“Thank God,” Peter said, as Merry blew through the front door at ten minutes past nine that evening. He’d stopped pacing the hall when she called from the airport and he knew she was safely out of the Coast Guard Jayhawk. But that had been more than half an hour ago, and he’d started to worry—about car accidents, downed power lines, flooded roads. Trees falling over just as Merry drove beneath them.
“Clarence and I had to drop a load of evidence at the station,” she explained. “God, I have never been so tired in all my life.”
“Tea? Warm milk?”
“Bourbon,” she decided. “In a big-girl glass. I’ve been cold and damp for hours, and I’m sure some nineteenth-century doctor would assure me whiskey’s medicinal.”
“Go change,” Peter advised, “then come back down by the fire and tell me all about it.”
“Where are the Whitneys?” She glanced in surprise around the quiet house.
“I sent them to the Dreamland. Could be the last time it’s not flooded this weekend.”
“True.” The Dreamland was Nantucket’s only real movie house, although fusspots on the southern end of the island argued that movies were also shown during the summer at the ’Sconset Casino. The shingled building sat on Water Street, one block off the steamboat wharves, which meant its ground floor was occasionally damp during storm season. It would definitely be closed tomorrow. Everything on Water Street would be closed.
She dropped her bag in the hall, her soaked shoes and coat in the kitchen, and took the back staircase up to the master suite where she and Peter were staying. The wind was shrieking around the old house, and the double-hung casement windows—original, with the rounded inset mark of Colonial glass—rattled in their frames. They hadn’t had the time to board up most of them, and Merry felt a finger of worry tease her spine. Hurricane-proofing Mason Farms had taken priority. But Isaiah Mason’s 1820 frame house on the Cliff had withstood terrible storms before, she reasoned; surely it would do so again?
Hot water streaming over her hair and down her chilled back restored her. So did warm pajamas and fleece slippers.
Peter had set out some cheese along with the bourbon and joined her in a glass.
“It’s like an unexpected date night,” Merry told him, drawing a throw around them both as they sprawled on the sofa facing the fire.
Peter’s lips found her temple. “You smell like a warm infant. With a regrettable distillery habit. Now tell me why you risked your life tonight.”
“Evidence,” Merry said, “that I was afraid might wash away.”
“Of what?”
“Murder.”
She told him then about the grounded yacht and the woman who’d died before she could reach the hospital. And about the cache of drugs she and Clarence had hoisted into the belly of the Coast Guard chopper, along with their baskets of crime scene evidence.
“Sixteen kilos?” Peter repeated.
“Worth a street value of a couple million. Or so the Coast Guard tells me. Biggest haul in the Cape and Islands District this year. We’re going to split the credit with the Jayhawk crew when the story hits the news.”
“I think you’ve earned a day off tomorrow.”
“I wish.” Merry popped a hunk of cheese in her mouth and chased it with a sip of whiskey. She leaned her head on Peter’s shoulder, muscled and solid as a bolster. “Pocock’s threatening to rescind my leave if the storm’s bad enough.”
“Nope,” Peter said decisively. “Not happening. We’re going to party in the rain this weekend and be on a plane to Paris Monday. If Pocock tries to pull anything, I’ll tender your resignation myself.”
Merry sighed, her eyelids fluttering. The flames were melding to a blue and orange line beyond her half-closed eyes. “You can’t do that, Pete.”
“Why not?”
“Because swinging out over the ocean tonight, scared out of my mind in gale-force winds, I realized something important. Something even Bob Butthead Pocock can’t ruin.”
“What?”
“How lucky I am,” she said. “Do you know how lucky I am? To love what I do?”
Peter’s gaze, warm and probing, met hers. “I know how lucky I am.” He kissed her.
“Terry,” Howie Seitz felt an instant of relief as the Coast Guard chief picked up at Brant Point Station. “I was afraid you’d have gone off duty.”
“Not tonight,” he replied. “Not tomorrow either. Just drinking coffee and checking screens.”
“You and me both.” Howie rocked back in his chair at the police station. He’d driven there straight from Jackson Point, his anxiety mounting, to turn over the fingerprint and bullet fragment evidence he’d collected. He could have done both in the morning, but he was too worried to go home and sit alone in his apartment, waiting for the hurricane to fall howling on his rooftop. He wanted to be doing something. Typing up his hospital notes was something.
“Did your chopper get back safely to Air Station Sandwich?”
“Touched down at eight fifty-seven. What’s up, Seitz?”
“I’m worried about a friend. I think she’s out on the water. Have you received any distress calls from off Madaket tonight?”
“Just the one,” Terry replied.
Howie’s stomach turned over. “What one?”
