He wrote for four minutes without speaking.
I know it was four minutes because there was a clock on Carla's wall, plain white, the kind sold in bulk at hardware stores, and I watched it because watching Declan Marsh write in his extremely small handwriting was making me feel like I was being documented, which I was, but there's a difference between knowing a thing and sitting inside it.
Carla watched him the way you watch a weather system.
He finally looked up. "How many incidents total."
"Confirmed, with direct evidence?" Carla went to the corkboard. "Seven. Probable but unverified, another four. There are two more I found recently that I haven't been able to fully research yet." She touched the edge of a printed map. "They cluster along the northeastern coast. Not exclusively, but heavily."
"Why coastal."
"I don't know."
"Guess."
Carla turned around and looked at him with the expression of a woman who had not driven from Vermont to be told to guess. "Something about proximity to deep water. That's the only geographic constant. Every location is within six miles of significant open water."
Dunhaven was on the water. Had always been on the water. I had moved here in 2018 because Marcus wanted the coast and I had wanted a change and the house had a kitchen with good light and sometimes that's the whole of a decision.
Glen had already lived here when we met.
I had not thought about that until right now.
"Mrs. Calloway."
I looked at Declan. He was watching my face again with that particular attention he had, the kind that felt less like suspicion now and more like he was trying to read something written in a language he almost spoke.
"Where were you before Dunhaven," he said.
"Portland. Why."
"Were there incidents in Portland."
"I was married to Glen in Portland for eight months before we moved here. He died here." I paused. "Nothing strange happened in Portland. Nothing strange happened anywhere before Dunhaven."
Declan wrote that down.
"So it's the town," he said.
"It's not the town," Carla said. "Bev Alcott was in Oregon. Della Reyn was in Massachusetts. It's not geographical origin, it's." She stopped. Chose a word carefully. "Proximity. To her."
The her landed on me like a hand on the shoulder.
"You think it came here for me specifically," I said.
"I think it was here before you," Carla said. "I think when you arrived it noticed you. And I think it has been." She paused again. That particular pause of someone whose vocabulary has hit its limit. "Tending to you. Since."
Tending.
Like a garden.
Like something kept.
The clock on the wall ticked. The throw blanket had not moved again. Outside the wind had picked up and the black Honda on the street rocked slightly, which was normal, which was just wind, which was fine.
Declan put his pen down on the table, flat, and looked at the ceiling for a second. It was a very specific gesture, the kind a person makes when they are recalibrating their entire working theory of a situation and need a moment where no one can see their face fully.
"I need to tell you both something," he said, to the ceiling, and then back down to us. "Selin Marsh was my sister."
Carla did not react. She already knew.
I said, "Was."
"She died in 2019. Natural causes, the coroner said." His jaw did the complicated thing again. "She was thirty-eight. Her heart stopped mid-beat. No underlying condition."
The same as Bev Alcott.
I thought about saying that. Carla's face told me she was thinking it too. We both didn't say it, which was one of those small silences that does more than talking would.
"She called me three weeks before she died," Declan said. "She told me something was in her house. She said it had been there for two years. She said she thought it was connected to Owen's disappearance but not the way I would think." He picked the pen back up, not to write, just to have something to do with his hands. "I told her to see someone. A professional." He said it flatly, without self-pity, which made it worse somehow. "She stopped calling after that."
The room was quiet enough that I could hear the Honda outside shifting in the wind.
"You took this case," I said slowly, "because of Selin."
"I requested it."
"Your department thinks you're investigating a probable serial killer."
"My department thinks I'm investigating a very unlucky widow. They gave me the case because nobody else wanted the paperwork." He looked at me directly. "I came here to find out what happened to my sister. And then I met you and you were."
He stopped.
"I was what," I said.
"Not scared." He said it the same way he had in my kitchen two days ago but it meant something different now. "Selin was terrified. For two years she was terrified. And you're sitting here with whatever is in this room right now and you're drinking tea from an empty mug."
I looked down. The mug was empty. I had been holding it for twenty minutes.
"I've had longer to adjust," I said, which was not entirely true.
The honest version was that somewhere between Glen and Paul I had made a decision, not consciously, not in words, to stop treating the strange things as intrusions and start treating them as weather. You didn't fight the weather. You wore the right coat.
Bev Alcott had tried to leave.
Selin Marsh had been terrified.
I did not know yet what I was doing. But it was not either of those things.
Declan stood up, pocketed his notepad. He looked at the corkboard one more time, at the photograph of Selin probably, though I couldn't see which one from where I sat.
"Don't go anywhere," he said. To me specifically.
"I live here."
"I know." He moved toward the door, then stopped with his hand on the frame and said, without turning around, "Lock your doors tonight."
"Will that help," Carla said.
A beat.
"No," he said. "But do it anyway."
He left. The door clicked shut behind him.
Carla and I sat in the quiet of a room that was not entirely empty and did not pretend to be.
"He's going to get in the way," Carla said.
"Probably," I said.
I put down the empty mug and looked at the corkboard. At the photograph of Tobias Reyn on a dock. At Bev Alcott's wind chimes. At my own name, written in red, connected to six other points by thread that Carla had strung with the patience of someone who had stopped sleeping properly years ago.
At the symbol I recognized from Paul's notebook.
"Carla," I said. "That symbol. The one in the corner. Where did you first find it."
She was quiet for just a half-second too long.
"Carved into the dock," she said. "In Hesswick. Under the waterline. You had to know to look."
Senator barked outside.
Once.