CHAPTER THREE
Cormorant Cove did grief the way it did most things — quickly, communally, and with a great deal of casserole.
By the time Marin walked down Wharf Street that afternoon, someone had already tied a black ribbon to the lamppost nearest the pier, and the bakery had a hand-lettered card in the window — In Memory of Walter Kessler, a friend to this town — beside a tray of the lemon bars he'd apparently ordered every Friday for eleven years, information Marin would not have known a week ago and now seemed to be accumulating everywhere she turned, the way a town's grief becomes, briefly, encyclopedic.
The official story, when it came, came fast and tidy: Walter Kessler, seventy-four, had been walking near the harbor during Tuesday night's storm, had likely slipped on the wet boards near the damaged section of railing at the end of the old pier, and had gone into the water.
The medical examiner's preliminary finding cited a blood alcohol level consistent with several drinks, a detail that made its way around town within a day, delivered by well-meaning neighbors in the hushed, faintly scandalized tone reserved for information that complicates a eulogy.
Poor Walter. You'd never have guessed. Grief does strange things to a person, I suppose, after Eleanor passed.
Marin heard the story three separate times before lunch, from three separate people, and each time something in her sat up and refused to lie back down.
She found Detective Sam Reyes on her fourth try, having missed him twice at the small brick building that served as Cormorant Cove's entire police department and once at the diner, where Ruth Whitfield told her, not unkindly, that he'd stepped out and didn't say where, and that she oughtn't hold her breath waiting on the police to hurry about anything in this town.
He was younger than Marin expected — early forties, maybe, with the sun-weathered look of a man who spent more time outdoors than his desk suggested, and a way of listening that made her feel, for the first three sentences, like he was actually doing it.
"Ms. Ashworth." He knew her name, which shouldn't have surprised her in a town this size but did anyway. "I heard you knew Walter a little. Sorry for the loss — small town, everybody's loss, one way or another."
"I only met him twice," Marin admitted. "But I think there's something wrong with how everyone's talking about it."
Reyes's expression didn't change, exactly, but something behind it went carefully neutral, the particular blankness of a man who had, in eighteen years of small-town policing, heard a version of this sentence more times than he could count. "Wrong how?"
"The drinking." Marin had rehearsed this on the walk over and it still came out clumsier than she wanted.
"Walter came into my shop two nights before he died.
He was drinking coffee. He mentioned — not directly, but it was clear — that he'd been dealing with some kind of medical thing that meant he didn't drink anymore.
He said something about promising a doctor, I don't remember the exact words, but it was definite.
And then two nights later he's supposedly out on the pier with a blood alcohol level high enough that people are talking about it at the bakery. "
"People change their habits," Reyes said, not unkindly. "Especially after a loss like his wife. It happens more than you'd think — a man white-knuckles it for years and then something breaks the dam."
"Maybe." Marin wasn't ready to let it go, and hated, a little, how her voice sounded doing it — earnest, a touch too urgent, the tone of a woman three weeks into owning a bookshop trying to convince a detective that she'd solved something over a cup of coffee.
"He also told me he'd found things while researching his book.
Old things about the town. He said it like it mattered.
Like it might be dangerous, almost — and then two days later he's dead. "
Reyes was quiet for a moment, and Marin had the distinct sense of being weighed, the same careful arithmetic she'd felt from Prescott Vance the day before, though something about Reyes's version of it felt less like assessment and more like patience.
"I'll tell you honestly, Ms. Ashworth, because you seem like someone who'd rather hear it honestly," he said finally.
"The ME's preliminary is what it is. The railing's been on the town's repair list for two years — I've written the memo myself, twice.
It was a bad storm. Old men fall off wet piers in bad storms more often than anyone likes to admit, and sometimes they've had a few drinks doing it, and sometimes their families would rather that not be the story, understandably.
I'm not saying you're wrong to have questions.
