Read Online Maplecroft by Cherie Priest - Free Book Online

penny a pound for stray bits of wave- and sand-tumbled glass and shells from a barrel by the front door. These bits end up in decorative ponds and small aquariums, in water closets, and sometimes in jewelry, hair sticks, or other baubles . . . most often marketed to the tourists who visit the shores when the season is right.
    Among Matthew’s many minor duties was this one: He was obligated to keep the barrel brimming with attractive sea detritus.
    Often he could be spotted down on the rocks, either in bare feet or wearing soft, flat slippers. He moved between the boulders like a cat on a shelf, picking his way deftly, his eyes on the cracks where soaked sand had been washed by the tide, threading itself in thin white seams full of tiny treasures. To watch him, you’d swear he was a creature of the shore himself, moving from stone to sand to surf with such unwavering expertise.
    Just a child still, really. Not a man yet, though nearing that cusp where people hesitated to call him “boy” but wouldn’t yet call him “sir.”
    When his godmother summoned me, she did so without his knowledge. She asked it as a favor, offering to pay me in the freshest seafood she could barter. Dutifully I appeared in her shop, strung with its nets, its gleaming brass instruments both assembled and disassembled for restoration, and its barrels ofsalt, stones, shells, floaters, linen scraps for sail patches, and every other thing a coastal shop might carry.
    Mrs. Hamilton, stout of frame and white of hair, was frowning worriedly when I arrived.
    After greeting me she said, “He’s out there now, like always.” And she wrung her hands together.
    “Filling the barrel?” I asked, and glanced toward the door.
    There it was, and overflowing. Literally—its contents spilled into drifts and hillocks across the creaking wood floor. Mrs. Hamilton had deployed a bucket to address the surplus, but it too was brimming. Likewise the mugs and the saucers were piled to heaping. It looked for all the world like there must be some leak in the ceiling through which these button-sized sea notions dropped in an unending trickle.
    She told me, “Yes, that’s all he does now. It’s always been his favorite, you know—something he does when he’s bored, or taking a moment from working the till or stitching up nets.”
    I crooked my chin toward the water. “The whole town knows to look for him there, out on the bay.”
    “More now than ever. It’s strange,” she said, leaning forward and crossing her arms on the counter. “And I don’t like it.”
    Uncertain of what, precisely, she did not like, I indicated the collection at the barrel by the door. “But he’s doing a very fine job.”
    “Better than fine, or worse. I can scarcely get his attention for any other task. And I know,” she said with a shake of her head, beating me to my instinctive argument. “He’s a lad still, and lads behave oddly without any prompting. But this has gone on for some time, and it’s becoming more and more of a problem by the day.”
    I sighed and set my bag down on the counter beside her. “Perhaps you’d better begin at the beginning. What exactly ishe doing that worries you? Apart from overfilling the stock barrel, which I can see for myself.”
    She exhaled deeply and her chest sagged, squeezing an abundance of bosom forward, over her arms. “It began a month or two ago. First he was having a hard time with the nets—he wasn’t paying attention, and he was dropping stitches, tying them into the wrong kinds of knots. When he was finished with a net, it wouldn’t have held anything. It wouldn’t even spread for the throwing. I watched him work, and I tell you, his mind was elsewhere.”
    “Again,” I said, “a common complaint when it comes to young men.”
    “But you should’ve seen it—the look in his eyes:
There wasn’t one
. Thought it was in my imagination, I did, but no . . . I’m sure of that now. Over time it’s gone from a boyish