A/N: Whoever's out there: hello...! We're out of the Prologue and into the chapters proper now. (Don't worry: we're not starting over.) Thanks for reading this thing... and, if you care to, don't be afraid to speak up. Comments are more than welcome...!

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Chapter One: Margaret and Tom

The pain was so awful, so sudden and sharp, that it threw him clear out of a deep sleep. Tom Buckley had been dreaming, something amorphous, dark, and vaguely smothering; just like that, the dream was gone from his mind, driven out by the spasms stabbing through his right shoulder and arm. Waking, he sat up and shouted out loud, a harsh, primal bark from well down in his chest—

Then, like that, the spasms stopped. Tom, as if cut loose from wires that had hooked their way into the flesh of his torso, fell back and lay in the dark, panting, his eyes open and wide, afraid to move lest he re-trigger whatever had just happened. But, whatever it had been, it had passed. His arm and shoulder felt not numb but normal. He felt no other pain. He coaxed himself to relax, drew and released half a dozen slow, deep breaths, and looked to the red digital readout on his bedside clock. Eleven-fifteen p.m. Not even midnight. He'd been feeling unusually tired and had gone to bed early; now, with the spasms compounding his atypical exhaustion, he found himself wondering if he should go to the E.R. Was he pre-stroke? Was it his heart?

In the final analysis, it was late, cold rain was pelting the windows of his loft bedroom, and Tom Buckley, alone in his bed, was an existentialist if not a fatalist. Whatever it was, it could wait until morning. And if it returned and killed him while he slept, he wouldn't have to worry about it any more, would he?

#####

Three hundred miles north, seven and a half hours later, on a misty morning on a rocky island off the coast of Maine, Anne Cassidy, with huge black Book, her Newfoundland, wandering the shore in front of her, scanned the gray water of the Atlantic for ships, for boats adrift, for post-storm debris. She'd had a largely sleepless night: the gale had finally kicked in in earnest around twenty-three-thirty, then whipped and howled until oh-four-hundred; the fog lifted just before dawn, taking the cloud-cover with it; and only then, once she'd shut off the horn of the Crow Island light station, did she grab a quick nap. She'd sleep again once she'd finished her patrol.

A roar approached from the direction of the mainland: the wreck divers from Macready's Point passing by Crow Island in their big black-hulled deck-boat. Real macho men. Five of them on deck. They looked Cassidy's way, leering and shouting lewd suggestions. Three of them turned and mooned her. As usual, she didn't react, didn't respond. Brave for what they did, she thought, wreck diving being one of the most dangerous activities on earth, but assholes nevertheless. Normally, she found it easy to ignore them. Today, tired and feeling oddly tense, she had to fight an urge to go and get the shotgun from its locked rack in the keeper's house and fire a warning-blast or two over their heads.

Time being money and wrecking not being the cheapest of hobbies, she mused, continuing her way around to the the far northern point of the island: she would imagine that, after last night's storm, the bottom might be too riled up for diving. Or maybe it wouldn't be, as deep as they might be planning to go. She'd heard tell, too, from Dick Tulley, that someone in town was at least partly funding their exploration of whatever wreck it was that they were targeting. Rumors of an Allied ship from World War II, likely a container vessel. Hardly sunken treasure— or as remotely mysterious as that Nazi U-boat that wreckers had found off the coast of New Jersey a few years back— but what did she know...?

Twenty yards ahead of her, Book barked suddenly, then growled, at something in the water not far offshore. Cassidy at first saw nothing; she leveled the binoculars, looked.

It was the bottom of an overturned black Zodiac, riding, nearly submerged, in the low, rolling waves.

#####

With Book, she set out in the launch; when she pulled alongside the Zodiac, she felt her heart pounding. It was Buckley's boat. Robert's.

The motor was missing. Had it not been, the Zodiac likely would have sunk completely. Water sloshed about on its upturned bottom. Cassidy got a hook under one of its side ropes; with the help of the launch's winch, she heaved the Zodiac over and upright. Underneath, she found...

... nothing. No Buckley. No blood. Only, upon closer examination, the light playing tricks on the Zodiac's wet skin, traces of something sticky and black, like crude oil.