“The VHF call we logged at five forty-eight. Woman reported seeing a flare off the north side of Tuckernuck. We got an SOS signal from the yacht, too—that’s why we sent out the Jayhawk cowboys. I reported the whole sequence to Meredith via email, but I guess you haven’t seen that yet.”
“I haven’t,” Howie admitted. Merry knew nothing about his private life. And she hadn’t had time to forward Terry’s report. “Who sent you that radio call?”
“You think it might be your friend?” Terry paused an instant, tapping keys. “Dionis Mather. Isn’t she Jack Mather’s girl? The Tuckernuck caretaker?”
“Yeah,” Howie said. “And Terry? She’s missing.”
The undertow was the first thing she felt, powerful and relentless, as the storm surge gathered, folded, and cleaved the sea. The shocking cold was an afterthought to the fierce grip of the waves as they clutched Dionis under the arms and tossed her forward, like a child thrown off a swing. She paddled wildly, the life vest keeping her mouth above the crests that lifted and crashed over her, flushing the air and sense from her body. Gasping in a trough, she shook her head, trying to clear her eyes and brain. Then a wave smacked over her head again. She was already weak from lack of food, from fighting for the mooring. Already close to hypothermic from cold. She was struggling against the current, and losing.
She glanced back and saw the work skiff surge at its mooring, until another crest blocked out the sight and she ducked her head beneath the spume. Rising as the wave passed, she looked around frantically, searching for the bluff—and realized the tide was coming in. The sea was driving her shoreward.
Dionis went limp, no longer fighting. Her teeth chattered uncontrollably, but if she allowed the crests to carry her, buoyed as she was by the vest, in a few seconds her feet would touch sand. She was lifted and hurled forward, a wave battering her head, and felt her left leg scrape hard against something—the galvanized chain of another mooring. She fought the impulse to grab on to it and rest for a few seconds. The cold was a greater danger, now, than the sea; she had to get out of both.
Dionis stumbled, her foot bending double as it dragged along the bottom. She had reached what used to be the beach. She fought to a kneeling position, but another wave broke over her and dragged her back. She reached forward, desperately, and pulled herself further toward shore. The bluff was close, now. But there was no longer a beach where she could haul herself out—
She lifted her head, searching for the faint glimmer in the bluff’s darkness that might be the path cut between dune grass, leading up to safety and her truck. If she could find where the path met the water—
Her hands scrabbled among granite stones, whirling in the spray. They cut her skin like knives and tore at her nails. The same tide thrusting her toward shore was simultaneously dragging her west and south, away from the path. She was drifting down toward the lagoon’s sandy promontory, known as Whale Island. If she were swept around it, Dionis would be carried out to sea.
Dionis would drown.
She waited for a trough in the oncoming surf and forced herself to rise. To stand. The next wave threw her bodily against the face of the bluff, and she clung to it, spread-eagled and shuddering. The angry sea clutched at her feet and ankles, wanting to drag her back, but she dug her fingers into the wet bluff loam and held on, waiting for the next trough. When it came, she forced herself to inch to the right along the face of the lagoon, clawing her way eastward.
She found the upward path when she fell over it. The narrow trail to the bluff’s crest was now underwater to the height of Dionis’ knees. Sobbing for breath, she began to crawl upward, bracing her trembling feet against the path’s edges and reaching for clumps of dune grass with her chilled, insensible hands.
Halfway, beyond the reach, at last, of the licking waves, Dionis lay still, her face pressed into the earth. The wind howled over her, stinging her cheeks and hair with blown grains of sand. She was shuddering uncontrollably but she could not summon the will to move forward. The cliff seemed impossibly high, the path endless, and her mind urged her to burrow deep and drift away. She clutched her hands beneath her chest and warmed them there. Someone would come soon. Someone would find her and lift her up, wrapped in a comforter of goose down. So warm, and she was so freezing, her jaws tapping together rhythmically. She felt her heartbeat slow and her breathing space to almost normal. She could sleep here. She’d be fine. The bluff would protect her. Why had she thought the storm was deadly? She was a child of the hurricane and the sea.
Clear as day, Howie’s voice barked in her ear.
Di. Get the fuck up.
Painfully, she hauled herself the rest of the way up and over the bluff’s edge. She crawled on all fours to her truck.
Dionis fumbled in the darkness for her front tire. Clutched it. Then forced herself, shaking, to her feet. Held on to the bracket of her side mirror with one hand, and pulled at the door handle with the other. Her entire body was trembling ferociously now.
The wind thrust back against the truck door. The wind did not want it to open. The wind did not want her to live.
Di, Howie shouted.
Whimpering, Dionis threaded all her fingers into the crack between the truck’s door and its jamb, and pulled.