Dedication

For Nat Sobel

Epigraph

A treacherous smiler

With teeth white as milk,

A savage beguiler

In sheathings of silk,

The sea creeps to pillage,

She leaps on her prey;

A child of the village

Was murdered today.

—Elinor Wylie, “Sea Lullaby”

Part 1
Grey Lady

Chapter 1

Now

Harry was briefly blinded—the bright May sun hitting just the right spot on his windshield—as he turned onto the crushed-shell driveway of the house in Kennewick Village. He pulled his Civic next to the orange Volvo station wagon—a car his father had loved—and covered his face with his hands and almost cried.

Alice, his father’s second wife, had called Harry early the previous morning to tell him that his father, Bill, was dead.

“What? How?” Harry asked. He was on his cell phone, walking across the tree-lined quad toward his dormitory. He’d been thinking about graduation, less than a week away, worrying about what he was going to do for the rest of his life.

“He slipped and fell.” Alice was speaking with gaps between the words. Harry realized she was crying, and trying not to show it, trying to sound calm and reasonable.

“Where?” Harry asked. His whole body was cold and his legs had turned to rubber. He stopped walking, and the girl behind him, also on her cell phone, grazed against his backpack as she moved around him on the brick walkway.

“Out on the cliff path, where he liked to walk.” Alice was now audibly crying, the words sounding like they were coming through a wet towel.

“Who found him?”

“They were tourists. I don’t know. They didn’t know him, Harry.”