"Why didn't you tell me?"

"That I had a Skype date?"

He composed himself. "Oh, no, sorry. No, why didn't you tell me you needed a lift across to the mainland? I'll take you. Unless you want to run up to the cottage and get your husband? There's room in the Whaler for all of us."

"Oh, thank you so much. Can we go down to the dock right now? I don't want to miss them. I miss them so much already."

"Yes, yes, of course. I can take you right into town by boat. We'll get there quicker than by car. I'll make sure you talk to your kids."

"Oh, thank you, Robert!" Her face lit up. I'm her hero. He pressed his suit as they walked fast down to the dock. "How nice for you and your husband to have this holiday away from the children." Rose did not reply. Was he here or not?

"This boat! I was so scared of it the first day we got here, and then I jumped out of it to rescue a hat!"

"That sounds dramatic," said Robert.

"It was!" Rose smiled. What a terrific smile. "It's a lot less threatening now."

"It's a good old tub," he said. "Not much for the open seas but it will get you to Dorset Harbor in no time. Craft fair at the Dorset Green on Mondays, which means traffic. Could you untie?"

"I think so."

It wasn't completely fair of him to ask her to untie when he could as easily have done it himself, but this way he got that satisfying rear view of her as she undid the bow knot without much difficulty. "You're getting to be a sailor yourself," he said.

"My husband always says the elegance of a knot is in the untying, not in the tying," she said. "This must have been an elegantly tied knot if it was easy for me to undo. We'll get there by eleven thirty, won't we?"

Robert pulled the cord twice and the engine caught. "We'll be there in half an hour," he said. "Less." He maneuvered the boat around the lobster pots and gave it plenty of gas once they were out of the no-wake zone. It wasn't easy to talk over the drone of the motor, so he didn't try. Rose was looking out over the bow as if she were a figurehead. She called back to him, "I reserved the computer terminal at the library from eleven thirty to twelve. They're usually good about it, aren't they? They seem nice there. I don't want to miss the kids." There was a catch in her voice. All at once, Robert pictured himself with an instant family: two children (what kind? how old?) and perhaps another one or two to round out their happy home. They could populate the dormitory room with loads of kids and their friends. They could field a baseball team, if only he knew how many people were on a baseball team.

Was the husband here?

"I think they're doing well at my sister's. And they should be-all that space! But I haven't heard anything for the past four days and it's kind of killing me. When I see them I want to go back to them. But when I'm here I'm here."

They skirted around the channel marker that would lead them into Dorset Harbor. He wanted her to keep talking, even though he could hear only about one word out of three over the sound of the outboard. He was piecing it together. Kids with sister. Husband possibly not here, so Robert was in with a chance.

"We'll tie up at the public dock. There's usually a space there." He slowed the engine. "See if you can spot an empty cleat and then just loop the rope around it."

"Don't go in too fast!" said Rose. "I'm not good at this."

"Any slower and we will be in neutral. In fact"-he put the engine in neutral-"now we are in neutral. You hop off and I'll tie up. See?" He looked at the clock tower in the white clapboard Congregationalist church that was Dorset Harbor's architectural prize. "It's not even eleven now. You have tons of time."

"Will you come with me?" Rose smiled at him. "I'm not sure how to get to the library from down here."

"I'll show you." He took another chance. "How nice for you to see your husband and kids, even by Skype."

"My kids, yes, not my husband," said Rose. "I mean, he won't be there."

"He's not at his sister's?"

"My sister's. No, he's at home. At home in Brooklyn."

That was all it took for him to be back in bed with her, in the turret room with the roses that conjured her name. "Here's the library," said Robert. "I'll wait."

The twins were having a blast.

"Mommy! I can see you!" Ben shoved Bea out of the frame but Bea fought back. She was learning. Maybe it helped not to have Mommy intervene. Something to think about, Rose. "Mommy! You're in the computer!"

Rose was crying with relief and love and missing them. "I'm here, you guys! Oh, you look so good. You have blue lips. What have you been eating?"

Here proceeded a long conversation, if you could call it that, about the many different FrozFruits Aunt Isobel had offered them while they were staying with her. They were mostly making faces at themselves in the Skype frame, but that was fine. It was all fine. "Are you having fun? A lot of fun?"

