complained about the way she was always hiding gift cards inside tricky puzzle boxes she’d argue that figuring figuring it out yourself was much more fun than just getting the present Then she’d give them a bunch of clues because Aunt Elsie wasn’t actually sadistic and she did know that not everybody liked puzzles She died in May of 2016 in a hit-and-run that tossed her car into a ditch where it ruptured a fuel line and caught on fire She was less than a mile from her house The impact the coroner said kindly at the inquest that ruled the crash accidental broke her neck before the explosion so she wouldn’t have felt a thing Not like that made anyone feel better It wasn’t much of a stretch to say that the loss of Elsie Kingsolver devastated the community of Archer’s Grove a small and mostly touristy island Elsie Kingsolver had been the archivist at the Edgewater Maritime Archive since her return to the island fifteen years ago right after the birth of her niece and nephew She’d been from the area too The Kingsolvers went back several generations generations and had multiple sailors in their family tree 6
Elsie had been the odd one out Well-behaved shipping shipping and merchant activity was in the family blood enlivened by youngest sons who ran off to sea to become pirates although the last documented case had been in the late 1920s And Great-Uncle Robert had technically disappeared while smuggling moonshine in Kentucky But the wandering gene usually struck the youngest child of the family which should have been Robby Carrie’s father and Chris’s uncle Instead he had earned a business degree married an accountant accountant named Helen and gone into banking His older brother Brian was a pharmacist It had been Elsie the eldest child and only girl who went slightly off-kilter devoting her life to history and old paper And it was in this that she had excelled A born teacher and a natural parent despite having no children of her own she gave presentations on the archival collection of shipping charters that actually drew crowds volunteered at the local historical society and did programs with the local schools where she dressed up as a pirate and led a treasure hunt Her funeral was packed with mourners 7
Chris and Carrie read a poem about slipping the surely bounds of earth together Carrie crying quietly and Chris staring fixedly out into the crowd counting somber black-clad neighbors to keep himself from breaking down It didn’t help much Carrie later suggested suggested that picturing everyone in his or her underwear might have been a better idea but Chris thought that that would have been disrespectful And he also came away confused by the number of people at the funeral that he didn’t recognize The funeral was held on an unfairly pleasant day with a cloudless blue sky beaming beaming down on the casket and a gentle breeze rustling the funeral flowers All sorts of people had known and loved Aunt Elsie so extended family colleagues from grad school and even the entire history department from the local college had come to pay their respects So it was silly for Chris to expect to know everyone at the funeral But a scattering of people in attendance were quite frankly sketchy looking There was a broad-shouldered man wearing sunglasses sunglasses and lurking in the back of the crowd wearing 8
gloves on a warm sunny day There was a dark-haired family clustered under a willow tree also all wearing sunglasses the daughter squashed between her parents She was clearly the same age as Chris but not someone he’d ever seen at school And when Chris walked back to the gravesite to fetch an aunt’s purse he found a tall man with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up over a baseball cap standing in front of the very new grave His silhouette was just the tiniest bit familiar Chris actually called out to him but the man tucked a bouquet of lilies into the already overflowing offerings of flowers and walked away without responding head down and hands in his pockets His eyes were shaded by a pair of aviator sunglasses In fact Chris decided there were an awful lot of people wearing sunglasses at Elsie’s funeral Maybe because it’s a sunny day Carrie suggested when Chris pointed this out to her at the wake She was normally pretty pale a side effect of having inherited inherited the redhead gene from the Kingsolver side of the family but today she was translucent and there were 9
