Chapter 10
"Cully!" Liam shouted. "Bring her about! NOW!"
"Which way!"
"West! Into the wrecks! Get us into the wrecks!"
The boy came off the shrouds like something falling and hauled on the sheet, and Liam threw his weight against the tiller, and the sailboat came around hard with the four hulls on her stern rope swinging wide behind her like a whip.
The crabber shipped water.
"ISAIAH!"
"On it!" Isaiah was already going down the rope hand over hand, in his boots, in his coat, over black water, and Liam had one second to be terrified for him and then he had no seconds at all.
He got the rifle up.
Five rounds.
Three longboats. Ten men to a boat. Thirty men on the water and one rifle with five in the box, and Liam put the Leupold on the lead boat and found the man in the bow and looked at him.
The man was looking back.
He had not raised his rifle. That was the thing Liam saw and could not make sense of. Thirty men were rowing hard down the Sound at five overloaded boats full of civilians, and the man in the bow of the lead boat had his rifle in his hands and had not raised it.
He was just watching.
"Liam!" Nell, from the rail. "Are they shooting?"
"No."
"What?"
"They're not shooting, Nell!" Liam kept the glass on him. "He's got the shot. He's had the shot for a minute and a half. He is standing in the bow of a moving boat with a scoped rifle at four hundred yards and he is not taking it."
"Then what does he want?"
And that was the question, and Liam did not have an answer, and the boats kept coming.
They ran west.
They ran west into the graveyard, and it was the only good decision Liam made that morning and he made it out of pure animal instinct.
The wrecks stood up out of the water like a drowned forest.
A container ship on her side with her hull a rust-red wall a hundred feet high. A ferry aground with her bow up on a sandbar and her stern awash. Fishing boats, barges, a great tangle of masts and rigging where a marina had come apart in some winter storm and been carried out and dumped.
Cully took them into it.
The boy knew what he was doing. He put the sailboat between the container ship and the ferry, through a gap so narrow that the crabber's gunwale scraped rust off the hull as she went past, and then he came hard to port around the ferry's stern and they were out of sight.
"Down!" Liam hissed. "Everybody down! Nobody moves!"
Twenty-five people went flat in five boats.
And they waited.
Liam lay on the cabin roof with the rifle and watched the gap.
The three longboats came past.
He saw them through the gap, one after another, thirty yards away, rowing hard north, and every man in them was looking straight ahead, and nobody looked into the gap, and nobody slowed down.
They went by.
And they kept going, north, up the Sound, toward the city, and the sound of their oars faded, and after four minutes there was nothing out there but the water slapping on the rust.
Liam let out a breath he had been holding for a very long time.
"They weren't hunting us," he said.
"They were," Nell said. "They came straight at us."
"They came straight past us." Liam sat up slowly. "Nell, they were going north. We happened to be in the way. They saw us and they didn't care, and they went by, and they're going somewhere and they're going there fast."
"To the city."
"To the city."
Isaiah hauled himself back over the stern, soaked to the chest, blue-lipped, and lay on the deck like a landed fish.
"She's swimming," he gasped.
"Isaiah, you idiot—"
"She's swimming, Liam."
Liam pulled him up and sat him against the cabin and put his own coat around him.
"That man in the bow," he said. "He looked right at me. He had four hundred yards and a clear shot and a scope and he did not take it."
"Maybe he's out of ammunition," Nell said.
"Maybe."
"Or maybe he doesn't want you dead."
Liam looked at the empty gap in the wrecks.
"That's what frightens me," he said.
They stayed in the wrecks all day.
There was no choice. Liam would not put twenty-five people on open water with three longboats loose somewhere ahead of them, and the tide was wrong for the outfall anyway, and everyone on those five boats had been awake for thirty hours.
So they slept.
They tied up in the shadow of the grounded ferry, in a pocket of still water between her hull and the sandbar, and they slept in shifts, and Liam took the first watch and the second and would have taken the third if Nell had not physically taken the rifle out of his hands.
He slept four hours.
He woke to a hand shaking his shoulder and Cully's face six inches from his own.
"There's smoke," the boy whispered.
"Where?"
"Ashore. West. Close." Cully's eyes were huge. "Liam, it's a cooking fire. It's small and it's tucked under the bluff and somebody's been feeding it for hours."
Liam was up.
He went forward with the rifle and lay down in the bow and put the glass on the shore.
