“Swings and roundabouts,” she said, with a shrug. “Cop shop, I reckon.”

Sharkey felt small and ineffectual in her presence, admiring yet intimidated by her conviction. She was brisk and downright, in the English way—“Buck up, mate” was her mantra, and, now and then, “Pull your finger out.” No wonder she was such a capable nurse: she was decisive, dealing with injured and suffering people, always conscious of time passing, motivated by a sense of urgency, her whole being possessed by the necessity to save a life—to rescue; and now she was rescuing him.

But though he was grateful, and murmured his thanks, he was helpless, as when, under the wave at Waimea the last time he’d risked surfing, he’d been trapped in the water, aware both of drowning and of being surrounded by swimmers, unable to help himself. And that helplessness had terrified him, because he’d thought I’m drowning and yet could not move, as in a dream, paralyzed by sleep, and surrendering to the heaviness of the water, rolled in the coffin of the wave and, looking up, was taunted by the dim daylight far above, on the surface.

Seeing him brooding, Olive asked the waitress for directions to the school, the town hall, the police station. Removing a pencil from her bun of hair, the waitress circled them on the map Olive had printed from the Internet. After that—the waitress saying, “Y’all come back, hear?”—they headed down the main street, Sharkey tagging along behind Olive. Passing a whitewashed house with green shutters and an old wheelbarrow serving as a planter, geraniums spilling from its tray, and on its own island in the center of town, surrounded by flowerbeds, the granite statue of a Civil War soldier clutching his musket, Olive said, “Pure Americana.”

“Mulgrave—sounds familiar,” the desk sergeant said at the police station. “I think there was a kid at our school with that name.”

But when Olive spelled it, the policeman said, “That’s not it. It’s your Yankee accent, ma’am.”

“Hear that, Joe? My posh Yankee accent.”

The sergeant agreed to tap the name into his computer, but found no matches.

“Anything before the early nineties, it won’t be in our database. We didn’t get computers hereabouts till then. You could check at the town hall—right across Main Street.”

The lawn fronting the Floristan Town Hall was planted with apple trees, some of them still hung with fruit, and the façade of the building was shaded by a high-roofed porch lined with white columns. Inside, the lobby was cool, a fluff of dust on the varnished floorboards. Seeing TOWN CLERK lettered in gold on a door, Olive entered and greeted an elderly man in a swivel chair, reading a newspaper at a desk.

“Nice trees out front.”

“Floristan’s famous for its flowering shrubs. You have to come in springtime.”