Serena's POV
By seven on Tuesday morning, I've lost everything I built in three years.
Odile tells me over the phone, in the flat, clipped voice she uses for disasters. The SEC has frozen Lowell Ridge's accounts pending an investigation into "irregularities of identity." The Lisbon bonds are in escrow. Two of our three investors have withdrawn. The union pension trust, the dockworkers, four thousand men and women who trusted a woman named Vera, has issued a statement of "grave concern."
"They don't know," says Odile.
"They know what the papers say."
"They don't know you."
"They know me as a fraud."
"Serena..."
"It's all right, Odile." I look at my hands. "It was always a borrowed name."
A silence.
"Don't you dare," says Odile.
"What?"
"Do not sit in that penthouse feeling sorry for yourself. I've known you a long time. I know that voice."
"I'm not."
"You are. You're thinking about getting on a plane."
I close my mouth.
She's right.
I've been thinking about it since five. I've been standing at the window, in Dominic's old grey cardigan, looking at the river, doing the sums. A bag. A passport. A flight to Lisbon, or Reykjavik, or anywhere. A house on an island with a door that locks and no mirrors.
A woman out on bail, said Dominic last night, with a false passport. What does she do?
She runs.
"I'm not going to," I say.
"Good."
"I haven't decided."
"That's not an answer."
"Odile, I'm tired."
"I know." Her voice gentles. "I'll be there in an hour. Don't touch the drive until I come."
She hangs up.
I put the phone down.
On the kitchen counter, between a bowl of green apples and a half-empty cafetière, sits a small silver USB stick. A white label. Four black letters, in the thin spidery handwriting of a man who has never, I now know, been anything but a murderer in a nice suit.
WALTER.
I don't touch it.
I sit and look at it for forty minutes.
***
Odile arrives at eight with a laptop, a thermos and a very bad mood.
She plugs in the stick.
A grey window pops up.
ENTER PASSPHRASE.
Below it, in small white type: Hint: He always said it.
Odile cracks her knuckles.
"Right," she says. "I can brute-force it. Six, seven hours, if it's a sentence."
"It's a sentence."
"How do you know?"
"Because it's a hint." I come and stand behind her. "He always said it. It's a phrase."
"Whose?"
"My father's. Vance knew him for thirty years. He'd know what Walter always said."
"And what did Walter always say?"
I stare at the screen.
I think of a man in a cardigan. A tall man, stooped, with a smell of pipe tobacco, who stood on the end of a dock at Camden when I was seven years old and I was crying because the ferry had gone without us.
Never mind, Birdie.
Whatever the water does, it does. And we'll still be here.
My breath stops.
"It's the engraving," I say.
"What?"
"On the ring. On Dominic's band. And on my..." I swallow. "On the plaque."
"The grave."
"Whatever the water does."
"Is that your father's?"
"He said it all the time." My voice cracks. "When I was little. When a thing was out of my hands. He'd say it, and put his hand on my head."
"Try it."
I type it.
My fingers are shaking.
whatever the water does
I press the enter key.
The window flickers.
A little green line sweeps across it, and vanishes.
ACCESS GRANTED.
Odile lets out a long breath.
"Well," she says. "Damn."
***
There are four files.
The first is a folder of scanned pages, fourteen of them, in black and white. I open the first and my stomach turns over.
It's handwriting.
My father's handwriting. Tall, sloping, the long y and the looped g. Page after page of it, copied and recopied, the same four paragraphs, the letters growing steadily more confident with every sheet. At the top of the first, in a different, smaller hand, someone has written L.P., practice.
I read the paragraph at the top of page fourteen.
I can't go on. I have failed the people who trusted me. I am sorry for what I have done. Please tell Serena I love her. Whatever the water does.
I stop.
I read it again.
"That's the note," says Odile slowly.
"That's the suicide note."
"It's a copy."
"It's a forgery." I'm on my feet. "Look at the first page. The y is wrong. The crossbars on the t's are too long. By the fourteenth he's got it. He's learned my father's hand."
"Who's L.P.?"
"Lionel Prax. Document examiner." I know the name from the trade. A disgraced consultant, struck off. "He used to do work for auction houses. Fakes. Provenance."
"Why would..."
"They didn't write it with Walter's hand." I'm shaking. "They wrote it with his."
"Serena."
"It's proof."
"Proof of what?"
"That my father was murdered."
I say it aloud.
For the first time in twelve years, in my own voice, to a woman I trust, in a kitchen full of sunshine.
It doesn't break me.
It does something far stranger. It sets me on my feet.
"Open the second file," I say.
It's audio.
Four minutes and twelve seconds.
Odile looks at me.
"You don't have to."
"I do."
"I can listen first."
"No." I take her hand. "I want to hear his voice."
She clicks.
There's wind. A long slow hiss of it, and the slap of water on wood. A gull. And a man, breathing hard, as if he's been walking.
Augustus.
My father's voice.
It's lighter than I remember. Younger. A little hoarse with cold. I clap my hand over my mouth.
Augustus, I've brought it. The ledger. The real one.
Walter. Brandt, soft and affectionate. My dear fellow. You look frozen. Come into the car.
No. I'll say it here. A rustle of paper. I've told Charles. He knows. I'm going to the SEC on Monday.
Are you?
I'm sorry. I'd rather it were anyone else.
So would I. A pause. A long sigh. You've always been the best of us, Walter. A man of principle. I used to envy it.
Augustus...
Come. Let's walk to the end.
The end of what?
The pier, my dear. I should like to say goodbye properly.
There's a long, long silence.
Footsteps on boards.
And then the recording stops, with a click, as if someone had pressed a button.
The kitchen is perfectly silent.
I'm on my knees.
I don't remember getting there. I'm kneeling on the tiles with my forehead against the edge of the counter, and Odile's arms round me, and a noise coming out of my chest that I don't recognise.
Let's walk to the end.
Let's walk to the end.
"Serena," says Odile. "Serena. Breathe."
"He knew."
"I know."
"My father knew, and he walked out there anyway."
"I know, love."
"He was so brave."
"He was."
"I never..." I'm crying so hard I can barely speak. "I thought he'd given up. I thought... for twelve years, I thought..."
"You didn't know."
"I was angry with him."
"Of course you were."
"I was so angry, Odile."
She holds me.
She holds me on the floor of my husband's kitchen for a very long time, while the sun comes up the wall and the cafetière goes cold, and I cry for a man in a cardigan who said never mind, Birdie.
When I've finished, I wipe my face on my sleeve.
I look up.
And I see something.
A tiny, flickering reflection, in the glass of the window.
The television in the living room. Left on, muted, from last night.
A grey harbour. A pier. A wide, weathered face under a woollen cap, filling the screen, with a microphone thrust up toward it by someone off-camera.
The headline underneath reads: MAINE LOBSTERMAN: "I PULLED HER FROM THE WATER."
I stop breathing.
"Oh no," says Odile.
"Turn it up."
"Serena..."
"Turn it up!"
She grabs the remote.
The sound rushes in.
...been keepin' quiet three years, says Abel Thorne, in the creak and drawl of his Maine voice, squinting into the camera as if it were the sun. But I seen the news. I seen what they're sayin' about that girl.
Which girl, Mr Thorne?
Mrs Hale. A pause. A long, slow, stubborn blink. She ain't dead. And she ain't a liar. I know. I'm the one who found her.