Margaret thought she heard music; a quiet theme. A flute perhaps, or a recorder. And under it, a low tone, a drone-one note, but not discordant. Comforting, somehow; welcoming-two notes in harmony. She stood on the expansive wooden porch, weathered now by decades of neglect, and listened. But the melody had faded. In its place was only the surging sea and the cackling wind, which banged shutters and whipped her cotton coat around her bare legs.

She lifted her face to the wind and stared into it. The elements were not fearsome to her. They would be companion to her and she would heal here. In the distance, towards the point, Margaret saw a lone figure also gazing out to sea. Intent, like herself. The person, a woman, Margaret presumed because a filmy white shawl was wrapped loosely about her, looked almost ghost-like in the fading light. Margaret looked at her for several seconds, but the woman did not move.

She fumbled in her purse for the key the realtor had given her and unlocked the front door. She entered and stood in the high ceilinged foyer, remembering. To her right was the dark oak deacons bench where she and her childhood friends plunked down their buckets of crabs and rocks collected along the sea front. Above it hung the imposing gilt-edged mirror with the long crack snaking along the bottom, still there after all these years. Behind her was the wooden coat tree where all manner of jackets, sun hats, and towels were flung.

The place seemed bigger somehow than when she was a child and this surprised her. Normally when one returns, things are smaller, rooms are shrunken, garden patches minimal, even people more diminished. That wasn't happening now. And Margaret stood and wondered.

The house had not been rented out for the past two summers the very peevish realtor had said when she finally located Margaret in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, and what, pray tell, did Margaret plan on doing with the place now that her father had been dead and gone for more than a year? If she wanted to sell it, well it needed work, not the least of which was a good paint job, inside and out, but it's not unmarketable, far from it; if she wanted to sell it, it was prime waterfront property and yes, Brown & Brown would be pleased to broker it for her; a number of potential buyers had already expressed interest in the old place, but she really ought to act fast, papers had to be signed, they couldn't proceed, not legally, without Margaret's signature, but faxing was okay and did Margaret want Brown & Brown to fax the papers up to Fredericton?

All of this was told to Margaret as she sat in her darkened kitchen in her home in Fredericton, a home that death had invaded and that Robin and Aislin and God had left.

"I'll come," she said quietly into the receiver.

"You'll come?"

"I'll come. I'll live there."

"You'll live here?"

"I'll live there."

"Well then," said the realtor.

Margaret flicked on the light switch and two bulbs in the multi-bulbed chandelier flickered dusky light into the hall.

She left her two suitcases by the stairs and walked into the spacious and at one time gracious living room. It was sparsely furnished now and what furniture was there was shrouded in white drop cloths, every surface laid with a fine ashen sheen. She ran a finger along the wooden mantle, and dust smudged the air around it like smoke.

The feeling that the house had grown, was growing still, made her proceed carefully, cautiously. Almost she could hear it expanding about her, a barren tomb about to break open.

Margaret forced her mind to return to a safe time when clusters of children chased through the rooms; her friends-Valerie, Donna, Jane, Bradley and Norma Ann clad in bathing suits and plastic flip-flops traipsing into the kitchen, her mother scooping out ice cream cones and warning them not to spill a drop, not one drop, in the living room. That was the place she remembered, not this musty construction that creaked in the wind like an old woman. Perhaps coming here was a mistake, one of those impromptu, spontaneous decisions that Margaret was so famous for.

"Honey, I'm home," she called into the silence.

The edges of the room took her voice and threw it back at her, mocking her. The tall bay windows, the hardwood floors, the chandeliers, the fire place which easily held five foot logs made Margaret suddenly angry that her father had pronounced it "defiled," making, according to her father, further habitation of it by Ochs impossible.

She would be the first Ochs to live here for twenty-five years. But then, she wasn't really an Ochs. Not anymore. Her last name was now Collinwood. It was a softer name and it suited her better.

No matter what happened between her and Robin she would never go back to being an Ochs. Robin had given her his name and she had no intention of giving it back.

The thing that had defiled this house was known in the family only as "The Tragedy," a black vertical mark in the horizontal line that was their lives. Time was measured henceforth in terms of it.

A year after The Tragedy we did thus and such.

Three Christmases after The Tragedy, didn't we go here or there?

Hannah died, when was it? Two years after The Tragedy. Poor thing. Just couldn't cope.

After "The Tragedy," her father had enlisted the agency of Brown & Brown in Bangor, Maine, to rent the house to sun-seeking, beach combing tourists. The rent money from the summer covered upkeep during the winter. Why her father hadn't sold the place years ago was beyond anyone's guess.

Margaret walked through the dining room and entered the kitchen. The wood stove stood in the center of the north wall, just like she remembered; and to its left a range, modern when Margaret was a girl with its four burners and large capacity easy-clean oven. Now it was rickety and age-spotted. A white fridge stood beside it-the kind with a small inside freezer that holds, at most, two gray metal ice cube trays and a cardboard rectangle of ice cream. And there was the table, oak and heavy standing firm on thick legs. This was the place where every evening, she watched her older sister, face scrunched into concentration writing in her school books; the windows behind dark with the night, the sea foaming.

