Chapter 4

The boathouse safe was behind the paint shelf, under a square of plywood Dot had nailed there herself in 2003.

The plywood was on the floor. The safe door stood open.

She knelt. Inside, on the felt, an envelope - long, cream, the flap slit clean with a blade. Empty.

Dot turned it over.

Across the front, in tight backhand, the same hand that wrote every Christmas card and every envelope from the law office in Boston:

Trust amendment - 1998.

Dot sat back on her heels.

Liza had been twenty-six in 1998, one year out of law school, and she'd done her father's trust work that summer out of a room over the boathouse because he didn't like lawyers in the house. She'd written that label. Which meant she had known what was inside it for twenty-six years.

The door banged.

Emmett came in with something in his fist and held it out: the envelope's twin, crumpled, scorched at one corner.

"Kindling box," he said. "Next to the stove. Somebody tried."

Dot took it. The same hand. The same six words.

"She's burning paper," Emmett said.

"She's not burning anything." Dot stood up. "That envelope was the only copy in this building."

"Copy of what?"

Dot crossed to the shelf under the window and picked up the answering machine. Gray plastic, cracked at the corner, dust in the speaker grille. She turned it over. The battery tray was empty and rusted. The cord had a knot in it she'd tied herself.

She plugged it in.

The display lit. Green numbers, all zeros.

Inside, through the little window, the cassette: a strip of white label, and on it, in fountain pen, in a hand she'd have known in the dark -

8/1998 - Keep

The machine hummed. Dot put one finger on the PLAY key and took it off again.

Emmett said, "Whose is that?"

"His."

"What's on it?"

"I don't know." That was true, and it was the worst part. Twenty-six years of not knowing. She'd been told to keep it, not to test it, and she'd obeyed a dead man like it was a religion.

Out on the water, the four-forty horn sounded once, long and flat.

Dot looked up. Through the window she could see the ferry pulling off the landing with a half-dozen people on the back deck and a green duffel by the rail, and Liza Sibley-Vance standing on the dock with the boat keys in her hand, watching it go.

"Dot," Emmett said. "She's going to come back down here."

"I know."

"So?"

Dot closed the safe door and stood up with the machine against her chest.

"So we've got two hours," she said. "And I need to know what our nurse's first name is."