#####

Back at Crow Island, in the keeper's house, Cassidy notified the Coast Guard and the Macready's Point police. The standard report, part of her duties as keeper of the Crow Island light station: Vessel unmanned and adrift. Missing-persons report to follow, details gleaned from keeper's personal knowledge: male Caucasian, early thirties, five-foot-seven or -eight, approximately one hundred and fifty pounds, no distinguishing scars, dark hair and beard, blue eyes.

Dan Shellberg, Macready Point's chief dispatcher, took the call:

Thanks, Annie. We'll get the crew out looking; we'll keep you posted. Macready's Point out.

Concern in his voice, through the crackle of the radio. Maybe more than absolutely necessary. Maybe the product of fifty-six years in a small town where little happened, where the endangerment or loss of a single life, even that of a relative stranger, engendered compassion rather than cynicism. Surely Cassidy had done nothing to invite sympathy for herself: she'd heard her own voice, flat and distant and detached, as she gave Buckley's description.

In the radio-shack corner of the keeper's house, Cassidy switched off the transmitter. She stayed where she was, her hands in her lap, while the stillness of the house settled about her, wrapped its way around her shoulders and her heart.

Blue eyes. What she hadn't said, then: Eyes of the clearest blue. Eyes of a blue you wouldn't believe, no matter how many summer skies you saw over a sunlit sea—

Book came and settled himself at her feet with a heavy sigh-out of breath. Cassidy reached absently to stroke his furred massive shoulder while her own eyes filled with tears.

#####

Three hundred miles to Cassidy's south, Tom Buckley paid a morning visit to a doctor he knew on the staff of the hospital at Stony Brook University. He sat, shirtless, on a paper-topped exam table while Carl Wilkinson, M.D., bespectacled, balding in his late thirties, his expression perpetually one of mild-mannered worry, wrapped Tom's arm in a blood-pressure cuff, pressed the breath-warmed sensor-pad of a stethoscope to his leanly muscled chest and back.

"Any headaches, Tom?" Wilkinson asked.

"No."

"Any tingling or numbness? Dizziness?"

"Nope."

"I could order a C.A.T. scan," Wilkinson said, after he'd taken readings and had his listen, fore and aft. "I could order a stress test. But it would only tell us what we can both already guess."

"Which is—?"

"You work too many hours, and you don't get enough sleep."

"Any conjectures as to what caused that pain?"

"Changes in workout. Racquetball strain." Wilkinson shrugged. "Could even have been a stressor within whatever dream you were having: your body tensed while you were under, and pop. What were you dreaming about? Any idea?"

"I remember— It's all really vague... It was like I was being suffocated. Something was— I couldn't breathe. I tried to break free, and— It was more than a pop: it felt like my arm was being torn off."

"Whatever it was, you're asymptomatic now. You want me to order those tests?"

"No. Don't bother."

"Alright." Wilkinson took the obligatory pause, the one that said he would prefer that Tom have the battery of tests but that he, Wilkinson, couldn't force the matter, either professionally or as a friend. He tapped the tip of his ballpoint on Tom's clip-boarded intake sheet. "Then we'll opt for the standard cure-all: aspirin or Advil as needed, and take it easy for a couple of days."

Tom got down from the table. "Whatever you say, Carl."

#####

That night, following a day of writing lecture notes, of working on his book (a physics text he was too apt to neglect), of taking a long swim in the campus pool, Tom found a message on his answering machine. He typically received messages on his cell, not on his landline, and the machine had no visual indicator: Tom had to remind himself to check it occasionally, should anyone be using what was essentially an outdated number. He picked up the receiver, heard the tell-tale stutter in the dial tone, keyed in his passcode—

Tom—? Hi. How are you—?

Robert. His brother. Sounding not just his usually gregarious if misfocused self, but troubled, too. All over something to do with a lighthouse, luminous algae, a shrieking like that of gulls, a woman on a beach, and a song whose title Tom recognized but whose tune he couldn't quite recall. At first, thinking Robert either high or drunk, Tom was irritated. Then he began to catch the slightest hush, a tone of dread, in his brother's voice. Increasingly puzzled, more concerned than annoyed, he listened while Robert rambled to a conclusion and wished him well.

