Breakup

The ice went out of Sable Harbor on the second Monday in May, and it went the way it always went, all at once and all night long, with a noise like a freight train that never finished passing.

It had been going soft for three weeks. By the end of April the harbor ice had turned gray and then black, and the fish houses had come off it on skids behind pickup trucks, and the last of Cal Hendry's Christmas trees had been dragged off the ice road and burned on the ferry landing in a bonfire that half the island had come across in boats to watch. By the first of May the ice was candled, rotted into long vertical crystals the size of pencils that rang like wind chimes when the waves moved them. Then on Monday afternoon the wind swung around to the northeast and started to blow, and by suppertime the whole sheet was moving.

Mara had a visitation that evening, for Elmer Tofte, who had been ninety-one and had run the Standard station on Front Street for forty years and had asked, in writing, for no fuss. The family had honored that by bringing only sixty people. They stood in the chapel at Front Street Funeral Home with their jackets open and their boots muddy, because it was mud season now and every road in the county was a brown river, and between the prayers they kept drifting to the windows to look at the harbor. Nobody could help it. Out past the breakwall the lake was white with broken ice as far as the island, and the wind was driving all of it into the harbor mouth, and the floes were riding up over one another along the breakwall and the town dock, grinding and shrieking and piling into ridges higher than a man.

"Ice shove," said Elmer's son-in-law, beside Mara at the window. "Nineteen seventy-one it pushed right up onto Front Street. Took out the Standard's front window. Elmer was so proud." He shook his head. "He'd have been out on the dock with a camera tonight."

People shook Mara's hand on the way out the way they had all spring, a little longer than they needed to. A woman from the island said, "You did right by Wren, even if it broke my heart," and went out into the wind before Mara could answer.

It had been a long winter. Two inquests in six months, in a county that had not held one in twenty years. Two women waiting in county jails for trials that kept being continued, one of them a cook who had baked the pies for every funeral lunch Mara could remember, and one a young woman who had plowed a road for nothing. Mara had been coroner for half a year, and had signed ninety-some death certificates, and had learned more about ice and knots and ledgers and the insides of people's kitchens than a funeral director ever needed to know.

By ten the last car was gone and the chapel lamps were off. Mara stood alone in the dark front hall with her auburn hair still combed for company and listened to the harbor. It was a terrible sound and a glad one. In a week the harbor would be open water, and the fish tugs would go out, and the Island Belle would make her first run to the island, and the whole town would breathe out.

Upstairs in the office the coroner's binder sat on the filing cabinet where it had sat since November, fatter now by two inquests' worth of paper. The county cell phone was charging beside it. Mara had learned, over the winter, to keep it within reach even in the bath, and to answer it on the second ring whatever the hour, because the people who called that number at night were never calling with good news and never wanted to wait. It had been quiet since March. Mud season was a slow time for a coroner. People stayed indoors and kept their tempers, the old folks held on for the lilacs, and the lake, locked under its ice, gave back nothing.

Then Mara went down the back stairs to the prep room, and unlocked the steel cabinet in the corner, and took out the box.

It was an ordinary banker's box, gone soft at the corners. Across the lid, in black marker, in Ruth Ansel's square capitals, it said CORONER — HOLD, and a strip of brown packing tape had been run around it twice. The tape had been cut and pressed back down more than once since February. Mara set it on the steel counter under the lamp and stood looking at it.

Mara slit the tape with a thumbnail and lifted the lid.

The photocopies were on top, where they always were: a thick sheaf of pages from the Hendry Ferry Line's old ledgers, 1994 to 1998, the columns of figures in a clerk's round hand, and every three months, circled in pencil, the same line. Dock security consulting — E.M. — $1,500.00. Twenty times. Across the top sheet a dead man had written, in a small, careful pencil: Nobody ever asked.

Under them was the carbon. It was thin and brittle and gray, the kind of paper nobody had used in twenty years, a coroner's form from 1997 on a deckhand named Leo Marttila, who had drowned off the ferry dock in the Gut at twenty-three. Manner of death: accident. And in the margin, in green felt-tip, in a neat hand that leaned backward as if it were bracing against a wind: No further action. — E.

Mara laid them side by side on the counter and read them again, slowly, the way she had read them a dozen times since February. It never took long. There was not much to read. Twenty payments, one drowned boy, one initial. That was all it was. It was not evidence of anything, Ruth had said, the one time they had talked about it, in March, standing in this room. It was an old man's paperwork from an old man's time, and everybody in it was dead or retired, and the county had enough living trouble to keep two people busy.

And yet Mara kept taking it out.

On the last page of the box, tucked in by itself, was a slip of paper in Mara's own writing, copied off the back page of an older set of notes from November: a date. October 22, 1998. The night a page had been cut out of a lighthouse keeper's log. The October a coroner named Walt Carrow had left town.

The coroner before Mara had been a retired dentist named Hal Lund, who had held the office for twenty-six years and left behind a three-ring binder of notes and a basement cabinet at Front Street full of files nobody had opened since. The coroner before Hal had been Walt Carrow. That was the whole list, as far back as most people in Sable Harbor could remember. When anyone spoke of Walt at all, which was seldom, it was in the lowered voice people used for a man who had run off: left town, they said, back in ninety-eight, and shook their heads, and changed the subject. His wife had remarried within the year. His drugstore on Front Street was a gift shop now.

Mara put the box back in the cabinet and locked it and went upstairs to bed, and lay awake a long time in the dark, listening to the ice.

The phone rang at twenty to six.

It was the county cell phone on the nightstand, and the gray light was already in the window, and the harbor was quiet. The wind had dropped. Mara picked it up on the second ring.

"Morning," said Ruth Ansel. Her voice was easy, the voice of somebody calling a partner. "Sorry. You'll want to be awake for this one."

"What's happened?"

"Hank Salo took the Viola out at four-thirty to set the first nets of the year. Off the old coal dock, by the point." A pause, and the sound of wind on her end, and gulls. "His net came up on a car."