Harrow Reach

In daylight the house was magnificent and wrong. It had been built in the 1850s by the family's timber money, out of their own milled cedar and their own quarried stone, and it was not a mansion in the European sense; it was the house of people who had bought the whole coast and intended to be comfortable in it. The west front was four storeys with a porch the length of a tennis court and windows that took the whole of the ocean. The east wing had been added in the 1890s by a son who had gone to the state legislature and come back with a taste for staircases. Inside, the rooms went on and nine of them were shut, and the shut ones were the ones we went into: a library of agricultural and legal volumes with the family's papers in fireproof boxes, a billiard room nobody had played in since 1974, and in the east wing a laboratory, which was the only room in that house that had been cleaned in thirty years.

That was the thing I did not expect, and it was the first thing Cole went to look at.

The laboratory occupied the whole of the east wing's first floor: a long room with a slate bench down one side, a stone sink with a trap in the floor, racks of glass shelving that still held a few dead reagents in jars, and a fume hood with a broken sash. Cole went round the room the way an engineer goes round a job he has not been asked to take — opening the hood, looking at the floor, standing a while at the window with his back to us. On the wall above the bench hung a chart of the tides for 1911, and beside it, in a frame, a photograph of a group of men in shirtsleeves standing on the harbour wall with a catch of salmon between them.

"Ambrose senior," said Cole. He had taken the photograph down and was holding it to the window. "Old Absalom's son. He built the laboratory; the story is he was going to prove that the family's bad luck was in the water. He got as far as buying the glassware." He put the photograph back on its nail, squaring it carefully, which I noticed. "It's the same story in every generation, doctor. One of them tries to shake the thing off with science and dies in the dark anyway. That's the family tradition. I'd rather not be the fourth."

"You could sell."

"I could sell." He said it mildly. "There's a trust in the city that has offered fourteen million for the southern half, with a conservation easement on the rest, and an attorney in Quillon acting for that trust who has offered me nearly as much for the whole thing, cash, if I'll take it now, and whose client has no name he is willing to give me. And I've done the arithmetic, and I know what the answer looks like on paper." He walked the length of the bench, running one finger along the slate, and stopped at the end and looked back down the long room at me. "But I didn't come three thousand miles to be run off a piece of land by a story. I've got a surveyor coming next month about the drainage, because the Drumble is killing the southern fields and there's a way to fix that which the county won't pay for and I will. That's what I do, doctor. I put water where it belongs. If there's something on that land, I intend to know what it is, and I intend to be standing there when I find out."

We spent the rest of that day in the library, with the family papers.

It was Cole's notion to read the estate's own business, and it turned out to be the most useful thing either of us did that week, because a family's papers are not a story; they are an inventory of obligations. In the fireproof boxes were the deeds back to 1854 and a hundred years of the estate's paper, and we went through it the way two men go through an archive, which is quickly and with their sleeves rolled up, going out twice for air and coming back with dust on our hands, and it was Cole who found what we were actually after, at the bottom of the second box: a bundle of letters from the 1890s wrapped in oilcloth that had kept them dry but had also made them smell of old kerosene.

The letters were from a man named Ozro Vandermeer to his brother, the legislator, and they were the letters of a man who had been disinherited and who knew it and who was not going to accept it quietly. Ozro had been the youngest son, trained as a chemist, educated at a college in the east at the family's expense, and then written out of the will in 1889 after a scandal that the letters only allude to in the way that old letters allude to things, in dashes and silences — a debt, a girl, a fire in a barn, and a sum of money taken from the mill's account and never accounted for. Ozro had written nine times over four years asking to be restored, at first reasonably and at the last in a way that made the hair stand up on my arms. The final letter had no date on it, and it ended with one sentence, in an ugly, pressed hand:

'You have taken my name out of your book, but the book is only one place my name is written, and I am not finished with this coast.'

"Ozro," said Cole, laying the letter down. "There was an Ozro. Nobody has ever mentioned an Ozro."

"Your grandmother's generation wouldn't have. Families bury that sort of thing."

"Families bury it and then forget the name and remember the feeling." He looked out of the library window at the orchard going up toward the ridge, and at the sea coming in white below the garden wall. "Find me what happened to him. I want to know where that man's children went, because people like that don't stop having children, and this is a small county, and everybody in it is related to everybody, and somebody up here has got a reason to want me gone that has nothing to do with a dog out of a ghost story."

At eleven that night I was sitting up in the front room writing my report to Varley — the report in which I set down, in the fourth paragraph, that I had begun to believe the print at the gate and the cut-out warning and the missing boot were one operation and not three — when I heard the thing for the first time.

It came from the south and the east, from out where the land flattens toward the Drumble, and it was not a bark and not a howl. A dog barks at a wall and howls at the moon, and both of those sounds are things a dog makes at something; this was a sound made at nothing, at the sky, in a voice larger than any dog's voice, and it went up and up and then stopped, not fading but ceasing, as if a hand had been put over a mouth.

Upstairs, on the floor above, I heard Cole Vandermeer cross his room to the window and open it. I heard him stand there, in the cold, for four or five minutes without moving, listening. Then I heard the window close, and the bolt go into its socket, and nothing at all for the rest of the night.