Chapter 10: What She Saw

I took the glasses off and sat under an oak tree in the rain until the lawn went back to green soup.

The deputy had left his umbrella and a pen.

He'd said I had until dawn.

I did not touch the pen.

I sat with my knees up and the form on the wet grass beside me, getting wetter, and I thought about nothing.

At some point the rain stopped.

At some point I heard the drip.

It came from across the lawn, slow and steady, and the grass under it sighed as it passed.

I did not look up.

"I will not come closer," Ambrose said.

His voice was the same.

It came from the dark in front of me, low and measured, from about ten feet away.

"Okay," I said.

"You may leave. The gate is open, and the deputy will not stop you."

"If you walk now, you will be at the road in twenty minutes."

"Okay."

"I would not blame you."

"You keep saying that," I said. "You're not great at the part where you tell a girl what she's looking at."

He was silent for a long time.

"My name is Ambrose Thornwick," he said at last. "I was born in 1921."

"In 1955, my father took us sailing off Nantucket, my brother, my sister and me. A storm came."

"A boat came out of it that was not a boat. Men in gray coats took us from the water."

"They gave us an injection in the cabin, to save our lives."

"Roake's father."

"Yes. We woke up like this. We did not stop waking up like this."

"Seventy years."

"Seventy-one in October."

He said it.

"The Trust took the estate," he said. "They kept us here."

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