Prologue
In the years when her middle name was Trouble, Zee had a habit of stealing boats. Her father never suspected her of any wrong-doing. He let her run free in those early days after her mother’s death. He was busy being a pirate reenactor, an odd leap for a man who’d been a literary scholar all his life. But those were desperate times, and they were both weary from constantly carrying their loss, unable to put it down except in those brief moments when they could throw themselves into something beyond the reach of their memories.
In her fantasy world, the one where she could forgive herself for what happened that year, Zee liked to think that her father, Finch, would have been proud of her skills as a thief. In her wildest dreams, she pictured him joining her adventure, a huge leap for the professor, but not for the pirate he was quickly becoming.
She had a preference for speedboats. Anything that could do over thirty knots was fair game. There was little security back then, and most of the keys (if there were any) were hidden somewhere on the boats themselves, usually in the most obvious place imaginable.
The game was simple. She would pick a boat that looked fast and sleek, give herself exactly five minutes to break in and get the engine started, and head out of the harbor toward the ocean. Once she passed the confines of Salem, she would open up the engine and point the bow straight out toward Baker’s Island. Later that night she would return the stolen boat.
There was only one rule. She could never return a boat to the same mooring from which she had stolen it. It was a good rule, not just because it presented an additional challenge but also because it was practical. If she put the boat back on the same mooring, she would be much more likely to get caught. Everyone knows that the last thing any good thief should do is revisit the scene of the crime.
Usually Zee would abandon the boat at one of the public wharves that lined Salem’s waterfront. Often it was the one at the Willows, the first wharf you came to when you entered the harbor. But when the cops started looking for her, she began to leave the boats in other, less obvious places. Sometimes she would jump someone else’s mooring. Or she would leave a boat in one of the slips at Derby Wharf, which made it easy to get away, since she lived so close.
Only one time did she mess up and misjudge the fuel level. She was all the way up by Singing Beach in Manchester when the engine died. At first she didn’t believe she had run out of gas. But when she checked the fuel again, her mistake was clear. Fighting the panic that was beginning to overtake her, she tried to come up with a plan. She could easily swim to shore, but if she did, the boat would either drift out to sea or smash against the rocks. For the first time, she was afraid of getting caught. In a strange way, she was grateful that there were no other boats around, no one she could signal for help. Not knowing what else to do, she let the boat drift.
She looked up at the moonless sky, the stars brighter than she had ever seen them, their reflections dissolving in the water around her like an effervescent medicine that seemed to dissolve her panic as well. Here, floating along with the current, staring up at the heavens, she knew that everything would be all right.
When she looked back down at the horizon to get her bearings, she found she had drifted toward shore. A dark outline of something appeared in her peripheral vision, and, when she turned to face it, a wharf came into focus and, on the hill beyond it, a darkened house. She grabbed an oar and began to steer the boat in toward shore, catching the onsweep of tide that propelled it broadside toward the wharf. She grabbed the bowline and jumped, slipping and twisting her ankle a little but keeping the boat from colliding with the wharf. She tied up, securing bow and stern, and scrambled over the rocks to the beach. Then she made her way up the road toward the train station, limping a bit from her aching ankle but not really too bad, all things considered.