I stand on the bulkhead and look down at the three little boats associated with the three cabins just south of Octopus Hole—and wonder why I’ve rushed here. Something to do with crabbing, and these little boats, each of which is now chained to the dock, and each of which once again displays a sign announcing the closure of the crab fishery.

Yet Adam and Aubrey, outlaw crabbers, went out anyway. And Adam, seeing his wife being attacked, had then rowed like a madman to shore to save her. Thrown his little boat up onto the sand, yanked his daughter free of it, and started searching for his wife, yelling for help, leaving Aubrey with the nice older woman there and charging up into the brush.

That little boat had still been there, beached cockeyed on the sand where Adam had left it, when Montrose and I arrived.

That little, utterly empty boat. Containing not a single crab pot.

Was that it? Was that what had sent me scrambling back to this place? Crabbing was banned on that weekend, and Adam’s boat had contained no pots anyway. Maybe he just left his outlaw pots out in the canal when he saw Sophie being attacked.

Like an idiot, I scan the water for crab-pot markers, as though they’d still be out there nearly three months later.

I heave a sigh and turn around. My eyes settle on the big gray cabin where Sophie Warner spent her last night on this earth. It’s a straight line from the steps through the seawall to the trail to the Wisteria’s front door, hidden by a big old cedar. I scan over the middle cabin where Teresa Dibley and her grandchildren slept—and think of how the kids got up in the middle of the night and the little boy heard something. Finally, I cast my attention in the direction of the Lily. The Mosses arrived late the night before the crime.

The tide is out, so I walk farther back over oyster shells and rocks to take in everything at once.

I have no idea what I’m searching for until I see it.

A faint indentation runs across the lawn from the Wisteria to the Chrysanthemum, and from the Chrysanthemum to the Lily. A buried water line? No, each cabin has its own well house. Power, I know, comes across from the road above. It would make no sense for a sewer line to run from cabin to cabin. Patches of bright green grass indicate separate drain fields for septic systems.

I remember the code for the Wisteria’s lock box, the wholly unsafe and unwise “1234” I saw Adam key in when we came back from the Hama Hama Oyster Saloon.

Down the beach I see a dad and two boys turning over rocks hunting for crabs. I feel like I’m doing the same thing.