Chapter 20: Five Hundred and One Feet

Maisie turned three on Saturday, on the pier, in a plywood playhouse the crew had built overnight.

It had a red door, a window box with plastic daisies, and a sign over the entrance in thick yellow paint that said MAISIE'S.

I stood in front of it with a paper plate in my hand and tried not to cry.

Thirty dockworkers had come with their wives and kids.

Britt had brought a sheet cake and a cat in a carrier, and the cat hated everything.

Tobin's mother sat on an upturned crate with a pie in her lap and dared anyone to take a slice before the candles.

The deputy from the pier gate sat in his car at the end of the pier, with the window down.

The judge had signed the restraining order on Thursday.

Ingrid could not come within five hundred feet of me, of Maisie, or of this pier.

"She'll come," Joel said, low, beside me. "She said she would."

"She's out on bail with a bracelet on her ankle."

"She's Ingrid."

At two o'clock a gray sedan rolled onto the pier.

A woman got out with a clipboard and a county badge on a lanyard.

"Mrs. Halvorsen? I'm with Child Protective Services. We received an anonymous report."

The party kept going, but the noise dropped.

"The caller says a toddler is living in a boat house with an unmarried man and no heat."

Joel's hand tightened on his paper cup.

Behind the woman, I saw the assistant lift his eyebrows at me from the cake table.

He had told me on Thursday night what Ingrid planned.

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