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country to get into. I don’t want my hang-­ups to be the cause of her missing something I know she wants. So I told her Orono wasn’t an option.”
    Maggie studied McCabe in silence. “What does Kyra think about all this?” she finally asked.
    McCabe smiled. A thin bitter smile. “These days she thinks I’m an asshole pretty much all around.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Kyra left me. Nearly two months ago. She didn’t want to hang around with a cop either.”
    Maggie signaled Max and asked her to bring her a beer. A Geary’s HSA. She had a feeling that this was going to be a long afternoon.

 
    Chapter 4
    Whitby Island, Maine
    June 1904
    W H A T A I M É E H A T E D most about dying was that she would never see her children grow up. Never see them fall in love. Or marry and have children of their own. Charlotte, the eldest, at eight. So bright and bossy. Always telling the others what to do. Always in charge. Like her father in that regard. Young Teddy, rambunctious and noisy at five. And the baby, Annabelle, not yet three, named for Aimée’s English mother.
    The children’s lovely pink faces floated above her. They seemed so close, so clear. She reached out a hand and stroked Teddy’s cheek. Felt its softness against her palm. Teddy. The one she loved most of all though she could never breathe a word of it. Not to Edward or anyone else. But Teddy had always been her favorite. So full of life. So eager. So naughty. So beautiful. There was nothing of Edward in his face. It was all a boyish version of her own. Teddy smiled down at her. “Bonjour, Maman,” he said in his sweet soprano. She reached up to pull him closer, but as suddenly as he had appeared, he was gone. She felt tears warming the coldness of her cheek at the thought of never seeing Teddy or the girls again. Never seeing them grow up was too awful to bear. Still, it would be so easy now to simply succumb to the pull of night.
    Through the spreading veil of darkness, she heard the crows circling above her again. Quite close now. They must have sensed her time was growing short. “Be patient mes amis,” she whispered through drying lips. “Luncheon will be served quite soon.”
    She saw the children again, walking away from her across a field filled with yellow flowers. A woman Aimée didn’t recognize held Teddy and little Annabelle’s hands on either side. Who was this woman leading her children away? A maid? No. Not a maid. Edward’s next wife? Perhaps. Charlotte, in a gauzy white dress and a brimmed straw hat, skipped ahead of the others. Suddenly Teddy wrenched his hand from the woman’s. He turned and began running back toward Aimée.
    “Maman, Maman,” he shrieked through his tears. “Maman, no! Don’t go! Please don’t go!”
    Aimée opened her arms and waited for Teddy to leap into them. Bury himself against her bosom and fill her face with kisses.
    The woman was on him in a flash. Catching him. Lifting him. “You are never to do that again,” she scolded. “You will get lost and die.”
    Teddy reached one arm toward Aimée. “Maman, Maman,” he cried, “please come back!”
    “Your mother is dead,” the woman said in a voice too harsh for such a message. “She’s never coming back!”
    Aimée wanted desperately to rise and run after them. But her legs wouldn’t move, and the harder she tried, the farther away the children seemed to be. Finally, all of them, her three children and the woman who was taking them from her, were nothing but specks on a dark horizon. And then not even specks. The field of yellow flowers faded.
    T H E S O U N D O F men’s voices roused Aimée from her reverie. They seemed to be real, not just a dream, and were coming from the ocean.
    She opened one eye and saw the dim outline of a fishing boat. Of course. St. Peter the fisherman, who, in the words of the Negro spiritual, must be “Comin’ for to carry me home.”
    Or maybe it was Jesus Himself come to take her in his arms and carry her