Chapter 10 - The Name on the Water
In October, the salt marsh along the North River turned the color of old copper.
The wind off the Atlantic blew hard and clean, carrying the sharp, clean scent of brine and decaying kelp across the newly graded gravel paths of the South Quay Memorial Park.
Where the rusted iron gates of Pier Forty had once stood, chained and padlocked behind warning signs from the Department of Environmental Protection, there was now an open granite archway.
Carved into the lintel were seven words:
*THE GROUND IS COMMON TO US ALL.*
On a Tuesday afternoon, when the wind was high enough to keep the gulls hovering motionless against the gray clouds, an old man walked through the archway.
He walked with a heavy, deliberate cane, his right knee stiff from forty years of damp salt air. He wore a navy watch cap pulled down over his ears and an oilskin coat with brass buttons.
Marcus stopped beside the newly installed iron benches overlooking the turning basin.
The water was clear.
The old oil slicks had been skimmed away; the sunken barges had been dredged up, chopped into scrap iron, and shipped to the foundries in Pennsylvania. Small schools of juvenile striped bass flicked through the eelgrass that had begun to take root along the riprap.
Beside him, Daniel Walker sat on the bench.
He was not wearing his overcoat. He wore a heavy wool sweater with leather patches on the elbows and a pair of spectacles pushed up onto his graying hair. He had a pencil behind his ear and an open ledger on his lap—not a ledger of names or debts, but the quarterly shipping manifests for his Portuguese cork imports.
"The girl settled in?" Marcus asked, leaning his weight against his cane.
"She has an apartment on Columbus Avenue," Daniel said without looking up from the figures. "Third floor. Two blocks from the library. She says the radiator clanks when the wind comes out of the east."
"All radiators clank in Boston," Marcus said, pulling a tin of peppermints from his pocket and offering one to Daniel.
Daniel shook his head.
Marcus popped a mint into his mouth, the sharp scent of wintergreen cutting through the salt air.
"Donald Cole died on Friday," Marcus remarked casually, looking out at a lobster boat chugging out toward the bell buoy.
Daniel’s pencil paused on the page. "Where?"
"In that state hospital in Cranston. Heart gave out while he was walking to the laundry. The boy—Ethan—applied for emergency furlough to attend the burial. The warden denied it. Said he was a security risk."
"And the Hale boy?"
"Transferred to Lewisburg two weeks ago," Marcus said. "His mother tried to write him a letter from Danbury. The prison censors sent it back. Contraband."
Daniel closed the ledger.
He slid the pencil into his pocket, took off his spectacles, and wiped the salt spray from the lenses with the corner of his wool sweater.
"You should close the office in Bristol, Marcus."
Marcus chuckled—a low, dry rattle that sounded like a shovel turning through oyster shells. "And do what? Watch television with the retired dentists? Go to the diner in Warren and complain about the property taxes?"
"Buy a boat," Daniel said. "Catch some flounder."
Marcus looked down at the granite stones beneath their feet.
"They're still looking for you, you know," Marcus whispered. "Not the feds. Not the state boys. But the old syndicates down in Philadelphia. They heard about what happened to Cole and Whitmore. They’re nervous, Daniel. They think the Ghost is building a new crew."
Daniel stood up from the bench.
He was sixty-one now. His hair was almost entirely silver at the temples, and his back had a slight, permanent hitch from twenty years of lifting sixty-pound crates of cork bark off the delivery trucks.
He walked to the edge of the granite pier, where the salt spray threw fine, cold needles against his skin.
He looked down into the water.
He didn't see the ships burning in ninety-one. He didn't see the three crates of weapons with his initials on the grease. He didn't see the blood on the gravel behind the science building.
He saw his daughter's face on the front porch in the morning sun, her mouth curved in that small, slow, beautiful smile, holding a blue ceramic mug of coffee and telling him that the salvia was going to bloom before the first frost.
"Let them look," Daniel said.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out the small, gray plastic microcassette Tyler Whitmore had dropped on the hospital floor six months ago, and held it between his thumb and forefinger.
The faded ink on the label—*CANAL BASIN – 10/14/95*—was blurred by salt and age.
Daniel opened his hand.
The small square of plastic dropped through twenty feet of cold air, turned once in the wind, and hit the green surface of the turning basin with a tiny, clean *plink*.
It sank through the eelgrass.
It drifted down past the granite riprap, down into the deep, black silt where the river met the sea, until the tide caught it and carried it out through the channel into the vast, dark emptiness of the Atlantic Ocean.
Daniel Walker turned his back on the water.
"Come on, Marcus," Daniel said, putting his hands into the pockets of his jacket. "I’ll buy you a sandwich at the Greek’s. Lily is coming down on the five o'clock train, and she wants to help me paint the porch before the rain starts."
May you like
The two old men walked together along the gravel path, their shoulders hunched slightly against the Atlantic wind, their silhouettes small against the wide, gray sky.
Behind them, on the stone archway above the harbor, the granite caught the last pale rays of the afternoon sun, solid and unmoving, while below it, the water washed the shore clean.
