Ellen blocked her wineglass with her palm. She managed a tiny smile. "The wine, I guess. Brody used to say that God invented whiskey to keep the Irish from ruling the world. Now, wine isn't whiskey, true, but I read somewhere it was an article in the Long Island Press, I think, Sunday—that there's just as much alcohol in a glass of wine as if you took a shot of whiskey and poured water in it, but of course the water doesn't matter, does it? It's just the shot of whiskey that has the alcohol in it, so the water doesn't matter at all...."

Tiffany, eyes as wide as saucers, stared at her.

The clock whirred; the cuckoo popped out and cawed in its raspy voice: Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo....

Ellen leapt to her feet. "Tiffany, I have to go. Something has happened to Sean!"

In a moment, bundled in her old ski jacket, she was gripping the wheel of her old Plymouth, groping through fog down Main toward the ghastly glow of the floodlights on Old Pavilion, where the rehearsal was breaking up. Tiffany, finally apprehensive, sat beside her.

Ellen jumped from her car at the Pavilion and caught up with Lenny in his flowing Joseph robes. "He's out there with that piling. And he's been out there for hours."

Lenny's fat jowls quivered in surprise. "Hours?" He grimaced. He did not like the unexpected, not at all. But he looked after the departing troupe and yelled, "Caleb, Harry, somebody! I need a boat."

"We're going with you!" Ellen insisted.

"No, you're not, Ellen." Lenny shook his head. "It's ten below freezing out there and dropping all the time."

He was adamant, and even more stubborn than she.

She could not wait in the Pavilion; it was too far from the water. So she sat with Tiffany in the Plymouth, listening to its heater growling, and the foghorn wailing, and the channel buoy tolling, while the long, long night began.

***

The sky lightened before Ellen's eyes. She had hardly nodded, but Tiffany had finally drifted off to sleep.

Behind her, she heard the Christmas banner flopping in the morning breeze. By the dock was the papier-mâché hump from the annual camel, soggy and probably ruined from the fog.

There was no hint of sun through the scudding clouds. She could see only a hundred yards or so up the channel, but she had rolled the window down six inches and had been listening to the grumbling of diesels as the fishermen swept the harbor all night long.

She grew numb. All at once she knew that Sean was dead. The town did not know, not yet, but the fishermen surely did. Of all men, they knew their enemy—the ocean—best. If it did not return a hostage instantly, he was doomed.