Chapter 6

At six o'clock the fog had come in past the reach and the lawn lights were on, two hundred white chairs filled, the conservancy board in the front row with their folders, and the plaque covered again with the same canvas.

Liza stood at the lectern in her white blazer with the ribbon scissors in her right hand. Blue ribbon, silver handles, the pair their father had used to open the boathouse in 1994.

Dot came up the lawn with the answering machine wrapped in a towel.

"You're not on the schedule," Liza said.

"No."

"Ben."

Ben the groundskeeper looked at the grass and didn't move.

Emmett stood up from the third row, walked down, and stood at the folding table beside the PA speaker with both hands in his pockets, and stayed there.

Dot set the machine on the table. She unwound the cable, pushed the jack into the speaker's input, and the lawn heard the small plastic click through two hundred chairs.

Then she walked to the granite post and took the canvas off the plaque.

Somebody in the back said, "Oh."

Dot went back to the table. Her hands weren't steady, which surprised her. Twenty-nine years on this island and her hands had never once done that.

She pressed PLAY.

The machine clicked. The wheels turned. On the little green display the counter rolled backward, four digits, fast - 2 0 2 4 falling through the years to 1 9 9 8 - and the PA squealed once and went quiet.

Two hundred people.

Then Alden Sibley's voice, thin and clear, off a cassette recorded in a room over the boathouse in August of 1998.

"Rose Calloway. My daughter. Born the fourteenth of June, 1966, in Bass Harbor, to Alma Trask, who kept this island before I bought it."

Liza moved.

She went for the cable, quick and smooth, the way she did everything, and Emmett stepped sideways and put his shoulder between her and the table, and she stopped with her hand out in the air.

The tape kept going.

"The fifth share of the trust is hers, and I have amended the instrument today to say so. The copy goes in the boathouse safe, Dot. You keep it." A pause. Paper shifting. "If they ever try to take her name off the plate, that's the day you play this."

The tape ran on into hiss.

In the back row, a woman stood up.

Dot had handed her a first-aid kit every June for eleven years. White polo, khaki shorts, canvas bag, and the small badge pinned to the cardigan that read R. Calloway, RN.

Rose.

She didn't say anything. She looked at the plaque, then at Dot, then at the machine.

Liza's hand was still up, still holding the scissors, the blade turned toward the lawn lights. In the steel, small and bright, you could see the back row standing.

At the front table, Pruitt closed his laptop, opened his briefcase, and took out a legal pad.

"Mrs. Vance," he said. "I'm going to need the 1998 trust file. Tonight."