The guesthouse door was unlocked when Mara returned.
Inside, the air smelled of furniture polish and the sea. A runner stretched down the narrow hall; its pattern of blue waves had faded to the color of old paper. Mara passed the visitor cards without touching them. Daniel’s card was gone. A different one lay on top now, blank except for the date: yesterday.
She climbed the stairs. On the first landing a radio played softly behind a closed door, the announcer reading the morning weather. By the second landing she could hear only the building itself: pipes ticking, wood moving in the damp, a window rattling in its frame. Room seven was at the end of the corridor beneath the amber window.
The brass key turned on the first try.
Mara opened the door far enough to see a bed, a desk, and a suitcase standing upright beside the wardrobe. The room had been cleaned recently. No dust lay on the sill. A glass of water rested on the bedside table, its surface unbroken.
“Hello?” she said.
No answer. She stepped inside and closed the door behind her. The suitcase was old leather, scuffed at the corners. A paper tag looped around its handle bore no name, only a string of numbers. She took a photograph before touching anything.
On the desk was a tide chart folded to the current week. Someone had circled the lowest tide of the month. Beneath it lay a map of the harbor, copied so many times that the shoreline had softened into gray. A pencil line ran from the ferry berth to the old pier, then stopped at a square drawn in the water.
Mara looked out the window. At low tide, the square would be a platform hidden among the pilings. As children, she and Daniel had called it the stage. They had dared each other to stand there while the water rose. Their mother had forbidden it, saying the boards would give way someday. Mara had not thought of that place in years.
A floorboard creaked in the corridor. Mara folded the map and slipped it into her coat. The door handle moved once, gently, as though someone on the other side was testing whether it was locked. She stood still. The handle moved again.
“Mara,” said a voice through the wood.
It was Eli. She let out a breath she had not realized she was holding and opened the door. He stood alone, but his gaze went past her to the suitcase.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.
“Neither should that.” She pointed at the case. “Who brought it?”
Eli looked toward the stairwell before answering. “It came over on the ferry.”
“With Daniel?”
His expression changed, not to surprise but to resignation. “There’s something your brother left under the pier,” he said. “The tide goes out in twenty minutes.”