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Tomorrow, I’ll inform our partners that
     you have declined our offer. Good day, Dr. Hatch.” He rose to go, and then just before the door he stopped, half turning.
     “There is one other thing. To answer your question, there
is
something that makes us different from all the rest. We’ve uncovered a small piece of information about the Water Pit that
     nobody else knows. Not even you.”
    Hatch’s chuckle died in his throat when he saw Neidel-man’s face.
    “We know who designed it,” the Captain said quietly.
    Involuntarily, Hatch felt his fingers stiffen and curl in toward his palms. “What?” he croaked.
    “Yes. And there’s something more. We have the journal he kept during its construction.”
    In the sudden silence, Hatch fetched a deep breath, then another. He looked down at his desk and shook his head. “That’s beautiful,”
     he managed to say. “Just beautiful. I guess I underestimated you. After all these years, I’ve heard something original. You’ve
     made my day, Captain Neidelman.”
    But Neidelman had gone, and Hatch realized he was talking to an empty room.
    It was several minutes before he could bring himself to rise from the desk. As he shoved the last of his papers into his briefcase,
     hands still trembling a little, he noticed that Neidelman had left his card behind. A telephone number had been scribbled
     across the top, presumably the hotel he was staying in. Hatch brushed the card into the wastebasket, picked up his briefcase,
     left the lab, and briskly walked back to his town house through the dusky summer streets.
    At two o’clock that morning, he found himself back in the laboratory, pacing before the darkened window, Neidelman’s card
     grasped in one hand. It was three before he finally picked up the phone.

3

    H atch parked in the dirt lot above the pier and stepped slowly from the rented car. He closed the door, then paused to look
     over the harbor, hand still grasping the handle. His eyes took in the long, narrow cove, bound by a granite shore, dotted
     with lobster boats and draggers, bathed in a cold silver light. Even twenty-five years later, Hatch recognized many of the
     names: the
Lola B,
the
Maybelle W.
    The little town of Stormhaven struggled up the hill, narrow clapboard houses following a zigzag of cobblestone lanes. Toward
     the top the houses thinned out, replaced by stands of black spruce and small meadows enclosed by stone walls. At the very
     top of the hill stood the Congregational church, its severe white steeple rising into the gray sky. On the far side of the
     cove he glimpsed his own boyhood home, its four gables and widow’s walk poking above the treeline, the long meadow sloping
     to the shore and a small dock. He quickly turned away, feeling almost as if some stranger was standing in his shoes, and that
     he was seeing everything through that stranger’s eyes.
    He headed for the pier, slipping on a pair of sunglasses as he did so. The sunglasses, and his own inner turmoil, made him
     feel a little foolish. Yet he felt more apprehension now than he’d felt even in a Raruana village, piled with corpses infected
     with dengue fever, or during the outbreak of bubonic plague in the Sierra Madre Occidental.
    The pier was one of two commercial wharfs that projected into the harbor. One side of the wharf was lined with small wooden
     shacks: the Lobsterman’s Co-op, a snack bar called Red Ned’s Eats, a bait shack, and an equipment shed. At the end of the
     pier stood a rusting gas pump, loading winches, and stacks of drying lobster pots. Beyond the harbor mouth there was a low
     fog bank, where the sea merged imperceptibly with sky. It was almost as if the world ended a hundred yards offshore.
    The shingle-sided Co-op was the first building on the pier. A merry plume of steam, issuing from a tin pipe, hinted at the
     lobsters that were boiling within. Hatch stopped at the chalkboard, scanning the prices for the various grades of lobster:
     shedders,