Twenty-Two Bones

The auger bit at ninety centimeters and stopped. Cora knew the feel of refusal in her shoulders before the gauge confirmed it: clay, dense as brick, the kind of layer that meant the estuary floor had not shifted in a long time. She marked the depth on her field sheet with a pencil, the tip blunted from the cold, and reset her grip on the T-handle.

The tide was still out. The flat stretched west toward the channel, ribbed with current-lines, pocked with worm casts. Dawn had not yet cleared the headland. The air tasted of iodine and turned mud, and her breath came in visible pulls.

She had been on the flat since 5:40, alone except for the gulls. The wind-farm contractors were late. She checked her phone. No signal at the waterline. The phone went back into the breast pocket of her waders, and she bent to the auger again.

The rope jammed.

Not the bit, the rope. The safety line she had rigged to the corer had snagged under a buried stone, and when she pulled, the knot bit back. She swore once, quietly, and knelt to work it free. Cold seeped through the knee of her waders. The mud made a sound when she moved, a wet, thick suck.

A voice came from the water.

“You’ll lose that line if you keep hauling.”

She looked up. A man stood in a flat-bottomed skiff twenty meters out, one oar resting across the gunwale. He wore no life vest. His sleeves were rolled past his elbows, and his hands were red from the morning. He had come in on the last of the ebb without a sound.

“It’s snagged,” she said. “I know.”

“The stone’s got a lip on it. You need to come at it from the channel side.”

She straightened. “You know the bottom.”

“I know the flat.” He shipped the oar and stepped over the side, into water that reached his shins, then his knees. The skiff drifted behind him on its painter. He walked toward her with the slow, deliberate gait of a man who expected the mud to hold him and would not be surprised if it did not.

“Eamon Tynan,” he said, and held out a hand.

She took it. His palm was hard, ridged with old rope-callus. “Cora Brennan.”

“The surveyor.”

“Marine biologist.”

“Same thing to the council.” He let go of her hand and looked down at the line. “You’re on the old oyster path. The stones are set in a curve. Your auger’s in the seam.”

She watched him kneel where she had knelt. He worked the rope free with two fingers, no more effort than picking a splinter. The line came loose and he handed it back to her, wet and cold.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You’ll want to move your transect ten meters north. The clay’s thinner there.”

She looked at him. “How do you know where my transect is?”

“I saw your stakes yesterday.” He nodded toward the line of orange flags she had set at low water. “You’re cutting through the old oyster path. The auger will jam every time.”

She should have asked how he knew the depth of the clay. She should have asked why a shellfish farmer was out on the flat before dawn with no gear and no reason. Instead she said, “I have a thermos in the skiff. Coffee. You want some?”

“I brought my own.” He reached into the boat and lifted a steel thermos, the kind with a dented cup screwed to the top. He poured a measure and held it out. The coffee was black and hot and tasted faintly of peat smoke.

She drank. He watched her with a stillness that was not unfriendly. The gulls wheeled and called. The first light touched the water and turned it the color of wet slate.

“You’re out early,” she said.

“The flat’s different before the sun. Quieter.”

“I thought it was quiet enough.”

“Not yet.” He capped the thermos and set it back in the skiff. “The wind-farm people won’t come out until nine. They don’t like the mud.”

“You know them?”

“I know their trucks.” He smiled, a small movement at the corner of his mouth. “They park on the hard shoulder and wait for the tide to do their work.”

She laughed. It surprised her. She had not laughed in weeks, not since the last call with her sister, not since the estuary contract had landed on her desk with its neat columns of deliverables and its unspoken assumption that she would be the one to make the data say what the developers needed.

“I’ll be here all week,” she said. “Maybe longer.”

“I know.”

He said it without emphasis, the way a man states a