Chapter 28 The Ship's Log

If the bones in the cleft were Lily's, then Polly was the one who had gone aboard the ship, and the search for Polly turned, as it had to turn, to the sea and to the ships. It was a different kind of searching than the one that had found the skiff. That search had been a matter of tides and stones and things the sea keeps close. This one was a matter of paper — manifests and crew lists and the careful records that men keep of movements across water — and Clara did not trust it, because the ledger had taught her that paper can be made to lie, but it was the only map they had, and a map, even an imperfect one, is better than open water. She went to the county archives with Inspector Hale, and they spent two days in a high, cold room where the light came in through windows that had not been cleaned in decades, and they read the shipping registers for the end of October 1971. The coastguard log for the dark of the moon was there, an entry in the hand of an officer who had died long ago, noting an unlit vessel off the headland, no action taken, and Clara read it and thought about how many silences were written down in the ordinary record of a working day. No action taken. The sea had been busy that night, and the man had not asked, and the log had been kept anyway, because that was what logs were for. And then there was Old Tom's notebook. It was found in a box of uncatalogued papers that the archive had not yet worked through, and Clara knew the handwriting before she knew what it was, because Old Tom had taught her to skip stones when she was a girl, and he had written her mother's name in the condolence book in the same round, unhurried hand. He had been the harbor master, and he had kept a notebook of the things that happened on the water — weather, tides, the names of boats, the small events that a village remembers and forgets. The entry for the end of October 1971 was three lines long, and it said: Dark of the moon. Saw the light off the headland. Did not ask. Old Tom had died four years ago, and the notebook had come to the archive with the rest of his papers, and Clara sat with it in her hands and thought about the entry, and about the man who had written it, and about the fact that he had taught her to skip stones and had never once told her what he had seen from the harbor wall on the night her uncle died. The ship's log came later, from a sailor's family who had read about the memorial and sent the archive everything they had. It was the log of a coastal freighter that had cleared for a continental port in the first week of November 1971, and in the margin of the entry for the night after the dark of the moon, in a hand that was not the captain's, someone had written: Took on a passenger at the cove. No papers. Women's business. Clara read the line, and she read it again, and she thought about the word passenger, and about the phrase women's business, and about how the ledger had called the same girl a package, and how the two words had meant the same thing, and how neither of them had meant a name. The trail led to the port, and Clara and Ruth went there together, because a search like this is better done with two, and because Ruth had waited long enough and would not wait at home. The port was vast and indifferent, the way the sea is vast and indifferent, and the shipping company's old ledgers were kept in a basement that smelled of oil and damp paper, and they read the crew lists for the freighter until the light failed. There was a name on the list that appeared once and never again — a steward, taken on for a single voyage, no address, no next of kin. Ruth wrote it down, and Clara watched her write it, and neither of them said anything, because there was nothing to say. A name on a crew list was not a girl. It was not proof. It was a thread, and they had learned to pull threads carefully. The steward's memoir surfaced months later, published decades ago in a small print run, sent to the archive by the same sailor's family. There was a passage in it about the voyage, and Clara read it aloud to Ruth in the reading room. A girl had been brought aboard at an English cove on a moonless night, the memoir said. She had not spoken. She had sat in the hold with her small bag and watched the water, and she had been put off at the first port with the bag, and a woman had been waiting on the quay, and the girl had walked up the gangway and had not looked back. The memoir did not name the cove. It did not name the girl. It said only that she had not looked back, and that the steward had thought about her for years, and had never seen her again. They could not prove it was Polly. There was no photograph, no name, no document that joined the girl on the quay to the girl in the room above the boathouse storeroom. But it was the first answer that let Polly be alive — that she had been taken aboard, that she had been put ashore in a city, that she had walked up a gangway into a life that the ledger had not recorded and the sea had not kept. Clara read the passage twice more, and she thought about the letters Polly had written from the ferry, and about the sister who had waited fifty years, and about the girl who had fought, and she understood that the answer was not an answer, only a direction. They took the ferry back to Thornhaven, and they stood at the rail in the cold wind, and Ruth said, quietly, "She would have written. If she could have, she would have written. Polly wrote letters the way other people breathe." Clara said nothing, because there was nothing to add. The sea moved beneath them, indifferent and vast, and the answer they had found was this: Polly had either lived and not written, which meant she could not, or she had not lived, which meant she could not. Either way, the sea had the story, and it gave back when it was ready, and they had learned, at last, to wait for it.