I'm saying that questions and evidence are different things, and right now what I've got is the second one, and it points where it points. "
It was, Marin thought, an entirely reasonable answer, delivered by an entirely reasonable man, and it did not make the feeling in her chest go away at all.
"Can I ask you something else?"
"You can ask."
"Did anyone check whether he had a book with him? A canvas bag — he carried it everywhere, he had it with him the last time I saw him."
Something flickered across Reyes's face — not much, but enough that Marin knew she'd landed on something he hadn't already dismissed. "There wasn't a bag found with him," he said slowly. "Just his coat, his wallet, his house keys. No bag."
"He was going to leave something with me," Marin said. "A ledger. He told me two nights before he died that he wanted to leave it with me for safekeeping. He never got the chance."
Reyes looked at her for a long moment, and something in his careful neutrality shifted, just slightly, into something more like genuine attention.
"Write down exactly what he said to you," he said finally.
"Word for word, as best you remember it.
And Ms. Ashworth — if anything else comes to you, anything at all, you come find me.
Don't go digging around on your own. This is a small town, and small towns keep their secrets close, and sometimes closer than is good for the person doing the digging. "
? ? ?
Walter Kessler's funeral was held that Saturday at the small white Congregational church at the top of Harbor Hill, and it seemed, to Marin, standing near the back beside Priya and Ivy, that nearly every resident of Cormorant Cove had turned out for it, filling the pews and then the side aisles and finally spilling out onto the church's front steps in a slow, murmuring crowd of dark coats and lowered voices.
Ruth Whitfield sat near the front, upright and dry-eyed in a way that looked, to Marin, less like composure than a woman who had simply run out of new tears for this particular kind of loss.
Tim Kessler delivered the eulogy in a voice that cracked twice and steadied both times, describing an uncle who'd taught him to fish, who'd never once in thirty-eight years missed a birthday card, who'd spent his retirement chasing down a history he believed this town deserved to know properly, "whether or not," Tim said, looking out over the crowded pews with an expression that made several people shift uncomfortably in their seats, "it was always convenient for everyone to hear. "
Prescott Vance sat in the fourth row, dressed impeccably, his expression arranged into exactly the right measure of civic solemnity, and rose during the reception afterward, held in the church hall over coffee and an enormous, mismatched spread of casseroles, to say a few brief, gracious words about Walter's contributions to the town's historical record — words that struck Marin, watching him from across the room, as slightly too smooth, too well-assembled, for a man supposedly caught off guard by grief.
"He does that at every funeral," Priya murmured, following Marin's gaze. "Says something nice, shakes the right hands, leaves before the coffee gets cold. It's very efficient. It's also very Vance."
Marin was still watching him when she noticed Denise Hartwell standing near the hall's side door, not mingling, not eating, simply watching the room with the same careful, contained stillness Marin would later come to recognize so clearly — a woman doing careful arithmetic behind an otherwise unreadable face.
When Vance crossed the room toward her, said something too quiet to hear, Denise's expression didn't change at all, but her hands, Marin noticed, tightened briefly around the coffee cup she was holding, and she left the reception herself only a few minutes later, alone, without saying goodbye to anyone.
"Who's that?" Marin asked.
"Denise Hartwell. Runs Vance's whole life, basically — has for years." Priya considered the departing figure with mild curiosity. "Nice enough, I think, in the couple times I've talked to her. Always seemed a little sad, honestly, though I never really thought about why."
Marin thought about it for the rest of the afternoon, turning the small, contained sadness of Denise Hartwell over alongside everything else she'd gathered that week — Walter's cryptic warning, the missing canvas bag, the blood alcohol result that didn't match the teetotal man she'd met twice — and it was that image, more than any other from the funeral, that stayed with her walking home that evening: a woman standing very still near a side door, watching a room full of grief with an expression that looked less like mourning and more like waiting.
It was, in retrospect, extremely good advice Reyes had given her at the station days before, and Marin would spend the following weeks almost entirely failing to take it.