He’d been following Loo ever since she was arrested. He’d treated it like any other job, as if his own daughter were a mark he was going to rub his finger against and smudge out. He dug through her clothes and books, looked at the bottom of her shoes to see where she’d been walking. He trailed her to work, watched her dodge the men eyeing her there, marked the sweat on her brow as she lifted platters and scrubbed dishes. He watched her go into Dogtown and come out with leaves in her hair. He’d seen her sitting on the roof and tracking stars through her telescope. And he’d uncovered the scrapbook of clippings about Lily’s death, hidden inside a dress in her closet. Saw the ways she was trying to make sense of things, just as he had, taping up his memories in the bathroom. Hawley read every article and clipping, turned every page, then put the book right back where he’d found it.
“The police can only trace a bullet if they have the gun that fired it,” he said at last. “They re-create the shot and compare. But I modified the barrel in the Beretta as soon as you put it back in the chest. Believe me. If I wanted to shoot your boyfriend, nobody would ever know it was me.”
He didn’t necessarily mean it as a joke. But Loo brightened, and Hawley knew he’d said just the right thing. She reached under the seat. She took out the whiskey again. This time, she opened the bottle and took a sip. Then she coughed and spit into the ocean.
“I don’t know how you can drink this stuff.”
“You get used to it.”
She put the cap back on and held the bottle like a club. Like she was going to smash it against the boat, ready to christen the Pandora all over again. And then her eyes moved toward the horizon and her face changed. She focused on the water. “I see something.”
Hawley grabbed the binoculars. It took awhile for him to find where she was pointing and then he did—something big was floating about a hundred meters north. It was hard to tell from the waves, but it looked like a body.
The engine kicked to life and Hawley turned the throttle as far as it would go. He pointed the bow straight and Loo crawled topside, focusing and refocusing the binoculars. She was hit by spray and wiped the lens on her jacket. As they got closer Hawley could see a mass covered in seaweed; there were arms and some kind of head. It was facedown in the water. And then he saw fur.
It was a giant bear. The kind Hawley used to win for Loo at cheap roadside carnivals. A huge pink stuffed animal filled with shredded foam and sawdust and hung high to lure in marks. Hawley would shoot out a paper star, and the carnies would hand over the prize, and Loo would stagger under the weight, refusing to let her father carry the bear and refusing to let go, shoving the animal into the seat next to them on the roller coaster, hugging the bear as they went up in the Ferris wheel and then strapping the bear into the car to go home. When they moved, there was never enough room to take it along. Hawley always promised to win another at the next carnival to make it up to her, and when he did, they left that bear behind, too. Now this waterlogged body seemed like a manifestation of all those abandoned animals, floating a hundred and ten miles out in international waters, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with a rope around its neck.
Hawley took hold of the stuffed animal and pulled it into the boat. The fur was a horrible fleshy color, the cheap, synthetic coat soaked through. Strips of shiny green kelp and brownish gunk caught around the arms and legs. The bear was missing one of its eyes, but the other remained—a clear plastic bubble with a small black disc that moved like a real eye, the iris slowly turning.
“Looks like our bearskin rug went out and got drunk,” said Loo.
Hawley nodded. Just hours earlier he’d been rolling all their savings into that fur, wishing he could wrap it around himself and Loo and hide away from the world.
“How the hell did this get out here?”
Hawley pointed to the rope. It was tied tightly around the animal’s neck and hung over the side of the sailboat into the water. He started pulling it up. He pulled and pulled and pulled, the rope getting thicker with algae the farther he went, until his hands were covered with green-and-black slime and he saw a ghostly shape rising through the shadows—an old wire lobster trap, filled with garbage.
“It must have washed out in a storm,” said Loo.
“No,” Hawley said. “It’s a marker.”
There were two lobsters in the trap, as well as a couple of crabs, but the rest was jammed with junk—bottles and bits of metal and stones and in the middle of all that something square and bright. A silver box, vacuum-sealed in plastic. Hawley pulled the lobsters out first, their tails flapping madly against the air, their claws raised, the antennae long and slippery. They were a good size, big enough to eat, but Hawley tossed them into the ocean, followed by the crabs, yanking each creature through the plastic netting. Then it was just the stones and the broken beer bottles and finally the box.
Loo handed him her knife and he cut through the plastic. It was thick as skin and twice as hard but eventually split in two. Hawley eased the box out. The sides were industrial-grade metal. The kind normally used on gun cases. There was a lock but it did not take long for Hawley to break it open with the knife. Then he flipped the side latches and opened the lid. The interior was lined with black velvet cloth, still perfectly dry. And in the center was a gold pocket watch.
Hawley picked up the watch and turned it over. The metal was cold as ice in his hand. There was an etching of a deer on the cover, its hooves raised in midflight. The deer was being hunted, an arrow in its side. He pressed down on the winding key and the shell flipped open. Set within the face were four smaller dials, marking the year, month, date, hour, minute, second. Hawley took a breath, and once again he was sliding his hand into the pocket of Maureen Talbot’s wedding gown and pulling out this same watch, like a magic trick reaching across time. He touched the key and the lid split in two, and there was the star chart, with its tiny flecks of diamond and sapphire, catching the last of the afternoon light. He pressed the heart of the shell against his ear.
The watch was ticking.
The floor of the boat had opened beneath them and he was falling through layers of his own life.
“Dad,” said Loo. “Dad.”
And then Hawley heard the boat.
It was half a mile off. A cruiser, maybe thirty feet, and the wake behind was wide and open, white froth streaming in lines and breaking the pattern of the waves. The boat was headed straight for them. And it was coming fast. There was no way they would outrun it. Not with the wind dead like it was.
“Go below,” said Hawley. “Get the guns.”
Loo scrambled into the cabin and came back with guns and the bag of ammunition, and together they started loading.
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to be careful.”
The pink bear was still tossed facedown in the bottom of the boat. It was the same size as Loo. Hawley’s hands started to shake. He should have turned the boat around. He should have followed his instincts and hit the road the instant he got home from the police station.
Loo peered through the binoculars. “It looks like two people on board.”
Hawley tucked the Glock back into his belt. He grabbed his father’s rifle and hid it under one of the blankets. “Take the shotgun and the sniper rifle and stay in the cabin,” he said. “Get in there before they see you.”