Chapter 7 of 13He Never Asked

"You want my honest read on that tin?" Ben Carter asked.

He kept his eyes on the water ahead, his left hand loose on the wheel, and he did not wait for her to answer. "Because it's going to cost you something."

Nora lifted the canvas tote off her knee and set it on the bench, where the box sat heavy as a brick, wrapped in a dish towel borrowed from the Port Blossom Inn's kitchen.

"I've paid already. Two blisters and a good pair of work gloves."

"Then you paid the small part." He eased the throttle back. Ahead, Tern Island came up out of the haze: gray rock, green scrub, and the cottage roof sagging against a nickel-colored sky.

"Say the whole part."

"Silas Blackwood sat at the Chart and Compass last night for over an hour. One cup of coffee. He asked Marge twice where you'd been digging."

"What did she tell him?"

"Nothing. She's got no use for him." Ben shrugged. "He didn't need her. He sits out on Sedge Head most evenings with binoculars, and from up there he can see your whole north shore."

Nora watched the wake fold back into the bay. Tuesday night she had seen a steady glint off the mainland rocks and told herself it was a porch light left burning.

"You could have mentioned that."

"I mentioned it now."

They came alongside the float. Ben cut the engine and took the tote from her before she climbed out. The tide was low, and the cobble beach showed a wide skirt of rockweed, black and slick, breathing that cold iron smell the ocean keeps in early June. Gulls argued over something near the seawall.

Ben handed her a Hannaford bag. "Two corn muffins and a coffee. Four dollars now, which is robbery."

"Thank you."

They were still unloading, the level in her hand and the mortar buckets by the bench, when the green skiff came around the north point.

Nora set the level down.

The skiff was old, white paint showing through the green. He cut the motor late and let the boat bump the float, then came up the beach like a man walking into an argument he'd already had in his head.

"You've been digging," he said.

Nora folded her arms. "Good morning, Mr. Blackwood. Yes. On my own land, with a permit filed at the town office on Thursday."

He wore wool, buttoned to the throat on the first warm Saturday of the season, and he stopped close enough that she could hear him getting his breath back from the cobble.

"The fact of the matter is, you pulled a tin box out of the ground that belongs to my family, and I've come to take it back."

"I have a tin box," she said. "Whether it belongs to your family is a question I can't answer yet. I don't know who buried it or why."

"You know my grandfather buried it."

"I don't know that either. You're telling me."

His mouth worked. "He buried it himself, the spring they raised the frame. Every dollar my family had went into that house and into Finch's business. When Finch sailed out of this harbor, he took our name with him. My father swept floors at the fish plant his whole working life."

"That's a hard story," Nora said. "It isn't a title."

"It's a claim."

"It's a claim you can't prove by shouting at me on a Saturday morning."

Silas took one step closer. Ben came up the beach and stood at the end of the bench with his arms crossed, saying nothing, and that was enough to stop the old man where he was.

"Hand me the box," Silas said. "Whatever's inside it is mine, down to the last item."

"What's in it?"

He didn't answer. He looked past her at the tote, then at Ben, then back at her face.

"There's a silver dollar in that tin," he said. "Set in it the year the frame went up. It's been in the ground a hundred years, waiting on a Blackwood to come for it."

Nora kept her face still. She had told Ben, and Ben had told no one, because Ben did not tell people things.

"You know the year," she said.

"I know the story. My father told it to me the way his father told it to him."

"You're Nora Vance." He said it the way a man reads a name off a paper he doesn't like. "You bought that cottage like a person buys a car. Sixty years I've walked that shoreline."

"You had a map," he said. "You found it in the house. Don't stand there and tell me you didn't."

"I'm not going to tell you anything about what I found, not while you're speaking to me this way."

"Silas," Ben said.

"Stay out of it, Carter."

"It's my boat and she's my employer. I'll stand where I like."

Silas turned back to Nora, and the wind pushed his cardigan flat against his ribs. "Give it to me and I'll go."

"No."

"You'll wish you hadn't said that."

"I've been shouted at by better-dressed men. It's Saturday, Mr. Blackwood. Go have your coffee."

He stood another moment, jaw working, one hand opening and closing at his side. Then he walked down the cobble, shoved the skiff off the float, and yanked the cord. The motor caught, and he swung the boat north without looking back.

Ben watched him go. "That went about how I figured."

Nora crouched and unzipped the tote. The tin sat inside, dull as a river stone, one corner still crusted with island dirt.

"He never asked," she said.

Ben turned. "Asked what?"

"What was in it." She stood up slowly. "He named the coin. He said the dollar and the year it was set, and I never told him there was anything in that box but rust."

"His father would have told him. Families keep things."

"Not that exactly. He never once asked what I found." She looked north, where the skiff had gone small against the headland.

Ben considered that. "Then it's written down somewhere."

"Which means his family has a record, and he's read it." She drew the zipper closed. "Monday I'm taking the photograph to the archive. I want those men named by somebody who isn't Silas Blackwood."

"Tomorrow's Sunday. Nothing's open but the church and the diner."

"Then tonight I photograph everything. The tin, the coin, the picture, with a witness and a date on the envelope." She hoisted the tote onto her shoulder. "He's waited sixty years for somebody to dig that box up. I did it in three days."

Ben picked up the mortar buckets. "Reckon so."

The tide had turned and was coming back across the cobble. Nora carried the level up the path, and what she could not answer was why a man who had waited his whole life for that tin had stood close enough to touch it and never once asked what was inside.