At 3:30 p.m., I’m supposed to end my best friend’s pain. At the red light on River Road, he asks for fifteen more minutes—and tears open the past.
The vet’s office puts me on hold with something bright and chirpy about wellness plans. The paper on my passenger seat—the consent form—flutters whenever the heater sighs. Scout rests his heavy, gray-muzzled head on my knee the way he did as a puppy, when everything was lighter and Mark still whistled on Saturday mornings.
The light turns red. I roll the window down to breathe cold air that smells like cedar and thawing mud. Then Scout makes a sound I haven’t heard in months—half howl, half cry—and surges forward. The leash burns across my palm. In the same motion, he’s out the window, thumping onto the gravel shoulder, scrambling toward the scrubby lot where the ferry used to turn around.
“Scout!” My voice cracks. I kill the hazard lights and stumble after him, slipping on wet leaves, the phone still warbling hold music in my coat pocket.
He moves like a dog with no arthritis ever existed. Past the sagging chain-link, past a KEEP OUT sign riddled with BB holes, down to the bony fringe of riverbank where the Columbia fattens and slows. He circles, noses the ground, paws, then digs. Not a playful dig. A deliberate, workman dig, the kind Mark used to laugh about. “Bury and find, buddy,” he’d say, tapping his boot. “Again.”
Dirt cakes Scout’s claws. He pauses, coughs, and keeps going. I crouch, my jeans taking on cold river. “What are you doing, old man?” I ask, even though I feel the answer land in my body—something Mark taught him. Something I was never meant to see until now.
A dull clink. Glass.
Scout whines. I push aside a tongue of earth. A Mason jar—big, cloudy, its lid wrapped with a ring of blue painter’s tape like a halo. My hands shake as I pry it free, the lid stubborn in the cold. It finally gives with a moist pop and the tin smell of time. Inside: a folded, damp-soft paper; a small silver key; and a microcassette in its cracked plastic case. The tape is labeled in Mark’s block letters, the kind he used for grocery lists and the names on our Christmas stockings: MILE 0 — ONLY IF I’M GONE.
The rest of the world shrinks to a point. Somewhere above me, geese drag a ragged V across the gray. The river takes a slow breath. Scout leans his shoulder into my thigh as if to say, Go on.
I unfold the paper. A hand-drawn map—not quite to scale, but familiar. River Road. The old ferry lot. An X under a doodled pine. A second line, in smaller writing: PO BOX 317 • KEY INCLUDED.
My throat closes. The heart knows handwriting better than the eyes do. This is Mark. Not a copy. Not a scan. The drag of his pen on cheap paper, where he always pressed too hard on the downstrokes.
“How—” The word breaks apart. Mark drowned two summers ago when a sudden squall flipped a jon boat near the east bend. He was a volunteer firefighter, born and bred to jump into black water for other people, not the kind who doesn’t come back. Cole Danner—our town’s golden boy developer—read the eulogy with perfect teeth and a practiced crack in his voice. “A tragic accident,” he said. I nodded while my ears filled with static.
The hold music dies. A woman comes on. “Cedar Ferry Animal Care, this is Angela. Just confirming Scout at three-thirty?”
My mouth works. “Can I—uh—call you right back?”
“Of course, Nora. I’ll keep the slot for ten minutes.”
I hang up without meaning to. I should be in a car, driving toward relief that looks like a soft blanket and a quiet room and the vet’s fingers on Scout’s good ear. Instead I’m on my knees in the mud with a cassette tape and a key that rattles like a bird bone in its little Ziploc.
“Okay,” I tell no one and Scout. “Okay.”
There’s a pawn shop three blocks up—Second Chance—where I once bought Mark a used nail gun and he kissed me in the parking lot like he hadn’t been married to me for fourteen years already. I wrap the jar in my scarf, bundle Scout into the car, and drive there with my hazard lights blinking like a confession.
The bell over the door yelps. A man with a milk-white mustache looks up from a stack of comic books. “We still do batteries and watch straps,” he says. “What can I—oh. Hey, buddy.” He bends to scratch Scout’s chest. Scout thumps his tail and makes the old-dog grunt that used to mean yes to everything.
“I need,” I say, holding up the tape, “a way to play this.”
“Lord,” the man says softly. “Haven’t seen one of those since—hold on.” He vanishes into a drawer labyrinth and returns with a handheld microcassette recorder, the kind reporters used to carry. He feeds it two AA batteries from a blister pack and blinks at me. “You okay?”
“I don’t know.” The truth fits too easily in my mouth.
He sets the recorder on the counter. I slide the tape in. Scout rests his chin on the glass, fogging it with slow breath. My thumb hovers, then clicks PLAY.
A hiss, and then the shape of a voice under water. I adjust the little volume wheel. The cheap speaker makes the room sound farther away. The hiss steadies—then Mark is in the shop, the beginning of his breath I could pick out in a crowd.