Tom exited the answering service, checked his call log, dialed the number that had to have been the one Robert was using. He got an answering service, courtesy of the Happer Institute; he left a message. He tried to write, couldn't concentrate. Left another message for Robert. He made himself a late dinner of pasta and marinara sauce and salad; he scanned the dustier reaches of his CD collection.

That night, Tom Buckley dozed off with the synthesized surge of "God Moving over the Face of the Waters" still rising and falling in his mind.

#####

The next day, at the university, he mentioned Robert's message to Margaret Matheson: regal, square-jawed, somber Margaret. Margaret of the still-dark-but-graying shoulder-length brown hair, the intent brown eyes, the skeptical frown, the occasional wry smile. Margaret who, in her prime, had been just short of six feet tall: even now, with the settling that accompanied age, she was taller than Tom.

They both taught at Stony Brook, she in psychology, he in physics; they shared a fascination with the paranormal, specifically with the compulsions that led outwardly intelligent people to abandon reason to the promises of so-called psychics and other charlatans. On the weekends, the odd weeknight, and, most intensively, between terms, they pursued and debunked said charlatans— an exhilaratingly skeptical hobby, and one that, for both of them, touched on obsession— and earned them not only a colorful notoriety among their other colleagues (Tom was Mulder to Matheson's Scully, or vice-versa, depending on who you asked) but the occasional odd threat from the so-called mind-readers, death-talkers, and faith-healers that they exposed.

On a personal level, they were close friends, not lovers: though Margaret, pushing sixty, was an attractive woman, enough of a difference existed between her age and Tom's to excuse the absence of physical involvement between them, to forestall the obligations and messy entanglements, physical, psychological, and emotional, of a sexual relationship. Neither of them was married, though Margaret had been, once; her one son, tragically rendered comatose following a car wreck, was a resident in a local hospice. Tom, to the best of his knowledge, had no offspring. (Children, he thought, were the primary means by which the human species perpetuated the world's woes.) He approached intimacy with tact and caution, and he'd managed a handful of affairs both with women his age and with those a bit younger: Tom, thirty-one, handsome and youthful-looking if slight of build, with thick, reddish-brown, semi-unruly hair, frankly sculpted cheekbones, lips that erred on the side of fullness, and wideset clear blue eyes, had attracted more than one female co-ed, and, though he made it a rule not to date anyone with whom he shared an academic relationship— that is to say, to whom he owed a grade— he was only human, and he responded both to the flattery of attention and to his own wants.

He had only Robert as immediate family. Their father had been hit head-on in his car and killed by a drunk driver when Tom and Robert were twenty-two; their mother, subsequently committing suicide by Marlboro, had succumbed to esophageal cancer when her sons were twenty-five. Though Tom was loath to admit it, Matheson was something of a maternal surrogate. She definitely was a confidante.

All of which Matheson knew, and which certainly justified her surprise now, as she cleared papers from her desk in the tactfully cluttered, high-windowed cavern she called an office. "First of all, Tom," she said, "a moment of incredulity here: you never told me you had a brother."

"We're not, umm— we're not exactly close."

Out of general, genuine curiosity, Matheson half-smiled, half-frowned. "What does he do? Is he older or younger than you?"

"He's a marine biologist. And he's older. By about ten minutes."

"I don't understand—" Matheson stopped, then, with her laptop bag half-clasped shut. "Wait: he's your twin? You have a twin brother?"

Tom nodded, a little sheepishly.

Matheson looked at him incredulously. "And you haven't spoken to him in nearly a year?"

"Like I said, we're not exactly close."

One of Matheson's rare chuckles. "You do realize that's putting the lie to a fairly widely held belief, don't you, Tom?"

Tom scratched the back of his neck. "Yeah, Margaret. Yeah, I do."

"Did you try calling him back?"

"I left a message. Two messages. He hasn't returned either one."

"Where is he?"

"Maine. A town on the coast, north of Brunswick."

"Well, if you're worried, why don't you drive up and see him? Why don't we drive up and see him? I could stand to get out of here for a couple of days. So could you."

"Margaret, I couldn't ask you to—"

"You just did, Tom. Come on. We'll take my car; you'll pay for gas."

"Jesus, Margaret, I've only just hit seniority: how much money do you think I have...?"

Matheson grinned. "Fine. We'll split on the gas." She laid a hand on Tom's shoulder and added, more seriously: "Pick a time, Tom, and we'll go."

