Deenie had looked puzzled, as if she'd never heard of high tide, and she and Thea had insisted that they build it close to the water.

"Because this is where we found Peeper," said Thea. "The castle is his meromial. Like we had for Uncle Sean."

"Memorial," corrected Ellen, hiding the grief that his name invoked. "Who's Peeper?"

"A doctor bird," proclaimed Deenie. "He blew all de way up from Jamaica, las' hurricane we had."

"And we made him well, and he went home," said Thea proudly. "Memorial!"

High tide had come, and desperately they'd panicked, dug a moat, and built an outer wall, but the kids were right: The wavelets had come only a few feet up the beach, had lapped at their wall, and were receding already.

Very strange. Even the tides seemed to spare these islands, basking in precious sunlight. Everything else that the ocean touched, it destroyed.

"In Amity," she mused, "it would all be wrecked by now."

Lips pursed, Thea dug at the moat. "Is that what happened to Uncle Sean?"

"No."

"What did?"

She felt her body grow rigid. She had promised herself that she would not lay her fears of the ocean on the child, who was always splashing with her friends in the gentle water, seemingly unattended.

But Thea was watching her, so she had to answer somehow. "Well... he went out on a boat and he never came back."

Deenie nodded wisely. "My daddy, he goes out in a boat. Someday, might be, he gwine stay away."

"No." Ellen smiled. "Your daddy will always come back."

"Maybe Uncle Sean's still there!" Her granddaughter looked out at the cove. "Maybe he'll come back!"

"I don't think so," Ellen said, choking.

"He could," insisted Thea. "He could come right in Masthead Cove."

"Papa Jacques on island now," said Deenie suddenly.

"I know," said Ellen, surprised. "We brought him here."

"You pay him, might be he do you wete mort nan dlo," suggested Deenie.

"What's that?" asked Ellen uncomfortably.

"He make bamboche—like a dance," the child said knowingly. "Then the spirit, ma'am, he hear this, yes? And comes back from waters of the dead."

Ellen stared at her. "What?"

"That what Papa Jacques say," Deenie said, shrugging. "I don't know. He makin' my sister well. In Haiti he was a great doctor, ma'am.”

Ellen suddenly envisioned Papa Jacques's saucer eyes, as black as night. His presence seemed very much there, and she did not like it.

She got up swiftly. "Thea, you want to come wading with me?"

Her granddaughter looked at the castle and shook her head. "I'm not finished yet."

Unhappily Ellen skirted the wavelets, moving toward the next cove. A squall line was building castles and golden spires to the west in the afternoon sun. The water was warm on her feet. She found a conch shell, vacated. Presumably the owner had gone to lunch in someone's chowder bowl.