In the main house, Kevin checked the dining room. The buffet he’d put out earlier had gone largely uneaten. The macaroni casserole, the soup, the meat loaf, the mashed potatoes. The Italians had wandered up to the dining room and grazed a bit on a salad. The Chinese couple picked among the fruit bowl. The Dutch brother and sister sat desultorily at a table; the girl toyed with a piece of chocolate cake. But most of the guests had not even bothered coming down to eat. Who could blame them? They probably had no appetite at all. How long would it take, Kevin wondered, after such a shock, for a body to return to itself again and desire food? Diana Olmstead, the large woman with the cane, was the only one who had a normal appetite. She caned her way into the dining room, prayer beads in one hand, and filled a plate with salad and vegetables, and a bowl of pea soup. She sat by herself in the empty room, looking out the large, darkened windows. Afterward, she bused her plate back into the kitchen, and finding neither Kevin nor Douglas there, she thanked Sheila Quinn. Sheila was doing the dishes, her hands in rubber gloves. Some people called her slow—but it was partly her speech impediment. She turned bright red, and nodded at Diana Olmstead, and quickly went back to her dishes.

Little by little, the guests settled into their rooms in the cottages and in the main house. Kevin made sure everyone had what they needed, blankets and towels and bottles of water, while Mrs. McIntyre helped. The night came slowly. The skies cleared; and now it was late, and Kevin lay awake in the master bedroom on the third floor, unable to sleep. Floors creaked below him. Toilets flushed. Voices maundered through walls. No one, it seemed, could fall asleep at the inn. On the second floor Parviz Mansoor, the man in the tweed coat, sat beside the window fully awake, as did the Dutch girl in the room across the hall. The night had turned balmy. The ocean whispered outside. And whether it was the effect of the moon, which just now rose from out of the ocean, or the smell of the tide, all the guests stirred inside their rooms. For five days, consciously or not, they’d wanted to get to the water. For five days they’d lived with the torment of not knowing, and then finding out, that their daughters or husbands or sons were somewhere lost in that sea. And seeing the orange moon lift from the ocean now, like a spotlight luminating acres of open water, they found themselves disheartened all over again. So vast was the sea. So appallingly cold, so indifferent the metronome of the tide.