The Mortar

I. The Match

Daniel Reyes was thirty-four, an actuary in Chicago, and good at calculating the odds of things going wrong. That was why he never understood how he missed this one.

Her name was Callie Marsh. Her profile had four photos: a woman laughing on a dock, a woman holding a jar of honey, a woman in a wool sweater with salt in her hair, and a woman looking straight into the lens like she already knew him. Her bio said: Maine girl. Beekeeper. Looking for someone who isn’t afraid of hard work or soft evenings.

They messaged for six weeks. She was funny and a little old-fashioned, and she asked questions nobody asked anymore. What did your father’s hands look like? What’s the last thing that made you cry? Daniel, who hadn’t answered a question like that honestly in a decade, told her the truth. Then he told her more.

In late September she wrote: My family has an island. Harrow’s Rest. The orchards are at peak and the whole house is making cider. Come for a long weekend. Let me show you where I’m from.

He should have felt the warning in his chest. He felt a door opening instead.

“Is it safe?” his sister Marguerite asked on the phone. “You’ve never met her.”

“I’ve met her. On video. Four times.”

“That’s not meeting.”

“Text me the second I land,” she said.

He promised he would. He didn’t know that promise would be the last thing he ever broke.

II. The Crossing

The ferry to Harrow’s Rest was not a ferry. It was a weathered lobster boat called the Patience, run by a man with a gray beard and eyes that never settled on Daniel’s face. He took Daniel’s duffel bag and the bottle of wine he’d bought at the airport and set them in the stern like cargo.

“First time out?” the captain said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Mm.” The captain looked at the water. “Pretty out there this time of year.”

Callie was waiting on the dock when they arrived. She was better in person than in the photographs, which almost never happens. She had a gap in her front teeth and a scar through one eyebrow, and she ran down the planks and kissed him before he could say a word. He tasted woodsmoke and apples.

“You came,” she said, as if she hadn’t been sure.

Behind her, on the rise above the landing, stood a long gray farmhouse with smoke curling from three chimneys. Women were gathered on the porch. There were nine or ten of them, ranging from maybe twenty to somewhere in their late thirties, all dressed in wool and denim, all watching him with the polite stillness of people waiting for a train.

“My sisters,” Callie said. “And cousins. And aunts, kind of. It’s a long story. It’s a house of women, always has been. Don’t be nervous.”

“Where are the men?”

She smiled. “Mainland. We don’t keep them.”

He laughed because he thought it was a joke.

The Patience was already pulling away. Daniel turned to wave, and the captain, standing at the wheel, did not wave back. He only watched the island, with a look Daniel would remember for the rest of his short life. It wasn’t cruelty. It was shame.

III. The Welcome

The first evening was the best of his life, and that was what made it so cruel.

They fed him roast lamb and potatoes crusted in salt. They poured cider from stone jugs, dry and bright and stronger than it tasted. A woman named Odette, tall and silver-streaked at the temples, told stories about storms. A younger woman named Wren, maybe twenty-three, with a nervous laugh, kept refilling his cup and avoiding his eyes. Callie sat beside him with her hand on his knee beneath the table.

“I haven’t felt this welcome anywhere,” he said.

“That’s the idea,” said Odette.

Somewhere past nine his limbs went heavy and warm. He remembered Callie guiding him up a staircase. He remembered a quilt that smelled of lavender. He remembered, distantly, his phone buzzing on the nightstand, and thinking: Marguerite. I have to text her.

He did not.

IV. The Morning

He woke to gray light and the sound of a rooster. His head felt packed with wet sand. The nightstand was bare.

His phone was gone. So was his duffel bag, and so was his watch. The door wasn’t locked, which struck him as strange until he looked out the window and understood. There was nowhere to go. Water on every side, flat and cold and endless, and the dock empty of boats.

Callie was in the kitchen when he came down, stirring oatmeal as if nothing had changed.

“Where’s my phone?”

“Somewhere safe.” She didn’t turn around. “Eat something. You’ll need it. There’s a lot to do today.”

“I want to call my sister. I want to go home.”

Now she turned, and her face was not unkind. That was the worst part. It was gentle, almost sorrowful, the face of a nurse delivering a diagnosis.

“I know,” she said. “They all say that. It’s okay to be scared, Daniel. But I need you to hear me clearly, because it’ll go easier if you do. You’re not going home. Nobody leaves Harrow’s Rest. There’s work, and you’re going to do it. If you do it well, you’ll have a good few months. Good food, a warm bed, people who care about you. I do care about you. That part wasn’t a lie.”

“Months,” Daniel said. His mouth was dry. “Then what?”

Callie looked at the oatmeal.

“Then the winter comes,” she said. “And we finish the wall.”

