I want to be clear that I did not go to the dock that night.
I went the next morning, at seven-fifteen, in full daylight, with coffee, like a reasonable person doing a completely normal thing.
The fact that I brought a flashlight anyway is irrelevant.
Dunhaven's dock was a twenty-minute walk from my house down a road that the town had been meaning to repave since approximately the Clinton administration. The harbor was small, working, the kind that smelled like brine and diesel and the specific hopelessness of the commercial fishing industry. Three boats were out already. Roy Bunn's truck was parked at the far end, which meant Roy Bunn was somewhere nearby, which meant I needed to look like I had a reason to be here that wasn't crouching under a dock in the early morning looking for occult symbols.
I had not come up with that reason by the time I reached the water.
Roy Bunn was sitting on an overturned crate mending a net, which people apparently still did, and he looked up when I got close with the expression he'd been wearing every time he saw me since Tuesday. It was the expression of a man who had found my husband's shoes and was going to be telling that story for the rest of his life and wasn't sure how he felt about the source material being right in front of him.
"Mrs. Calloway," he said.
"Roy." I held up my coffee like it was a hall pass. "Just walking."
He looked at the flashlight in my other hand.
"Lot of walking gear," he said.
"I walk thoroughly."
He went back to the net with the energy of a man who had decided that whatever I was doing was not his problem, which I respected enormously.
I walked to the end of the dock. Marcus's boat slip was empty now, caution-taped across the cleat in a way that struck me as both procedurally correct and cosmically pointless. The water below was dark green and opaque, the kind of water that doesn't show you what's in it as a matter of principle.
I looked at the tape for a moment.
Marcus had named his boat The Second Option, which he thought was funny and which I had found mildly depressing for two and a half years. The name was still painted on the slip board in his handwriting. He had good handwriting, better than mine, better than Declan Marsh's which set the bar underground.
I crouched down at the edge of the dock and pointed the flashlight at the underside of the nearest piling.
Nothing.
I moved to the next one. Nothing. The third had barnacles and what appeared to be an old fishing lure tangled in the joint and nothing else. I was beginning to feel like a person who had gotten up at six-thirty to go look at pilings, which was exactly what I was.
The fourth piling was different.
It was set back slightly from the others, part of an older section of dock that predated the current structure by the look of the wood, darker and more weathered, the grain gone soft with decades of salt water. The flashlight caught it at an angle and the symbol was just there, carved deep and with apparent patience into the wood just below where the dock surface met the piling. Right at the waterline. You would not see it standing. You would not see it from a boat. You had to be exactly where I was, crouched at the edge in the early morning with a flashlight and bad intentions.
It was the same symbol.
Not similar. Identical. The same proportions, the same interior line that curved in a direction that didn't feel like any direction I had a name for, the same three marks at the base that Carla had described as almost like roots and I had privately thought looked more like fingers.
It was also not alone.
Below the main symbol, newer, carved with less patience but the same basic shape, were two smaller versions. Side by side. Like footnotes.
I took a photograph with my phone. Then another one because the first was slightly blurred because my hand was doing a thing I was choosing not to call shaking.
"That's private property."
I stood up so fast I nearly went into the water.
Declan Marsh was standing six feet behind me, another gas station cup in hand, jacket collar turned up against the wind, looking like a man who had also gotten up at six-thirty but for more defensible reasons.
"You followed me," I said.
"I was already here."
"Why were you already here."
He nodded at the piling. "Same reason you were." He came to stand next to me and looked down. From standing you couldn't see it. He crouched, looked, stood back up. "When did you find out about the symbol."
"Yesterday. Carla."
"She told me about it eight months ago. I came to look then." He paused. "I didn't find it."
"It's the fourth piling."
"I checked the fourth piling."
We both looked at the fourth piling.
"It wasn't there eight months ago," he said, slowly, "and it's there now."
"That's one interpretation."
"What's another interpretation, Meredith."
I had started noticing that he used my first name when he forgot to be professional and my last name when he remembered. The ratio was shifting. I was keeping track without meaning to, which was its own kind of problem.
"It could have always been there," I said. "Below the waterline at high tide. Eight months ago the water level was different."
"Was it."
"I don't know. I'm not a hydrologist." I showed him my phone, the photograph. "The two smaller ones are newer. You can see the difference in the wood color."
He looked at the photograph for a long time. Then he pulled out his own phone and took the same photograph, and then one more of the piling from a wider angle.
"I need to ask you something," he said, still looking at his phone.
"You need to ask me a lot of things. You have a very small notepad."
"The radio music. The eleven seconds." He looked up. "Do you know what song it is?"
I opened my mouth to say no.
Something stopped me.
Not a thought. Not a memory. Something more physical than that, a specific pulling sensation behind my sternum, the same one I got in the hallway at three in the morning.
"No," I said.
He watched my face.
"You hesitated," he said.
"I was thinking."
"You don't hesitate when you think. You hesitated because something happened when I asked." He put his phone away. "I'm not accusing you of lying. I'm saying something happened."
Down the dock, Roy Bunn's net work had stopped. I glanced back. He was looking at us with the expression of a man updating a story he was going to tell for the rest of his life.
"There's someone you should talk to," Declan said. "A man named Foster Gale. He lives on the north edge of town. He's been in Dunhaven for forty years and he's completely out of his mind."
"Comforting."
"He's also the only person I've found who's seen the symbol before." Declan finished his coffee. "He drew it for me. Unprompted. Before I showed him anything." He crushed the cup slightly in his hand, not aggressively, just the unconscious grip of a person who was more unsettled than they were showing. "He called it a name when he drew it."
"What name."
The wind off the water picked up sharply, cold and salt-heavy, and for just a second underneath it, faint and sourceless, eleven seconds of music that dissolved before I could hold onto it.
Declan heard it too.
I watched him hear it.
"He called it," Declan said, quieter now, "the Keeper."