“If you’re hearing this,” he says, “it means I didn’t get the chance to tell you in person. I’m sorry, Nora. I didn’t want to scare you. The thing at the river—my accident—it wasn’t.”
He stops, as if choosing a smaller word. He starts again.
“Don’t trust the man who read my eulogy.”
The recorder hums. Somebody’s freezer clicks in the back. I realize I’m gripping the counter so hard the glass prints into my palms.
There’s more: a scrape, a whispered “Mile Zero, start there,” and the faint clack of the tape being flipped over before the recording ends. On the folded map, at the bottom corner, I hadn’t seen the tiny string of numbers until now—the kind Mark scribbled on post-its when he didn’t trust a phone: 45.6739, -122.5371. I pull out my cell, type them in. The pin drops on a place I know too well: the little cabin on county land by the east bend—the one Mark told me never to visit without him.
Scout lifts his head from the counter. He looks at me the way old dogs do when the world narrows to the next right thing. His tail taps once against the glass.
Ten minutes, the scheduler said.
The map shakes in my hands.
“Cabin,” I whisper. “Mile Zero.”
Scout’s ears tilt forward.
“Do we go?”
Part 2 — The Ten-Minute Reprieve
The man at Second Chance wraps the recorder in a brown lunch bag like it’s something holy. Scout noses my elbow, asking for the next right thing. My phone buzzes again—Angela from the vet.
I answer. “Can I… move Scout’s appointment to tomorrow morning? First slot?”
Silence, then a voice softened with the kind of gentleness that makes you feel worse. “We can do 8:15. If he’s uncomfortable tonight, give the pain med we sent home last month, a half tablet. Keep him warm.”
“Thank you.” I hang up and feel the weight of everyone who might say I’m selfish—people in my head, people in our town Facebook group who argue about everything from potholes to prayer at football games. Letting go is what a good person does when she loves a dog. But my dog just opened a door my husband left behind.
On the paper map, Mark drew more than an X. He sketched the old ferry lot, then a line upriver to the wooden bridge at Sandbar Creek. A second X hugged the stilt shadow by the north abutment and, in his neat block letters: MILE 1.
“Start at Mile Zero,” his recorded voice said. We did. Now Scout is aimed at Mile One like a compass needle.
I tuck the tape recorder in my tote, slide behind the wheel, and coax Scout into the backseat with a promise of chicken later. The heater smells like pennies; the Mason jar clinks against the console with every frost heave. Cedar Ferry scrolls past—our thrift store window full of prom dresses from three proms ago, the diner with the light that never turns off, the billboard where Cole Danner’s perfect smile invites us to imagine “A New Waterfront for Everyone.”
“Everyone,” I say out loud, and watch Scout’s ear flick.
At the bridge, the county never fixed the warped planks; locals know to drift the center. I park by the scrub and follow Scout down the dirt slope, my boots chewing mud. The river narrows here before flexing wide again. The creek mouth wears a fringe of gray grass and bottle caps, the last toys of summer fishermen. Scout’s paws sink and lift, leaving four deliberate marks. He stops under the north abutment, sniffs, then paws once, twice. He looks at me like a foreman.
“Okay, boss.” I crouch and pull away fistfuls of cold earth until my knuckles bark. The smell is river and iron and old leaves. My fingertips ping glass.
Another Mason jar. The same blue painter’s tape hugging the lid like a cheap halo.
“Mark,” I whisper, because the name is a bridge too.
The lid fights me until it doesn’t. Inside this one: a thick stack of thermal receipts looped with a rubber band; a square thing wrapped in waxed paper; and a plastic baggie with a marker’d label: DON’T LET THEM BUILD AT THIS WATER LINE.
The receipts are for rebar, pilings, geotextile fabric, truck rental—supplies a volunteer firefighter might recognize as the skeleton of a decent riverbank, or the lack of it. The totals glare. People around here get married for the price of one of these slips.
I unwrap the waxed paper. A Polaroid slides into my hand, swamp-cold. Mark and Cole stand ankle-deep at the creek mouth, summer bright, the low sun throwing knives on the water. Mark’s jaw is tense, his yellow volunteer jacket unzipped. Cole is in rolled chinos like a magazine spread, a measuring rod in his hand, a smile that doesn’t meet his eyes. Behind them, a fluorescent survey stake flaunts a bold black line and the number 9′ in thick marker. On the Polaroid’s white border, someone—Mark—has written JUL 14, 8:12 P.M.
The day Mark died was July 14.
My stomach drops. The air is suddenly too thin. I flip the photo over. On the back, in the same block letters: If I don’t make it home, give to L.C.
L.C.
