Water Street

Mouse droppings in the silverware drawer decided it. Maren had been ready to live on saltines and her father's Werther's until the money ran out, but on Tuesday morning she opened the drawer for a spoon and found a neat little scatter of evidence among the forks, and she shut it again and stood there with her hand flat on the counter. Then she made a list.

It had eleven items on it. Mouse traps (lots). Bleach. Coffee that was not Maxwell House. A hose washer, because the outdoor spigot dripped at a rate she had timed at one drop every 1.8 seconds. Below the line she'd drawn, in smaller letters, the questions: Who bought the padlock. Who knows about the radio. Who is Wren.

The road from the point into Port Ellery was two and a half miles of mud season, which in Maine was apparently an actual season with its own name and its own rules, the main rule being that the gravel stretch past the Gagnon mailbox turned to pudding by noon. Her father's truck, a 2011 Tacoma with 214,000 miles and a pine-tree air freshener so old it smelled of nothing, handled it the way a tired horse handles a hill. She came into town past the Congregational church and the one traffic light, which blinked yellow in all directions and seemed to have no opinion about anything.

Water Street ran along the harbor. Lobster boats sat on their moorings with their bows all pointed the same way, like a class of kids listening to a teacher. The tide was out and the whole place smelled of mud flat and bait.

Coombs Hardware & Marine occupied a white clapboard building with a porch and a sign that had been repainted more recently than the building. Inside it was dim and narrow and smelled of rope. Ruth Coombs was on a stepladder halfway down the second aisle, restocking a hook of brass snaps, and she said "Morning" without turning around.

"I need mouse traps," Maren said.

"Victor or the humane kind?"

"Which ones work?"

"Victor." Ruth came down the ladder with her reading glasses pushed up into her white hair, small and quick, and walked to the end of the aisle without looking at the shelves. She handed Maren a four-pack. Then she handed her a second four-pack. "Old house. They come in through the cellar when it thaws. Peanut butter, not cheese. Cheese is cartoons."

At the register a man in rubber boots was buying a single hose clamp and said, "Ruthie," on his way out, and Ruth said, "Danny," and that was apparently a full conversation. Maren filed the name. Ruthie. Not Ruth, not to anyone who'd known her longer than four days.

She put the traps on the counter with the bleach, the coffee and a hose washer Ruthie had found in a drawer of four hundred hose washers by feel. Ruthie rang them up on a register that printed its receipts in purple.

"Twenty-eight sixty," Ruthie said.

Maren paid. She had planned this part. She had planned it in the truck, the way she'd once planned the opening of a postmortem meeting, so that nobody could get defensive before the facts were on the table.

"The lock on the oil house was new," she said. "It had one of your stickers on it."

"Lot of locks have my stickers on them. I'm the only place in town sells locks." Ruthie tore the receipt off and folded it in half. "You get Gil out there?"

"Gil came Saturday. He says a hundred and forty thousand."

"Gil always says a hundred and forty thousand. Then he finds something." She put the traps in a paper bag. "What are you going to do about the septic?"

"I don't know yet. Did my father buy that lock?"

"Did he say anything about the septic? Gil?"

"He said it was historical."

Ruthie made a small noise that might have been a laugh. She folded the top of the bag over twice and creased it with her thumbnail, the way you'd seal an envelope.

"Somebody's been in there," Maren said. "The radio was on. There was coffee in the thermos. Not old coffee."

"You still thinking about the inn?"

"Retreat."

"What's the difference?"

"About eighty dollars a night." Maren leaned on the counter. "Ruthie. You found him. You must have been out there a lot."

Ruthie looked at her over the counter for long enough that Maren became aware of the clock above the door, a Sea Scouts promotional clock from some decade that had liked orange. Then Ruthie pulled her glasses down onto her nose and looked at a clipboard.

"How many rooms?" she said.

"Six."

