Chapter 1: The Key Under the Pot

The rain came off the Atlantic in sheets, and I stood in it with my hand over the flowerpot and my fingers numb, because I had spent the last six hours driving from Dublin and I was not ready to be dry yet. The pot was terracotta, cracked along one side, and I had lifted it a thousand times as a girl to get the spare key my mother kept there. My sister had kept the same pot. My sister had kept the same habit.

The key was underneath, cold and slick with rain, and when I turned it in the lock the door swung in like it had been waiting for me. I stood on the step a while longer, listening to water drum the gutter. A seagull screamed somewhere over the harbor. In the corner of the yard, the old buoy my father had painted blue in 1974 was still leaning against the wall, and the paint had peeled down to grey.

I stepped inside and closed the door on the weather.

The cottage smelled of woodsmoke and salt and something else, something under it, a smell like wet animal and pine that I could not place. The kitchen lamp was on over the table, the little brass thing with the green shade that Siobhan had bought at a car boot sale in Galway the year she decided she was going to stay here forever. The lamp was on. The rain was coming down hard, the whole coast grey as a wet slate, and someone had left the lamp on in my dead sister's kitchen.

I put my bag down and my hand found the back of a chair before the rest of me did.

The table was scrubbed clean except for two things. A note, torn from a notebook and weighted down. And the weight itself, iron, grey with rust at the edges, stamped with a curling fish and a number. A fishing weight, the kind the co-op handed out at the start of every season so the counts could be tracked. My sister had a hundred of these in her shed.

She had left this one on the table.

I picked up the note first, because you save the hard thing for last, that is what a year of interview rooms teaches you. The handwriting was Siobhan's, sloped and hurried and pressing too hard on the paper, the way it always got when her hands were shaking. Two words.

You're home.

I put the note down. Outside the window the harbor lights were just coming on, three of them, smeared yellow in the rain, and the boats were all tied up and knocking against the wall. I counted them without meaning to. Detective's habit. Twenty boats in the harbor and every one of them in. On a Tuesday in the middle of the season, with the mackerel running.

Then I heard the step behind me and every hair on my arms stood up.

"You left the key under the pot," a man said.

I turned slow. The door to the back hall was open, and he was standing in it with his shoulders filling most of the frame, dark auburn hair plastered flat from the rain, a jacket dripping onto the flagstones. Grey eyes, watchful, set deep in a face that had spent a lot of years squinting into weather. The smell in the cottage was stronger now, that animal and pine, and I knew without knowing how I knew that it came from him.

"Most people knock," I said.

"I did knock. Twice. You were standing in the yard staring at the buoy." He nodded at the table. "Don't touch the weight."

I looked down. My fingers were a few inches from it, close enough that I had not noticed my own hand moving. I pulled them back and put them in my coat pockets.

"You are Declan," I said. "The harbormaster."

"Aye."

"My sister mentioned you." I did not say how. Siobhan had mentioned him the way you mention weather that might turn.

"I am sorry about Siobhan." He said it plainly, no softness laid over it, and I respected that more than a whole wake's worth of condolences. He stepped out of the doorway and I got the full measure of him. He was tall and built like a man who worked with his hands, not a man who went to a gym. There was a small white scar through one eyebrow, old and faded, and his collar was turned up badly on one side, as if he had dressed in a hurry.

"Where did you find her?" I asked.

"Off the headland. Under the rocks." He crossed to the table and stopped on the far side of it, and there was nothing between us but the note and the weight and the smell of the sea coming off his coat. "The coroner said the water. She had been in it a night."

"And no one thought to call me."

"We did call you. Four times. You did not answer."

The shame came up hot in my throat. Four times. There had been a bad stretch of months, a bad stretch of bottles, and I had a memory of a phone lighting up face down on a counter and me not turning it over. I looked at the weight so I would not have to look at him. The fish on it was worn nearly smooth.

"The co-op hands these out," I said. "Why would she leave it out?"

"Siobhan did a lot of things I did not understand." He was watching me the way a man watches a dog he is not sure of. "What did she tell you, before?"

"Nothing. She told me nothing. I have not spoken to my sister in a year." I heard how that sounded. "Not properly. She wrote letters. Birthdays. I never wrote back."

Declan said nothing. His silence had a weight to it that made me want to fill it, and I clamped my mouth shut and did not.

"The funeral is Thursday," he said at last. "Father Byrne will do the mass. She would have wanted the small one."

"She would have wanted the one with the singing." My voice came out thinner than I expected. "She used to say the small funerals were for people with no friends."

