Chapter 24: The Harbor Sees

The year ended on a Friday, and Clara chose the dock.

She chose the long wooden pier at Curtis Bay, where the rail cars ran down to the water, and she chose noon.

Nobody was invited, because she had told the whole harbor.

By eleven, three hundred people stood on the planks.

There were longshoremen in their good jackets, and the yard crew with their wives, and the cook from Roland Park in a hat she had bought for it.

The detective stood at the back with a paper cup of coffee.

Beside him a judge waited in a borrowed raincoat, with a register under his arm.

Chase Loomis was serving eleven years, and his father had sold the shipping company to pay the lawyers.

The paper had said so on Tuesday.

Nobody mentioned it.

Morton stood at the foot of the pier in a dark suit that fit him, with his arm held out.

"You look like your mother," he said.

"That's the pearls."

"It's not."

He walked her down the length of the dock, past three hundred faces, and he did not look at his shoes once.

At the end, in front of the water, Alexander waited.

He wore no hat.

He had left the black cane in the car, and he stood with a plain walking stick in his right hand and his left hand empty.

Margery sat in the first chair, in a hat made entirely of white silk roses.

She had said it was her biggest yet, and no one had argued.

Clara reached him, and Morton kissed her cheek and stepped back.

For a moment she and Alexander only looked at each other.

"I wrote something," she said.

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