Silently, Rory put one arm around her, the other around Shelly, and led them away from the church toward the parking lot. For some reason, the light, warm weight of his arm across her shoulders threatened to make her cry all over again. She breathed through her mouth to keep the tears in check.

The events of the past few days had squelched her enthusiasm for telling him about Grace, yet she knew she still needed to fill him in on what she’d learned. Shelly was with them, though; once again, the timing wasn’t right. But Shelly was intuitive.

“I feel like walking home,” she said, somehow picking up on Daria’s need for time alone with Rory.

“Are you sure?” Daria asked. She didn’t think Shelly had yet come to terms with Father Macy’s death, and she was concerned about her.

“I’m sure,” Shelly said.

“I’m fine. I’ll see you at the Sea Shanty.”

Daria watched her walk away from them, then turned to Rory.

“Do you have your car here?”

“Uh-huh. Do you?”

“Yes. But…” She looked into his green eyes. He appeared to be studying her.

“I need to talk with you,” she said. “Can we take my car and go somewhere? I can bring you back here after.”

“Is this about Shelly again? About me researching” — “No,” she interrupted him.

“No. This is something else.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Where are you parked?”

She drove across the island to the sound, and they walked onto the pier where they had crabbed together a few weeks earlier. There were children on the pier this afternoon, crabbing, fishing, and threatening to push one another into the water. Daria and Rory walked past them to the pier’s end, where they took off their shoes and sat down in their good funeral clothes to dangle their legs above the water.

Daria was not sure how to begin.

“I never got to tell you how my visit went with the parents of the pilot,” she said.

“I wondered about that,” Rory said.

“But with Father Macy and everything, we haven’t really had a chance to talk.”

She looked into the green-brown water. A crab swam just below the surface, slipping sideways through the water.

“So?” Rory prompted.

“How did it go?”

She glanced at him, then looked back at the water.

“There’s no easy way to say this,” she said, trying to warn him about what was coming.

“Only the pilot’s father was there. I met with him at a little cafe he and his wife own. And as I talked with him, I realized that his wife—that the mother of the pilot—is Grace.”

For a moment, Rory’s face was impassive. Then he slid demy seemed to understand what she was saying and turned toward her.

“Grace?” he asked.

“Grace Martin?”

“That was my reaction, too,” Daria said.

“I still don’t understand. I still don’t quite know what’s going on. She may go by the name Martin, but her husband’s name is Fuller. Eddie Fuller.”

“Her ejc-husband, you mean,” Rory said.

She shook her head.

“He referred to his wife as Grace, and then I saw a picture of her on his desk. I didn’t let on that I knew her. I asked if he and his wife were separated, and he said no. They aren’t getting along, though. She blames him for” — “Wait a minute,” Rory said.

“Slow down, will you, please? Grace is separated. Maybe he just didn’t want to admit that to you.”

One of the roughhousing young boys on the pier ran into them, and Rory told him to knock it off. It was the first sign of impatience she’d seen in him, and she knew how disturbed he was by what she was telling him.

“That’s possible,” she said.

“But I think he was telling me the truth.

He said she’s living in the apartment above their garage, because she’s angry with him about their daughter’s”— ” The Grace I know doesn’t even have any children,” Rory interrupted her again.

Daria felt exasperated.

“Rory, I’m sorry, but I’m telling you, this is the same woman. He even said she had surgery not too long ago, although I didn’t ask what she’d had surgery for. And she did have at least one child. A daughter named Pamela, who was the pilot in the plane crash. And the reason she’s so angry with her husband is that he was the one who had encouraged Pamela to become a pilot. Grace never wanted her to” “Wait a minute,” Rory said again.

“Assuming you’re right, and Grace Fuller is Grace Martin, isn’t that a bit of a coincidence that I would end up meeting her when you had been so intimately involved in her daughter’s—in trying to save her daughter?”

“Yes, huge coincidence,” Daria agreed.

“And, I’m sorry, Rory, but it’s made me wonder if maybe it wasn’t a coincidence at all.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not sure what I’m saying,” Daria said. A windsurfer sailed so close to the pier that she could see the cleft in his chin.

