“He died,” Cole said stiffly. “He was buried in the earth. Trust me. You’re worrying about the wrong things. Playing detective, digging up the past. And meanwhile your house is literally crumbling into the sea.”

I heard the waves outside, the wind in the trees. I heard the sounds of the house all around me, the creaking and settling.

“Don’t change the subject,” I said.

“You don’t believe me? Come here.”

He led me down the stairs, through the living room, into the kitchen, and down the basement steps.

“What?” I said, suddenly stopping and holding on to the railing. “Do you have a cage of some kind constructed down here? Are you planning to hold me prisoner? It won’t work. I have plans tonight, just so you know. If I don’t show up, they’ll come looking for me.”

“Shut up,” he said. “Just look.”

I descended the final steps, and we stood in the damp chill until my eyes adjusted to the gloom. The house was built only shortly after the Day Estate, one of the earlier houses on the island. Its foundation, like the big Day house, was made of flat slate slabs stacked into an intricate underground wall. But where it rose above the earth, I saw, it was leaning precariously inward, tilted. Over the years the leaning stones had actually pushed the basement stairs over, until they were slanted and cramped under the ceiling. How had we not noticed this? How fast was it moving? I tried to remember walking down the basement steps in childhood; had there been more room?

The adjacent wall was leaning outward, toward the bay. I saw the cracked and crumbling slabs all along the ground. A tomb by the sounding sea.

“You think the ground beneath your feet is solid? It’s quicksand. It will swallow you whole. Start seeing what’s right in front of you,” Cole said, “or you’ll lose it all.”

From then on, in addition to worrying about Cole, and Baby B, about my mother and father, about Lucas, about how long we could go on together like this, about what secrets the past was holding on to, I also worried about the house. It seemed vulnerable, both to Cole and to the degradations of time. I walked from room to room. I noticed suddenly all the ways it was falling apart: the pitted, scratched floorboards that seemed to slant toward the bay, the walls that almost sagged under the weight of moisture or salt, the rusty pipes seeping amber water underneath all the sinks.

Instead of sleeping at night, I lay awake and worried. During the day I walked to the graveyard and read the old inscription. SON~BROTHER. I sometimes felt there was someone behind me, over my shoulder, a little flash of movement. But when I turned my head, there was no one.

Chapter 23

23