Chapter 6: The Dead Man Walks In

The lakeside church was full by ten forty.

I knew because I stood in the vestibule with my hand in the crook of his arm and counted the heads through the door.

Every captain from the fleet was there, in dress blues, and every office clerk from the Lindmark Marine building.

The two directors who had signed my father's last will were in the second pew.

On an easel at the front stood a photograph of Hamish at twenty-five, grinning on the deck of a freighter.

Under it sat the walnut box, which Bernadette had collected from my kitchen at dawn with a house key I had never asked her to return.

"Tell me again why we're doing this," Skye hissed on my other side.

"Because she called a funeral for a living man and told the whole town to come."

"I mean why are we dressed like this."

I wore the black dress I had bought for my father's service.

The man beside me wore Hamish's old charcoal suit from the lake house closet, and it hung a little loose on his shoulders.

He had said nothing about that.

He held his cap in his bandaged hand and kept the ruined side of his face turned toward me.

"Ready?" I whispered.

"No."

"Good," I said. "Neither am I."

We walked through the doors.

The organ was in the middle of a hymn, and it stuttered and stopped on one wrong note.

Heads turned in the pews, row by row.

I heard the first gasp near the back, and then a second.

A woman in a navy hat said, quite loudly, "Oh my God."

We went down the center aisle.

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