Chapter 19 of 20Safe From Fire and Water

Silas Blackwood's salvage claim ran to everything "on or near" the wreck, and the wreck lay at the foot of the cottage's north foundation on Tern Island. A hearing was set for the fourteenth at the harbormaster's office in Port Blossom. If Silas won it, Nora Vance would lose the tidelands, the seawall, and most of the house standing on them.

A week after the storm, she had Agnes Miller's diary open on the kitchen table, still in its oilcloth wrapper, and she was on her third pass through page forty-one. Fog stood against the windows. Beyond the north point, water worked at the gap in the seawall with a slow slap she had learned to read the way other people read a clock.

The phone rang at seven-forty. It was Dot, from the town clerk's office, and she sounded like a woman talking from under a blanket.

"I shouldn't be telling you this."

"Then tell me anyway."

"The hearing's on the calendar. Ten o'clock, the fourteenth."

"I saw the notice."

"There's a second page." Nora heard a drawer slide shut on the other end of the line. "He amended it Friday."

"Amended how?"

"He added the upland. It says the wreck and 'the upland parcel adjacent to it.'"

Nora stood up without meaning to, one hand flat on the diary.

"That's my house."

"That's what I said."

"Dot, does he have a lawyer?"

"Nobody in this town has a lawyer. That's how we all stay polite."

She thanked her and hung up, then sat a minute doing arithmetic she didn't like.

Ben Carter came in at eight-thirty without knocking and stomped the grit off his boots. He set a sheet of marine plywood against the counter.

"Ninety-two dollars," he said.

"For one sheet?"

"That's Rockland for you."

"That's robbery."

"Reckon so."

She moved the diary to the far end of the table. He watched her do it and said nothing, which was one of the reasons she liked him.

"Coffee's on."

"I smelled it from the boat."

He poured, drank it standing at the window, and considered the fog the way he considered most weather — as an item on a list.

"Surveyor's Thursday," Nora said.

"I know."

"If the north corner is undermined past the footing, five weeks of work is trim on a sunken boat."

"It isn't undermined. I've been under that corner twice. There's ledge."

"Then why is the seawall gone?"

"The seawall was rocks a man stacked in 1921. The ledge is older than the both of us."

"He amended the claim," she said. "He added the upland."

Ben set his cup down.

"Friday?"

"Friday."

"Then it was never about a boat."

"No."

"Then your argument is the deed."

"Deeds get argued."

"So do salvage claims."

"Dot says he doesn't have a lawyer."

"He doesn't need one if nobody objects."

"Then I'll object."

Ben put on his hat and went out to finish tarping the east slope. He had the door half shut when Grace's skiff came around the point, and he held it open for her out of habit.

Grace Carter cut the motor, stepped onto the cobble in rubber boots with a clipboard under her arm, and stopped at the edge of Nora's gravel path.

"You're standing on my transect," she said.

"Good morning to you too."

"I've lost another stake. It's underwater now."

"How bad is it?"

"Worse than April." She flipped a page on the clipboard and wrote something down. "The drop-off is closer to your porch steps."

"That's the nor'easter."

"That's the nor'easter plus the wall being gone. The wreck is holding the rest of the bank together. Those ribs are acting like a revetment."

"So Silas wants to pull it off the beach."

"Silas wants to sell the fastenings to a restaurant in Rockland and call it maritime heritage."

"Will the harbormaster listen to you?"

"I filed an objection Friday. It's short and mostly footnotes."

"Thank you, Grace."

"Don't thank me." She checked a stake with the toe of her boot. "I need that beach in one piece through October or my data's garbage."

"That's the most romantic thing anyone's said to me all year."

Grace almost smiled. "That's bleak." Then she pushed off, and the outboard carried her back toward the harbor.

Nora had the diary open again when Ben came in at eleven for water. He drank from the jug and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

"Read me what's got you."

"'A terrible argument' is page thirty-nine. This is forty-one." She turned the book toward the window light and read it out. "'Whatever treasure they guard, it must rest in a place safe from fire and water, the two great fears of any islander.'"

"She's guessing."

"She's a lighthouse keeper's wife writing in a book she hid inside a wall. She's not guessing. She's working something out."

"Same thing."

"It isn't."

"So what does it mean?"

"In a house, everything fears fire and water. Wood burns, and wood rots. Plaster goes the same way, twice over. There is exactly one thing in this building that neither one can touch."

Ben looked at the hearth.

"The chimney."

"The chimney."

"That's a lot of stone to take apart on a sentence in a diary."

"It isn't a sentence. It's a load path. She's telling us where a person would put something they meant to keep."

"Reckon it's both," Ben said, and went back out to the tarp.

By noon the fog had burned off and the island smelled of hot rock and kelp. Nora knelt at the hearth with a flashlight and a putty knife.

The hearthstone they had lifted back in May sat level again, its underside carved with a compass rose tangled in a ship's knot. Whoever broke in had pried up six floorboards between the chimney and the front wall and left them curled like shavings. They had read the map on the floor and stopped there. Not one pry mark touched the masonry.

She ran her palm down the stones. Cool and dry, the joints tuck-pointed by a steady hand, the lime still pale under all that sea air.

She tapped the back of the firebox with the butt of the flashlight.

Not hollow. She knew hollow. Every wall in that house had told her what hollow sounded like — a soft, roomy note with air behind it. This was short and tight, a note with something dense on the far side of it.

She tapped again, lower, and got the same answer.

Silas Blackwood had a salvage tag on a wreck, an amended claim on her upland, and until the fourteenth to make both of them stick. In all the years he had watched this house from Sedge Head, he had never once come down on his knees in front of the fire.

She found her pencil and drew a small X on the stone, low and to the left, where the mortar was steadier than any hand in Port Blossom could manage now.

In plain sight. It had been in plain sight since 1921. Tomorrow morning, before the fog lifted, she would take the chimney apart.