There’s only one L.C. who ever smelled like newsprint in this town—Lina Cho, the reporter who asks questions at council meetings that make men in suits look for exits. She wrote that column about the county selling off the old boathouse without bids. The paper fired her when the development ads came in; now she runs a Substack and a Twitter that half the town follows and the other half pretends not to.
A branch cracks behind me. My head whips up. Just a deer posting away, white tail blinking like a flashlight between alders. I breathe and try to unclench my jaw. Scout leans his weight against my shins, the way he did the night I got the call from the sheriff about Mark’s boat. Back then, I thought my dog was steadying me. Now I wonder if he was, even then, pointing toward where the steady was hidden.
“Come on,” I say. “We need a table and something that pours coffee.”
We climb to the road. The sky wears that Pacific Northwest gray that looks like wet slate for six months at a time. At the diner, the waitress slides us into a corner booth as if Scout is a tired uncle and not a dog who has a date with mercy. I lay out the map, the receipts, the tape recorder, the Polaroid. I find Lina’s email in my phone and type I have something for you. It might matter. —Nora Hayes. Then, because words alone never crack noise anymore, I attach the Polaroid—front and back.
She replies in under five minutes: Can you meet now? Thirty minutes. Ask for the back table. And, Nora? Don’t send that photo to anyone else yet. Please.
While I wait, the vet calls again. “Just checking,” Dr. Kim says softly, “that you have the meds if you need them. Nights can be hard.”
“I have them,” I say. My voice goes smaller. “How do I know I’m not… making him linger because I can’t let go?”
On the other end, dishes clink—she must be between exams. “You know him,” she says. “He’ll tell you when his good moments are too far apart. Our job is to love them through all of it.” She hesitates. “And to forgive ourselves either way.”
After she hangs up, the waitress brings water for Scout in a pie tin. He drinks, sighs, and rests his head on my thigh. I want all his good moments; I also want the truth my husband buried with glass and tape.
Lina slips into the booth wearing three layers of black and a neon beanie the color of a highlighter. She looks younger than the trouble she causes. “Thank you for trusting me,” she says, not really for me but for the thing on the Formica between us.
She studies everything like it might talk. “Your husband was Mark Hayes,” she says gently, and not like a question. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” I say. “I thought sorry was the end of the sentence.”
She scans the receipts, eyebrows up. “These are the boring kind of receipts that put people in handcuffs.” She holds the Polaroid by its edges, leans into the grain. “That’s a survey rod. And that number”—she points to 9’—“is… optimistic for spring melt.”
She flips the photo, reads the initials. “L.C. is either me or Larry from county records. Larry would have gotten a manila envelope. I get the stuff that scares people.”
I press play on the recorder. She listens to Mark’s voice with the respect of a person entering a church. When he says Don’t trust the man who read my eulogy, she shuts her eyes. “Cole read that eulogy because he wants to own your grief,” she murmurs. “It buys him the town’s permission to build a playground on top of a cemetery.”
The bell over the diner door chimes. Two men in carpenter pants order to-go coffee and scan the room without scanning. Lina’s gaze meets mine. “I park around back,” she says lightly. “Let’s not be the story in the same place as the evidence.”
We step into the service alley. The air tastes like fryer oil and rain. A black SUV idles at the curb—tinted windows, rental plate. The driver’s eyes flick up, then away, in the mirror. My skin tightens halfway between fight and run. Lina tucks the Polaroid into her notebook and slides the map back to me.
“I’ll get the photo scanned at full res,” she says. “And I know someone who can clean up audio if there’s more on that tape. Nora… I won’t publish your name unless you say. But the timestamp on this? It places Cole with Mark minutes before your husband went into the river.”
My phone quivers again. A text from an unknown number: Careful what ghosts you dig up. People drown in that bend. A second later, a photo arrives—me under the bridge, mud on my hands, Scout at my knees. The caption: Grave robber.
“Who—” My voice breaks into pieces. Lina’s already snapping a shot of my screen. “Send me that,” she says. “It’s harassment if not worse. And it means we’re loud enough for them to get scared.”
She jogs to her car. I buckle Scout into mine with hands that don’t feel like hands.
At home, the house is the same and not. The couch dip where Mark watched ballgames. The coat hook where his jacket used to snag. The space that grief rearranged but didn’t redecorate. I spread everything on the kitchen table and stare until the laminate pattern swims.
The Polaroid pulls me back. I slide it from its sleeve again, this time with a flashlight under the shade like a kid telling ghost stories. The reflection on the water catches my eye—a distortion that isn’t only the sky. At the far edge of the frame, in the mirrored blur, a third figure stands on the bank, half hidden by alder shadow. Not Mark. Not Cole. Broader shoulders. A square of light at the wrist, like a watch face. He’s turned toward them, not the river.
I flip the photo and trace the ink with my thumb: If I don’t make it home, give to L.C.