It was the wrong shoulder— the left, not the right— and yet, suddenly, Tom felt a ghost-stab of the pain from the day before. He suppressed a shudder even as he saw the concern deepen in Matheson's dark eyes. "Thanks, Margaret."

#####

Up to Maine. The Bridgeport-North Jefferson ferry. Then northbound, through the fresh summer green of the eastern seaboard. Not willing to admit how worried he was, Tom suggested that they leave at an ungodly hour of the morning; not wanting to argue with her friend when he was so obviously concerned, Matheson agreed. She took first shift at the wheel while Tom, in the passenger seat, caught up on some of the sleep he'd lost the night before. Somewhere in western Connecticut, misty mid-morning sunlight coming through the Bonneville's windshield, he woke to find her singing along with the radio: one being the— yes, being the— one is the loneliest number, in an unapologetic amateur alto.

Tom blinked the sleep from his eyes, focused on the stereo display. "That's not— Holy shit. That's Three Dog Night, isn't it?"

Matheson replied: "It certainly is, young man."

Tom let his skull fall back against the headrest. "You're haunting my dreams, Margaret."

Matheson smiled wryly. "At least I'm not fueling your nightmares. Go back to sleep, Tom."

#####

About an hour later, just north of Chelmsford, Massachusetts, they stopped for sandwiches and coffee. Then it was Tom's turn to drive. He was still at the wheel, having exited I-95 north for a coastbound two-lane, warm grass-and-salt-scented air blowing through the rolled-down driver's-side window of the Bonneville, when he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the red-blue flash of a light bar. A black-and-white, moving up behind them with intention, if not aggression.

"Shit," Tom muttered. He slowed, eased the Pontiac onto the shoulder. At the rumble of gravel under the tires, Matheson stirred from a nap, woke. She frowned muzzily at the passenger-side mirror.

"How fast were you going, Tom?"

"I was doing the speed limit, Margaret." Tom tried not to sound as irritated as he felt. He put the Pontiac in park. "Or near enough."

"'Near enough' doesn't always cut it outside the cities."

In the center mirror, Tom watched the officer approach. Dun-colored trousers, a dark blue jacket open over a button-down khaki uniform shirt, non-mirrored Aviators. A woman in her mid-forties, lean and rangy in build, thin through the face, her brown hair mostly concealed under a brimmed hat. Tom rolled the window the rest of the way down and put both of his hands on the crown of the steering wheel as she reached the car.

"Afternoon," the officer said. No challenge to her tone: just a statement of fact.

Tom looked up at her. "Hello," he countered, equally noncommital.

"License and registration, please."

Tom handed up his license; Matheson retrieved the Pontiac's insurance card from the glove box. "This is my car," she told the officer, as she handed the card over to her. "He has my permission to drive it."

The officer smiled slightly. "Understood, ma'am."

Tom asked, while she examined his license: "May I ask what this is about? Was I speeding?"

"Yes. And no. Was just running a hunch here—"

"I beg your pardon—?"

"— and I think it's paid off." The officer handed Tom his license. "I'm Chief of Police Frances Hollister, of the Macready's Point police department. Are you any relation to Doctor Robert Buckley, Tom?"

"I'm his brother."

Chief Hollister took off her sunglasses and looked Tom very directly in the face. Her gray eyes were kindly and sharp and edged with crows' feet. "Well, so you are."

"Is Robert in some kind of trouble?" Tom asked.

"He went missing about two days ago—" A silver Ford F250 passed, doing the speed limit or a bit above; Hollister looked after it, shifting closer to the Pontiac as she did. They were on an old crowned two-lane asphalt road: hardly the best place to be conducting a conversation with someone driving a car as broad as the Bonneville. "Look, Tom," she said, "would you and Miss Matheson mind following me to the station? Be more comfortable talking there."

#####

The Macready's Point police department was housed in a single-story brick building set back from the road, said road running perpendicular to and midway along Main Street, at the summit of a hill leading down to the waterfront. Tom parked the Pontiac in a spot signed VISITOR; Chief Hollister waited for him and Matheson outside the building's heavy outer glass-and-steel doors. At the top of a twenty-foot pole to the right of the doors, the Stars and Stripes snapped in the salt-tinged breeze, above the farmer and the seaman standing side by side, a pine tree and a resting moose between them, on the blue state flag of Maine.

