Chapter 17: Rainer's Night

I did not open the grocery bag in the church.

I carried it across the wharf yard against my ribs, and I told Tiernan where I was taking it before he asked.

"Rainer has the only other key to anything my father touches," I said. "He'll know what it means in a way we won't."

Tiernan looked at the bag and then at me.

"Take it," he said. "Come back."

That was all.

He didn't ask what I'd say to his brother, and I loved him for the blank space he left.

Rainer had sent the launch to the end of our dock without a word.

It sat low and grey in the black water with one lamp lit in its cabin.

He had said the road was watched, since his father had put two men in a car at the foot of Mill Row at noon.

The Harbor House locks had been changed that afternoon, he told me later, and his bags stood on the front steps in the snow.

He took my hand to help me over the rail, then let go of it at once.

"There's a chart table," he said. "It's the only dry place."

He backed the launch off the dock and ran it out in the dark behind the breakwater.

He cut the engine.

We drifted in the lee of the stone, with the harbor lights coming small and yellow over the water.

I laid the ledger on the chart table under the cabin lamp.

It was bound in black leather, with a brass clasp, and the pages inside were ruled in four columns in the chairman's slanting blue hand.

Rainer put on a pair of glasses I had never seen, and he read.

His finger went down the page and did not stop for a very long time.

"Family," he said at last, in his figure voice. "Paid, Booked, Kept."

"Kept is what he took."

"And these two initials on the far right, M and D."

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