"Then it is a good thing she had half the village." He reached across the table and, before I could stop him, closed his fingers around the fishing weight. His hand was broad and there was a callus on the side of his thumb, and I watched him do it and felt something in my chest pull tight, a tug behind the ribs like a line going taut. He noticed. His eyes came up fast and fixed on mine and he went very still, the way a hare goes still in a field.

"What," I said.

"Nothing." He put the weight in his jacket pocket and his voice had changed. "I will take this. You have enough to be getting on with."

"Put it back."

"No."

"It is not yours to take." I stepped around the table. The floorboards were cold under my socks and I was aware of my own heartbeat, of the rain, of the small space between us narrowing. "This is my sister's house. That is my sister's table. Put the weight back and get out of my kitchen, or I will walk down to the barracks and tell them the harbormaster is robbing a dead woman."

His jaw worked. For a moment he looked like he wanted to laugh, and then he did not look like that at all. "You will not go to the barracks."

"Try me."

"When Siobhan died," he said, slowly, picking his way, "there were things found on the rocks that the coroner did not put in his report. The sergeant in this town is a good man. He is also a man who has lived here his whole life, and there are questions he knows better than to ask." He took a breath. "I am asking you to trust me for one night. Keep the door locked. Do not go out to the headland. And do not ask anyone in this village about the weight."

The lamplight sat on his cheekbone. Rain ran off his jacket onto the flagstones. I could smell him, pine and wet wool, and under that the sea, and I had the sudden, ridiculous notion that I could smell whether he was lying. I did not know how. I knew the thought had come from somewhere very old in me and that it was not the drink talking, because I had not had a drink since Galway.

"I am not going to do what you tell me," I said. "I have had a year of people telling me what to do and it went badly for everyone."

"That I believe." The corner of his mouth moved. Then he looked at me properly, and his grey eyes were not cold at all, they were tired, and there was something behind the tiredness that I could not name. "You have her eyes. Siobhan's. I did not expect that."

"Everyone says I have her eyes."

"They are wrong." He said it quietly. "She had the sea in hers. You have the sky."

The line landed in a room that was too quiet, and I felt my face heat, and I hated that. He was a stranger. He was a stranger in my sister's kitchen taking my sister's things.

"Get out," I said.

He went. He stopped in the doorway and looked back at me, and the rain behind him was a grey curtain and the smell of the sea came in. "The lock on the back door is broken," he said. "Use the bolt. It is stiff, so put your shoulder behind it."

Then he was gone down the path and I heard the harbor gate click, and I stood in the kitchen with the lamp hissing and my hands shaking, and I could not tell whether it was the grief or the man or the fact that I had counted twenty boats and every one of them had been in the harbor on a Tuesday in the season.

I turned the key in the door and threw the bolt, which was stiff, and I put my shoulder behind it.

Then I went through the cottage. I told myself it was to find clean sheets. It was a lie. I opened the dresser drawers and looked at my sister's jumpers folded in a way I had never been tidy enough to manage. I checked the windows one by one, and at the last one, the little one that faced the yard, I stopped. The yard was dark and the buoy was a black shape against the wall. Above it the rain had thinned and the moon was coming through, nearly full, and I could see the harbor beyond the gate and the boats knocking in the swell.

There was a wolf standing on the headland.

It was far off, up on the rocks where the land fell away into the Atlantic, and it was enormous, grey and silver in the moonlight, and it was not moving. It was looking down at the village. At the cottages, at the harbor, at the one square of yellow light in Siobhan's kitchen window where I stood with my hand on the glass.

I did not move either. I watched it the way you watch a thing that has no business being there and knows it. There were no wolves in this part of Ireland. There had never been wolves in this part of Ireland. My father had trapped rabbits and mended nets and told me there were no wolves left in the whole country, and I had believed him the way children believe.

The wolf lifted its head. The moon was behind it and I saw the shape of its jaw and the length of its legs and the way it stood on the rock like a man stands on a quay looking at his own boats.

Then it turned and it was gone into the dark, and the headland was only rocks and grass and the wind, and my heartbeat was loud in my ears.

I let go of the window. I went to the kitchen and I took the note off the table and I read the two words again, the sloped handwriting pressing through the paper.

You're home.

And under my fear, under the grief, something in me had answered the wolf the way you answer your own name. I stood in my sister's kitchen with the note in my hand and I was certain of exactly one thing, and it was not a thing I could explain to the sergeant or the coroner or the harbormaster with his grey eyes and his stiff lock.

The wolf had been looking for me.