Isobel had gone all out, of course, and there was a bouncy castle in her backyard for the weekend, and all the kids from the neighborhood were coming over to play. "Don't worry! I'm having it catered!" she said as she squeezed in the frame. "This is great for them. They're living on FrozFruits. It's brutal here. How's Maine?"

"Maine's great. Are they okay? Are they sleeping? Is Ben hitting?" Or biting, she didn't add.

"He's hitting enough to be noticed. But there are big kids here, don't forget. They outweigh him!"

"I could come back if it gets to be too much."

"HIIIIIII MOMMMMMMMMMY!"

"Hi my sweet pea sweet Bea!"

"I made Ben cry!"

She couldn't say, "That's good," but she applauded Bea's gumption. "Well, try not to make him cry, but I'm glad you two are playing together."

Ben began doing something that was making screeching noises in the background. "I'm moving the chair!" She loved the way he said it: chay-o. "Watch me moving the chair!"

They were having a ball and Fred and Isobel had arranged it all. She had an urge to talk to him, to see him in front of her. To have him next to her in bed at night and wake up with him there.

"I'm really fine with them here, Rose. Fred could go up and see you. What's it like up there? Where are you, anyway?"

"We're Down East!" It was such a funny expression for being so far north they could practically swim to Nova Scotia. "On an island off the coast. In a cottage. Maybe the kids will come here someday." She was feeling expansive. "Maybe you'll all come here someday."

"Rose, they need me out in the yard to break up a fight. Talk to you in a couple of days?"

"Okay-same time Wednesday. No, Thursday. Wednesday's the lobster bake."

"It's just a parade of cliches up there. Are you catching your own lobsters?"

"Not yet! Tell them I send my love."

Isobel waved and the picture froze. Rose closed her eyes, took a breath, and let her shoulders fall.

"Are you over and out?" Robert's voice behind her startled her. "Were they wonderful?"

She smiled broadly. "They were! They're great. They're actually doing okay without me."

"And you are thriving?" he said. He hoped he made the question sound funny.

She grinned. "You sound like a doctor."

"I give you not only a clean bill of health, but an excellent prognosis."

"Oh, and what is that?" she asked. It was fun to flirt.

"My prognosis is that you will enjoy a rich and healthy life if you and your darling children come up to Maine once a year from now till death-"

She cut him off. "Now till death? Yikes." Had he been going to say, "Now till death do us part?" She barely knew him. A little crush was okay but she wasn't ready for a proposal.

He was making an effort to gather his wits back together. "Well, let's just say I hope you come up here for many years."

He was amusing, if a little professorial and Ichabod Craney for her taste. "I don't think we've even found every room in the place yet. We keep discovering new ones. I told the others you were coming and they said you can have Kenneth Lumley's room." She smiled again. They already had Hopewell Cottage in-jokes. "If you stay till Wednesday you can join us for the lobster bake. Lottie's husband, Jon, thinks he has someone lined up to come over and make it all happen."

"He's having it done for just the six of you? That's not very Hopewell."

"What is very Hopewell?"

"To do it ourselves!"

"Do you think we can manage? There are only"-she counted-"seven of us. And one is three years old. Is that enough?" Rose had no idea what a lobster bake entailed. Lottie said you bury the lobsters in the sand, but that seemed fairly unlikely.

"We just need people who are willing to put some muscle into it. I'll be one of them, if you could really see me staying that long."

"Perfect. And Jon can be the other. We're doing it on Wednesday night because it's apparently a full moon."

"It's a blue moon, in fact," Robert said.

"But it's only the middle of the month. That doesn't seem right. Isn't it supposed to be the second full moon of the month?"

"There's some technicality about it this year," Robert said. "I can't remember what." Fred would know, Rose thought. "But Google says it's a blue moon so I believe them."

They didn't spend a whole lot of time in Dorset Harbor, which pleased Robert. He preferred to keep away from town. They left the library, went back down to the dock, and looked for their Whaler. It had been moved by another boater, with a larger craft.

"Do they just do that? Move boats?" asked Rose.

"It's the law of the sea," said Robert.

"Or the law of the jungle."

