I'm Nell Ashgrove, a domain broker with twenty-two days left to buy clips.com. The owner lives in a lighthouse on Kittredge Island. His door says NO BUYERS.
Somebody had added a second line under that, in fresh ink. It said This means you too, Mr. Mace. Sterling Mace was my rival, and apparently he'd been here first.
I knocked anyway. Brokers knock. It's in the job description, right below "wait."
Nobody answered. The wind answered, mostly. I left my card wedged in the door frame. Then I walked the fifty minutes back, my raincoat flapping like a flag of surrender.
The post office was also the store, and the store was open.
I found Mags behind the counter, sorting letters into wooden cubbyholes. Each cubbyhole had a name on a strip of tape. One said QUILL. It was empty.
"Sterling Mace," I said. "When was he here?"
"Saturday." She slid a letter into a slot marked BURL. "Came on a hired boat out of Halloway. Big white thing with a radar on top."
"He didn't take the ferry?"
"Ferry's Tuesday," she said. "Men like him don't wait for Tuesday."
"What happened?"
"He walked up to the light with a briefcase. He walked back without the briefcase looking any lighter."
She glanced out the window. "Cloud coming in from the east. He was gone by two."
"Did he meet Ambrose?"
Mags picked up the next letter. She read the address for much longer than an address takes to read.
"Ambrose doesn't meet people," she said. "People meet Ambrose. There's a difference, and it's mostly up to him."
The island had no hotel. It had a room above the post office that Mags rented out to birdwatchers and lost relatives. It cost thirty dollars a night and came with a quilt, a kettle, and a window facing north.
From the window, I could see Marrow Point Light. At 6:47 the lamp came on, a slow white sweep across the water. I timed it.
I'm not sure why. Waiting makes you time things.
At 9:14 I refreshed clips.com on my phone. The post office had a satellite dish, and the signal came up the stairs like heat.
Wind east, cloud thickening. Light on at 6:47. A visitor at the door. Card left, kind handwriting.
I sat on the bed and read it four times.
I'd watched the lamp come on at 6:47. So had the website. My card had been left in the door four hours earlier. Somebody had found it and judged my handwriting.
I bent a paper clip into a question mark. It's harder than it sounds. The bottom dot is the tricky part.
I called Desmond.
"It knows about the card," I said.
"Of course it knows about the card," Desmond said. "It's a lighthouse. Watching is its whole thing."
I heard him turning pages. "Any sign of him?"
"A swept step. A woodpile."
"Neat woodpile?"
"Very neat."
"Lawyers have neat woodpiles," Desmond said. "I'm keeping that category open."
Later I went downstairs for milk. Mags was closing the till. She counted coins into a tin with the speed of someone who'd done it ten thousand times.
On the wall behind her was a corkboard. It held a tide chart, a church bake-sale flyer, and a row of yellow receipt stubs. They were money order stubs, one per year, pinned in a neat line. The oldest was faded nearly white.
Each one was dated in March. Each one was for the same small amount.
"What are those?" I asked.
Mags didn't turn around. "Frost tonight, maybe. You'll want the second blanket."
"They're all from March."
"Most things on this island happen in March," she said. "The ice goes out. The lambs come. People remember what they owe."
She closed the tin. "Milk's on the house. Don't make a habit of it."
Clips.com had been registered in March 1996. Domain names renew on the date they were born.
I took the milk upstairs and didn't sleep for a while.
On Wednesday, day twenty-one, I went back.
I took a different approach. I didn't knock. I walked around the cottage, slowly and in plain view, like a cat that wants you to know it isn't stealing anything.
Behind the cottage was a shed. The door was held shut with a loop of wire. It wasn't locked. On an island with sixty people and one ferry a week, I suppose locks feel a bit like bragging.
I didn't open it. I want that on the record. I stood by the window and looked in.
Inside was a desk. On the desk was a computer, the old beige kind, with a monitor the size of a microwave oven. The cord was unplugged and coiled neatly beside it. A sheet of dust lay over the keyboard, undisturbed, the way snow lies over a field nobody has crossed.
Nobody had typed on that keyboard in years.
Behind the desk were shelves. On the shelves were binders, dozens of them, fat and blue. Each spine had a year written on it in black marker. 1996. 1997. 1998. They ran to 2004 and stopped.
One binder lay open on the desk. I could see the pages from the window. Each page held a strip of paper, the width of a ruler, typed with one line. Each strip was fastened to its page with a paper clip.
I pressed closer to the glass and read the top strip on the open page.
November 3, 1999. Wind northwest, gale by midnight. Light on at 4:31. Fishing boat Kestrel in late but in, her skipper waving.
Below it was the next night. Wind dropping. Light on at 4:30. Nothing to report, which is the best report.
Hundreds of strips. Thousands of paper clips.
Clips.
I stood very still in the wind. I had been bending paper clips in my office for a week, trying to buy a name. The name had been sitting here the whole time, holding paper.
"They're the clippings," said a voice behind me. "One a night. That's what the name meant."
I turned around too fast and nearly sat down in the woodpile.
He was tall, even with a slight stoop. Seventy-nine, he'd tell me later, with a white beard trimmed short and a navy wool sweater with leather patches at the elbows. He leaned on a walking stick made of driftwood. His eyes were pale and unbothered.
"Mr. Quill," I said.
"Ambrose. Mr. Quill was my father, and he didn't care for it either."
He looked at the shed. "You didn't open it."
"I didn't."
"Mr. Mace opened it."
"I'm sorry."
"So was he, briefly. The door sticks, and then the wire springs."
He held up a hand and wiggled one finger, as if remembering where the wire had gone. "He bled on a 1999. I've forgiven him. The 1999 hasn't."
I laughed before I could stop it. He didn't laugh, but his beard moved in a way that suggested he'd been hoping I would.
"I'm a domain broker," I said. "I'm here about clips.com."
"I know what you are. Mags told me. She said you bend paper clips."
He glanced at my hands. I was holding one. It was bent into a hook. "She said you'd come back today."
"How did she know?"
"Because that's what the patient ones do," he said. "The impatient ones bring briefcases."
He turned toward the cottage. He walked slowly, using the driftwood stick more for punctuation than balance. At the door he took down my card, read it, and put it in his sweater pocket.
"Kind handwriting," he said.
"The website said that."
He stopped with his hand on the latch. For a second I thought he hadn't heard me. Then he turned and looked at me with an expression I couldn't read.
"What website?" he said.
I opened my mouth. Before I could answer, he shook his head, as if dismissing a fly, and pushed the door open.
"Come in, Miss Ashgrove. Wipe your boots. Mind the cat, she has opinions."
He stood aside. "We have a great deal to discuss. You're about twenty-two years late."
Up next: Not for Sale
Continue to Part 4 →