There’s a second line I somehow missed, squeezed low in the corner, almost ghosted by damp: Ask about the east bend. They changed the line.
My phone pings—Lina again: Nora, one more thing: do you happen to have the key Mark left? There’s a PO Box in his name on my old notes.
I look at the tiny silver key in its Ziploc. My breath snags.
Before I can reply, headlights rake across my living room wall—too slow to be a neighbor, too deliberate to be lost. Scout lifts his head and rumbles a sound from deep in the place where wolves remember. Tires crunch. The light lingers like a hand on a doorknob.
On the table, the Polaroid gleams. In the white border, JUL 14, 8:12 P.M. burns like a match head.
The SUV engine outside drops to a hush.
Someone kills the lights.
Part 3 — Box 317
The SUV outside kills its lights like a thought you don’t want to have. Scout’s throat makes a low, old-dog rumble. I slide the Mason jar, the map, and the Polaroid into my tote, pocket the tiny silver key, and do what Mark used to say when a structure fire ate the sky: move your feet first, think in the car.
Back door. Alley. Gravel that chews. I buckle Scout with the practiced hands of a hundred vet trips and turn left, then right, then right again—Mark’s three-turn trick to shake tails even when no one’s chasing you. I glance at the rearview mirror until it stops being a mirror and starts being a story. Nothing but a string of dark houses and a porch pumpkin caving in on itself.
Cedar Ferry’s post office keeps the lobby open all night for PO boxes and bad sleepers. The fluorescent lights buzz like gnats. A patriotic poster from five years ago curls at the corner. Box rows shine dull and uniform, little brass mouths waiting to tell on somebody. I find 317 by muscle memory I don’t have, slide the key in with fingers that forgot how to be warm, and turn.
Inside: a padded mailer with my name in blue Sharpie, the way Mark wrote on every holiday present—block letters, small smiley in the O. NORA — WHEN SCOUT IS OLD.
The mailer makes a small, dense sound in my hands. I sit on a lobby bench meant for stamp lickers. Scout drops his whole weight against my shin and sighs like a bellows losing steam. I peel the mailer open along its teeth and spill out a cheap thumb drive with a cracked red cap, a folded note, and a flat tin the size of a deck of cards.
The note says, I didn’t want to put more weight on you while we were carrying enough. If you’re opening this, it means Scout told you it’s time. I am sorry for the timbers I laid across your heart without asking. Start with the USB, folder called READ ME. Underneath, in small letters: P.S. The tin’s for coffee coins, unless you need it for a lawyer.
Inside the tin, taped under mints: two twenties, three tens, and a stack of ones folded into triangles like the time he made me a paper bouquet on our tenth anniversary. I press my knuckles to my mouth. The coins inside the tin jostle—quarters and a small washer punched with a heart. Mark, who hid softness in hardware.
The USB needs a port and the lobby doesn’t have outlets or mercy. Across the street, Spin City Laundromat glows neon and mercy enough to ignore a dog if he looks like Scout. We shuffle into dryer heat and detergent steam. The night clerk nods, earbud half in. I claim a table under the bulletin board where lost cats live forever and plug the drive into my old laptop, whose fan sounds like a bad decision.
Folders bloom on the screen: READ_ME, ANNIVERSARIES, TRANSFERS, AUDIO, PHOTOS, NOTES_MILE. I click READ_ME.
Nora,
If you’ve made it here, first: forgive me for keeping quiet too long. A quiet man thinks he’s being brave by carrying the heavy things alone. Turns out that’s just another way to leave you with them later.I can’t tell you everything without putting your head in the alligator’s mouth. But I can give you enough to choose what to do.
- “ANNIVERSARIES” are letters I wrote every year because I never said enough out loud. Read if you want to know how I loved you. Skip if you’re mad—anger is a real language too.
- “TRANSFERS” is where the money went after we stopped trying for a baby and started trying to love our town harder. It’ll make the math of our life make sense, I hope.
- “NOTES_MILE” tells you what Scout knows by nose. I trained him because I didn’t trust batteries.
- If something happens, ask for L.C. She listens.
Mile Zero first, like on a river. Then one, then more, if you still have daylight.
— M.
I open ANNIVERSARIES because I can only be mad and in love at the same time, and bitterness needs water. Fourteen PDFs with names like Year_03_Pancake_Syrup.pdf, Year_07_The_House_That_Sweats.pdf, Year_12_Our_Spoiled_Dog.pdf. I click Year_03. It opens to a scan of notebook paper in blued lines.
Year Three: You hate pancakes for dinner unless they’re crispy at the edge. I burn them anyway, like a man learning to be generous. Today Dr. Patel said “low motility” and I heard “you’re less of a man,” and then I watched you make a joke about adoption that tasted like courage. I don’t know how to talk about this without apologizing for existing. So I fixed the porch light and put twenty bucks in the jar marked “kids we don’t have yet,” and I started a second jar called “town.”
