Free The Ebbing Tide by Elisabeth Ogilvie Page B

the wharf. The sun was going down and she felt chilled; yet it was still warm. The chill was not from the weather, she knew, but it had something to do with the thing tied up at Stevie’s mooring, around which the Coast Guard dinghy moved so gingerly.
    Jamie slowed, Dick bounded away from her, over toward the marsh. She saw Dennis Garland standing there by the old anchor sunk into the ground where the beach joined the marsh. His clothes blended with his background, and she would have missed him if Jamie and the dog hadn’t seen him. He stood there, motionless, his hat brim slanted so that his face was shadowed. He was, somehow, an anonymous figure. He could have been anyone. But because she knew who he was, and why he was on the Island, she thought of him as she walked home; of him, and the mine, together.
    In the evening the men talked about the mine. The captain and crew of the Coast Guard boat had been afraid to touch it. When they left they cautioned the fishermen about touching it again, and added that they would send for a mine expert from Boston to come down and look at it. Meanwhile, it remained in the harbor, a quiet, black, ominous thing.
    During the evening Joanna added a little more to her scant hoard of knowledge about Dennis Garland. He had been in the Navy. Owen told him about Stevie and Mark, and he was interested. He had been in the Pacific himself, he said, and then turned the subject abruptly, asking a question about the Island. The change was so sudden that Joanna looked up at him, but his face told her nothing. He lay back in Nils’ chair, watching the smoke from his pipe drift toward the ceiling, and his sharply rugged profile was remote and seemingly at peace.
    Owen lounged in his own chair, his moccasined feet outthrust, a drink at his elbow. Dick lay between the two men, showing a fine impartiality. Joanna, sitting at the table, trying to write letters, glanced at them often. It was a pleasant, companionable scene. So had Nils and Owen sat during many an evening, sometimes with a cribbage board between them, and so had she glanced first at the fair head and then at the black one, and marveled at the easiness that was in Owen when he was with someone who could gentle him. Now he had that same easiness, and it gave her a pang, as if somehow he were being disloyal to Nils.
    She gave up trying to write her letters and went out into the kitchen and turned up the lamp. She put more water in the tea-kettle, and laid out the things for getting breakfast. The woodbox was full of seasoned birch and spruce, and fine stuff for kindling. Owen had been outdoing himself at keeping the woodbox full, she thought dryly. She washed her face and brushed her teeth, took her lamp from the shelf and went up to bed.
    It was one of those nights when she felt an onrush of loneliness for Nils. The bed looked big and cold, the towering headboard was too imposing for a woman sleeping alone. She turned back the covers so that they would look more hospitable, and began to undress. After the itching nervousness she’d felt downstairs, her skin received the cool air gratefully. She stood naked for a moment, rejoicing in her freedom from clothes as simply as an animal enjoys freedom from its harness. She could see her reflection, all dim shadows and brief golden highlights, in the mirror; she was supple, as narrow-flanked and high-breasted, as if she had never had two children and nursed them both. One thing she had always enjoyed was her superb physical and mental health.
    Jamie turned over, murmuring, in his crib, and she reached for her pajamas. In bed she sat cross-legged, brushing her hair and reading. The men were talking so softly downstairs that she couldn’t hear even a murmur. How much longer would Dennis Garland stay? she wondered. But he had bought Uncle Nate’s Place. There was no hopeful doubt about it, and tomorrow she would have to write to Nils concerning it, and the boys. Tomorrow . . . She