The kettle on the stove ticked as it cooled. Elio set down his mug and listened. The harbour had the particular hush it kept at slack tide, when the fishing boats settled on their lines and the gulls forgot, briefly, to fight over the offal. He could hear the slap of a moored hull against the pier. He could hear a dog two streets over.
He listened for the bell. It was his job to ring it, and his grandfather's, and his great-grandfather's. Every evening, when the water turned and the channel between the breakwater buoys ran true, the bell in the tower behind his cottage called the boats home. A simple thing. A useful thing.
Tonight, the bell rang.
Elio looked at his hands. They were still wrapped around the mug. He looked at the door to the cottage, closed. He looked at the window, where the last of the daylight sat on the sill like dust. He had not climbed. He had not pulled the rope.
The sound came again, a single, plain note that fell into the harbour and was swallowed by it. Not the slow, ringing home the fishermen knew. A single stroke. Off-tide. Wrong.
He set the mug down and went out across the stones. The tower stood black against a sky the colour of old pewter. He climbed the wooden stairs, counting them the way he always did. Fourteen. At the top, the rope hung from its hook. It was still. There was no wind in the tower. The clapper of the bell rested against the bronze, and the bronze was cold.
He touched the rope. He did not pull it. He went back down.
In the cottage he relit the stove and put the kettle on again, because that was what his hands knew to do. The house smelled of lamp oil and the tea he had let go cold. He took the tin of tobacco from the mantel and rolled a cigarette, and his fingers were steady. He thought about the men he had pulled from the water, and the one he had not.
A knock at the door. Three quick raps, then a fourth after a pause.
Mira Sol stood on the step with a notebook under her arm and a biro behind her ear. She wore a waterproof jacket the colour of a lifebuoy and she was already looking past him, into the dim of the room, as if she might find something interesting in the corner.
"Elio," she said. "I heard the bell."
"Wind in the tower," he said.
"There wasn't any wind."
"There was, earlier."
She smiled in the polite way she had when she knew he was lying. She had a museum board to please, and a grant, and a tidy story about the ferry that had once run between Greyhook and the next cove around. She wanted passenger lists. She wanted names in glass cases. She wanted history to sit still.
"I need the ledgers," she said. "The ones your grandfather kept. I'm not asking for the diary. Just the passenger lists."
Elio leaned on the doorframe. He could smell rain coming in off the water, the briny, metallic smell of it, the way the air tasted when the tide was about to turn.
"There's nothing in them you can use," he said.
"I can decide that."
"The ink's faded. Half the pages are water. The names that are left are none of your business."
She tilted her head. She had been a child when the ferry had gone down; everyone in the harbour had been a child, or a child's parent, or a child's ghost. She had been one of the ones he had carried to shore in the bow of his skiff, a small, soaked thing in his arms. He could not lie to her. He had never been able to lie to children, and he had decided, later, that he could not lie to anyone who had been one.
He said, "No."
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she put the notebook back under her arm.
"I'll come back," she said, "when you've thought about it."
He watched her go down the path. The stones clicked under her boots. At the gate she turned, and the harbour light caught the side of her face, and she said, very quietly, so that the wind almost took it, "It rang twice, Elio. I counted."
She went. The lane smelled of wet gorse and the low tide. Elio closed the door and stood with his hand on the latch, and the bell in the tower was silent, and the kettle on the stove began to tick again as it boiled, and somewhere out in the dark channel the water began, at last, to move.
He thought about the ledgers in the chest under the stairs, and the names in them, and the name that was not, and he put his coat on to go and look at the tide.