#####

Save for the department dispatcher, a tall, thin, older man with expressive pale blue eyes and graying hair swept back off a high forehead, all of Hollister's people— all five of them, by the available space and the count of desks in the station— were out helping with the search for Robert Buckley or otherwise performing their duties in the field.

Asked Hollister, as they passed the dispatcher's desk: "I miss anything while I was out, Dan?"

"Not a thing." The name tag on Dan's shirt read SHELLBERG. He eyed Matheson and Tom. "You need help with these two, Frances?"

"Think coffee will just about cover it, Dan. If it's no problem."

"Yep." Or ay-up. Two syllables. That was how it sounded to Tom. Shellberg pushed up out of his office chair. "Will do."

#####

Seated behind the desk in her office, Hollister got them up to speed over fresh Folgers served up in white stoneware mugs stenciled Macready's Point P.D. in faded blue. By all estimates, Robert Buckley had met with mischief in or around the archipelago of islands ranging approximately three to eight miles offshore from town either before or— more likely— during a squall that had blown in from the sea two nights ago. He'd set out to collect water and plant samples from the catches he'd planted around the islands; he never came back.

From a vinyl-cushioned steel-framed chair across the desk from her, Tom asked: "Who reported him missing?"

"The lightkeeper on Crow Island," Hollister replied. "She found his boat overturned and adrift."

Matheson, seated to Tom's left, raised an eyebrow: "'She'...?"

"Mm hm." Hollister blew lightly at the black surface of her coffee, sipped. "College girl, up for the season. Been here about four months, actually. Does her job, and she's not a half-bad mechanic, too, from what I hear." She looked from Matheson to Tom. "Imagine you'll be wanting a look around."

Tom nodded. "If we're not in the way—"

"Not at all. The Happer Institute would probably be the place to start." Sheriff Hollister wrote out directions on a slip of white memo paper, slid the paper over to Tom. "And you'll be needing a place to stay."

"We passed a motel on the way in to town—" Matheson said.

"Naw. You don't want the Baraboo. The place is overrun with wreckers. Wreck divers. Worse than Hell's Angels. Here—" Hollister wrote out another set of directions. "Gal by the name of Nancy Patterson, runs a B&B called 'The Rocky Point.' She'll put you up. Give you a fair rate, too. I'll let her know you're coming."

#####

Up in the lamp room, Cassidy was having a go at the gyroscope, which, she told herself, had picked up a bit of a shudder over the last two weeks. A tilt to the pan, perhaps— God forbid the sealants around the mercury pool had sprung a leak. More truthfully, she was doing something to keep herself busy, something to keep her mind off of Robert Buckley— They'll find him, she told herself. He'd turn up. He was marooned on one of the outer islands, and he and Cassidy would share a laugh about his twenty-four-hour Crusoe-ism over beef stew and a loving chastisement and between the sheets later— when she heard what sounded like the Fallen Angel approaching, far below, only there was more than one engine, and at least one she didn't recognize. Then the engines fell silent, and a minute or so later Dick Tulley shouted up the tower:

"Annie—?"

"Up here, Dick."

"I'll need you t' come down, please."

Something in his tone. Cassidy set aside her tools and descended from the lamp room. Tulley was waiting for her in the doorway of the lighthouse; she followed him outside.

A Coast Guard inflatable was tied up behind the Fallen Angel at the jetty.

Cassidy frowned at the boats, the three extra people, two men and a woman, all of them in uniform, standing on the dock. Book was making a quiet inspection of the strangers, sniffing hands, accepting pats to his broad head and back.

Cassidy asked: "Dick, what's going on—?"

She stopped. She knew before he replied. She knew, and still it was a shock—

Tulley's tone was uncharacteristically gentle: "They found him, Annie. Doctor Buckley. They think he got clipped by a tanker. They're trying to contact his family now—"

"Oh, God—" Cassidy whispered.

"— but they need someone to— to identify him, to make it official, and you knew him better than— than—"

It was as if something were swelling in Cassidy's chest, forcing the air from her lungs. She felt a desperate need to sit down. "I can't leave the station," she said.