V. The Work

They put a blade in his hands before breakfast was over, and for three weeks he did the labor of six men.

He split cordwood until his palms bled through the calluses. He hauled seaweed up the cliff path in wicker baskets to feed the garden beds. He mended fences, dug drainage ditches, scraped the hulls of two dinghies that were always chained and padlocked. Most of all, he quarried granite from the north shore with a sledge and iron wedges, and dragged the blocks on a wooden sledge down to the sea.

The sea was where the wall was.

It ran along the southern edge of the island, a curving rampart of fitted stone fifteen feet high and a quarter mile long, built to hold back the winter surf. It was the most impressive thing he had ever seen made by hands. Looking at it, he felt something close to awe, and under the awe, slow and cold, a feeling that hadn’t earned its name yet.

“Who built it?” he asked Odette once.

“Everyone who came before you,” she said.

He noticed small things. The women never raised their voices. They never hurried. Every one of them carried a knife at her belt, even in the kitchen, and when Daniel looked too long at the dinghies, a hand would drift to the handle without anyone seeming to notice.

He noticed the graveyard on the hill, too. It held no headstones, only flat slate markers set in tidy rows, each carved with a first name and a single year. Elias, 1894. Thomas, 1931. Raymond, 1967. Curtis, 1988. Miguel, 2009. Brandon, 2023.

One for every year. One for every autumn.

His chest tightened until he couldn’t breathe, and he leaned over the slate that said Brandon and vomited into the grass.

VI. The Journal

He tried to run on the nineteenth night.

He had been planning it for a week. He’d been hoarding bread and a hatchet head, and he’d learned the guard rotation, if you could call it that. Someone always sat awake on the porch with a shotgun across her lap, wrapped in a blanket, knitting. They took turns. They never seemed bored.

He planned to go out through the root cellar, cross the orchard, and cut one of the dinghy chains with the hatchet. In the dark he’d row west and keep rowing until a light appeared.

In the barn, searching for a crowbar, he found the journal.

It was wrapped in oilcloth and pushed behind a rafter, the pages swollen and brown. The handwriting was a man’s, small and desperate. The cover bore a name: Curtis Webb. Boston. 1988.

He read it by the beam of a stolen flashlight, hands shaking.

Day 3. They are very kind and I am afraid of them.

Day 31. I found the graves. I counted. There are 94.

Day 60. I asked Marguerite (not the Marguerite I know; there’s one in every generation, the names recur) why. She said the island takes a tithe. She said it has always been this way. The first women came here in 1731, running from something, and they made a bargain with the place, and the bargain is that the island keeps them safe if it is fed. She said they hate it. She said they love it more. She said she doesn’t remember what the world was like outside, and she didn’t seem to want to.

Day 88. I tried the boat. Odette caught me before I cleared the cove. She didn’t hurt me. She said, “You’ll try the water, they all do. The water won’t have you either.”

Day 102. I think I understand what the wall is for.

The last entry was dated November 14, 1988. It was only two lines, in a hand so shaky it barely held the shape of letters.

They’re coming for me tomorrow. The mortar has to be wet. Tell my mother I’m sorry I didn’t call.

Daniel read it three times. Then he understood the thing he had been looking at for nineteen days: the great curved rampart, fifteen feet of fitted stone, growing a little longer and a little taller every winter. And why the women never worried about winter.

Someone has to be the mortar.

VII. Wren

He went out through the cellar anyway.

He got as far as the orchard. Frost lay silver on the grass, and the apple trees stood heavy with fruit nobody would pick in time. He ran in a crouch, hatchet in his fist, tasting iron in his throat.

“Daniel.”

Wren stood between the trees, hands empty. She wasn’t holding a knife, and she wasn’t calling out.

“Please,” he whispered. “Please. You don’t have to be like them.”

“I know.” Her voice cracked. “I’m twenty-six. I was born here. My mother’s in the east row, 2011. She tried to take me away. They didn’t kill me because I was little.” She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. “I can’t leave. I wouldn’t know how. And if I helped you, they’d put me in the wall beside you.”

“Then tell me where the key is.”

She looked at him a long moment. Then she took a small brass key from her pocket and pressed it into his palm.

“It’s the third dinghy,” she said. “The one painted green. The tide turns at four. Go left around the point, not right. The current’s against you on the right.” She swallowed. “Don’t look back. If you look back you’ll stop.”

He kissed her forehead. It was the only gratitude he had left. Then he ran.

VIII. The Water

The green dinghy slid off its rocks with a sound like a held breath finally let go. The oars were heavy and his hands were raw, but fear is a better engine than any he had ever owned. He pulled until his shoulders burned, cleared the point, turned left, and felt the current take him.

