He kept pushing until he heard her knock on the window, and then he hurried aft to where the stern still nudged against the dock. Stepped aboard and flashed Jess a thumbs-up through the wheelhouse doorway, heard the engine throttle up in response, the propeller churning wash as the boat slipped away.

“Made it,” he said when he entered the wheelhouse. It was warm inside, smelled of engine oil and kerosene and old clothes. On one side of the little room was a sink and a stove, a couple of cupboards, and on the other side was a table and a little three-sided settee. Up ahead was the captain’s chair, a panel of ancient electronics, the wheel and the throttle and the gear selector. There was a hole in the floor in a forward corner of the wheelhouse, same side as the stove, stairs leading downward.

Jess stood at the wheel, navigating the boat out from between the wharf fingers, aiming it across the harbor to the end of the rocky breakwater, where red and green buoys marked a channel to open water.

“I was beginning to think you all weren’t coming,” she said.

Mason found Lucy curled up in a corner of the settee, snoring already, her brush with danger tonight apparently forgotten. He scratched her behind the ears and sat down beside her.

“Wouldn’t have missed it,” he told Jess. “Just figured the dog needed a walk before we cooped her up on this boat.”

*  *  *

On the government wharf, Joy stood in the shadows and watched as the lights of the little fishing boat rounded the breakwater. The night was nearly pitch dark, but he could tell nevertheless when the boat had cleared the harbor; the lights on the mast began to rock with the swell as the boat motored out of sheltered waters and into the open strait. It plowed the waves and turned westward, carrying Jess Winslow and her companion with it.

The man and the dog had abandoned the Suburban by the time Joy reached the pier. But that was no matter. He’d hurried to the truck and heard the sound of a diesel engine in the boat basin below, and he’d known what the widow and the man planned to do.

He might have tried to intercept them, but he didn’t. He’d waited, hidden on the margins, away from the dim yellow sodium lights, and stared down at the little harbor’s three fingers, the derelict hulks moored therein.

For a few minutes he didn’t see anything. And then one of the hulks had moved, its propeller churning water, and Joy had watched as the little boat slipped away from the dock and out toward the breakwater.