"That's what they're here for." Tulley gestured at the Coast Guard personnel on the jetty. "They'll keep an eye on things while you're gone."

#####

No need to lock the keeper's house. Cassidy retrieved only her jacket. She kept her tri-fold wallet, complete with her identification, in her jeans pocket, not in a purse.

Book followed her to the Fallen Angel.

"Stay, now, laddie," Tulley told him. "Your missus'll be right back."

"No," said Cassidy. "I want him with me. I want my dog."

"Alright, then." Tulley pointed to the deck of his boat. "Book: here."

Book came aboard; Tulley cast off. The Fallen Angel set off for Macready's Point.

#####

Tom and Matheson dropped their bags at the Rocky Point bed-and-breakfast, an enclosed-porch two-story-plus-attic on a bluff outside Macready's Point, with a wide and windswept view of the ocean and an archipelago of distant misty islands to the front and a wide stand of the area's omnipresent dark firs to the rear.

Nancy Patterson came out the screened back door of the porch and down the house's stone steps when the Pontiac's tires crunched onto the graveled square marked off as a parking area. She was in her late forties, tall and solid, with bobbed dark hair; she wore a blue sweatshirt, jeans, and white canvas boat shoes.

She smiled as she approached the Pontiac. "Hi—"

In regional dialect, it came out as "Heyyyah." Tom shut off the Pontiac, got out. "Hi. I'm Doctor Buckley—"

"— and you—" said Nancy Patterson, looking from him to Matheson— "—are Doctor Matheson, right...? Fran said you'd be right up. I'm Nancy. Glad to know you."

Tom shook the hand she offered. Her grip was strong, her fingers warm and bony and rough-skinned. Matheson, shaking hands with her in turn, surveyed the parking area. Aside from a pine-green, mud-spattered Subaru Forester, the Bonneville was alone.

"Are we your only tenants?" she asked.

"Naw. Them two, they're hiking the trails. Got a couple out antiquing, another three off sailing," Nancy replied. She intercepted Tom as he popped the trunk on the Pontiac. "Let me give you a hand with your things."

She had their overnights out of the trunk and wrangled deftly through the porch door and into the house before Tom had even a chance of gallantly protesting; she laid out the house rules— breakfast from seven until nine-thirty, fresh bakery always on hand, quiet after ten p.m., please— as they passed through the kitchen and the sitting room; on the way up the carpeted, softly creaking staircase, a pine bannister to their right, she said: "I've put you facing the ocean, Doctor Matheson, and you've got the woods, Doctor Buckley. Unless you'd prefer it the other way 'round; it's all up to you."

She deposited their bags; Tom and Matheson thanked her; she left them alone. The rooms were small and cozy, more sensible than kitschy. Good down comforters on the beds, solid knotted-pine furniture, a minimum of knick-knacks on the dresser tops. Tom did, indeed, have a view of the firs, their sharp dark tops pointing like spears into the blue sky. He left his overnight where Nancy had set it and went to meet Margaret in her room across the hall.

She was at the window, smoothing out and hanging the one top she'd brought that was in true danger of wrinkling. "Wonder if that's Crow Island."

Tom joined her, looked out to sea. Even through a scrim of worry, it was a beautiful view. They were maybe a hundred feet off the water, the bluff leading down to the shore in a tumble of rocks not quite sheer enough to be called a cliff; the ocean was semi-smooth and glittering under the early summer sun. From the south proceeding northward, Tom could see four, possibly five, small islands; on the island second from the south stood a lighthouse.

"Could be." For a moment, he thought he saw a boat moving on the water, approaching the mainland from the island. Hard to tell, given the brightness and the angle of the sun. "Suppose we'll know soon enough."

#####

The Maine branch of the Happer Institute was a cluster of eco-friendly block-like buildings set among the rocks of yet another bluff north of town. Plenty of natural light, courtesy of double-paned insulated glass, and a more-than-sincere nod to alternative energy sources, as evidenced by the arrays of rooftop solar panels that augmented the campus's power plant. From the bank of windows in the reception area of the institute's main building, Tom could see, at shore level, a building that might have provided shelter for wet-labs, a boat house, and a handful of Zodiacs and small fixed-hulls lying at berth at a pair of docks. The reception area itself reflected the surrounding rocks in terms of its coloring: shale and lighter grays, the warmth of red-gold granite.

