There, he bought a Sony handicam. He spent some time searching for the kind of soft plastic-covered wire gardeners use; but found a carbon-steel chef’s knife quite easily. On an impulse he went to Beacon Hill, where he picked up two bottles of Montrachet. On his way back to the car he stood for a moment on the south side of the Charles River Basin looking across at MIT, then on an impulse tried to phone Brian Tate. No answer. Back at the motel, Anna was sitting on the bed naked with her feet tucked up, crying. Ten o’clock in the morning and she had already pinned notes to the doors and walls. Why are you anxious? they said, and: Never do more than you can. They were like beacons for a bad sailor, someone lost even in familiar straits. There was a faint smell of vomit in the bathroom, which she had tried to disguise by spraying perfume about. She looked thinner already. He put his arm round her shoulders.

“Cheer up,” he said.

“You could have told me you were going.”

Kearney held up the Sony. “Look! Let’s walk on the beach.”

“I’m not speaking to you.”

But Anna loved to be filmed. The rest of the day, while seabirds flickered over the shallows or hung like kites above the beach, she ran, sat, rolled, posed looking out to sea, against the white sand in the coastal clarity of light. “Let me look!” she insisted. “Let me look!” Then screams of laughter as the images poured like a stream of jewels across the little monitor. She wouldn’t wait to see them on the TV. She had the impatience of a fourteen-year-old—that life had not allowed her to remain fourteen, she could sometimes imply, was her special tragedy.

“Here’s something you don’t know,” she said. They sat for a moment on a dune, and she told him about the Mann Hill Sea Monster—

November 1970: three thousand pounds of rotting flesh is washed onto the Massachusetts sand. Crowds gather all the next day, motoring up from Providence and down from Boston. Parents stare, startled by the blubbery flippers. Kiddies dart and dash up close enough to frighten themselves. But the thing is too decayed ever to be identified; and though its bone structure resembles that of a plesiosaur, consensus has it that the gale has brought in nothing more exotic than the remains of a basking shark. In the end, everyone goes home, but the arguments continue for thirty years—

“I bet you didn’t know that!” said Anna, leaning back against Kearney’s chest and encouraging him to put his arms around her. “Though you’ll say you did.” She yawned and looked out over the bay, which was darkening like the fine crust on a blob of mercury. “I’m tired out, but in such a nice way.”

“You should go to bed early,” he said.