You told me once love is a verb. So I’m trying to conjugate it into lumber and cash until the grammar makes sense.
— M.
I close it because breathing is something you can forget to do. Scout’s head is warm against my calf. The laundromat machines turn and turn, their eyes full of other people’s ordinary.
TRANSFERS is an ugly spreadsheet, my least favorite language. Mark labeled columns like a man trying to build a bridge across an accounting river: Date, Amount, Purpose, Recipient. The recipients aren’t all people. HENDERSON CAT / EMERG. SURGERY, GONZALEZ DOG / CHEMO, MARSHALL LOT RENT / 2 MOS, SCHOOL BAND / BUS REPAIR, RIVERBANK MATERIALS / C. ROJAS, VETERANS’ FOOD FUND, LITTLE LEAGUE SCHOLARSHIPS, L.B. / NEW WATER HEATER. The amounts are never small, never big enough to hurt and yet they add up to a life. I scroll and see HENDERSON again and the note EVICTION ASSISTANCE. My chest tightens. Henderson’s rental sits on the low side of River Road, where the flood map bleeds blue. Two months after Mark’s line, a line item for SURVEY REVIEW / LARRY COUNTY, then COPY FEES / COUNTY RECORDS.
I click over to NOTES_MILE and a text file opens like a hand drawn map in words.
Mile 0 — ferry lot jar
Mile 1 — creek abutment / receipts + Polaroid (if the wind didn’t eat it)
Mile 2 — east bend / letter (for later)
If you get as far as Mile 1, I probably spilled the bucket I was carrying. If you get to Mile 2, you’re braver than me. Under the second crossbeam at the barge dock, there’s a bolt that looks like a bolt but isn’t. Magnet box behind.
Important: If anyone says the waterline is nine feet in July, laugh them off the job. Ask Larry at County about the change order on 7/14.
My hand shakes on the trackpad. The Polaroid time in the border glows in my mind: 8:12 P.M., JUL 14. The same night.
A new text pops up from Dr. Kim: How’s our guy? Try the half tablet now. It can take the edge off and might let him sleep.
I cup the chalk-white pill in my palm like a fragile lie. Scout takes it mashed in a bit of stale muffin from the vending machine and licks my fingers as if this is a party and I’m late to it.
The AUDIO folder contains three files: voice_0714_1902.m4a, mile0_intro.m4a, and if_not_back.m4a. I put my earbuds in like I did for true crime when true crime was other people.
voice_0714_1902.m4a crackles with the familiar cheap-mic hiss. Mark’s voice, close and steady. “Testing. It’s seven-oh-two. I’m meeting Cole at the barge dock in an hour. If I run late, don’t wait dinner up.” A pause. “Nora, if you ever hear this… I’m sorry I always made you the last to know the hard thing. I thought I was protecting you. I was just protecting the part of me that’s afraid.”
I bite my lip until salt happens. The washers in the back row thump a rhythm for men who are late to dinner forever.
mile0_intro.m4a is the same audio from the recorder, the sentence about not trusting the man who read his eulogy, but clearer, like it was pulled from a phone before he put the cassette together. if_not_back.m4a is short. “Under the second crossbeam,” Mark says softly. “If anyone tells you I fell, remember I know rivers. Men who know rivers don’t fall in by accident.”
The laptop screen goes dim like a breath held. I touch the space bar and it wakes, the ugly spreadsheet glaring like a confession. I scan until the scrolling makes me sick. Payments to families I know by dog names. Henderson, again. Gonzales. A kid in a marching band who cried when they cut the bus route last year. Mark’s quiet work pulled a net under half the town while the other half cheered a billboard that said A New Waterfront for Everyone.
“Everyone,” I say again, and this time I hear how the word breaks.
Lina’s text lands. I scanned your photo. There’s a third figure in the reflection on the waterline—backlit, wrist light like a watch. I’m sending to a friend who cleans audio too. Also: Larry from County confirms there was a change order logged 7/14 and then… edited. He’ll talk but not on the record yet. Can you come by with anything else you found? Also—do you have the PO box key?
I send a picture of the padded mailer and the USB, and the text of NOTES_MILE where Mark wrote about the crossbeam and the magnet box. Her reply comes in three dots then a sentence: If the magnet box is still there, that’s your next stop. But don’t go alone. I’ll meet you at the dock at dawn.
Dawn is a good hour to do a bad idea. It’s also eight hours away. The laundromat’s clock hums loud enough to be a warning.
A bald guy with a laundry basket passes and grins at Scout. “Old soldier,” he says, and keeps moving. On the bulletin board, a flyer flaps: Cedar Ferry Pet Pantry — take what you need, give what you can. I recognize the font. Mark printed those in the firehouse office on nights when the radios slept.
