Chapter 1 #2
"We look," Isaiah agreed.
The fog lifted at midmorning, all at once, the way it does on cold water, peeling back off the surface in long tearing sheets, and there was the land.
It was close. Closer than either of them had guessed, a low green shore maybe four hundred yards off the port rail, dense and dripping and dark, and Liam felt his stomach turn over at how easily they could have run onto it in the dark and never known.
Isaiah started the motor.
It caught on the second crank, sputtering, and he brought the bow around and ran them slow along the shoreline, north, in the gray, and the two of them stood at the rail and searched.
They searched all day.
They searched every gravel spit and every rock shelf.
They searched the tangles of bleached logs piled at the high water line, the great gray bones of trees the water had dragged from somewhere and dumped, stacked in a jumble twenty feet deep in places.
They ran the boat as close in as Isaiah dared and Liam went up the mast twice with his eyes streaming in the wind, hooked one arm through the rigging, and glassed the shore through the Leupold,
because the scope was the only glass they had and Tom Darcy had said it would gather light when a man's eyes failed him.
They found a dead seal.
They found a plastic float the size of a barrel, and a rubber boot with no foot in it, and a hundred yards of green net wadded into a knot.
They found nothing else.
The light started to go around four, the way it did in that wet country, the gray going gradually grayer with no sunset in it at all, and Liam felt something in his chest beginning to close, a slow terrible door swinging shut.
"There," Isaiah said.
His voice was strange.
Liam came aft fast.
Isaiah had cut the throttle and the boat was slowing, wallowing in the chop, and he was pointing across the bow at a place where the shoreline folded in on itself, a wide shallow cove maybe half a mile across, its mouth half choked with a bar of gravel.
And growing along the whole inner curve of it, in the water, standing in the water, were trees.
Not driftwood. Not the gray bones. Living trees, hundreds of them, thousands, grown out over the shallows on long crooked trunks so that their branches trailed down and touched the surface and lay there.
Their leaves were gone with the winter. What was left was a mass of thin drooping wands, silver gray, hanging in curtains, and the tide moved them so that the whole cove seemed to be breathing.
Willows.
"Look at the wrack line," Isaiah said quietly. "Look where the driftwood piles up. Look at the shape of it, Liam."
Liam looked.
And he saw what Isaiah saw, because Isaiah had spent his whole life seeing how a thing was put together.
The cove was a trap. The gravel bar across its mouth broke the current and the current dropped what it was carrying, and the willows caught the rest, and everything that had ever floated into that cove had stayed there.
The shore under the trees was a solid mat of debris.
Logs and branches and plastic and rope and rot, packed in against the roots, six feet deep, an entire winter of the Sound's garbage laid down in one long curving heap.
"That's the place," Isaiah said. "That's the place the water lets go. If she came north on that tide, she came here."
Liam was already reaching for the rifle.
They anchored in eight feet of water and waded the last of it, and the cold came up through Liam's boots and into his knees and he did not care.
Fifteen rounds.
He had counted them at first light, out of habit, out of something Tom had put in him. Fifteen rounds left of twenty-seven, and he had spent twelve of them in ninety seconds on a rain-swept dock and had nothing to show for it but a boat and a stain on the bow.
He carried the Winchester across his chest as they came up out of the water and into the willows.
It was very quiet under the trees.
That was the first thing. There was no wind in there. The willow wands hung down all around them, close, brushing their shoulders, and the light that came through was thin and green even with the leaves gone, and every sound seemed to come back at them a half second late.
No birds. That was the second thing, and Liam did not notice it right away, but Isaiah did.
"Where are the birds," Isaiah said.
Liam stopped.
He listened.
There were no birds. Not a gull, not a crow, not a single call anywhere in that whole drowned cove, and they had heard gulls all day, all the way up the coast, gulls following the boat and squabbling over the seal carcass, and here there was nothing.
"Keep moving," Liam said, and his voice came out low.
They worked the wrack line.
They went slow, side by side, ten feet apart, and they turned over what they could turn over and looked under what they could look under, and it was awful work, and Liam did it with his teeth set, because every dark shape in that heaped debris was her until he got close enough to see that it wasn't.
A coat sleeve that was a strip of tarp.
A hand that was a root.
Hair that was seaweed, black and long and moving in the shallow water, and Liam went down on his knees in the mud for that one and put both hands into it before he understood, and knelt there afterward with his heart slamming and his empty hands full of kelp.
Isaiah found it.
He was fifty yards up the curve of the beach, and he had stopped, and he was standing very still, and when Liam looked up, Isaiah was not looking at the ground.
He was looking at the trees.
"Liam," he said.
Liam came.
And when he got there, he saw.
There was a break in the willows, a gap where the trees thinned and a low bank of mud and gravel ran up out of the wrack toward the higher ground, and in that mud was a long dragging furrow.
It went up from the water.
Not down. Up.