It was maybe six hundred yards west of the wrecks, a low stony beach under a crumbling bluff, and there were trees on the bluff and a fallen fence and the roof of something that had been a house.
And on the beach, a fire.
And beside the fire, a man.
He was sitting on a rock with his back to the water and his head bowed, and he was alone, and there was nothing on that beach with him at all.
"One man," Liam said.
"Could be bait," Nell said, from behind him.
"Could be."
"Ten more in the trees waiting for some fool with a soft heart to row ashore."
"Could be." Liam kept the glass on him. "Nell, he's got a book."
"What?"
"He's got a book in his lap and he's reading it. He's been reading it since I put the glass on him and he hasn't looked up once." Liam adjusted the focus. "He's not watching the water. He's not watching anything. He's just sitting there on a rock reading a book."
Nell crouched beside him.
"How old?"
"Fifties. Maybe sixty. Gray. Thin." Liam paused. "Nell, he's not armed."
"Everybody's armed."
"He's got no rifle, no belt, no knife on his hip. There's nothing on that beach but him, a fire, and a book, and there is nothing behind him but a burned-out house."
Nell was quiet for a long moment.
"We row past," she said.
"Nell."
"We row past, boy. There is a war coming and we have got twenty-five people and one rifle with five rounds and there is nothing that man can give us that's worth the risk of finding out."
Liam lowered the rifle.
"He's not dangerous," he said.
"How can you possibly know that?"
"Because a dangerous man on this coast does not sit with his back to open water for four hours." Liam sat up. "That's a man who's stopped caring what comes out of the water at him."
He looked at Nell.
"And that means something's already happened to him," he said. "And I want to know what."
They took the skiff.
Three of them. Liam, Nell, and Petyr with his shotgun, and Isaiah stayed with Chloe because Isaiah would not leave Chloe for anything on this earth now, and Cully stayed to watch the wrecks.
They rowed in slow.
The man on the rock did not look up until the skiff's bow grated on the stones, and when he did look up, he did it without alarm and without much interest, the way a man looks up at a sound he has decided is not important.
He was older than Liam had thought.
Sixty, maybe more. Gray to white, thin to the point of gauntness, with a long face and deep lines cut down either side of his mouth, and his eyes were red-rimmed and swollen the way a man's eyes get after days of a particular kind of crying.
He was wearing a shirt that had once been white.
"Good afternoon," he said.
His voice was hoarse and very tired and completely calm.
Liam stepped out of the skiff with the rifle down along his leg.
"You're alone," he said.
"Yes."
"Nobody in the trees."
"No."
"You'll understand if we check."
"I would think less of you if you didn't," the man said.
Petyr went up the beach and into the burned house and came back three minutes later shaking his head.
"Nothing," he said. "Nobody. But—"
He stopped.
"Say it," Nell said.
Petyr's face was strange.
"There's a lot of graves up there," he said. "Up past the house. In the meadow. A lot of graves."
The man on the rock closed his book.
He closed it carefully, with two hands, and Liam saw that it was a Bible, an old one, black leather gone soft and gray at the corners and swollen at the spine from water, and that a great many of its pages were marked with strips of torn cloth.
"Forty-one," the man said.
Nobody spoke.
"Forty-one graves." He looked up at Petyr.
"You will find that thirty-eight of them are properly dug and three are shallow, and I would ask you not to judge me for the last three. I ran out of daylight and I ran out of strength on the same afternoon, and I was not going to leave them lying out for another night."
Nell Rook lowered her shotgun.
"Who are you," she said.
The old man stood up.
He did it slowly, in stages, the way a body does when it has been sitting on a cold rock for a very long time, and he tucked the Bible under one arm and put out his hand.
"My name is James Wilford," he said. "I was the pastor of the Nazarene congregation at Two Rivers, up the creek there behind that bluff."
He looked at Nell's hand, which had not moved.
"Forgive me," he said, and lowered his own. "I have forgotten what one does. It has been a long few days."
"Pastor," Nell said carefully. "Where's your congregation?"
James Wilford turned and looked up at the meadow above the burned house.
"There," he said.
He made them eat.
That was the thing Liam could not get past. They had come ashore with a rifle and a shotgun to see whether an old man was bait for an ambush, and within ten minutes the old man had put a pot on his fire and was apologizing that there was not more of it.
"It's clams," he said. "Mostly clams. There's a little barley in it but I would not want to oversell the barley."
"We're not hungry," Liam lied.