Scout lifts his head like he heard Mark’s name in the air. His eyes are clouded marble but they find me anyway. I want to tell him it’s okay to let go. I also want to tell him we’re almost done, that I can finish the list if he needs to rest. He licks a line across my wrist. The machines keep turning. Somewhere, a dryer door pings.
Headlights smear across the laundromat windows and pause. My skin tightens in a way that makes me feel both alive and about to be less so. The SUV from my street idles at the curb, or maybe every dark vehicle is a story I told myself. The driver doesn’t come in. After a beat too long to be nothing, it pulls away.
I pack the laptop, the drive, the mailer. I tuck the flat tin deeper in my tote. We step into night that smells like rain without nerve. I open the car door and Scout puts up one back leg like a question. He’s slower now that the pill softens the edges, but the part of him that’s made of yes is still loud.
At home, the porch light I never changed is still too dim. I lock the door and wedge a chair under the knob because that’s what my grandmother did after tornado warnings. On the kitchen table, I spread our new, ugly inheritance: the receipts, the Polaroid, the map, the note, the USB. In the living room, the couch dip looks like a Mark-shaped meteor crater.
My phone buzzes with a voicemail from a number I haven’t heard since the county returned his effects. Mark Hayes flashes like a bad joke. My throat closes up. I press play and it’s his voice, older than the audio, younger than the last day, pulled off an old Google Voice backup Lina must have accessed with help from someone who owed her a favor.
“Hey, hon,” he says, and I have to sit. “I’m at the east bend. Might be late. Don’t wait up.”
Then a pause, and the sound of water moving with a purpose. Another male voice, farther away, familiar in the universal language of men who rehearse charm. “Mark,” it says. “Let me handle the line.”
The voicemail cuts off there, a coffin nail of sound.
Scout, from the rug, lifts his head and stares toward the front door, ears up as much as arthritis lets them. Not a growl. A question.
I look at the note again—Under the second crossbeam. Magnet box. I look at the clock. I think of dawn, and Lina, and Cole’s billboards, and the way grief rearranged the furniture and called it interior design.
I pick up the magnet flashlight we keep by the breaker box. The kind that sticks to metal like a decision.
“Okay,” I tell Scout, my voice small but working. “One more mile.”
He thumps his tail once. Outside, somewhere in the dark, a car door clicks shut like a period at the end of a sentence I don’t want to read.
Part 4 — The Crossbeam
Dawn comes the way winter does here—quiet, gray, the river wearing a shawl of breath. I park two blocks from the barge dock and kill my lights early. Scout steps down stiffly, one back leg hitching, then plants himself like he isn’t leaving until I do what we came to do.
Lina pulls in behind me in a dented Subaru with a bumper sticker that says ASK A HARDER QUESTION. She climbs out with a thermos, two paper cups, and the kind of bag that makes TSA agents sigh. “Half-caf because we’re pretending we’ll nap later,” she says. She looks at Scout and kneels. “Hey, hero.” He leans his forehead into her open palm like a blessing.
The dock is a low rectangle of weary timbers, bolted into a patience the river pretends to respect. Fog presses the water flat. Far downriver, a tug coughs. Someone tossed a pair of work gloves on a cleat and forgot them. On shore, marsh grass rattles like unspooled tape.
“Second crossbeam,” I say, and hold up the magnet flashlight. Mark’s voice from the night before sits in my chest like a small hot stone: Under the second crossbeam at the barge dock, there’s a bolt that looks like a bolt but isn’t. Magnet box behind.
Lina hands me a pair of nitrile gloves. “If we find anything, we pretend we watch CSI for fun, not for homework.”
We lay flat on the planks with our faces over the black. The river smells like pennies and cold bread. I sweep the flashlight under the first beam—rust freckles, barnacle nubs, a rope scar. Under the second, I slow down. A row of bolts, most dull with life. One shines too clean and too recent.
“There,” Lina says, calm as a metronome.
I hook my fingers over the plank edge and lower my arm. The magnet kisses the head of the bolt and holds. When I pull, the bolt gives like a tooth, sliding out without protest. It’s not a bolt at all, just a cap—threadless, hollow—a costume. Behind it, in the shadow notch of beam and brace, a small, black rectangle is taped to the wood with blue painter’s tape that matches the halo on the Mason jars.
Lina slides the rectangle free. It’s a magnet case, scuffed and cold. She clicks it open with a thumbnail and tips the contents into her gloved palm: a microSD card in a tiny zip bag, lacquered with carefulness; a folded scrap of receipt paper; and a dog tag—the cheap aluminum kind stamped at fairs—on a split ring.
The tag reads SCOUT — IF FOUND, CALL NORA, our old number. I don’t breathe right for a second.
