CHAPTER TWO
The afternoon brought its own steady parade of Cormorant Cove, each face carrying some small fragment of the town's memory of her aunt.
A stout, cheerful woman named Delia Okafor, who ran the post office and had, Marin remembered now with a rush of warmth, once saved her the good stamps as a child, bought three paperbacks and made her promise to bring back the book club properly, "the way Josephine ran it, with the good wine and no patience for people who hadn't actually finished the book.
" A young harbor patrol officer named Beck, sunburned and earnest, stopped in on his lunch break and bought a battered field guide to coastal birds, admitting sheepishly that he'd been meaning to learn the difference between a cormorant and a shag for two years and had simply never gotten around to it.
A cluster of teenagers commandeered the café's corner table for the better part of an hour, ostensibly studying, mostly not, and left, to Marin's quiet delight, having bought two paperbacks between them along with their lemonades.
She noticed, too, the smaller currents running beneath the day's cheerful surface — the way conversation seemed to dip and steer around certain names, the careful, practiced lightness with which several older customers mentioned "the harbor project" before changing the subject, the odd, charged little silence that fell over a knot of women by the register when Prescott Vance's name came up in passing.
Small town weather, she told herself, nothing more; every place had its currents, its old grudges worn smooth as sea glass by years of careful avoidance.
She filed it away without much thought, too busy that first day to wonder whether any of it might matter later.
By closing time the free coffee was gone, the pastry case was down to two lonely scones, and Marin had sold more books in a single day than she'd expected to sell in a week.
She counted the till twice, out of disbelief more than diligence, and was still smiling about it when she noticed Walter Kessler hadn't left with the rest of the crowd.
He was still in the chair by the local history shelf, though he'd set his mystery novel aside, unopened, and was instead paging through something from his canvas bag — an old ledger, cloth-bound, the color gone from green to a kind of tired olive. He looked up when her shadow crossed him.
"Am I in your way?"
"You're the reason I can afford to keep the lights on today," Marin said. "Stay as long as you like. I just need to lock up the front in a few minutes."
"I won't be a bother." He closed the ledger, but didn't put it away.
His fingers stayed on the cover, tapping once, twice, an old man's habit of thinking with his hands.
"Your aunt used to say this shop was the only place in town where people told her the truth.
Everywhere else in Cormorant Cove, people say what's polite.
In a bookshop, apparently, they say what's real.
" He smiled, but it didn't quite reach his eyes.
"I've been thinking about that a great deal lately. "
"That sounds like the start of an interesting conversation."
"It might be." He hesitated, and in the pause Marin heard, faintly, the buoy bell out past the breakwater, carried in on the evening air.
"I've been putting together a book. Local history — nothing anyone will get rich off, but I promised myself when I retired I'd finally write it properly instead of just talking everyone's ear off about it at the Rotary Club.
" He tapped the ledger again. "I've found some things this year I didn't expect to find.
Old things. The kind of things this town has spent a long time being careful not to remember. "
"What kind of things?"
He looked at her for a moment, and something in his expression reminded her, oddly, of her aunt — that same weighing look Jo used to give her when deciding whether Marin was old enough for a particular truth.
"Nothing I should hand you on your reopening day," he said finally, with a small, apologetic laugh.
"Forgive an old man his dramatics. I've been alone with this too long, that's all, and it's made me strange about it.
" He stood, slowly, gathering the ledger back into his bag.
"I wonder if I might ask you a favor, though. Not today. Soon."
"Of course."
"I'd like to leave something here with you.
For safekeeping. Just for a little while.
" He said it lightly, but his eyes weren't light at all.
"Your aunt kept things for people. Books, letters, once an entire chess set belonging to a man who'd left town in a hurry and never came back for it.
I always admired that about her — that people trusted her with things they didn't quite trust themselves to hold onto. "
"You can leave anything you like here, Mr. Kessler."
"Walter." He shouldered the bag. At the door he paused, one hand on the frame, and looked back at her with an expression she would replay many times over the coming weeks, turning it over like a stone in her pocket, trying to find the seam in it.
"Some things you think are buried at sea have a way of washing back up, Ms. Ashworth.
Whether anyone's ready for them or not." He gave a short, rueful laugh, as if he'd surprised himself by saying it out loud. "Don't mind me. Goodnight."
The bell rang its small, bright question behind him, and then he was gone, a slight figure moving down Wharf Street in the blue evening light, and Marin stood at the window a moment longer than she needed to, watching him go, before she remembered she still had a till to close and a cat to feed.
She didn't think of the conversation again until two mornings later, when Ivy Chen came through the door of the Inkwell & Anchor with her apron still on and flour on her sleeve and an expression Marin had never seen on her before — the particular stillness of someone carrying news they didn't want to be the one carrying.
"You should sit down," Ivy said.
"That's an ominous way to start a Thursday."
"Marin." Ivy came around the counter, which she never did, and took both of Marin's hands in hers, which she also never did. "It's Walter Kessler. They found him this morning, down by the pier. He's — Marin, he's dead."
The espresso machine hissed somewhere behind them, oblivious, and Dewey stretched in the window seat and resettled himself in a small orange comma of indifference, and for a moment none of it seemed to belong to the same version of the morning Marin had woken up into.
"How," she managed.
"They're saying he fell. During the storm last night — you know how bad it got, that section of railing by the old pier's been rusted through for years, everyone's been saying the town needs to fix it—" Ivy's words were coming too fast, the way words do when a person is trying to outrun the feeling underneath them.
"He must have been out walking and lost his footing.
The tide brought him in this morning. Owen Pruitt found him, he was out early with his dog. "
Marin thought of Walter Kessler two mornings ago, sitting in the chair by the local history shelf with his hand on an old ledger, saying some things you think are buried at sea have a way of washing back up.
"Was he drinking?" she heard herself ask, and didn't entirely know why the question came out first, ahead of the dozen more obvious ones.
Ivy blinked. "I don't — I think that's what they're saying. Why?"
"No reason," Marin said, too quickly, and the lie sat strangely in her mouth, because it wasn't quite a lie — she didn't have a reason yet, not one she could put into words.
Only the memory of Walter Kessler's dry, careful hands on a ledger, and the particular, deliberate way he had chosen his words two nights before, like a man setting something down gently because he suspected he might not get the chance to pick it back up.