Chapter 1

Bitsy Coyle upended the canvas ditty bag over the dock boards at nine o'clock in the morning, and the christening cup rolled out into the sunlight.

It traveled a foot and stopped. Silver, small, no bigger than a fist. It struck the wet teak with a hollow ringing note - a sound that did not match the weight of a hundred and thirty years. Forty members of the Point Association had walked down to the dock to watch. Nobody spoke.

"Mother's cup," Bitsy said. She said it to the dock, not to Nora. "The 1890 cup. In her bag."

Nora Belknap stood at the edge of the boards with her hands at her sides. Navy polo, khaki shorts, white deck shoes gone gray at the toe, a pencil behind her ear because it was always behind her ear. Salt haze hung over the harbor, and the southwest breeze moved the halyards on the moorings, a slow clinking that went on and on while nobody said anything else.

The bag on the dock had her name stenciled on it. N. BELKNAP - PETREL. She had carried it for eleven years.

"Say something," Bitsy said.

Nora looked at the cup. Then she looked at Delphine Ochoa, twenty-six, the dock steward, who had gone very still with a drying towel in her hands.

She didn't say anything.

The locker room door stood open behind them. Bitsy had a key to it; she had a key to everything. When Nora arrived at seven-forty to run the first launch, the padlock was already hanging loose on the hasp, and Bitsy was standing there with her phone in her hand, and there had been no point in asking how the bag got opened.

They had emptied the locker onto the boards. Foul-weather jacket. A brass boat key. Two tide tables. A tin of pencils. Reading glasses on a cord. And the bag, which had held, until Bitsy turned it over, one silver cup.

"Nobody's accusing you of anything yet," said Ellis Vaughn, the commodore, who had come down in his club blazer with his coffee and had not drunk any of it.

Bitsy laughed, once. "Ellis. It was in her bag."

At 9:20 the board voted. Suspension without pay, pending review. Nora's boat key went into Bitsy's palm. The cottage on the compound - harbormaster's housing, thirty-one years of it, a kitchen window that faced the breakwater - would be locked by noon.

"I'm not calling the police," Bitsy said, which was the kindest thing anyone said all morning. "I just want her off the property before the family gets here."

The christening was at four.

Nora put her hands in her pockets. She did not ask for the cup. She did not ask for her jacket. The members watched her the way people watch a boat take on water - with interest, from a distance, and with no intention of getting wet.

"May I have my bag?" she said.

"It's evidence," Bitsy said.

Nora nodded once, as if that answered a question nobody had asked. She turned and walked back up the ramp past forty people who stepped aside for her.

Delphine caught up with her at the top, towel still in her hands, face hot.

"Nora. Say something to them. You didn't-"

"Pick the cup up," Nora said. "Don't let it sit on the boards."

"I already did."

"Good." Nora looked at her a moment. Delphine had sun freckles across her nose and a radio clipped to her belt, and she was the only person on that dock who had not decided anything yet. "When they put it out for the toast, keep it under the bar light. The pendant over the mahogany. Not the window light."

"Why?"

"Because I asked you to."

Nora walked up the drive toward a cottage she no longer had a key to, and behind her the launch horn sounded, and Petey Marsh took the Petrel out with a new captain at the wheel.