The receipt scrap: 0714_EASTBEND.MP4 written in Mark’s block letters, and under it: If the sound is dirty, ask Jules. The name rings somewhere—the radio guy who used to engineer the high school football broadcasts, the one who moved to Portland to make podcasts about haunted lighthouses. If Lina has a number for the ghost of a radio station, it’s his.
She tucks the card back into the bag like a baby tooth. “Let’s see what we see before the river decides we shouldn’t.”
We hunch in her car with the heat on low and her field laptop open to a reader that makes the microSD look both microscopic and like a universe. Scout curls on the floorboards, nose on my boot, old bones grateful for thirty seconds that feel like shelter.
The file opens into static and motion—no prologue, just a cold sprint. The frame shakes, points of light smear—headlamps? Stars? The angle is chest-high and jittering, the lens catching a wedge of river and the black right angle of dock. The date stamp in the corner stutters 07/14 then stabilizes. The time crawls: 8:09, 8:10. The audio is a closet full of ocean. Then a voice peels out of the hiss, close to the mic.
Mark. “Cole, just mark the real line. We can’t cheat a river.”
A second voice, smooth as a brochure: “We’re not cheating. We’re optimizing. Your town wants a boardwalk and an ice cream shop, not a flood map.”
The camera lurches. A streak of white fills the left of frame—a survey rod? The headlamp flares out past it, catches a slice of a face: jawline, the shine of teeth like an advertisement. Cole.
“Listen,” Mark says. “Those trailers on River Road? Nine feet in July is a lie. You’ll drown the low lots in the first pineapple express.”
“Language, Mark.” The tone is almost kind. “If you come with me to the meeting next week, we can—”
A slapping sound interrupts—river against metal or shoes on wet plank. The picture whips right, smears a shoulder, finds water. Something heavy hits—a splash without the arc of a dive. The audio flattens into pure winter. Then a new sound—fast, hard, receding. Footsteps. Not toward the water. Away.
Lina freezes the frame and scrolls the tiny timeline back one notch at a time, the way you back up a car you don’t trust. “I can’t clean it more in the field,” she says, voice low. “But that…” She taps the waveform. “That isn’t a man jumping in. That is a man leaving.”
Outside, a truck door slams on the road that leads to the dock. My body goes stiff without asking. Lina doesn’t look up; her fingers keep doing the work of making water confess. “We’re on public land,” she says, conversational. “But if someone tells us otherwise, we’ll love the First Amendment from somewhere else.”
She drags the last minute. The headlamp tilts to the dock post, frames a watchface square and bright on a wrist that lifts mid-gesture. The face is modern, backlit—expensive. The hand is not Mark’s; Mark wore cheap Timex and a band with soot scars. The square of light is right by the edge, then the frame scrapes sky. The audio punches—splash—footsteps—breath, not Mark’s—then nothing.
The truck engine idles close. A voice calls down the dock, neighborly but not. “Everything all right there?”
Lina moves the laptop to the floor and steps out with the kind of smile that lets other people relax. “Morning,” she says. “You with the county?”
The man at the top of the ramp wears a vest that could belong to anyone—contractor, survey, security. He keeps his hands visible like a good lesson. “Just making sure no one’s trespassing,” he says, eyes on our faces, then the river, then the angle under the dock like he knows what a crossbeam is for. “This dock’s slated for work.”
Lina cocks her head. “Great. Public works schedule on the website? I’ll tell my readers.” She is silk over wire.
He smiles the way people do when they’re about to say ma’am. “You two should be careful. Pilings rot. Ladies fall.”
“People,” I say. “People fall.” My voice comes out steadier than my hands.
His eyes flick to Scout in the car, then to the keys in my fist, then back to the river. “Nice dog,” he says. “Shame when old ones wander down here, sleep too hard to hear the tide.”
Before the shape of that sentence can settle, another vehicle turns into the lot—silver county pickup, real seal on the door. A thin man with a tie too short climbs out and lifts two palms like a referee. “I’m looking for Nora Hayes,” he says, breath pluming. “I’m Larry. County records.”
The vest man laughs softly, tips an invisible hat, and strolls back to his truck like he remembered he left the stove on. He doesn’t look behind him. He didn’t need to. People who leave never do.
Larry stands there breathing like stairs are a new concept. “I shouldn’t be here,” he says, and then, “I’m here anyway.”
Lina moves us all to the picnic table by the parking strip where the light is thin but decent and the microphones in phones can’t pretend a thing. I show him the Polaroid on my phone, the time stamp burned into the border, the third figure reflected in the water’s mirror with a square watch face lit like a tiny billboard. Larry presses his lips together until they change color. “They edited the change order,” he says softly. “The nine-foot line wasn’t from hydrology. It was… aspirational. I flagged it. The flag disappeared.” He looks at me. “Your husband filed a complaint the day before he died.”
My chest does the complicated work of breaking without making a sound.
“You’ll talk on the record?” Lina asks.
