Kiss the Water

I found the key under the loose stone by the kitchen step, exactly where the solicitor’s letter said it would be. The stone came up with a wet suck, and beneath it the key lay in a hollow of black mud, cold as a coin. I wiped it on my trousers and let myself into the cottage.

The air inside had the weight of a room that has been shut for months. Damp wool, cold ash, the faint mineral smell of stone. My mother’s raincoat hung on its peg by the door, sleeves stiff. On the table, a mug with a dried teabag fused to the bottom. Nothing else. No note, no half-finished letter. Just the ordinary debris of a life interrupted mid-task, which is what the police had called it. An interruption. She had gone out for a walk along the shore and the shore had kept her.

I set my duffel on the settle and opened the windows. The sea came in at once, that green-and-iron smell, and I stood there with my hands on the sill, letting the room breathe. I had not cried at the funeral. I had not cried on the ferry. I did not intend to start now.

The cottage sat above the high-water line on the eastern side of the island, twenty minutes on foot from the village. My mother had lived here alone for eleven years, and before that with my father, and before that with a man whose name I never learned. She had not spoken of any of them. She had sent letters instead, short and factual, full of weather and the price of paraffin and the number of razorbills nesting on the western cliffs. I had kept them all in a shoebox in my flat in Aberdeen, and when the police called I was reading one dated three days earlier. It ended, The sea is loud tonight. I’ll write more when it quietens.

I unpacked in the small bedroom at the back, then walked down to the shore. It was not yet six, but the light had begun to leak from the sky. The tide was out, the sand ribbed and gleaming. I pulled my jacket tighter and walked the line where the wet sand met the dry, cataloguing the erosion I had come to map. My grant application had specified the eastern coastline of the island. My mother had died the week after I sent it. The two facts sat side by side in my head, refusing to speak to each other.

That was when I saw her.

She stood at the edge of the water, barefoot, absolutely still. The surf ran over her feet and pulled back, ran and pulled, and she did not shift. She wore a long grey coat, unbuttoned, and her hair hung dark to her waist. She was not looking at the sea. She was looking at me.

I stopped. The wind came off the water and flattened the grass along the dune. She did not seem to feel it. Her face held no surprise, no greeting. She smiled, and the smile had in it the quality of recognition, the way a person smiles when they have been waiting for someone they knew would come.

Then she turned and walked south along the shore, and I watched her until she passed behind the black rocks at the point, and I did not follow.

The shopkeeper was a woman named Mrs. Tavish, seventy at least, with a spine curved from decades of leaning into island wind. She sold bread, tinned milk, paraffin, stamps, and batteries, and she kept a notebook beside the till with a red ribbon for a marker. When I came in that first morning, she was writing in it, and she closed it without hurry and slipped it under the counter.

“You’ll be the Grant girl,” she said. “From the cottage.”

“Maren,” I said. “I’m here to map erosion.”

“Aye.” She rang up my bread and my tea and my tin of beans. “You’ve seen her, then.”

I did not pretend to misunderstand. “Who is she?”

Mrs. Tavish put the bread in a paper bag and folded the top twice. Her hands were brown and cracked at the knuckles. “Iona MacLeod. She’s lived here longer than anyone can remember.”

“She doesn’t wear shoes.”

“No.” Mrs. Tavish handed me the bag. “She won’t cross a threshold, either. You won’t get her inside a house. Not hers, not yours, not the kirk.” She looked at me with her pale eyes. “You’ll be wanting to know about the men.”

I said nothing.

“There’s a list,” she said. “In the notebook. Every man who ever loved her. Every one of them drowned.” She tapped the counter with one finger. “I keep the tally. Someone has