Ben Carter set two boxed deadbolts on the porch rail of the Salt-Spray Cottage on Monday morning and looked at the front door the way a man looks at a horse that has thrown him before.
"That door's been kicked more than it's been opened."
"It's out of square." Nora Vance knelt at the sill and pressed her thumb along the jamb until she found the place where the wood had gone soft. "The strike plate was biting into paint. A shoulder would have popped it."
"Reckon so."
She stood and took the brace and bit out of her canvas bag. Fog still hung over Port Blossom harbor at her back, and Tern Island smelled of low tide and wet stone. "Above the knob, jamb side. I'll sister the frame with white oak first. I brought a length over from the mainland."
"You brought white oak to a fishing island."
"I brought white oak to a door that's lasted a century. Nothing else out here lasts a winter."
"Most folks would have hung a new door and been done with it."
"Most folks are flipping something. I'm restoring it."
Ben handed her the drill. "Suit yourself."
The oak took the screw the way old wood does when the grain is still sound, grudging for the first turn and then solid. She threw the deadbolt and heard metal seat in metal, a sound the cottage had not made in many years. Ben watched her test it twice.
"The window's the bigger problem," she said. "Anyone with a flat bar can pop that sash with one hand."
"I'll cut you shutters off the old storm panels in the boathouse."
"Do that. And a hasp on the boathouse door. I want one key running all of it."
"One key." Ben wiped his palms on his jeans. "You'll lose it by August."
She pulled the ring out of her jacket pocket and held it up — the new deadbolt key, the brass key the lawyer had handed her on closing day, her truck key, her son's apartment key. "I've carried the same ring since the year Liam was born."
"Then you'll be carrying two."
They took the hasp down the path to the boathouse. The brass key turned hard and then gave; inside, the water slapped at the pilings and the air smelled of creosote. Ben drilled while she held the door steady against the wind.
They worked without much talk after that. Ben cut the shutters from two storm panels he had pried off the boathouse wall, and Nora set the hinges so the panels would fold flat and not catch the wind. The tide was low. The rocks off the point showed their weed, and gulls argued over something they would not share.
An outboard buzzed across the channel and cut to idle at the float. Grace Carter stepped off a gray skiff with a coil of line in one hand and a cooler in the other.
"Dad. Nora."
"Morning," Nora said.
"Somebody finally did something about that window." Grace studied the new shutters, then the deadbolt, then her. "Took you long enough."
"Three nights is long enough for me."
"You know who did it."
"I know who benefits from it." Nora set the drill on the rail. "That isn't the same thing."
"No," Grace said. "It isn't."
"Grace." Ben said it without heat.
"I'm not starting anything. I'm here for the eelgrass." Grace knelt at the edge of the path and set small stakes in the sand. "Your north shore has the best eelgrass bed in the bay, and it sits by a seawall that's moving."
"Then give me the survey."
"I'll email it tonight. Read it before you dig on that side." She straightened and looked at the cottage. "And whoever pried up your floorboards knows this island has no road on it."
"That's a short list," Nora said.
"Shorter than you think." Grace picked up her cooler. "Three of us, anyway."
The outboard caught on the second pull, and she was gone.
Ben watched the skiff until it reached the channel marker. "She's not wrong."
"I know."
Nora went back to the sash and looked across at the north shore, where the tide was already climbing toward the seawall. Grace had a point, and it was a structural one. A wall that moved let water behind it, and water behind a wall took sand with it. Another summer of that and no amount of white oak would fix the foundation.
Ben had brought lunch in a Hannaford bag: two ham and Swiss sandwiches on bulkie rolls, a bag of Humpty Dumpty chips, and a whoopie pie he cut in half with his pocketknife. He handed her half without being asked.
"Two deadbolts and a hasp ran me $62.40 at Hammond Lumber," Nora said. "I'll write you a check."
"Put it on the account."
They ate on the porch with their boots over the edge. The fog had burned off by nine and the southwest wind came up warm, the first real June air of the season. The tide had turned and was filling the inlet again, and the old pilings of the float stood in the sun like something the sea had forgotten.
"Ben." She set her sandwich down on the wax paper. "How long has Silas Blackwood been like this?"
He chewed and swallowed. "Longer than this house has been empty."
"That long."
"Give or take."
"It's not a secret, is it? What happened to his family."
"It's not a secret. It's just old." Ben wiped his hands on his shirt. "Silas is the only one still carrying it around."
"Then tell me."
He was quiet a moment, looking at the water. "Jedediah Blackwood. His grandfather. Ran a chandlery on the north end of the waterfront."
"The man in the photograph."
"My grandfather fished this harbor with him. That's where it comes from, not from Silas."
"Go on."
"In 1921, Jedediah and Alistair Finch bought a schooner together, even shares. Jedediah kept the books. Finch got his picture in the paper."
"Then what went wrong?"
Nora pulled her knees up and wrapped both hands around her coffee cup.
"Finch sold the partnership out from under him before he ever sailed. Papers filed up in Portland. A signature Jedediah swore he never put on anything."
"And the money?"
"Every dollar the Blackwoods had was in that hull. When Finch's boat didn't come back, it went with him."
"He sued."
"He lost. Took the store first, then the house. Overnight, the way it's told."
"Then what did he do?"
"Moved in with his son and sat at the window with a spyglass, watching for a boat that wasn't coming." Ben turned his cup around on the rail. "He never worked another day."
"For how long?"
"Until he died. Silas was about twelve."
Ben set the cup down. "The grudge outlived him. It's still on Main Street, behind a glass case."
"And he thinks I'm the one taking it out of the case."
"He died bitter, Nora. He blamed Finch for every year of it, right up to the last."
"And you thought it was about old houses."
"He's talked about that cottage my whole life," Ben said. "I never figured he'd go through a window."
She looked out over the inlet and did the arithmetic. Not an old tin box buried by a seawall. Not a silver dollar. Three generations of a debt nobody had ever paid, and a man on Main Street who had been raised inside it, counting.
"That's why he watches the island," she said.
"That's why he can't stop," Ben said.
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