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earrings.
    “I like the tsunami narrative,” Ruth said, frowning at the cat.
    Muriel flicked the braid behind her back, out of the cat’s reach, and then rubbed the white patch between his ears to distract him. She peered at Ruth over the top of her glasses.
“Bad idea. Shouldn’t let your narrative preferences interfere with your forensic work.”
    Muriel was a retired anthropologist, who studied middens. She knew a lot about garbage. She was also an avid beachcomber and was the person who’d found the severed foot. She prided herself
on her finds: bone fish hooks and lures, flint spearheads and arrowheads, and an assortment of stone tools for pounding and cutting. Most were First Nations artifacts, but she also had a collection
of old Japanese fishing floats that had detached from nets across the Pacific and washed up on the island’s shore. The floats were the size of large beach balls, murky globes blown from thick
tinted glass. They were beautiful, like escaped worlds.
    “I’m a novelist,” Ruth said. “I can’t help it. My narrative preferences are all I’ve got.”
    “Fair enough,” Muriel said. “But facts are facts, and establishing the provenance is important.” She scooped up the cat and dropped him onto the floor, then rested her
fingers on the latches on the sides of the lunchbox. Her fingers were decorated with heavy silver and turquoise rings, which looked incongruous next to Hello Kitty. “May I?” she
asked.
    “Be my guest.”
    On the phone, Muriel had asked to inspect the find, so Ruth had repacked the box as best she could. Now she felt a kind of tension in the air, but she wasn’t sure where it was coming from.
Something in the formality of Muriel’s request. The solemnity of her attitude as she removed the lid. The way she paused, almost ceremonially, before lifting the watch from the box, turning
it over and holding it to her ear.
    “It’s broken,” Ruth said.
    Muriel picked up the diary. She inspected the spine and then the cover. “Here’s where you’ll find your clues,” she said, opening it to a section somewhere in the middle.
“Have you started reading it?”
    Watching Muriel handle the book, Ruth felt her uneasiness grow. “Well, yes. Only the first couple of pages. It’s not that interesting.” She took the letters from the box and
held them out. “These seem more promising. They’re older and may be more historically important, don’t you think?” Muriel laid down the diary and took the letters from
Ruth’s hand. “Unfortunately, I can’t read them,” Ruth added.
    “The handwriting looks beautiful,” Muriel said, turning over the pages. “Have you shown them to Ayako?” Ayako was the young Japanese wife of an oyster farmer who lived on
the island.
    “Yes,” Ruth said, slipping the diary below the table and out of sight. “But she said the handwriting’s hard even for her to read, and besides her English isn’t so
good. She did decipher the dates, though. She said they were written in 1944 and ’45, and I should try to find someone older, who was alive during the war.”
    “Good luck,” Muriel said. “Has the language really changed that much?”
    “Not the language. The people. Ayako said young people can’t read complex characters or write by hand anymore. They’ve grown up with computers.” Under the table, she
fingered the blunt edges of the diary. One corner was broken, and the cloth-encased cardboard wiggled like a loose tooth. Had Nao worried this corner between her fingertips, too?
    Muriel shook her head. “Right,” she said. “It’s the same everywhere. Kids have terrible handwriting these days. They’re not even teaching it in schools
anymore.” She placed the letters next to the watch and the freezer bags on the table and looked over the collection. If she noticed the missing diary, she didn’t mention it.
“Well, thanks for showing me,” she said.
    She heaved herself to her feet, brushed the cat hair