Chapter 6 - The Salt of the Shore
Nine months later, the morning tide was running out of the Choptank River, leaving behind wide, glistening flats of grey mud, broken oyster shells, and sea glass polished smooth by three hundred years of brackish water.
My new home sat on four acres of high ground on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, five miles south of St. Michaels.
It was an eighteen-eighty waterman’s cottage—clapboard siding painted the soft, weathered gray of driftwood, a wide cedar-shingled porch that ran along three sides of the house, and a single wooden pier that extended sixty feet into the creek where a restored twenty-two-foot Dyer Dhow launch bobbed gently against the pilings.
There were no marble floors here. There were no chandeliers, no brass plaques, and no security gates with retinal scanners.
The air smelled of marsh grass, woodsmoke from the cast-iron stove in the kitchen, and the clean, sharp salt of the Chesapeake Bay coming off the open sound.
I stood on the end of the pier wearing a pair of faded canvas trousers, an oversized gray wool sweater with darned elbows, and a pair of beat-up leather boat shoes without socks. A heavy white ceramic mug of black coffee was cradled in my hands, the steam rising into the crisp October morning.
Behind me, the screen door on the porch creaked open with a familiar, metallic whine.
Captain Thomas Vance—now retired from active service, wearing a flannel shirt and corduroy pants—walked down the crushed-shell path toward the dock, carrying a brown cardboard box under his arm and two fresh cinnamon rolls on a paper plate.
"Morning, Admiral," Vance said, his voice easy, relaxed, stripped of the military edge that had governed his life for thirty years.
"Morning, Tom," I replied, taking one of the rolls without looking at him. "Tide’s forty minutes late today. The wind’s backing into the northeast."
"Nor'easter coming off Hatteras by Thursday," he nodded, leaning his hips against the wooden bollard at the end of the slip. "We should check the mooring lines on the dhow before noon."
He set the cardboard box down on the pine decking between our feet.
"What's that?" I asked.
"Final distribution report from the bankruptcy trustee in Baltimore," Vance said, taking a sip from his own thermos. "Thought you’d want the operational wrap-up before the weekend."
I looked down at the box.
The legal fallout from that rainy night in Annapolis had concluded with the cold, mathematical precision of an artillery table.
Mason had entered a guilty plea to two counts of major procurement fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft in the United States District Court in Baltimore five weeks ago. The federal judge—a woman who had served eight years as an Army JAG officer in Germany—had rejected his attorney's plea for home confinement and probation.
Mason had been sentenced to seven years and three months at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland.
The court had ordered thirty-eight million dollars in criminal restitution. Reed Coastal Developments had been dissolved under Chapter 7 liquidation; the waterfront parcels had been sold to a state conservation trust for twelve cents on the dollar, and the half-built condominiums in Baltimore had been stripped of their steel and concrete by a court-appointed receiver.
Mason was currently working forty hours a week in the prison maintenance facility, repairing industrial laundry machines for twelve cents an hour. In his last letter to me, which Vance had intercepted and destroyed at my request, Mason had written six pages complaining about the quality of the institutional soap.
"And Arthur?" I asked, looking out over the creek where a great blue heron was stalking minnows in the shallows.
"The Severna Park house was cleared through the trust last Tuesday," Vance replied quietly. "Your disability lien held the equity. The bankruptcy trustee couldn't touch the residential parcel because of the military dependent homestead exemption you filed three years ago."
"Is he still in the house?"
"For now," Vance said. "He resigned from the Atlantic Maritime Club in April. The board asked for his keys after the Baltimore Sun ran the third installment on the procurement sting. He doesn't go into town much, Caroline. The local hardware store says he sends his yardman in to pick up his groceries."
Vance pulled a small, white business-sized envelope from his shirt pocket and laid it on top of the cardboard box.
Across the front, in the spidery, precise copperplate handwriting of an appellate judge whose fingers were stiffening with arthritis, was written: For Caroline.
I didn't pick it up.
"Did you read it?" I asked.
"No," Vance said honestly. "The courier brought it to the post office box in Easton yesterday. His lawyer said your father spent three weeks writing it after the sentencing in Baltimore."
I looked at the envelope.
The salt wind caught the corner of the paper, lifting the flap slightly.
Inside that envelope, I knew what was waiting. There would be explanations. There would be citations of family history, references to my mother’s expectations, legal rationalizations for why Mason was favored, and a seventy-one-year-old man’s desperate, dying plea for his daughter to come back to the dinner table so he wouldn't have to die alone in a twelve-room house full of silent clocks and empty rooms.
He wanted a daughter to preside over his funeral.
He wanted someone in uniform to stand beside his casket at the cemetery so the retired judges from Annapolis would think that the Reed family had preserved its dignity after all.
I picked up the envelope.
I didn't tear the paper. I didn't break the seal.
I held it between my thumb and forefinger, feeling the thickness of the heavy vellum—the same expensive stock he had used for forty years to write his judicial opinions.
Then I let my fingers open.
The wind from the northeast caught the white square of paper before it hit the water.
It lifted it three feet into the air, spun it in a wide, lazy circle over the creek, and dropped it into the dark, brackish current forty yards out from the pier.
The paper floated for four seconds, the ink blurring into gray clouds against the water, and then the outgoing tide pulled it beneath the surface, carrying it down toward the Choptank, down toward the bay, down toward the deep ocean where names, titles, and family debts don't mean a damn thing to the water.
"That's that," Vance said quietly.
"That's that," I agreed.
From the end of the lane, a small yellow school bus rumbled past the hedgerow, its engine rattling in the quiet morning, dropping off three local children who began running down the dirt road toward the neighboring farm, their laughter carrying clear and sweet over the marsh.
I finished my coffee.
I looked down at the Dyer Dhow bobbing against the pilings. Her brass fittings were polished; her mahogany coaming was oiled with three coats of tung oil; her small diesel engine was primed and full of clean fuel.
"Tom," I said.
"Ma'am?"
"Drop the lines," I told him, stepping down into the boat, the cedar floorboards taking my weight with a solid, reassuring creak. "The tide’s running fast. If we clear the bar before eleven, we can have lunch on the hook behind Poplar Island."
Vance smiled. He unhitched the heavy manila bowline from the iron cleat, stepped down onto the forward thwart, and reached for the ignition key.
The starter motor turned once. The small Yanmar diesel caught with a deep, rhythmic, confident thrum that pushed the morning mist back from the hull.
I took the wooden tiller in my right hand.
The red mark on my wrist was gone. The gold braid was in a cedar chest in the bedroom. The thirty-three years of silence were filed away in the classified archives of a country that was still sleeping safely behind its walls.
May you like
I pushed the throttle forward.
The bow rose slightly, cutting through the dark, green water with a clean, white bone in her teeth, heading straight out toward the open Bay where the horizon was wide, empty, and completely free.
