THE SALTSTONE MYSTERIES · CASE 01 · CHAPTER 1
The Saltstone Sovereign
The Saltstone Sovereign did not dock so much as it collided with the weather.
Eleven miles off midcoast Maine, the Atlantic had spent thirty-six hours sharpening itself against the outer ledges, and when the ferry finally swung its blunt steel snout into the lee of the harbor basin, the island looked less like a destination than an argument between gray spruce and wet granite. Sheets of cold April rain drove sideways across the pilings. Halfway up the bluff, the village of Saltstone appeared and disappeared behind ragged curtains of salt mist: white clapboard, black slate, and church spires whose weather vanes had rusted into permanent dispute with the prevailing wind.
Maeve Vance stood at the forward rail of the passenger deck, her collar pulled up against the spray. In her right hand she carried a single scarred leather suitcase; in her left, buried deep in her coat pocket, she gripped the heavy iron-and-brass ring that had brought her back.
There were twenty-two keys on it. None of them had tags.
Her great-uncle Caleb—whom four generations of islanders had called Cappy—had considered labels an insult to memory. If a man didn’t know which brass blank turned the padlock on the timber shed or which notched iron bit drew the deadbolt on the salvage loft office, Cappy had reasoned, the man had no business inside. He had carried that ring on his belt for forty-two years, rattling like an anchor chain every time he climbed the granite steps to the wharf. Now Cappy was three weeks in the cemetery behind Our Lady of the Shoals, and the iron ring had arrived in a padded manila envelope at Maeve’s apartment in Boston, accompanied by a probate decree, three unpaid electric bills, and a handwritten note from the estate attorney informing her that Vance Maritime Salvage & Workshop was currently her sole responsibility.
The ferry shuddered as Captain Enoch Peake threw the starboard diesel into reverse, churning the dark green basin water into yellow froth. Deckhands in oilskins caught the heavy hawser and dropped the loop over the bollards with the dull, sodden thud of wet hemp.
Maeve waited for the few foot passengers to clear the gangway before stepping down onto the slip. Saltstone’s smell hit her before her boot touched the timber: creosote, diesel soot, low-tide bladderwrack, woodsmoke, and the clean, stinging iron of rain coming off open sea. It had not changed in fourteen years. Nor had the island’s peculiar economy of accumulation. To her left, stacked against the freight shed, sat six rusted cast-iron radiators, three bundles of cured spruce knees, and a 1970s rotary telephone switchboard sheltered under a shredded blue tarp. In Saltstone, where barging an eight-yard dumpster to the mainland cost eighteen hundred dollars, nothing was ever discarded if it could be stacked, sheltered, or blamed on probate.