"Where are people going to park, six rooms? You can't park on that point in March, you'll lose a car." She made a note on the clipboard that had nothing to do with Maren. "You'll want more traps than that. Come back Friday, I've got a case coming."

That was the end of it. Maren knew the shape of a closed ticket when she saw one. She took her bag and her purple receipt, and on the porch she stood for a minute looking at the harbor, the way people in movies did when they had been stonewalled, and felt slightly ridiculous, and went down the steps.

---

The Port Ellery Lobster Co-op was a long gray shed on pilings at the end of the public landing, with a hand-lettered sign that said RETAIL TUES–SAT and a smaller one under it that said NO RETAIL. Nobody had resolved this. Inside there was a scale, a whiteboard with the day's boat price written on it ($6.25, which Maren gathered was low and had been low for a while), a Bunn coffee machine and three men in orange bibs standing around it the way engineers stand around a whiteboard, mostly not talking.

The woman behind the counter was about sixty, wore a Red Sox fleece and introduced herself as Carol before Maren could say anything. Maren had come with a different list, the one from her spreadsheet. She'd printed it at the library on Monday: the twelve vessel names that showed up most often in her father's logs. Mary Beth. Second Wind. Lisette. Abigail Rose. Three Daughters. She'd thought she could ask, casually, whether any of those boats still fished out of here. She had not thought about what casually looked like when you were holding a printout.

"Those all ours," Carol said, reading upside down. "Most of them. Mary Beth's gone, Harold sold her to a fella in Stonington. Three Daughters is Danny Ricker. Why?"

"They're in some papers of my father's."

"Who's your father?"

"Walt Brannock," Maren said. "I'm Maren. Brannock."

She said it louder than she meant to, the second time. One of the men by the coffee machine set his cup down on the counter. He was broad through the chest and sunburned in April, which seemed like an achievement, with a face that had been out in a lot of weather and a way of standing that favored his left leg. He didn't look at her. He looked at the cup. It was a full cup, a big one, the steam still coming off it.

Then he walked out. He went through the side door onto the wharf and let it bang behind him. Through the salt-spotted window Maren watched him go down the ramp to the float, limping on the steep part, and step down into a skiff without using his hands.

Nobody said anything. One of the other men took a sip of his own coffee.

"Sam," Carol said eventually, as if this explained it.

"Did I do something?"

"Sam Pelletier." Carol pulled the coffee cup toward her side of the counter and poured it into the sink, slowly, and rinsed the cup. "Don't take it personal."

That sounded like exactly the kind of thing people said when it was personal. Maren looked at the printout in her hand, at the twelve names in Arial 11, and folded it into quarters.

"Danny Ricker," she said. "Is he around?"

"Hauling," Carol said. "They're all hauling. You want to buy any lobster? It's a retail day."

The sign said both. Maren bought two lobsters, at nine dollars a pound, because it felt rude not to, and had no idea how to kill them.

---

The Harbor Lunch was across from the bank and had nine booths, a counter with stools that spun and a laminated menu on which the haddock chowder was listed twice at two different prices. Maren ordered the cheaper one. She put the lobsters in their wet paper bag on the seat beside her like a date.

She had her laptop open. This was a habit she'd been trying to break, along with checking LinkedIn to see which of her former coworkers had posted their Some personal news announcements, but it was easier to sit alone in a diner behind a screen than without one. She opened the spreadsheet and sorted by vessel. Lisette showed up nineteen times between 1996 and 2021. Captain listed, in her father's hand, only as E.

She was scrolling through the photographs of the Lisette entries when a man slid into the other side of her booth.

He was in his fifties, tanned in a way that came from boats you didn't have to work on, in a navy quarter-zip with a small embroidered logo on the chest she couldn't read upside down. His teeth were very straight and very white. He had a coffee, which he'd brought with him from the counter, and he set it down beside her chowder as if they'd been sitting together for an hour.

"Maren," he said. "Dennis Farrow. I'm sorry about your dad."

"Did you know him?"