No one was at the reception desk— Chief Hollister had warned them that the staff tended to fare for themselves when it came to greeting visitors— but, within a minute of Tom and Matheson's arrival, a woman with long blonde hair and a functional build, her white lab coat open over a blue t-shirt bearing the snarling logo of the Maine State Black Bears, emerged from a hallway leading off to the right and, smiling, came to meet them.

"Hi," she said. "I'm Jessica Brand. Chief Hollister said you'd be coming." She shook Matheson's hand. "Doctor Matheson, I presume—"

Matheson nodded, tipped her head toward Tom. "And this is Doctor Buckley—"

Doctor Brand looked from Matheson to Tom. Met his eyes and, for just a second, froze. Tom as much as saw the word— uncanny— register in her expression.

"Come on," said Jessica Brand. "I'll show you around."

#####

It was all a distraction, Tom realized. A waste of time. Still: what else could they do? Trained professionals were combing the coastal area for Robert; should they insist on joining in the search, Tom and Matheson would only be in the way, could very likely become liabilities or casualties themselves, given their inexperience with the area and with the ocean. And the institute— more specifically, Robert's workspace and living quarters— might reveal something of his frame of mind, his motivations, might offer clues as to where he was when he went missing.

So, dutifully, with a growing sense of sick apprehension, Tom perused the notes and written logs Robert had made, his schedules (already forwarded to the Coast Guard and the local search team) for checking his catch-strainers. In the lab area, then, while he noted the samples of algae that Robert had kept, both in solution and on slides, Matheson drifted toward a series of small aquariums arranged on a work bench.

"Those are mine," said Jessica Brand. "I'm the local clam expert."

Tom joined Matheson in perusing what looked basically, despite the presence of aerators, like glass cases of silty water and muck; he paused, as she did, at one particular case. Particular in that its screened top was padlocked.

Matheson looked to Brand with a bemused smile. "Are you afraid they'll escape...?"

Tom still had his eyes on the aquarium: for just a second, he saw clearly a row of shells at the bottom, half-buried in the mud. They were a glistening, oily black; they were partly open. Tom leaned in for a closer look— and, in unison, the shells closed.

"Wait—" He gestured to the tank. "Margaret, did you see—"

A man's voice interrupted him: "Don't be eyeing Jessie's prizes, now, Doctor Buckley. She's afraid you'll borrow them for lunch."

Tom straightened away from the tank. A solidly built man with black hair, wearing a windbreaker, not a lab coat, over a pale green polo, was approaching from the direction of the lab's exit.

"Steve: hi," said Doctor Brand, turning toward him. "This is Dr. Matheson; you've already guessed that this is Robert's brother, Tom. I thought they might like to see his workspace—"

"— not, however, a bunch of bivalves that would look better in a pot." The man called Steve smiled for Tom and Matheson— a smile, Tom thought, that missed "facetious" by a good mile and landed squarely in the realm of "brittle." "If you're done here, Jessie, maybe Doctor Buckley would like to have a look at his brother's living quarters." He added, as he offered Tom and Matheson yet another of the day's rounds of handshakes: "I'm Doctor Stephen Costas. Glad to meet you."

Obviously, Matheson had also noted the quality of Doctor Costas's smile. "Charmed," she said, coolly, as she took his hand.

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"So why do you think he was running interference...?" Matheson asked, once Costas had left her and Tom alone in the cabin that Robert had used as his living quarters and, more than that, once she'd had a chance to verify, via a casual glance through the paned window over the kitchen sink, that he was, in fact, clear of the door and apparently on his way back to the institute's main building.

Tom was in the cabin's living area, seeing what little there was to see. Robert had traveled light, by the look of things; aside from the functional, largely wood-framed furniture— a green sofa and and a mohair easy chair, a small flatscreen TV, a work desk with a closed Macbook, yet more handwritten logs and notes regarding algae, a handful of books related to his field— there was little to mark the space as his. Oddly, Tom found himself afraid to look in the bedroom or the bathroom, to see clothing in his size, possibly to spot whiskers the color of his own hair in the sink.

He joined Matheson in the kitchen instead. "What's that, Margaret?"

"He wanted us out of there, Tom," Matheson replied. "That was obvious." As she spoke, she opened the refrigerator, looked inside. "Well, you and Robert have that in common."

