Rafi came down the steps carrying Juno's camera case in both hands, as if it might bite him. He stopped when he saw Adrian between the two crewmen.
“Where does this go?”
Cal pointed to a dry part of the platform. Rafi put the case there and kept his hands extended. He had been good at describing what people ought to do all weekend. Now that nobody wanted a description he seemed uncertain what his arms were for.
“Get her bag,” Cal said. “There. In the water. Don't go in.”
Rafi knelt, reached the strap, brought it up streaming onto the deck. He looked inside and made a small distressed sound. Then he zipped it shut, which was about as useful a decision as could be made about it.
The medical crew came down carrying more things than Cal thought could pass on the stair. People moved when they asked. The captain gave an account of the fall while one of them bent over Juno. Cal got out of the way, keeping the towel around his shoulders. His knees had begun to hurt. There was blood on the pale wood beneath one of them.
“You went in?” the second medic asked.
He nodded.
The man looked at him, asked him questions Cal could answer, then told him to sit where he was until someone checked him again. Cal sat. He watched the other medic fit something around Juno's neck, speaking to her before each movement. Juno answered in short irritable pieces. When she couldn't remember something immediately she tried to lift her head and was asked not to.
Adrian said, “Is she all right?”
Nobody answered him. He asked again, this time addressing the captain by title. The crewman beside him tightened his grip when Adrian started forward.
“Stay,” the captain said.
Lena appeared at the top of the stair. She was carrying Adrian's light jacket, folded over her forearm. Cal could see the officers behind her before she could. One spoke to the captain; the other came down. Lena flattened herself against the rail to make room.
“Adrian,” she said.
He looked up. She held the jacket out as if the distance between them were an inconvenience to be solved by his reaching. The officer stopped her from following it down.
“I'll need you to stay up there, ma'am.”
“That's my husband.”
“We'll speak to you separately.”
Lena pulled the jacket against herself. She didn't leave. Cal remembered the blue folder in her case, the shore buildings in its pictures. He had thought that when the offer came apart she would take herself somewhere else. She remained at the rail, looking down at Adrian until the officer asked her to step back.
The captain began telling the uniformed man what he'd seen, pointing first to the public side passage, then down the steps. Adrian spoke over him.
“I wanted her to listen. I didn't push her in.”
Cal had the low rail in his hands. His palms were slippery. He could remember exactly where Juno's heel had landed, the foot finding no surface beneath it. What had happened before her heel slipped was still there too.
“She told him to let go,” Cal said.
The officer turned to him. Cal heard himself say it again, giving the man something that didn't depend on a microphone catching it. “At the gangway. He took her arm. The crew tried to stop him.”
The officer asked his name. Cal supplied it, tired of the little delay between giving it and being recognized. He gave his account of what he'd seen from the salon and the outside door. When he got to the hand signal he showed his palm.
“Hold. It means hold. It didn't tell her to do anything else.”
The man wrote, asked where he'd been when he first saw Adrian take her arm, and Cal pointed back through the panes. He could no longer see the whole route from where he sat. He described the places where he'd moved.
Juno made a sound as they shifted her. Cal turned. She was looking for her bag.
“Here,” Rafi said, holding it up. “I've got it. It's very wet.”
“My phone.”
“I've got that too.”
It had been in the camera case rather than the soaked bag. Rafi showed her the screen. She tried to move a hand toward it, stopped when it hurt and swore.
“Tess,” she said. “In the contacts. Tell her I'm going to the hospital. She has my keys. She'll answer.”
Rafi fumbled the phone. Juno told him the code, turned her eyes away and let him do it. Cal looked at the deck. He had known the bag's compartments. He hadn't known who had her keys.
When Rafi got through, his voice became much too bright. Juno shut her eyes.
“Just tell her,” she said.
He stopped explaining the extraordinary circumstances and did.
They brought a stretcher as far as they could, then moved Juno up with hands and instructions and pauses where the boat made the space difficult. Cal stood to follow and the officer asked him to wait. He sat down again. Rafi carried her case and bag up ahead. She didn't look back at Cal until she was at the top.
“Don't send anything out,” she said.
“I won't.”
Rafi went with her as far as the dock, holding her phone to his ear and carrying the bags badly, but carrying them.
Adrian was taken up next. The crewmen let go only when the officers had him. He looked toward Cal on the low platform.
“You saw her go,” he said.