Larry’s laugh is small and sad. “I like my pension. But I’ll give you document numbers you can request that are somehow still public. And—I saved the server metadata. On a thumb drive at my sister’s, which is not a thing I told you.” He glances toward the road where the vest truck went. “And I didn’t see you. Any of you.”
A gull clears its throat overhead. The tug downriver calls again. In my pocket, my phone vibrates. Angela — Cedar Ferry Animal Care: Just checking if you’re on the way for the 8:15. We can do a home visit at noon if that helps—Doctor has a break.
The little screen flares like a sun I can’t look into. I thumb back Noon, please. At our house. My fingers feel guilty. My chest feels like yes.
We pile into our cars because that’s what you do when you’re done not being seen. Lina tucks the microSD into a small pelican case like it’s evidence from a moon landing. “Jules is in Portland,” she says. “He’ll pick up if I call, which is one of his better qualities. If anyone else calls you, don’t pick up. If anybody follows you, go to the firehouse. People don’t do stupid things under a framed photo of a chief.”
I nod, then realize I’m shaking my head at something I haven’t said out loud. “He left me a dog tag,” I say. I hold it up. The cheap metal flashes. “In case I forgot who I belong to.”
Lina’s mouth does that tremble that isn’t weakness, it’s weather. “He left you a trail because he trusted your feet.”
On the way out, the black SUV noses back in like a patient shark. It drifts through the lot, neutral-faced, tinted. It doesn’t stop. It wants us to know it can be here whenever it likes. I memorize the dent in the rear quarter panel anyway, the way you memorize the freckle on a person who might hurt you.
At home, I lay Scout on the couch he knows is off-limits but always belonged to him. He sighs and puts his muzzle on the armrest, facing the door like a sentry too polite to retire. I wrap him in the flannel we use when winter gets in our bones and stroke the worn fur where his eyebrows used to be. “Noon,” I tell him. “At noon we give you the kind of mercy you gave me every day.”
He thumps his tail, a soft drumbeat of agreement, of love, of something beyond both.
Lina calls from the road. “Got Jules. He’s clearing a slot. I’m sending him the raw file now and the time stamp. He says he can clean the river out of it.”
“Can he clean the river out of us?” I ask, almost laughing. It comes out like the ghost of a laugh, a shape without a sound.
“Working on it,” she says. “I’ll be at your place in an hour.”
The hour fills itself. The town Facebook group argues about the holiday parade route under a photo of the mayor in a Santa hat. Someone posts a blurry shot of a black SUV downtown and asks if anyone else noticed out-of-state plates. Somebody else posts about coyotes near the school. I feed Scout boiled chicken and he takes it, polite, like he knows I need to be needed.
At 9:17, Lina and a man who must be Jules step into my living room carrying cases that look like they might also hold violins. Jules is younger than his voice and older than his hoodie. He nods once at Scout, once at me, and starts setting up microphones and a laptop and a small alien thing with dials.
“We’ll only run the audio,” he says, fingers moving like a pianist. “Video can wait. Let’s see if the river will let go of the words.”
He slides the microSD in and the waveform blossoms—gray on gray, a winter horizon. He applies a filter, then another. The hiss sharpens, then thins. He frowns, listens, subtracts the frequency where fog lives. The room narrows to the graph on his screen and the rasp of our own breathing.
And then, like something breaking the surface, a sentence arrives.
Mark, close: “If you move that line, you drown the low lots. You can’t put a playground on a floodplain and call it a park.”
Cole, smooth but smaller than before: “People love rivers, Mark. They don’t read maps.”
A scrape. A shove. A splash. Jules’s hands fly. He isolates the beats. The footsteps come next, bright as nails on a tabletop—wood, wood, wood—fast, receding.
Jules lifts a finger. “Listen.”
A third voice, almost lost under the river, says a single word, not a kind one, not loud, but clear enough to make three people in a living room hold very still.
“Run.”
Lina leans in. “That’s not Mark,” she says.
“No,” I say, my mouth remembering how to be dry. “Mark knows rivers.”
Jules hits one more dial. The footsteps bloom and go. The splash does not repeat. The silence after it is the kind that comes when a person stops being a person and becomes everyone else’s story.
“It’s enough,” Lina says, not triumph, just fact. “It’s enough to ask a better question in public.”
My phone lights up on the coffee table. An unknown number again. A text, then another. The first is a photo of my porch last night, the chair wedged under the knob. The second is a message that smells like cologne through a phone.
Stay home today, Nora. Let the river keep its secrets. You have a noon appointment anyway.
Scout lifts his head and looks at me. His eyes are fogged glass and still somehow a mirror.
Jules’s cursor hovers over the play button like a heartbeat waiting to happen again.
“Play it from the splash,” I say. My voice is mine and isn’t. “And then send it everywhere.”