At nine o'clock on a Friday night in December, the first selectman's daughter knocked on Tad Coombs's kitchen door in Pound Cove, Maine, with a backpack over her shoulder, a laptop under her coat, and four slashed tires on her car in the town office lot.
"Mr. Coombs," Maddie Pelletier said. "I'm sorry. I didn't know where else to go."
Tad looked past her into the dark. Snow was coming in off the water. Down at the harbor, the mooring lights bobbed in the swell.
"Come in, dear," he said. "Before you let the heat out."
Tad was seventy-one. He had been a welder at the Pound Cove boatyard for forty-four years, building steel lobster boats and fixing everything else that floated. He had a gray beard, a bad knee, and a face like a weathered buoy. He lived alone in the house on Harbor Hill where his grandfather had lived, and three days a week he still went down to the yard to fix what the young fellows could not.
He had known Maddie Pelletier since she was born. Her father, Gil, was first selectman, which in a Maine town of eleven hundred people meant a little like being mayor and a lot like being the person the whole town called when the plow did not come. Gil was in the hospital in Portland that week, recovering from a bypass.
Maddie was twenty-eight. She worked at the town office as assistant treasurer. She was smart, careful, and, at that moment, shaking so hard she could not unzip her coat.
Tad made her a cup of tea and waited.
"The harbor fund," she said finally. "The mooring fees. Every boat in the harbor pays the town for its mooring every year. It's a lot of money. Almost two hundred thousand dollars."
"I know," Tad said. "I pay for mine."
"Somebody's been taking it. Not all of it. A little every year. For six years." Maddie set the laptop on the table. "I found it in October, doing the year-end reports. The numbers in the town ledger don't match the bank. I copied everything. Every record. And the state auditor is coming Monday morning."
"Who's been taking it?"
Maddie looked at her tea.
"Gordon Leavitt," she said.
Tad sat back in his chair.
Gordon Leavitt was the town manager. He had been town manager for twenty-two years. He ran the town meeting. He coached Little League. He had given the speech at Tad's wife's funeral in 2017.
"Are you sure, dear?"
"I'm sure," Maddie said. "And he knows I found it. I left a printout on the copier this afternoon. Stupid. When I came back, it was gone. At five o'clock, his brother-in-law was waiting by my car."
"Curt Haskell?"
"He didn't touch me. He just stood there. He said, You should take a vacation, Maddie. Somewhere far. Then he walked away." She swallowed. "When I came out after six, my tires were slashed. All four."
Tad knew Curt Haskell. The whole harbor did. He was Gordon Leavitt's wife's brother, from Rhode Island. He had come up five years ago with a beat-up boat and a worse temper and tried to fish lobster out of Pound Cove. The local fishermen had not made it easy for him. He had not made it easy for himself.
He was the kind of man who had been in a lot of fights and lost most of them.
"Did you call the sheriff?"
"The sheriff's deputy for this end of the county is Gordon's nephew," Maddie said. "I called the state police. They said they'd send somebody to take a report about the tires. Tomorrow. Maybe."
She looked at Tad.
"I just need to get to Monday," she said. "I need me and this laptop to be in the town office at nine o'clock Monday morning when the auditor walks in. That's all. But I can't go home. Curt knows where I live. And Dad's in Portland."
Tad looked out the kitchen window at the harbor for a long time.
Then he got up and took down his oilskins from the hook by the door.
"Get your bag, dear," he said. "We're going to the island."
Ram Island was a quarter mile off the end of Harbor Hill. Tad's grandfather had built a fish camp on it in 1922, a two-room cabin with a woodstove and a cot and a little dock on the lee side. Tad went out there in summer to fish and in winter to be alone.
But Ram Island had one more thing that mattered.
At high tide, it was an island. At low tide, it was not.
Twice a day, for about two hours on either side of dead low water, the sea drew back from a long gravel and mud bar that ran from the foot of Harbor Hill out to the island. You could walk across it in boots. The old-timers called it the Ram Island Bar, and every child in Pound Cove learned about it by the time they were six, because every summer some tourist tried to drive a boat over it at half tide and spent the afternoon sitting on the bottom, waiting for the water to come back.
"The tide's going out," Tad said, standing on the shore with a flashlight. "Low water's at eleven-forty tonight. We'll walk across."
"Walk?"
"Walk," Tad said. "Mind the mud. Stay on the gravel. Follow my light."
They crossed the bar in the dark at ten-thirty, on foot, with the snow coming down and the black water sucking and gurgling on either side of the gravel spine. Tad went first with the flashlight. Maddie followed with the laptop in a garbage bag inside her coat.
The cabin was cold. Tad built a fire. He had food in the cupboard, canned stew and crackers and coffee, and two old wool blankets.
"Not a soul comes out here in winter," he said. "Just me. And by two o'clock in the morning, the tide will be all the way back in, and there'll be a quarter mile of cold water between us and the town."
Maddie sat by the stove wrapped in a blanket, holding the laptop.
"What if they come by boat?"
"Then they'll come," Tad said. "And we'll see who knows the water better."
She fell asleep around midnight, on the cot, with the laptop under her pillow.
Tad sat up in the chair by the window with the lights out and his grandfather's old binoculars in his lap, watching the harbor.
At one-fifteen in the morning, he heard it.
An outboard motor. Small, maybe a twenty-five horse. Coming out of the inner harbor, slow, with no running lights.
Tad lifted the binoculars.
Against the faint glow of the town, he could see a dark skiff, low in the water, heading straight out toward Ram Island. Two men in it. One of them standing in the bow with a flashlight, sweeping the beam across the water.
Then the beam swung up, across the rocks, and stopped on the window of the fish camp, right where Tad was sitting.