Marge set the coffeepot down on the counter and left it there, which meant she intended to stay a minute.
"Third time you've read that page," she said. "You want a muffin with it, or are you just punishing yourself?"
"Blueberry," said Nora. "I'm not punishing myself. I'm reading a badly written ordinance."
"Uh-huh."
Nora Vance slid two singles across the counter. The Chart & Compass was nearly empty at that hour: one man at the end with a plate of eggs, the pie case holding a single slice, a tide chart taped beside the register with the week's numbers penciled in.
"You're in off the island early," Marge said.
"I printed the town code at the inn's business center last night. Ten cents a page."
"That's robbery."
"The library closes at five."
Marge nodded at the folder. "So what's wrong with it?"
"Section 14-B runs nine paragraphs." Nora turned the page around, though Marge had no intention of reading it. "Paragraph four is the one that matters."
"Read it to me."
"The Historical Preservation Commission last met on April eighteenth."
"And?"
Marge leaned a hip against the counter, mug in hand.
"And 14-B only reaches properties on the town's historic inventory."
"Who keeps the inventory?"
"The commission adopts it. No vote, no listing."
Marge topped off the mug and tore a ticket off the pad. "So the paper's no good."
"The paper's no good."
"Then go see Wendell before the Rotary eats his whole afternoon." She stuck the ticket on the spindle. "Wear the good jacket."
"I don't own a good jacket."
"Then wear the one without paint on it."
Town Hall opened at eight. By nine-forty the front office smelled of fresh floor wax, and the radiators ticked the way they do in June when nobody has told them it's summer. Dot was at the counter with her glasses pushed up into her hair.
"You again," Dot said, and said it kindly.
"I need five minutes with Mr. Pike."
"He's got the Rotary at noon."
"Then five minutes now."
Dot eyed the folder. "That's a lot of paper."
"It's the right amount of paper."
"You want copies?"
"Two sets. I brought quarters."
"Put those away." Dot ran them on the machine behind her and refused the coins anyway. "What is all this?"
"Ordinance with paragraph four marked. Permit stamped paid. The fee receipt. The deed. A boundary map off the county registry."
"Website, or the registry itself?"
"Website. Before six this morning."
"He'll see you."
Wendell Pike came out at ten past. He was polite the way a man is polite after he has already decided.
"Ms. Vance."
"Mr. Pike." Nora squared the stack with two fingers. "I'm asking you to rescind the order."
"I don't have the authority to do that."
"You do. It's paragraph four."
He looked at the page for a while. His jaw moved once, side to side.
"The overlay," Pike said, and stopped.
"Applies to inventoried properties. Show me the inventory entry for the cottage."
"I'd have to look."
"I looked. There isn't one." She turned the map to face him and set her thumb on the harbor line. "The district was drawn to cover the village and the shorefront. Tern Island isn't inside it. It's not on this map. It never was."
"That's a strong thing to say."
"Somebody wrote a complaint against a property the ordinance doesn't cover, and somebody stamped it through anyway."
Pike pulled the file. Her name was on the tab, Nora Vance, with the island address under it. He didn't open it.
Behind her the front door opened, and the room changed temperature.
"Nora." Mayor Thorne crossed the linoleum with his hand already out. "I heard we had a situation. Dot, is that coffee fresh?"
"It's from seven, Mayor."
"Then I'll pass." He turned the smile on her. "Wendell, what are we looking at?"
"Code doesn't support the order," Pike said. "Not on its face."
"Well." Thorne spread his hands, generous. "Then the code doesn't support it. I've always said we should be careful with the island."
"You've always said that," Nora agreed.
Something moved behind the smile and was gone. "You're a long way out there by yourself. Weather's turning this afternoon."
"I have a captain."
"Of course you do."
Pike wrote the rescission out by hand on town letterhead, two short paragraphs and a case number and his signature, while Dot ran the copies. Nora put one in the folder and one in her jacket pocket. Thorne was gone by then, out the side door toward the parking lot, and she did not watch him go.
Ben had the lines off the cleat before her foot hit the gunwale.
"Got it lifted," he said.
"Rescinded. There's a difference."
"Reckon there is." He let the wheel over and the bow swung past the breakwater. The wind had clocked northeast overnight, and the harbor lay the color of old pewter. "What'd it cost you?"
"A morning. Two dollars for a muffin."
"Cheap." He nodded at the folder. "Pike signed it?"
"He did. By hand, on town letterhead."
"Anybody standing there when he did?"
"The mayor."
"Figured."
They ran the fifteen minutes with the throttle down, fog thinning into a flat gray lid over the island.
"There's a routing slip in the file," Nora said. "Yellow. Initials at the bottom."
"M.T.," he said.
"That's what it said."
"We know what that stands for."
"We know what it looks like."
The cottage stood where it had stood, and that alone was something. Nora went up the path ahead of him. The door was shut, the padlock was on the hasp, and it was locked. She turned the key herself and felt the tumblers give.
"Lock's still on," Ben said behind her.
"The lock's still on."
They went in.
The main room had been dim and orderly when they left it the day before. Now sawdust hung in the air and lay in curls along the sill of the north window, and that sash stood open wide, its latch bent out of its keeper, the sill scraped pale beneath it. Six floorboards had been torn up out of the middle of the room, running from the chimney base toward the front wall, their ends splintered where a bar had gone in and pried. One had snapped across the grain and been left wedged up at an angle.
The hearthstone they had lifted lay against the wall exactly where they had set it.
"Hearthstone's where we left it," Ben said.
"Nobody touched it."
Nora crouched at the broken edge and read the pry marks. Close together at the start, wide and ragged where the work had gone careless. Beneath the boards the joists were bare and the crawl space was empty, packed with a hundred years of grit and nothing else.
"They went at it from the chimney out," she said. "North to south. Fast."
"How fast is fast?"
"They quit being careful about halfway."
Ben didn't answer right away. When he did, his voice had changed.
"I figured Silas was a cranky old man with a story," he said. "I've been telling myself that for two weeks."
"And now?"
He picked a splinter off the sill, thumbed the fresh wood, and looked at the open window and at the tear in the floor. "Now I figure somebody came out here Thursday night with a wrecking bar and a pretty good idea where to start." He straightened. "Question is what they thought they'd find."
Nora looked down into the empty joist bay below the ruined boards. "That's a good question."
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