Each time Kevin drove past Caginish Point that November he saw cars from out of province: tour buses, engines chugging in the cold, knots of people hunched into the icy winds. Voyeurs. Some with camcorders. All with cameras. He wanted to chase them away. Why did they need to come? What use was their presence, rubbernecking, trampling down the teaberry and pitcher plants? Why did they need to travel so far just to get within arm’s reach of death? To inhale it, to photograph it. To say they were there; they’d seen the spot. Did it make them somehow stronger to rub elbows with the dead? Did they say: This could have been me? Wild strawberries bloomed there each June, and every year Kevin had picked them. They were small, tart, tastier than the cultivated kind. But not next year; he wouldn’t pick strawberries at Caginish ever again.

One night an American couple arrived who claimed they’d lost their son on the flight. After registering, they went down to the beach with metal detectors. Kevin had a nagging feeling. Who would do such a thing? Douglas checked them out at the naval yard; he was working there full-time, helping with the sorting. No, they’d never heard of the couple; they weren’t on any of the family lists. Bunty Phillips ended up escorting them off the island and telling them never to return.

The tinfoil set, Douglas chimed.

Tinfoil?

He’d learned the word from a veteran crash investigator. They showed up at every air disaster.

But tinfoil? Kevin asked.

They wear tinfoil under their hats, Douglas explained—as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. It keeps aliens from reading their minds.

Somewhere in a laboratory in Ottawa that fall, men in lab coats burned bits of electrical wire, plunged them into salt water, placed them against litmus paper and compared the colors with those of the burnt wires found on the plane. Another man studied the filaments of lightbulbs, the manner in which they twisted when burned. Another freeze-dried documents found floating on the water: napkins, newspapers, business reports, a page of musical notation (The Metamorphoses by Richard Strauss). Later, they’d all be examined for a message, a mark, a clue, some indication those onboard had known what was going on. Slowly, meticulously, over months, the plane itself was being hung back together, each piece—some no larger than a postage stamp—stuck onto a life-size skeleton the exact shape of the plane. A giant jigsaw puzzle, a shattered cup, two hundred and fifty tons heavy.

None of this mattered to Kevin Gearns. It wouldn’t change a thing. Yet each night, when he came home from the naval yard, Douglas rattled on about ailerons and Kapton cable and the in-flight entertainment system and emergency cockpit procedures, until Kevin finally had to tell him to stop. He didn’t want to hear it anymore.