"Judith Finch called the harbor office twice," Ben Carter said, leaning the plywood against the porch rail. "She wants to walk the interior Thursday."
"She can walk it Thursday." Nora Vance wiped her hands down her jeans. "With the wall closed."
"You told me it was rot."
"I told you I found rot. I didn't say how much of it."
"You left it open all night."
"It's June. Nothing gets in but pollen and one confused grackle."
Her canvas bag sat on the counter by the sink with the little book inside it, wrapped in a dish towel under a stack of lumber receipts. It had been there since Tuesday night. That was not a thing she intended to explain at seven in the morning.
Ben took off his cap and slapped it against his thigh. Fog had beaded on the brim during the crossing from Port Blossom to Tern Island, and the spruces behind the cottage were still dripping. "I want that wall closed by noon," he said. "Tide's low at one and I've got trim sitting on the dock in Rockland."
"Closed by noon."
He didn't reach for the pry bar. "Walk it for what?"
"To inventory the architectural fabric." He shrugged. "Her words."
Nora carried the lath she'd pulled out to the kindling box and came back. "You're telling me this on Wednesday."
"I'm telling you before you answer her."
"Then tell her Thursday."
"Why Thursday?"
"Because I'd rather she walked through a finished room than an open wall."
Every word of that was true. None of it was the whole truth. The panel was back in its opening, tapped home Tuesday night, the seam skimmed over with joint compound she'd bought on the Hannaford run in Rockland along with coffee and a rotisserie chicken. In the pantry's gray light it read as a bad patch job and nothing more.
"Want me to square that stud?" Ben asked.
"Please."
He squared it, and he didn't ask again. At eleven he loaded his tools into the skiff and crossed the Reach to Port Blossom, and Nora stood on the porch until the sound of his outboard had faded into the fog line. Then she went in and laid her palm flat against the pantry wall and stood there a while, the way you test a beam for give.
At noon she took the tide in.
The Chart & Compass was nearly empty, Marge working the counter with a rag that had seen better decades. She set the chowder down and stayed.
"Agnes Miller," Nora said. "Lighthouse keeper's wife. Does the name mean anything to you?"
Marge's hand stopped. "Why?"
"Research."
"Uh-huh." Marge looked at her a long moment, then nodded at the bowl. "You want the short version or the long one?"
"Short."
"Agnes Miller wrote little pieces for the Courier. Called them 'Notes from the Light.' Half the town read them and the other half pretended not to." She picked the rag back up. "Harold Miller lost the light in twenty-five. Took a job inland and never set foot in this town again."
"Why'd he lose it?"
"Nobody said. When nobody says, that's your answer."
"Any of her papers survive?"
"The light kept logbooks. Cora Jean Ripple carried them up to the archive years ago, and I haven't laid eyes on them since." Marge topped off Nora's coffee without being asked. "Chowder's eight fifty now. Blame the haddock."
"And a slice of that blueberry pie. The wild ones."
"It's on the house."
"Put it on the tab."
Ben came back at seven, when the light had gone copper and the tide was on the turn. Nora met him at the float with her flashlight off.
"What are you doing back?"
"Forecast turned. Squall line coming through after midnight." He looped the painter around the cleat. "Shutters are fine. I checked them."
"Then go home."
"I've been thinking about that wall all day."
He climbed onto the float and stood with his hands in his pockets, waiting the way he waited on weather. Nora had known men who shouted. Ben stood.
"Come inside," she said. "Sit down."
He sat. She poured him coffee in the cup that didn't leak and set the small book on the oilcloth between them.
Ben looked at it. "That's a diary."
"Agnes Miller's. The keeper's wife. Nineteen twenty-three."
"There was a compartment in that wall. Somebody built it when they built the house, long before she wrote a single line in this. A hiding place in a cottage that had nothing yet to hide."
Ben picked up the cup but didn't drink. "And you lied to me."
"I did."
"Why?"
"Because I didn't know yet what I had."
He turned the book over, checked the binding with his thumbs, set it down the way you'd set down somebody's mail. "Read it."
So she read it. The handwriting was small and upright, the hand of a woman who had learned to write on a slate and never quite relaxed about it. The early entries were weather and birds and the price of kerosene. Then, in March: "From the tower on a clear night I can see the north cove of Tern Island as plain as a picture on a wall."
Three weeks on: "The Gannet came in again after midnight with no running lights. Four men on the float and heavy crates, and one of them sat on the stern with a shotgun across his knees, easy as a man holding a cat."
"Harold says the crates hold vital medicines bound for the mainland, that the doctors up and down the coast are short and the law has turned honest men into thieves. I have no quarrel with medicine. But a crate of medicine does not ask for four men and a crowbar."
And then: "The light log is a public record. Harold has begun writing 'no traffic' on nights when I have watched three boats cross the cove."
Nora turned the page. One entry was left, the ink pressed so hard the paper had cockled.
"The Blackwood trawler came in from the east at two this morning and lay alongside the Gannet, and the two of them sat out there in the dark like horses in harness. Angry voices carried over the waves. A terrible argument. I fear their partnership in this 'medicine' trade is coming to a bad end."
She closed the book. The lamp hissed. Out past the point, the tide worked at the north seawall, taking what it took every night.
"Thursday," Ben said. "You told Judith Finch Thursday."
"I did."
"You still planning to tell her there's nothing in that wall?"
Nora looked at the diary on the oilcloth, and at the man across the table who only believed what he could put his hands on.
"No," she said. "I'm taking it to her. At the Historical Society, where there are witnesses."
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