"I met him twice. He was a character." Farrow smiled. "He threw me off the point the second time. Very politely. Well, politely for Walt."

"How did you know I'd be here?"

"It's Port Ellery. There's here, or there's the Irving station." He took a business card out of a slim leather case and slid it across the table with two fingers. It was heavy cream stock. FARROW COASTAL HOSPITALITY, Portland and Kennebunkport, and a phone number. On the back, in blue ink, he'd already written something. "I'll be quick, because I know you've got things going on. I do small inns. Twelve to twenty keys. Historic properties, mostly. I've been looking at Gannet Head for about six years."

"It's not for sale."

"Everything's for sale. I'm not being a jerk, I promise, that's just the business." He tapped the card. "Turn it over."

She turned it over. $1,600,000, he had written, and underlined it.

"Cash," Farrow said. "No financing contingency. As is, which, I've seen that house from the water, as is is a gift I'm giving you. My guys close in thirty days. You don't have to fix a single thing. You don't have to deal with Gil Haskell, who is a nice man and who will bleed you for two years."

She did not like that he knew about Gil. She did not like it at all.

"The Coast Guard owns the light," she said.

"The Coast Guard owns the optic and the horn and an easement. You own the tower and the house and the oil house and four point two acres." He said oil house the same way he said everything else, easy, and she watched him for anything extra in it and found nothing. "I'd keep the tower. People love a tower. Weddings."

"I'm doing a retreat."

"I heard." He nodded like this was a good idea he'd once had himself. "No wifi, right? Tech people."

"Who told you that?"

"You told Gil. Gil told his wife. His wife does hair." Farrow turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the table. "Look, I think it's a great concept. I just think it's a concept for a different building. That house was built in 1879 for one guy and his family and a goat. You'll need an engineered septic, sprinklers if you go over five rooms, ADA access on the ground floor, and the road. Don't forget the road. The town won't plow past the Gagnons'."

"I'm aware of the road."

"I know you are." He got up. He left the coffee. "Thirty days, cash. The offer's good till the end of June. After that, honestly, I've got a place in Camden I'm looking at, and I don't need two." At the end of the booth he paused, and for a second the smile came off and he looked like a tired man in his fifties who had driven up from Portland on a Tuesday. "Your dad was out there by himself a long time. It's a lot of house to be lonely in."

Then he paid at the register, for both of them, before she could stop him.

Maren sat with the card. The chowder had a skin on it now. The number on the back was written in a confident, even hand, the hand of someone who wrote numbers like that often, and she found that she had already, without deciding to, divided it by the monthly cost of a one-bedroom apartment in Sunnyvale. It came out to a little over five years of rent. She put the card face down.

---

"You're Walt's girl."

The voice came from the last booth, the one by the kitchen door, which Maren had assumed was empty because she hadn't seen anybody in it. An old man was sitting there with his back to the wall. He wore a green wool jacket buttoned to the collar and held a magnifying glass the size of a saucer over a folded copy of the Courier-Gazette. He did not look up from it, and when he did turn his head toward her his eyes didn't quite land on her face. They landed somewhere to the left of it, near the coat hook.

"I am," she said.

"Thought so. You've got his walk." He lowered the magnifier. "I can't see worth a damn, but I can hear a walk. Sit."

She sat, taking the lobsters with her. Up close he was small and gray-whiskered and older than the jacket. A cane leaned against the booth. His hands were enormous and spotted and very still.

"Everett Thibodeau," he said. "Ev."

The E. She knew it before she'd thought it through, the way she sometimes knew where a bug lived before she'd read the code. "You fish the Lisette."

"I fish her when the doctor's not looking." He folded the newspaper. "Short string. Eighty traps. My granddaughter says I'm going to drive her into the Hogsback one of these days." He said the name of the ledge without any weight, the way you'd say the name of a road.

Maren had her phone in her hand. She had a photograph on it, from volume twenty-two, page forty, and she almost held it out before remembering he couldn't read it. So she read it to him, quietly, while the cook banged a pan behind the door.

