“Might get a stray in the woods, maybe a sick one, which’d make it meaner.” The old man sucked his teeth. If Sharky was dead, nothing could bring him back. But he needed to know it was no mystery. There had to be a sensible explanation, and birds were probably it, from what Bonnie reported.

Elizabeth voiced a new thought. “Were there any men up there?”

Bonnie told them she had seen no one.

Elizabeth prompted, “Those fellows who came across the ferry yesterday?” There had been an unkempt group of three “punks,” dressed outlandishly in Nazi caps, torn army pants, and ripped shirts. On the pier, they had eyed Elizabeth and Bonnie lewdly, making suggestive gestures the women had turned from with disgust.

Bonnie shook her head, swallowing hard. It was too horrible even to contemplate that any man, no matter how brutish, would put out a dog’s eyes. What would he use? A sharpened branch? A walking stick? She fought to keep her stomach from turning over again.

An urgent knocking on the front door interrupted the three. Captain Johnson called irascibly, “Come on in before you break the damn thing down! You know the door’s open!”

A tall man of about twenty-­five entered in a hurry. The sea was in his lean, weathered face, with its black Portuguese eyes, long nose, and a heavy mustache that curved down on both sides of a strong mouth. Craig Soaras was the mate of Johnson’s fishing-­charter boat, the Jessica, and a childhood friend of Elizabeth. Children loved him. They tugged at his large mustache knowing its piratical fierceness masked warmth and shyness. They rode his back, they clung to his shoulders when he sailed them across to Chatham for the annual visiting circus.

To Craig Soaras, the Jessica was like his own boat. To him, the long hours at sea passed in the best way a man could live his life—caring so ardently for what he did that he was scarcely aware of doing it. His sailing and fishing were no more “work” than breathing or eating, or lying on a beach watching fiddler crabs scuttling about and pipers dance on the wet sand with the ebb and flow of the waves.

Now the man panted anxiously to the captain, “Can we talk alone, Elias!”

Knowing these men, Elizabeth quickly led Bonnie out, but she could not help wondering what needed to be private between them.

In the living room, Craig moved quickly to the captain’s side. Johnson paid hard attention. Craig wasn’t a man easily upset, and he was sure blowing a conch now.

“Elias, I was around the north side going for bluefish—” Soaras couldn’t help interrupting himself with a fisher­man’s enthusiasm. “Caught a nice one, twenty-­seven pounds!”

“Fair . . .” Elias Johnson teased and waited to hear about the worry he saw in the man’s eyes. Had the price of their fuel gone up again?