“I haven’t been able to figure this out,” she said, “but it’s made me wonder about Grace’s interest in Shelly. Maybe it was a coincidence and now she’s just interested in Shelly because Shelly is… a substitute daughter, in a way. But let’s say it wasn’t a coincidence. That somehow she knows what Shelly did when we were trying to save her daughter, and she’s planning to get… I don’t know, revenge or something.” She knew it was an outlandish suggestion and heard the doubt in her own voice as she explained it to him. “Though, how she would know, when only Pete and I knew about it, is beyond me.”

“Well, I vote for the coincidence theory,” Rory said.

“The way I met her… on the beach… she’d been bitten by a fly… I just don’t see how that could be some sort of setup or plot on her part. But obviously, she lied to me about being separated, unless she considers living above the garage a separation. And she lied about not having kids.” He shook his head.

“No wonder she never wanted me to come down to Rodanthe.”

“Can you try to find out what’s going on?” she asked.

“I mean, can you make sure that she’s not … well, nuts? That she doesn’t have some wacko plot to hurt Shelly?”

“If anything, she seems to adore Shelly.”

“Everyone adores Shelly,” Daria said.

“But not every n one pummels her with personal questions and brings her jars of shells.”

Rory drew in a long breath, then nodded.

“I’m seeing her again tomorrow night,” he said.

“I’ll talk to her then.”

In an area where a huge percentage of the residents were tourists, it was amazing how quickly rumors flew among the locals. Daria first heard the rumblings on one of her construction jobs, the day after Father Macy’s funeral. She and Andy were installing cabinets in a kitchen, while George and Billy hung a ceiling fan in the adjacent dining room, when George started talking about the investigation. His brother was a cop, so he was privy to information others might not know.

“It was such a weird sort of accident,” George said from his perch on one of the ladders.

“I mean, does it make any sense to you guys? Here, Sean Macy’s been hang-gliding for a dozen years, maybe, and suddenly he crashes.”

“It was probably just a lapse in his concentration,” Daria said. She held the base cabinet tight against the wall, while Andy screwed it to a stud.

“That’s not what my brother thinks,” George said. He left Billy holding up the ceiling fan as he ticked off the facts on his fingertips.

“First of all, it was a competition, not some everyday flight. If there’s any time Sean would have been paying attention to what he was doing, it would be then. Second, the weather was perfect.

I mean, he would have to go out of his way to crash in that kind of weather. “

“So, what are you saying?” Billy asked.

“You think someone wanted to off him?”

“They considered that,” George said, helping Billy with the fan again.

“Maybe somebody didn’t like the penance Sean gave them after confession or something, and so they tampered with his hang glider.

But the police have gone over the hang glider with a fine-tooth comb, and it was in perfect working order. “

“What do they think happened, then?” Andy asked as he backed out of the base cabinet.

“That maybe he took that nosedive into the sand on purpose,” George said. He waited for the drama of his words to sink in.

“That’s nuts,” Andy said.

“Well, there’s more.” With the fan secure, George climbed down from the ladder. “My brother and a couple of other cops have been talking to some witnesses—experienced pilots who were there. It looked to them like an intentional stall.”

“Maybe it was part of his performance,” Andy said. “Maybe he was going to” -George interrupted him.

“That other priest at St. Esther’s. The old guy, Father Wayne? He told my brother he’d been worried about Sean lately. He said Father Macy had been withdrawn and upset. He thought Sean might have been screwing… Excuse me. There’s a lady present. He thought Sean might have broken his vow of celibacy.”

Daria was incensed. How far had this rumor spread? The man had been dead only a few days, and already his memory was tarnished.

“That’s all just speculation,” she said. “And it really bothers me to hear it. Why does everyone always have to look for the dirt? Sean Macy was a really good man and a good priest. He wouldn’t have” -She suddenly remembered Shelly’s prediction that the priest would kill himself, and an eerie sense of dread filled her chest.

“He wouldn’t have what?” George prompted her to finish her statement.

“I just wish you wouldn’t spread this kind of thing around until you have some facts to back it up.”

“Don’t listen, then, Miss Priss.”

George continued talking about Sean Macy and what the cops had or had not been able to uncover, but as Daria resumed her work on the cabinets, her thoughts were on Shelly. Shelly had always been unusual in her ability to see things others could not, but she’d never before displayed psychic powers. If Sean Macy had indeed killed himself, how had Shelly predicted it?