The island shrank behind him, a black hump with a few lit windows. The stars were enormous. For the first time in nineteen days he felt something he’d forgotten the weight of.

Hope.

An hour passed, or two. His arms trembled. The wind picked up, and then, far to the south, a light blinked. A small yellow light low on the water, rising and falling with the swell.

A boat.

He stood in the dinghy and screamed. He waved his shirt over his head. The light turned toward him. It grew, and the shape resolved: a weathered hull, a wheelhouse, a name painted on the bow in peeling white.

Patience.

Daniel stopped waving.

The lobster boat slid alongside him, engine rumbling. The captain stood at the wheel with the gray beard and the eyes that never settled on faces. He looked down at Daniel for a long moment, and in the light of the wheelhouse lamp, Daniel saw that the old man was crying.

“I’m sorry, son,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Please,” Daniel said. “You know what they do.”

“I know.” The captain’s voice was barely a whisper. “My daughter’s out there. She was eight when they took her from me, and she’s thirty now. If I don’t bring back what they send me for, they’ll hurt her. Every year I tell myself it’s the last. Every year there’s another.” He reached down with a boat hook. “I’m sorry. God forgive me, I’m sorry.”

The hook caught the gunwale. The dinghy swung toward the larger boat. Daniel could have jumped into the black water, but the water was thirty-eight degrees and the island was only a few miles away, and he knew, in a cold flash of actuarial clarity, exactly how that calculation ended.

He sat down in the dinghy and put his face in his hands.

IX. The Wall

They didn’t beat him. He had expected that. Odette met them at the dock at dawn, wrapped in a gray shawl, and simply took his arm.

“You tried,” she said. “That’s good. It means you have a spine. The ones who don’t try are harder.”

“Callie,” Daniel said, searching the row of faces. “Callie, please.”

She stood at the back, eyes red-rimmed. She didn’t look away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I meant what I said. I did care for you. I still do. That doesn’t change what we are.”

“What are you?”

“Daughters,” said Odette. “Caretakers. We keep the island fed, and the island keeps us alive. It has never once been cruel to us. It asks for only one thing, once a year.”

“That’s murder.”

“It’s a tithe.” Odette’s voice was gentle, almost weary. “Every one of us has been to the wall. Every one of us has stood where you’re standing, wondering whether the world would be kinder to us than we are to it. It never was. Not once.”

They walked him up the cliff path in the first pale light. The women formed two lines, and he realized there were more than he had counted. There were thirty at least, women of every age down to a girl of nine or ten who clung to Wren’s skirt and didn’t know where to look. Nobody spoke. The only sounds were the surf and the wind and the crunch of gravel.

At the base of the great wall, a gap waited in the final course of stone, a vertical slot about the width of a man’s shoulders, open to the sky. A lime-and-sand mortar steamed in a wooden trough beside it. A mason’s trowel lay on a block.

Daniel did not fight. That was what haunted Wren afterward, in the years she lived. He did not struggle or beg. He looked once at the sea, which was beginning to turn pink at the edge, and once at the sky, and he asked only one thing.

“My sister. Marguerite Reyes, in Evanston. She’ll be looking for me.”

“Nobody has ever found anyone,” Odette said, and it was not a threat. It was an apology.

“Tell her,” Daniel said, “that I called. I tried to call.”

Callie stepped forward and took his face between her hands. She kissed him once on the mouth. Her tears were warm on his cheeks.

“Close your eyes,” she said.

He did.

The women of Harrow’s Rest set the last stones of the season by the time the sun cleared the water. Anyone passing in a boat would have seen only a long gray wall, newly pointed and handsome, rising above the surf. They would not have seen what it held, or heard what it said. Walls don’t speak. That is what makes them such good keepers of secrets.

X. The Tithe

Winter came hard that year. The storms rolled in off the Atlantic and broke against the south rampart and did no damage at all. The women stayed warm. They told stories and ate stored apples, and in the evenings they sang low songs older than any of them could trace.

On the first night of spring, Callie Marsh sat alone in the lamplit kitchen with a cracked tablet balanced on her knees. She had a new profile to build, and she approached it the way a farmer approaches a field.

She selected the photograph of herself laughing on the dock. She picked the one with the honey jar. She wrote the bio the way she always did, in the voice of someone who wants nothing but a good heart:

Maine girl. Beekeeper. Looking for someone who isn’t afraid of hard work or soft evenings.

Her thumb hovered. Out the window, past the orchard and the hill of slate markers, the sea lay quiet under a thin moon, and the long gray wall curved along the water like an arm.

She was crying again. She always did, this part.

She pressed Publish.

Seven hundred miles away, in a small Ohio apartment, a lonely man’s phone chimed with a new match.