Mary, stretched out in her chair with her feet propped on the railing, sounded almost as sleepy as Kate felt. "What?"

"Did you see anything last night?"

"Like what?"

"Like anything, like any goings-on over at the Meanys'. Do you know what Cal Meany's drifter looks like?"

"The no-namer?" Without hesitation Mary pointed to where it rode at anchor. "Sure. Saw it come back last night."

"You did?" Kate sat up straight. "What time?"

Mary squinted thoughtfully at the horizon. "Was about the time the girls left, midnight or thereabouts. Well, maybe closer to one."

"Did the aunts see him, too?"

"They might have. They were in their skiff by then, and I was waving from the porch. We didn't get a chance to comment."

Gull had seen Meany in Cordova a little before ten-twenty. If Mary saw him at one, there was just enough time for a drifter with that much horsepower to get from point to point. "Could you see Meany?"

Mary shrugged. "Sure. He was on the flying bridge."

"Did you see his boy?"

Mary shook her head. "There was a light on in the galley, though. He could have been inside." She frowned.

"What?"

"Come to think of it, Meany had to shinny down off the flying bridge to drop anchor. If the boy had been on board, he would have been in the bow, wouldn't he?"

Kate wished her sympathies were not quite so much with the boy; when she got good news of this kind it made her heart lift, and it was much too early in the investigation for her heart to be doing anything of the kind.

"Clumsy," Mary added.

"Who?"

"Meany, last night. Stumbling around the boat like it was midnight January instead of midnight July. Course it was the Fourth, he could have been drunk," Mary added. "Most of them were. Idiots."

"Yeah," Kate said, but absently. Gull had said something like that, something about Meany nearly stripping the gears on the drifter. Clumsy, on deck as well as on the throttle? The stories Mary and Gull told didn't square with what Kate had seen. Meany had moved with a feral grace, quick, nimble, never putting a foot wrong, always reaching for the proper tool and wielding it with a casual competence that elicited, however reluctantly, admiration and even envy.

She sat up with a jerk.

"What?" Mary said.

"Huh? Oh. Nothing." Kate relaxed again, eyes narrowed in thought. If Meany hadn't been acting like Meany, either at the small boat harbor or in Alaganik, maybe it hadn't been Meany on the boat. Maybe it had been someone else. Maybe even the murderer, trying to extend the span of Meany's life while he, or she, set up an alibi.

Mary said, "Just what was all that business today with you and Old Sam and the wet clothes?"

"What? Oh." Kate drained her mug. "I behaved like a horse's ass, and he pitched me into the bay for it."