Chapter 22 of 24The Milled Edge

The salvage hearing ran out of Friday, which left Nora Vance until Monday morning to prove the iron box belonged to the cottage on Tern Island and not to Silas Blackwood. If she could not open it by then, his claim on the upland parcel would stand, and she would lose the house.

On Saturday she sat at the workbench under the east window of the main room while the fog peeled off the cove and Tern Island came up behind it. She knew its weight as well as her own hammer's. Small, iron, mitered at the corners, the lid set so close to the body that she could not work a fingernail into the seam. She kept calling it a keyhole, but a keyhole is never that straight, and what she had was a slot, narrow and even, cut into the front face beside a worn spot where a thumb had rested for years, polished smooth by somebody's habit of reaching for it.

The float door banged against the piling, and boots crossed the porch, and Ben came through it with a Hannaford bag hooked over one arm and two coffees in his hands.

"Any luck?"

"No."

"You've been at it since Tuesday."

"I know what day it is."

"Then let me run it over to Ellsworth."

He sat down across from her.

"Emmett Dow on High Street does bank locks and strongboxes. He'd have it open before lunch."

"He'd cut it open."

"Reckon he would."

"Then no."

Ben unwrapped a whoopie pie and put half of it by her elbow.

"Monday's coming whether the box opens or not."

"I know when Monday is."

"You want to stand in front of the harbormaster in Port Blossom holding a rusted tin and a dead woman's diary?"

"I want to stand in front of him holding proof."

"Proof of what? That Jedediah Blackwood put his money into a rum boat?"

"That's what Silas says he did."

"Silas has believed that since he was a boy, and saying it out loud won't get his name off your deed."

Nora squared the box against the edge of the bench.

"Proof the house isn't his, the cove isn't his, and a man who spent his whole life hearing his family called fools was never told a lie."

Ben looked out at the water, where a lobster boat worked the ledge.

"And if it isn't in the box?"

"Then I lose the house, and I'll know I lost it honestly."

Ben drained his coffee.

"Plumber's quote came in."

"Go on."

"Thirty-one hundred and eighty dollars for the rough-in, and he wants half of it up front."

"Put him off till Tuesday."

"I'll put him off till Tuesday."

He took his cap off the peg by the door.

"Charter at ten. People from Ohio want to see seals. I'll be back with the plywood by four."

"Ben. The pie was a good idea."

"Hannaford had them two for five."

The door shut behind him.

Her phone rang at half past nine.

"Hey, just checking in," Liam said, and a bus let out its air behind him in Boston.

"I'm all right."

"That isn't what I asked."

"I had half a whoopie pie and a coffee with cream in it."

Nora carried the phone to the window.

"I'm practically a Mainer."

"Mom. Friday. You hung up before I got to the parking lot."

"They heard the whole case and ran out of afternoon, so the harbormaster set it over to Monday morning."

"That's a stall."

"That's a postponement."

She heard him let a breath out through his nose.

"Silas Blackwood shook my hand on the way out."

"What did he say?"

A truck moved off down the street.

"He said your mother is a determined woman. He said it apologetically, which was worse."

"He's an old man with a grudge and a lawyer from Bangor. I'm not going to pretend he's nothing."

"I could drive up tomorrow night."

"You have a review Monday morning."

"I have a mother with a hearing."

He had stepped out of the apartment for this call.

"Liam."

"Fine. I'll wait. Text me when you have something to hand them."

"I will."

Grace Carter came down the path at eleven with a clipboard under her arm and her boots wet to the ankle. She stopped in the doorway as if the threshold needed a decision.

"You're still here."

"I own it. For now."

She flipped a page.

"The stake line moved again. North end, past what's left of your seawall."

"Past it how far?"

"Past where I'd stand."

Grace capped her pen.

"My second objection goes in Monday morning, in the same packet as his."

"Grace. Thank you."

"Don't." She said it without heat. "I'm not on your side. If Blackwood gets your upland, he gets the cove, and the cove is where the eelgrass is."

"Fair enough."

"One more thing."

She tucked the clipboard under her arm.

"Your mayor walked the shore with the town engineer on Thursday and photographed your foundation."

"Thorne was on my island."

"He was on the beach below the mean high water line, and the beach below that line belongs to the town, and Thorne has been walking that line since before you got here, so he knows exactly where it runs."

"And he'll say so Monday."

"He will."

Grace looked at the box on the bench.

"If I were you, I'd have something to hand them."

The cottage went quiet then except for the tide working the rocks under the north wall.

Nora laid out what the island had given her: the 1923 almanac open to its hand-drawn map, the water-stained photograph of two men in front of a roofless house, Agnes Miller's diary in its oilcloth, and the docket Ben had peeled out from under a batten, with fourteen crates and north cove penciled on it. Last, the dollar, nearly black with tarnish except where her fingers had rubbed it bright.

She had spent the week treating the coin as money, and so had every hand that held it since 1921. Silas had stood on her beach in June and demanded that tin back, and he had known what was inside before he ever saw it. He only insisted, with the certainty of a man who had told the same story all his life, that it mattered.

She weighed the coin in her palm. Heavier than a quarter from the laundromat machines in Rockland, heavier than a coin has any reason to be.

On Tuesday she had slid the spine of a butter knife into the slot, and it had gone in loose and rattling, with no purchase behind it. Her chisel was too thick at the tang, and a screwdriver would have gouged the iron.

Nora stood the dollar on edge and brought it to the mouth of the slot. The milling lined up with the opening as if the slot had been cut to its measure, and one tooth of the edge caught on something inside, the small grab of a key finding its first pin.

She pushed, and the coin went in until the face of it lay against the iron. Her hand wanted to hurry. She held the dollar square and nudged it to the right.

Something inside the box let go. The click came up through the iron into her fingers, a bolt dropping home in a channel that had been cut and fitted and waiting a long time for exactly this. The lid rose under her thumb.

Nora kept her hand there and looked out at the cove, where two boats were working the ledge. Alistair Finch had built this box to open for somebody who stopped treating a dollar like money. Monday morning she would walk into the harbormaster's office with the answer in her hand.