Mercer," I say.
"Don't know the name."
"The man who built it."
"Ah."
I stare at the thing in the tin.
I'd have thought I'd feel something. Hatred, fear, an urge to scream. Instead there's a strange, calm, enormous emptiness, like the sea at slack water.
It's so small.
"Why didn't you give it to the police?"
"Because the man who came to take my statement," says Abel, "was a friend of the Hale family. And a week later, someone broke into Ruth's house and went through every drawer."
"Ruth never told me."
"She didn't want you frightened."
"And now?"
"Now," says Abel, and shuts the lid, "I think you've been frightened long enough."
I take the tin.
It weighs nothing.
I hold it against my chest, and I wonder how a thing so tiny could take so much.
"There's a man been asking about you," Abel adds, more quietly. "Two weeks gone. Big feller in a blue jacket, with a New York voice. Came to the wharf. Offered me five thousand dollars to tell him if a woman had washed up on Vinalhaven the night of the explosion."
"Drummond."
"I told him I'd seen nothing but lobsters."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me, girl." His eyes are very sharp. "Be careful. That church was full of people with a reason to look at you. I watched every one."
"Which?"
"All of them." He frowns. "Specially the old fellow with the silver hair. When he gave that speech, he didn't look at the coffin. He didn't look at the husband."
"Who did he look at?"
"You."
The wind drops.
My skin goes cold.
I turn the tin in my hands.
And I hear, on the quay behind me, a quiet step, a shadow falling across the sunlight, and a voice I would know in my sleep.
"Mr Thorne," says Dominic. "I thought I'd find you here."
I don't turn.
He's standing at the end of the dock. I can feel his gaze on the back of my neck.
I don't know how long he's been there.
I don't know how much he heard.
"And Ms Lowell," he says, very gently. "I've been looking for you."
"I needed air."
"A mile and a half's worth?"
I put the tin down on the crate.
I stand up, slowly, and turn.
He hasn't moved. He's very pale, in his black coat and his dark tie, with the wind pulling at his hair. His eyes go to Abel, and to the tin, and to my face.
His voice is almost inaudible.
"You were never here for the job," says Dominic. "Were you?"