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know?"
    "Dad, don't you dare take out a loan from those shysters," said Sam angrily. "Don't you dare. I'll take care of the bills until this gets cleared up."
    "We have enough money," his mother insisted.
    Yeah, right.
    "I'd like to stay here tonight," he said, surprising his parents. "Maybe you'll remember something."
    Sam's plan was to canvas the neighbors the next morning and question them about Eden 's car. The working-class neighborhood was fairly close-knit, full of porch-sitters with easy views through chain-link fences. Maybe someone had been sitting on a stoop and had recognized Eden from the old days; maybe they'd be able to recall a license. It was going to be humiliating, going door to door in search of Eden . Sam dreaded it, and yet he was flat out of any other ideas.
    Until three a.m . That's when he bolted upright in the spindle bed that his father had painted Superman-blue shortly after they had taken him in.
    Phone calls.
    He clung to the possibility until he dropped off to sleep, and in the morning, over waffles and O.J., he said to his parents, "Did Eden make any long-distance phone calls while she was here?"
    His mother, misinterpreting, said, "Well, yes. She would have used her calling card, normally , only there was some kind of problem with it. She said that she'd square up w ith us after we got the phone bill."
    "All right," he said, making a victory fist. "Now we're getting somewhere." It wasn't like Eden to be so careless; but then, the risk of a call being remembered was relatively small. "Has the bill come in?"
    "Yesterday." Picking up on his enthusiasm, his mother hurried over to the Formica counter and brought the unopened bill to him. "I haven't even—"
    Sam took his knife, still all buttery, and slid it under the flap. Heart hammering, he scanned the toll calls on it. There were half a dozen made to the same number—his mother's sister—and one to Martha's Vineyard .
    Sam punched in the number and reached someone at a gallery called the Flying Horses.
    He hung up. A faint glimmer of a smile, the first in twelve hours or so, hovered at the edges of his lips. He got up from the breakfast table and dropped a kiss on top of his mother's gray hair. "She didn't take off for Germany with it," he said. "That's something, at least."
    Next stop: Martha's Vineyard .

Chapter 3
     
    A fresh southwest wind was kicking up seas and slapping them against the sides of the ferry as it steamed through a fleet of sailboats scattered like daisy petals across the sound. Ahead lay Martha's Vineyard , blue-gray in the summer haze. Sam Steadman leaned on the starboard rail and squinted into the afternoon sun.
    Yeah. This is more like it.
    He had fled the cabin, which was crammed with August tourists and smelled like cheap food, for the open air of the upper deck. His work as a marine photographer had taken him aboard every conceivable type of vessel, from kayak to freighter, and always it was the same: the scent, the sight, the sound of the sea is what brought out the best in him. He took deep, long breaths of air, filling his lungs with its salty essence, and rued again the time he had to spend on shore.
    Sam considered it one of life's great ironies that he wasn't cut out for a full-time job at sea. The long hours, brutal conditions, and sheer terror of a fisherman's life were not for him. Merchant Marine? Too many hours belowdecks. Navy? Coast Guard? Too many times in jail for that. Nope. Chronicler of seamen, that was what suited hirn.
    He still remembered the day he held his first camera, an Instamatic, probably stolen, that at fourteen he'd bought for five bucks from a pal. The local paper had been sponsoring a cat photo contest, and even though Sam didn't have a cat, he knew where to find them: on the wharves, scrounging for rats and fish guts.
    The photo he submitted, of a white cat sleeping hammock-style in the folds of a fishing net, took first place. He won a gift certificate for fifty dollars at JC Penney