Cal didn't answer immediately. Adrian had let him tell the long story of a failed film without pretending to receive a revelation. He had defended him when he was standing outside his own workroom, unable to get in. Cal wanted those things to belong to a different man from the one waiting on the stair.
“I saw you take her there.”
Adrian's face worked. He seemed about to say Cal's name. Instead he turned and went up where the officer directed him. At the top, Lena moved toward him with the jacket. An officer raised a hand between them.
“Cal hit him,” she said to the officer. “He was already hurt. You can't say Adrian—”
“You weren't in the room,” Adrian said.
She stopped. Cal looked up from the low platform.
“He was talking,” Adrian said. “In the bedroom. I took a pillow off the bed. I held it over his face.”
“Adrian.” Lena had pulled the jacket against herself.
“He tried to pull it off. I kept it there until he stopped.” Adrian looked at the officer. “She didn't ask me.”
The officer moved him on. Lena put the jacket out again, and Adrian touched its edge as he passed. She followed until the other officer stopped her. She remained there, holding it.
Cal watched until he couldn't see either of them. Then the officer asked about the camera on the steps.
He had forgotten it again.
“Mine. A. I was using it.”
“Was it recording?”
“Yes. I left it running when I went in.”
The officer went to it with him. Cal showed the button without reaching past the man's hand. The recording stopped. He gave up the camera with the fresh Sunday card in it, strap wet where it had trailed down the stair. He told the officer that B, in Juno's case, had been packed before Adrian came over; it held their earlier tests, not a response interview that had never happened. The officer said they'd speak to her about it. Cal didn't volunteer to fetch it from the ambulance.
By the time Quinn reached the dock Cal was wrapped in a second towel, his wet shirt in a bag at his feet. Someone had found him a crew T-shirt. It was too small across the shoulders and had a faded drawing of a fish on the breast. He could feel the salt drying behind his ears.
Quinn stood in front of him long enough to look at the scraped knees and his shaking hands. She asked whether he'd been checked. He said yes. The medic, passing behind her, supplied the qualification that they weren't finished with him.
“We have what you sent,” she said. “I need you to go through it with me.”
Cal nodded.
“All of it. Including why your first account was different.”
“I know.”
A wedding guest was filming from farther along the dock. Cal saw the phone, saw himself in the bright little rectangle for a moment as the man moved it. He had an impulse to turn his good side toward it. The impulse arrived intact, as if nothing had happened to him all day.
Quinn moved between him and the phone.
“You told me you hadn't seen anyone fall.”
“That wasn't true.”
She waited.
Cal told her where he'd stood on Friday. He told her what he had seen before Felix went over, what he'd done with his phone while there might still have been a person to help. His throat hurt from the water. He drank from a bottle the captain had brought and went on.
Quinn stopped him when he shifted the time to something he remembered more easily. They went back. The payment confirmation was in the message she'd received. He confirmed it was his account. He hadn't returned the money. The debt payment to Juno was his ordinary debt, not money she'd demanded for silence. He made that distinction before Quinn had to ask him for it.
Behind her, crew carried the unused interview chairs off the boat. One chair had a spot of black tape on its back where Juno had marked her position. Cal watched it pass and lost his place.
“You sent Mr. Sloan a recording,” Quinn said.
He returned to the account. There were names he had enjoyed saying two days ago. He said them now without trying to make the people sound better or worse than they had been.
When they paused, Pam stood at the edge of the cleared space. She had Juno's spare shoes in her hand. Somebody had given them to her and she had apparently kept them through the whole emergency. One was balanced inside the other.
“They've gone,” Cal told her.
“I know.” She looked at the shoes as if they'd just appeared. “I'll take them. Somebody will want them.”
She went along the dock toward the road. She walked carefully, watching the gaps between the boards. Cal had no idea what she'd been told about her brother, or what she would believe when she heard it. He didn't call her back to make the case.
The captain came to ask whether he could move the bags left by the salon. Quinn told him which ones could be moved and asked him to keep the others where they were. A few guests were still inside, waiting for someone to tell them the next event. The screen had gone black, but its light remained on the wall.
Cal's phone lit beside his knee. For one impossible moment he thought it might be Mara with the visit restored. It was a message from Juno, sent through Rafi's phone.
Tell me if the payment doesn't go. Don't contact Tess.
He read it twice. Then he replied that he would tell her, and that he wouldn't. He set the phone face down and went back to Quinn.