The refrigerator held next to nothing, and what it held could best be classified as contradictions. Low-fat plain yogurt, soy milk, a half-head of celery, and a bag of apples. Wholegrain bagels, pre-sliced. Three bottles of microwbrew pale ale. A half-empty box of Twinkies, a package of sliced American cheese, cold cuts, and, in the freezer, garden burgers.

"And not a clam in sight." Matheson shut the freezer.

Tom didn't reply. He remained where he was, beside her, looking at the closed freezer door; it struck him, then, how bare the white enamel looked. No Post-It notes. No magnets printed with take-out menus or the number of the local pizza place, if there was one (and there had to be, civilization being a sign of pizza, not vice-versa). No emergency contacts. And...

"... no pictures," Matheson murmured, as much as reading his mind. "A cliche, and yet we can't help but expect to see them."

Tom nodded. He didn't know, exactly, what photos Robert might have displayed on a major household appliance (even using such terminology, though, he couldn't see it as a joke, not now): snapshots of himself with colleagues, possibly, or a girlfriend, or even some particularly beautiful-in-the-eyes-of-the-beholder sample of his beloved algae. Tom found himself trying to recall the last time that he and his brother had appeared in a photo together: something to describe for Matheson now, the two of them, he and Robert, in costume for Halloween, maybe, or together at school, with family at Christmas or Thanksgiving; he found he could see nothing, nothing at all, in his mind—

Someone knocked at the cabin's door. Before either Tom or Matheson could move to answer it, Sheriff Hollister opened it and looked in.

"Pardon me, Doctor Matheson, Doctor Buckley—" She focused on Tom, and the expression on her thin face was both flustered and deeply tragic. "I'm so sorry, Tom: I'm afraid I have some bad news."

#####

A group of fishermen had found Robert. Had netted his body, just below the surface, in about a hundred feet of water three quarters of a mile southeast of Crow Island. Absolutely by chance: nothing would have prevented the currents from carrying him farther on down the coast. Owing to the usual mixups with the official channels and a sorry upgrade to the local radio-dispatch system, Hollister had only just received the message.

"Mortuary facilities in the town clinic: they've transported him there," she said. Tom thought, with distant and absolute clarity, that she seemed more stricken than he was. She had her hat in her hands, was turning it slowly by the brim, like a rolling of rosary beads. "I'll show you the way."

Matheson drove the Pontiac as they followed Hollister's squad car back toward Macready's Point.

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The Macready's Point Clinic. Another single-story building in red brick, only larger and of more modern a vintage than the town police station. A pillared canopy sheltered a drive-up and the sidewalk in front of the glass main doors; a U-lane of asphalt looping in off the parking lot accommodated trauma arrivals at the building's western side. An ambulance was still sitting at the emergency entrance now. Margaret parked the Bonneville next to a late-eighties tan Silverado pickup that had taken its share of ocean salt; she stayed protectively close to Tom as they walked with Chief Hollister to the clinic doors.

None of them spoke; Tom had his eyes fixed on a point just ahead of his walking feet. Consequently, as the young woman just inside the clinic doors had her own attention fixated on the course immediately before her, she and Tom collided with one another.

He recoiled at the shock of physical contact; she seemed to recoil in horror. His immediate and brief impression of her was that she was in her mid-twenties, brown-haired, lovely if windburned through the face. She'd been crying. She met Tom's eyes, her own eyes so dark as to be nearly black, and breathed out harshly, practically spitting the word in his face: "Jesus—"

Before Tom could react, let alone respond, she stepped past him and pushed her way out through the clinic doors. A tall, fair-haired, older man in a blue jacket followed along after her a moment later.

"Tulley," Chief Hollister said to him, in sober greeting.

In passing, Tulley nodded to her, to Matheson, and, with a shadow of the young woman's shock on his face, to Tom. "Chief—" he said, to Hollister. "If you'll pardon me—"

He went out the doors after the young woman. "Annie, hold up—"

"That was her, wasn't it—?" Matheson said slowly, once the door had shut behind Tulley's broad back.

"Who—?" Tom asked, still somewhat lost in shock.

"Anne Cassidy," Hollister replied. "The keeper of the Crow Island light station."

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