Turner Point was a narrow slab of rock jutting out into the water. I rounded the tip, followed the curve, and slipped in closer to shore, where massive walls of jagged rock sprung up from the ocean, a dense wall of trees settled on the edge. On a sunny day, the cliffs looked as if they were on fire, the light turning the reddish-brown slabs of granite into a blinding wall of orange flame. Today the granite face of the cliff was dark, the water below it an inky dark blue.
The ache in my back had turned to flat-out pain. The fever was back. I felt it in every inch of my body. It was hard to concentrate. The choppy water had turned to five-foot swells by the time I pulled alongside my strings, cranking the wheel until I was next to the buoy. I put her in neutral and pulled off a couple of layers, stripping down to a T-shirt and Grundens. I was burning up as it was, and looking at a full day’s work. I’d pulled almost three hundred pounds from this patch of bottom last week, and now the soak time had been more days than I’d planned with missing Saturday. Plus, I needed the traps to be full, needed to pull at least three hundred pounds. Or more, for that matter. The bank had called again, looking for this month’s payment on the Salt House. They’d left a message reminding me it was a week late. As if I needed a reminder of the money I didn’t have.
I leaned over, gaffed the buoy, and put the warp in the hauler. When the trap came to the surface, I pulled it up, balancing it on the rail. I stared at it, squinted, not sure I was seeing things correctly. The door was wide open, the trap empty except for a few crabs and some kelp.
I moved the trap off the rail and set it on the deck, examining it to see if the closure had somehow failed. But there was no damage to it.
I’d repaired these traps in the beginning of the season, replacing all the J clips and rigging new cord for the mesh hooks that secured the trap. The white clips still looked new, not one missing, and the hook was intact.
There were only two ways for a door to open: either the door failed or someone opened it. And this door was brand-new.
I turned and flicked on the hydraulics, pulling up the second trap. The whir of the hauler matching the buzz in my head, my body tighter than the line rising out of the water. The trap cleared the surface. I didn’t reach for it, just shut off the hydraulics, and watched as the trap twirled, suspended over the water, the door swinging wildly.
Water poured out of the empty trap. Not even a crab in this one. Just a dead dogfish, its mouth slack, hanging open, almost as if it were laughing at me, mocking me.
I looked at the water, trying to think clearly through the pounding in my skull, a deafening drone in my head. I pressed my hands against my ears, pushing back at the pain, the noise swirling inside, growing louder and louder until I felt my mouth open and a shout spill out. I kicked at the trap on the deck, sending it sliding to the stern.
By the third trap, I knew before it was fully out of the water that the door would be open, the trap empty. That the lobsters had been taken out, stolen. I didn’t need to pull all of them to know what I was going to find. Every trap on this trawl would be empty, as would the ones on the trawl twenty yards off my port side.
The conversation with Gwen earlier at the dock ran on high speed through my mind. Her voice slamming into me, she sounded high, drugged up. I looked at my hand, felt it split against Finn’s nose, and saw the girl weaving as she left the dock.
I threw the traps back in the water, tossing the buoy over the side. I turned the boat and headed in, pushing the diesel engine as hard as she would go through the swells. I kept my hand on the throttle, my full weight pushing against it, the gash in my knuckle opening against the pressure, a circle of red appearing on the bandage. The hull pounded against the sea, water slamming into the windshield and over the rails with each wave.
The radio cackled above me, and I heard Boon’s voice, saying Kelly, pick up, Kelly, pick up. I turned the radio off, tried to concentrate on keeping the boat from taking a wave sideways at the speed I was going.
I turned the corner into the cove at full throttle. I slowed at the No Wake buoy, looking over at Finn’s slip, but his boat was gone, the slip empty. The roar of the diesel engine matched the thunder in my head. I came in too fast and threw her in reverse to avoid hitting the dock. I shut her off, jumping over the rail before the boat came to a stop.
I tied the bow line in a quick figure eight and took the gangplank in two strides, heading to the parking lot. I heard my name, once, then again. I kept walking, reached the truck, climbed in and reversed, the tires kicking up small stones under the tires. I pulled out of the space and saw Boon, in the doorway of the shop, less than fifty yards away, his mouth forming my name. I put the truck in gear and drove off.
Drops of water rolled off the bibs I was wearing, and the windows fogged as soon as I pulled into traffic. I turned west off the main road, my foot itching to slam down on the gas pedal.
The streets just outside the center of town were a maze of narrow, tree-lined roads with cedar-planked houses, one resembling the next. Widow’s walks sat perched on rooftops high above the tree line, and cobblestoned sidewalks hemmed the road. Every inch of me wanted to drive as fast as my mind was racing, but I kept to the speed limit.
It wasn’t until I crossed the railroad tracks onto Route 45, the street opening wide and flat, that my leg gave in to the tension, my foot pressing the gas pedal until it touched the floor of the truck. I wasn’t even sure I could find Finn, but I remembered Hope had said something about Peggy hating the house, with the train tracks right on top of her. There was only one neighborhood where the tracks ran through, a large cul-de-sac of duplexes known as the circle when I was growing up.
There was a new sign at the entrance of the circle with Magnolia Hill written on it—even though the street sat at the bottom of a listless stretch of road, and the only trees that rimmed the pavement were a handful of scruffy, overgrown pines. It was adjacent to the town dump, and when I turned into the circle, a whiff of decay seeped in the crack of the window.
I pulled over at the first duplex with a car parked in the driveway. An old guy wearing nothing but a bathrobe over his basketball-sized stomach answered the door and didn’t know Finn, but his wife came up behind him and pointed to a house farther down the street.
I pulled in the driveway next to an older truck, hopped out, and was up the steps in two. The doorbell didn’t ring when I pressed it, so I opened the screen and used my fist to bang on the wooden door. The sound of it echoed, bouncing around the semicircle of houses.
The door opened, and a boy wearing a baseball hat looked out at me. A look of surprise washed over his face, or it struck me at first as surprise. I waited for him to ask who I was, what I wanted, and I realized the look on his face wasn’t so much surprise as recognition. He knew who I was. That much was clear.
He stepped back from the doorway, and I could’ve easily stepped in, but I backed up down the stairs.