The second tea tasted worse than the first, which I had not thought possible.
I drank it anyway because Foster had made it with the focused intention of a man who considered hospitality non-negotiable regardless of circumstances, and also because Declan had taken one sip and put his mug down with the careful placement of someone committing to never touching it again, and I was not going to give him the satisfaction of agreement.
Foster talked.
He talked the way people talk when they have been waiting a specific number of years for the right audience and have given up hoping for it and then it shows up on a Thursday. He talked with his hands, which given the enlarged knuckles looked like it cost something. He got up twice to pull maps from the wall and spread them on the rocking table and point to locations with a pen he uncapped and recapped between every sentence.
The shape of it, assembled from two hours and three mugs of increasingly bad tea, was this:
The Keeper had been in Dunhaven since before Dunhaven was Dunhaven. Foster had found references to it in town records going back to the 1690s, in the particular coded language of people who needed to write something down but were reasonably concerned about what would happen if they wrote it plainly. A phrase that recurred in the margins of meeting notes and land surveys and one extremely strange entry in a church ledger: the water's attention.
It had been dormant, or something like dormant, for long stretches. Decades sometimes. Foster's best theory, and he said best theory with the humility of a man who had revised his theories many times and expected to revise them again, was that it required something specific to become active. Not a place. Not a season.
A person.
"A specific type of person," he said, tapping the map near the harbor. "Ada was it in her time. There was a woman before her in the 1890s named Ruth Caswell who I found in exactly two documents and then nothing. Before that the record gets thin." He recapped his pen. "But the symbol on the dock. Every time there's a new one it means the Keeper has fixed on someone. The count of smaller symbols is the count of." He paused. "Interferences."
"Husbands," I said.
"People who got between."
Declan said, "It killed three people."
"It removed three people," Foster said, with a distinction that I could tell Declan found infuriating by the way his pen stopped moving entirely.
"Those are the same thing."
"To us, yes." Foster looked at him steadily. "To the Keeper the difference is probably the same as the difference between swatting a fly and committing a moral act. It doesn't experience the distinction."
"That doesn't make the people less dead."
"No," Foster agreed simply. "It doesn't."
Declan stood up and walked to the window, which in a house this size meant he was six feet away and still completely audible. He stood with his back to us looking at the sea grass and the rocking wind and working through something private.
I watched Foster watch him.
"His sister," Foster said quietly to me, low enough.
"I know," I said, equally low.
"He's going to want to do something about it. People like him always do." Foster said people like him without judgment, just taxonomy. "Ada's second husband was the same way. Good man. Very determined. He filed a report with the county sheriff in 1951 about disturbances at the property and then he disappeared from the dock and after that Ada stopped telling people things."
I filed that away in the part of my brain that had been quietly filing things for six years.
"What did Ada do," I said. "That made it work. Thirty years, died in her own bed. What was the approach."
Foster looked at me for a moment with something that might have been relief, the specific relief of someone who had waited a long time to be asked the right question.
"She stopped fighting the fact of it," he said. "Not the losses. She grieved the losses. She was angry about the losses, I think, for a long time." He turned his mug in a slow circle. "But she stopped treating its presence as a problem to be solved and started treating it as a condition to be navigated. Like a chronic thing." He paused. "She talked to it."
"Did it talk back."
"Not in words. But she said she always knew when it had heard her."
The three pens in his cardigan pocket rattled again, lightly, with no proximate cause.
Foster looked at them. "Like that," he said.
Declan turned around from the window. His face had done whatever it needed to do privately and was back to its working configuration. "There has to be a way to stop it."
Foster said, "Probably."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the honest one. I've been looking for forty years and I haven't found it. That doesn't mean it isn't there." He folded the map slowly. "It means I'm one person with bad knees and a limited research budget."
Declan looked at me.
I looked back at him.
"Carla's corkboard," I said.
"Carla's corkboard," he agreed, reluctantly, in the tone of a man confirming an alliance he hadn't fully decided to join yet.
We left Foster's house at noon. He stood on the uneven porch and watched us go with the particular stillness of someone watching something they expected to see again but weren't certain of.
At my car I stopped.
There was something on the windshield. Not a note, not a flyer. A single stone, flat and dark gray, placed precisely on the center of the glass. Smooth. The kind pulled from deep water.
I picked it up.
On the underside, scratched lightly, too lightly to have been done with any normal tool, was the symbol.
Small. Just the one. No footnotes.
Declan came around and looked at it in my hand.
"That wasn't there when we arrived," he said.
"No."
"We were inside for two hours."
"Yes."
He looked at the stone for a long time. Then at the water, visible between Foster's house and the tree line, a thin gray strip of ocean sitting there minding its own business the way oceans do.
"It knows we're asking questions," he said.
"It's always known what I'm doing." I turned the stone over in my hand. The symbol side was warm. Not sun-warm. The sky was completely overcast. "I think this is less of a warning and more of a."
I stopped.
"More of a what," Declan said.
I thought about the blanket moving in Carla's house. The pens rattling in Foster's pocket. The stove light that flickered like punctuation.
"Participation," I said.
Declan stared at me.
"It's helping," I said. "In its way. Whatever its way is."
I put the stone in my jacket pocket. It was warm the whole drive home.