The Hale Shipping building stood at the end of Commercial Street with the harbour below it, all glass and pale stone, the kind of building that wanted you to understand it had stopped being a warehouse a long time ago. Emma parked across the street and sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel, rehearsing. She was not here as a detective, she reminded herself. She was here as a sister doing paperwork. The family was selling the lake house. There were questions about that night that belonged in the family archive, and who better to answer them than the man who had been standing at the centre of it.
That was the story, anyway. She had told it to the aide on the phone, and the aide had told it to Marcus Hale, and Marcus Hale had given her twenty minutes at eleven o'clock, which told her he had decided long ago that refusing the Lindqvists anything, ever, would look like guilt.
His aide was young and polished in the way of people who are paid to absorb other people's awkwardness. "Ms. Lindqvist. He's expecting you." She took Emma down a corridor lined with photographs: Hale ships in Hale weather, three generations of Hale men shaking hands with governors. Halfway along the wall, between a launch and a christening, hung the photograph everyone in two states knew by heart. Sarah in her engagement dress, laughing, head thrown back, the lake behind her going gold. It was the picture from the memorial programme. Emma had a copy of it in a drawer she no longer opened.
"He put that one up himself," the aide said, following her eyes. "He won't let the cleaners touch the frame."
Marcus rose when she came in, and the first thing Emma saw β before his face, before the hand he extended β was the ring. It hung on a fine chain at his open collar, a slim gold band that swung once as he leaned across the desk and then settled against his shirt. He caught her looking and did not explain it, and she did not ask. Ten years of practice, she thought. Both of them.
"Emma." He held her hand a moment longer than business required. "You look like her. God help me, every year you look more like her."
"Everyone says that," Emma said. "It stopped being true about five years ago, but everyone still says it."
He smiled the sad, practised smile she had seen at the memorial, at the scholarship dinner, at the unveiling of the bench at the lake. "Your father. The aide said he's β how is he?"
"Ill," Emma said. "That's why the house is being sold. That's why I'm going through everything. He wants it settled."
"Settled," Marcus repeated, and sat, and folded his hands, and became β she watched it happen β the grieving fiancΓ©, the way other men became golfers or fathers at forty-one. It was not fake, exactly. That was the thing nobody who watched him on the news ever understood. The grief was real. It was just also a performance, and he had had ten years of rehearsals.
She asked him the questions she had prepared, the harmless ones, and he gave her the account she could have recited with him. The string lights. The toast Robert had given, careful and proud. Sarah laughing at something Priya said. The band. The cake nobody ate. His voice did the thing it always did at the same place, the place where Sarah walked down to the dock to look at the water, and it gentled, and he said, "She liked to stand at the end of it. She said the lake looked back at you from there."
"Marcus," Emma said, "in all the statements, everyone says she was happy that night. Radiant, the police report says. I have to ask for the archive. From you. What was her mood, really, that last hour?"
"Radiant is right," he said. "She was β " He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on its saucer, a small precise movement. "She was angry with me by ten, I won't pretend otherwise. She had a temper, your sister, when she felt cornered. She'd found out something about the wedding arrangements β the seating, the flowers, I never did learn what β and she was furious in that quiet way she had, smiling at everyone. I told myself I'd fix it in the morning. There wasn't a morning. That's the part I carry, Emma. Not the dock. The morning I didn't get."
The room went on being quiet. The harbour went on being grey beyond the glass.
Emma kept her face exactly where it was, because her face was the only evidence bag she had in that office. Angry. She turned the word over the way she turned over file headers at her desk, looking for what did not match. She had read his police interview until the paper copy she had made at nineteen had softened at the folds. In good spirits, he had said. Sarah was happy all evening; she never left my side for long; I noticed nothing wrong. The sheriff's summary said radiant. The town said radiant. Priya's statement said radiant, Priya who had lied about everything else but had said radiant too. In ten years, in every version of that night that anyone had ever given under oath or over coffee, no one had ever said Sarah Lindqvist was angry.
People describing a mood they didn't witness reached for the photographs. People describing a mood they had been in a room with reached for specifics. Flowers. Seating. I never did learn what.
"You never told the police she was angry," Emma said, lightly, an archivist checking a date.
"It didn't seem β " He stopped, and for one second the polished thing slipped and she saw something older and much less managed move behind his eyes. "It didn't seem kind. To her memory. She was entitled to a bad hour without it becoming the story of her death."
"Of course," Emma said.
He walked her out himself, past the photograph, his hand at her elbow, and told her about the new scholarship girl, a marine biology student from Bangor, and Emma understood that he would do this for the rest of his life, beautifully, at dinners and unveilings, and that somewhere underneath it he had just handed her the first true thing anyone had said about her sister in ten years without knowing he had done it.
In the elevator she took out her notebook and wrote one word, in the capitals she used for things that did not fit.
ANGRY.
Chapter 7: The Boathouse Router
The boathouse had to be cleared by Friday, because the estate agent wanted photographs of it empty, and so on Wednesday morning Emma put on her father's old work coat and went down the path with a roll of bin bags and a thermos, telling herself it was only a room.