Constance Greene was soaked to the bone, her sodden dress clinging heavily to her body, the hem bedraggled with sand and mud. But she did not feel the cold: her homeless childhood on the docks of New York City seemed to have made her permanently immune to chill. The wind thrashed the salt grass and cattails, which swayed crazily as she pushed her way through, her low boots squishing along the marshy ground, the flashlight beam playing into the murk, illuminating the slashing drops of rain. She moved swiftly, her mind an angry, embarrassed, humiliated blank.
At first, her instinct had been simply to get away—get away before she did something so violent and permanent she would regret it forever. But as she ran from the Inn, south toward the dunes and the salt grass, the faintest of plans began to form.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew that what she was doing wasn’t simply defying Pendergast, but was also irrational and perhaps dangerous. She didn’t care. She also knew that her guardian, for once, was wrong: there was something else going on in the town of Exmouth, something dark, strange, beyond ratiocination—and still unsolved. She knew more than he did about such documents as the Sutter manuscript; she knew there was often more to them than was commonly believed. Obscura Peregrinatione ad Littus (A Dark Pilgrimage to the Southern Shore): there was a mystery here still to be uncovered, and the answer to that mystery lay to the south, in the ruins of Oldham—she was sure of it. What that answer was she could not begin to guess. But she would prove to Pendergast that she was right. She would prove it—and then she would shut herself away in certain sub-basement chambers of the Riverside Drive mansion known only to her until she felt in the mood to see the sun again.
As the land rose, the salt grass gave way to scrub oaks and twisted Scotch pines. She had passed Skullcrusher Rocks and the hook of land beyond, crossed a mudflat and channel—it was low tide—and reached Crow Island, at the far edge of the wildlife refuge. The ocean lay eastward, to her left, beyond the long, narrow barrier island. She paused to listen, but the wind was so loud that she could not hear the surf. The only thing visible in the swirling blackness was the faint blinking of the Exmouth lighthouse behind her, the beam sweeping by every nine seconds. It was this light that she navigated by, the beacon showing her the way to Oldham.
The scrubby trees began to thin, and dunes anchored by dune grass made their appearance. Now she could finally hear the thundering of the unseen ocean—or rather feel it beneath her feet, the shaking of the ground caused by the huge Atlantic rollers pounding the beach. She angled across the island, once again checking her position with the lighthouse. The deserted town could be no more than another mile or two. She would be there very soon.
A good nor’easter didn’t frighten Bud Olsen. On the contrary, he liked it. It filled him with vigor. And it didn’t bother Aubrey, his golden retriever. After retiring from fishing ten years before, Olsen had moved into town and now lived in a small house at the end of Main Street, where he could walk everywhere—especially to his Tuesday lunch club and to the library, where he was a vigorous borrower of books, preferring the maritime adventure stories of Patrick O’Brian, John Masefield, and C. S. Forester.
At nine o’clock, with the wind rattling the casements, Aubrey began whining at the door and wagging his tail. Olsen laid aside his book and rose from the chair with a grunt. He turned off the kerosene lantern and walked to the door.
“You want to go out, boy?”
Aubrey wagged his tail more vigorously.