2145. Fog, vis nil. F/V Lisette, E., radar dead off the ledge. Talked him in on 68. Showed white then red. Fixed set at his mooring Tues. Pie.

Ev listened to the whole thing with his head tilted. When she was done he didn't say anything for a while.

"Strawberry rhubarb," he said finally. "My wife made it. Walt wouldn't take money. He'd take pie."

"He fixed your radar."

"Three times." Ev held up three fingers, as if she might need help with the number. "Ninety-eight, oh-four and I want to say twenty-nineteen. Raytheon, the first one. Pile of junk. He'd come out to the mooring in that little skiff of his with a tackle box full of tubes and sit in my wheelhouse half the morning cussing at it, and he'd get it going, and he'd never take a dime. Not one time."

"Why?"

Ev's face did something then, very small. The mouth closed. He reached for the newspaper and the magnifier, and he held the magnifier over the paper again though Maren could see it was the obituaries page, upside down.

"Mr. Thibodeau," she said. "The other boats called him Lightkeeper. On the radio. Did you know it was him?"

"Tide's coming in," Ev said to the newspaper.

"Who else knew?"

"I'm meeting my granddaughter at one."

"Ev. Please. Somebody's been using his radio since he died. Somebody put a new lock on it."

He moved the magnifier an inch to the right. She watched him not answer. He was very good at it, better than Ruthie, who at least had to keep her hands busy. Ev just sat there being seventy-nine years old with the obituaries upside down, and after a full minute the cook came out and topped up his coffee without asking, and called him Mister Ev, and the moment was gone the way fog goes, all at once and then entirely.

"He fixed my radar," Ev said, as she stood up. "Three times. That's what I've got."

---

She drove home the long way, by the shore road, because she wanted the time.

The sums went like this. Severance through September 12, which was twenty-one weeks from now. Checking account: $31,400 and change, after the flight and the truck insurance and the nine-dollar lobsters. Gil's number, $140,000, and Ruthie's opinion that Gil's number was a starting point. The septic, unknown. The road, unknown, and possibly not hers to fix. Six rooms at $400 a night was $2,400 a night if they were all full, which they would not be, not in the first year, not in a building where the plumbing was historical and the town didn't plow. She'd run that model on Saturday with an occupancy of 40 percent and had felt good about it. Now she ran it at 25 and felt worse.

On the other side of the ledger: one card, cream stock, face down in the cupholder. Sixteen hundred thousand dollars. Thirty days.

She didn't like the way the numbers came out. She didn't like how fast she'd done them, either.

At the Gagnon mailbox the gravel had gone to pudding exactly as advertised, and the Tacoma slid sideways in a way that made her grip the wheel and say "No, no, no" out loud, to a truck, and then it found purchase and climbed out onto the hard ground under the spruce. The point opened up ahead. The tower stood white against a sky going the color of dishwater, and below it the oil house sat squat and brick with its door shut, the cut padlock still hanging in the hasp where she'd left it, a fact she now noticed she didn't love.

She parked. She carried in the traps and the bleach and the coffee and the lobsters, who had stopped moving at some point on the shore road and whose fate she would deal with later. She baited eight traps with Jif. She did not think about Sam Pelletier's coffee going down Carol's sink. She did not think about Dennis Farrow knowing who Gil Haskell's wife was.

Then she went out to the oil house, because she couldn't not, and opened the door.

The radio was where she'd left it, its little screen glowing amber on channel 68, the squelch hissing low. The thermos was where she'd left it. The shelf of green ledgers was where she'd left it, thirty-three volumes and the clean rectangle of floorboard-colored shelf at the end where the dust didn't reach.

And on the workbench, beside her laptop, square in the middle of the legal pad where she'd written 0248 and the bearing and the range and nothing else, someone had set a roll of Werther's Originals, new, the cellophane still on it.