Robert untied this time and started up the engine. The ride back to Little Lost was smooth, as the tide had just turned. The clouds looked a little ominous, so Robert concentrated on getting them back quickly. He was pleased that, for a musician, he was pretty good with boats.

They were easy in each other's company and quiet on the path back up to the cottage. The ominous clouds had quickly blown over and the sun looked like it was going to make a comeback.

"I think that cottage needs a lot of people in it, doesn't it?" Rose remarked. "Otherwise it could be kind of a lonely old barn."

"A lonely old barn, yes," said Robert. She was so right. "But it doesn't always have to be that way." He looked at her again with his soulful eyes. "You really do look like Helga," he told her. "The Andrew Wyeth woman. I didn't need to stop at a museum to see her. She's here."

"You've had too much sun," said Rose, who knew she looked exactly like Helga. "Time for you to meet the others."

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.

"What's that box, Beverly? Want me to open it up?"

Jon was at the point of taking the box right out of the suitcase before Beverly could stop him.

"That's not letters," Beverly said. "That's mine."

"Not to worry," Jon said, and Beverly was pleased that he used that more old-fashioned phrase. But this box was nothing but worries. This box was all he had left of his dearest friend.

Beverly slept little, even here where the night was so inky black and so deeply quiet. When he'd opened his eyes this morning he'd looked to the sky to see if there was even the smallest glint of light in the east. That, or a single bird in song, would be enough to tell him that the night was over. He did not enjoy sleeping alone.

The porch of his turret room stretched around the side of the house-the cottage-so he could see the dawn break from there. He had taken the old coffeepot back up to his room, so he made a cup of coffee, used the bathroom (without flushing-noises were very loud this time of morning), and went outside to watch the dawn.

He took Possum with him.

Possum was in the box-well, the remains of Possum. The cremains of Possum, as the awful people told him when they gave him what was left of Possum after they had killed him. The vet had killed him, after all. He had still been living some kind of life before Beverly broke down and took him to the pet hospital downtown. He had thought Possum would come out better, but he came out dead. And now he was in this box.

Gorsch would have known what to do. Damn Gorsch for leaving everything to me.

Gorsch had truly left everything to him-the houses, the money, the music rights. Beverly was a very rich man, no doubt. But Gorsch had also been good at facing things, making the right decisions. And now he had left that to Beverly too.

The wretchedly noisy lobster boats began their assault on his senses. Their motors were as loud as any garbage truck lumbering down Madison. And their music! Radios playing at top volume as the lobstermen yelled over the sound. They weren't even the craggily handsome lobstermen of those television programs that Beverly flipped through too late at night when he couldn't sleep. He couldn't see them properly from up here at the cottage, but he could tell by the way they moved that they were not his type. Brawny, though.

Beverly had never thought much about how a lobster got to a plate, but Jon had explained that all those buoys in the harbor were actually painted different colors, and each color was the mark of a different lobsterman. Another occupation that's out for me, Beverly thought. If 12 percent of those lobstermen are color-blind, they must be pulling up the wrong lobsters.

That's what the buoys were attached to. Traps, down there on the seafloor. The traps were complicated affairs-Beverly had seen them in stacks on floats in the water, in driveways on land, in piles on wharves; they were everywhere. Lottie had looked it up in the library. Apparently there was bait in one compartment and then for some reason of physics that she had not taken in, the lobster would get caught in another compartment where it would wait till it was pulled up and taken out by the lobsterman. There was some complication about size and tail notching that Beverly had not paid attention to. He was more interested in eating lobsters than in hearing about their capture.

He liked that they were about the freshest thing you could eat. Alive one minute, hot and steaming the next. They didn't have nerve endings, anyway.

Possum had shrunk to almost nothing by the end. Everyone in Beverly's life was always dying, first when they were all young and now when they were all old. And all he could do about it was watch the sunrise.

"Good morning, Beverly!" He was startled by Lottie's bright voice. She was like one of these birds: a little too energetic but not unwelcome. "I know this is your private balcony but I wanted to share the sunrise with somebody and you're the only one up. Do you want some company?"

Of course he didn't want company.

She looked at the box. "Oh no, Beverly. It's Possum, isn't it?"

How did this woman know things? She came nearer. Don't touch that box, he willed. Do not touch Possum.