Chapter 23 The Cove

The low spring tide came four days later, and Clara and Ruth and Graham walked out along the headland before the sun was fully up, when the sky was the pale gray of a gull's wing and the water had drawn back from the land as far as it would ever go. The cove north of the harbor was a place Clara had not visited since the morning she found the boathouse box, and she had expected it to feel smaller, but it did not. It was larger, and emptier, and the air inside it moved differently, as if the walls of the cliff were holding something. The tide had gone out farther than Graham had ever seen it. Rocks that were usually covered stood bare and dark, furred with weed, and the shingle at the base of the cliff was wet and ridged with the marks of the retreating water. Graham walked ahead, his head down, reading the beach the way other men read a page, and after a time he stopped and knelt and brushed at the stones with his hands. Clara came up beside him. In the hollow where the cliff leaned back, half-buried under a drift of shingle and dried weed, was the collapsed rib cage of a small boat — a skiff, her planks rotted to soft dark tissue, her ribs showing through like the bones of some enormous creature that had died on its knees. The hull had been broken open by the sea and buried again and held, and the tide that day had given it back. Graham did not speak. He worked with his hands, pulling away the stones and the weed, and Clara and Ruth worked beside him, and the sun came over the headland and the water stayed low, and the three of them uncovered the skiff piece by piece. It had been sunk deliberately, Graham said — there were holes in her, and a length of chain wrapped around her keel, meant to keep her down. Someone had wanted this boat to stay at the bottom, and the sea had not cooperated. The sea never cooperated. It only waited. He showed them where the oars had been fitted, and where a small iron ring was still bolted to the bow, and he traced the grain of the wood with one finger the way you trace a name you have not heard in a long time. "She was a working boat," he said. "Eighteen foot, maybe. The kind you would keep on a beach and not think twice about. That is what Harlow would have wanted — nothing that anyone would miss. The night she went out, I would not have known her from any other. I only know her now because she has been waiting here, in this cove, all my life." Under the skiff, pressed into the shingle where the keel had lain, they found a bundle wrapped in canvas and tied with rope that had gone to pulp. The canvas fell apart in their hands, and inside there was a woman's small things, ordinary and terrible in their ordinariness: a hairbrush with a cracked tortoiseshell back; a pair of lace-up boots, one lace still threaded; a locket on a broken chain, and inside the locket a photograph so faded it might have been anyone; and a letter, folded small, the paper soft as cloth, addressed in a young woman's careful hand to Polly. Ruth's hands were shaking. She took the letter, and she held it, and she did not open it. "It is addressed to her," she said. "Someone wrote to her, and she never got it. Or she got it and kept it, and then —" She stopped. She could not finish the sentence, and she did not have to. They found the remains further along the cove, in a cleft in the rock where the tide had been unable to reach and the stones had covered what they could not wash away. There was very little — the sea is thorough, and fifty years is a long time — but there were the bones of a small person, and a scrap of dark wool, and a silver chain without its locket. Clara stood back and let Ruth and Graham kneel there, because she understood that some griefs have to be met first by the people they belong to. She watched Ruth take off her own coat and lay it over the stones, a gesture of impossible tenderness, and she thought about how the dead ask for so little and are given so late. It was Ruth who finally asked what Clara had been trying not to think about. "The other one," she said. "The ledger says two. My grandmother only ever knew of one." Graham shook his head slowly. "The one taken away in the car — nobody kept a record of her. That is what Harlow was good at. One girl became a missing person, and the village let it be a tragedy. The other became nothing at all. No family came looking because she had no one left to miss her, or because the men she had run from were the ones who sent her here. Either way, she never got a name on a report. That is the part that has kept me awake for fifty years. One we could call a sorrow. Two was a pattern, and a pattern could have been stopped." They marked the place with a cairn of stones, the way sailors mark a grave on a foreign shore, and they stood for a long time in the cold wind while the tide turned and began, slowly, to come back in. Graham's voice, when he finally spoke, was rough. "I rowed for Harlow's men once," he said. "I was eighteen. I did not know what the skiff was for until I was out on the water and it was too late to ask. I have asked myself every day since why I did not ask then. If I had, maybe —" He stopped. "Maybe it would not have changed anything. But I would have known her name. That is what I have lived with. Not what I did. What I did not ask." Ruth looked at him for a long moment, and then she reached out and took his hand, and they stood together while the water crept back up the shingle. Clara watched them, and she thought about the chain her mother had written about, the chain of silence and fear and love that ran through the village like a current, and she thought about how a chain can be broken link by link, and how each link that is broken lets in a little more light. When they walked back up the headland, Clara phoned the police from the county seat, and she told them what they had found, and she gave them Eleanor's brooch and the locket and the letter. The officer on the other end was quiet for a long time, and then she said she would come herself. Clara hung up and looked out at the cove, where the tide had already covered the cairn, and she thought about the girl who had been sent to sea on the dark of the moon, and the sister who had waited fifty years, and she knew that whatever the sea gave back from here on, it would be a long time in the giving, and that was all right. They had learned to wait.