There were even a few dishes in the cupboards, Margaret noted. She took one down. This heavy, white crockery was not her mother's. The dishes of her childhood were a pale cream with fragile blue flowers around the rims. She put the saucer in the sink and wandered through the rest of the downstairs. The bathroom seemed to be working, the taps ran clear. The toilet flushed. A solid house it was, she thought. She would stay here. She had no illusions about "fixing the placrac of the sort found in every craft store from Coffins Reach to Fredericton. No, she would let the house stay pretty much the way it was, solid and worn. It, like her, needed rest, not some hasty swathing in printed fabric.

She carried her suitcases up the stairs and stopped at the large landing which faced the sea. This room, hallway really, would serve nicely as her studio, she thought. The light was good. She undid the latch on the window and with a few heavy shoves, managed to push it part way up. Down in front of her the ocean was dense and murky in the September half-light, the expanse of ground leading to the sea overgrown with fingers of pale grass and wind wifts of sand against rock.

Her mother kept a rock garden there, Margaret remembered, and would spend long hours tending wild flowers, forcing them to grow in the "right places," huddled against rocks and shells that she would gather by the apron-full along the beach. But the rocks rebelled, the flowers would not be tamed. Every year her creations were destroyed by winter's tides and storms.

To her right, hidden now by the lay of the land, was the small bungalow where Bradley and his mother lived. Her friend Bradley, or rather her sister's friend Bradley was happily included in all their childish games. She leaned her head out of the window and looked up. It was still there, directly above her, the underside of the small porch, or widow's walk as it was called in these old houses, the place where wives in long dresses and wool capes would look out at the sea for the tall sailing ships that would bring their husbands home, the place from which her sister fell to her death. Her father had forbidden them to go out there. It's dangerous, unsafe, he would proclaim. "Let me fix it first." But he never did. Margaret had stayed off the fragile porch, but not Norma Ann. It was always her favorite place, a place for playing with Barbie dolls; and as she grew, a place for writing in her diaries and listening to her transistor radio. Margaret forced her gaze away from the porch and looked instead far up the point to the north. The little cabin was still there, she noted, hardly larger than a boathouse and constructed of old barn boards. It was home to a bachelor named Rusty MacGregor when she was young; it looked abandoned now, an isolated shell.

The woman was still there, Margaret noticed-standing motionless near the water line, the long ends of her gossamer shawl billowing around her, becoming wet with sea water as the tide surged. Margaret watched her. For a long time she watched the woman. How long would she stand there, still as stone? Margaret waited-five minutes, seven minutes, ten minutes-but the woman did not move. It became a grade school staring game. Who will blink first? Who will be the first to burst out giggling?

In the end, Margaret lost. It was the phone that jangled her to reality. Margaret finally located the source of the sound. Downstairs, in the kitchen, on the sideboard was the only phone in the house, a black one with a dial. Margaret answered it on the sixth ring.

"Well, hello there! I was just about to hang up thinking maybe you hadn't gotten there yet." It was the realtor from Brown & Brown. Margaret didn't even know her name-Maizie or Mavis, something like that. She never gave it when she called. She was one of those people who just assumed you knew who she was.

"I just got in."

"Well, I'm glad. As you can tell, we turned on the electricity and hooked up the phone for you. The number's printed right there on the dial for you." "Thank you."

"We also had the place cleaned up, about, oh a month or so ago, so you should find it in not too bad shape-"

"Thank you," Margaret said again.

"-top to bottom. And now that we know where to send the bill, we'll get it over to you, we tried sending it to your uncles, but they refused to pay, can you imagine? It's not like they don't have the money, none of them, but I'm happy that we were finally able to locate you."

Her uncles. Margaret had been out of touch with this side of her family for such a long, long time. Uncles, aunts, cousins, second cousins once and twice removed, cousins of cousins, nieces, nephews, nephews of nephews; the fabric of the family Ochs, interwoven like wool along the Maine coastline. "Fine," was all she said.

"You should be aware, Margaret dear, that no matter what your uncles say, you, my dear, have clear and secure title to that house, so don't let any of them push you around or come hounding you for part of the profits from the sale, let me know when you want to start the paperwork. I had a potential buyer walk in yesterday, right off the street, Margaret, right off the street! We really should get moving on this, summer's almost over, dear."

Dear? Margaret had never even met this woman.

"....But before you list the place it might be a wise idea to get a set of dead bolt locks on both doors."

Margaret ran her fingers through her short hair. "What's wrong with the locks?"

"Oh, they're fine, Margaret dear, but they're the very same locks that have been on the place for the last thirty years, and what with summer renters and such, one can't be too careful, especially now that we're beginning to get all the riffraff, antique hunters and the like from Boston and New York coming through here all summer long."

After she hung up, Margaret sighed and went out to her car. She looked toward the point, but the woman had finally gone.

The first two things she carted in from her car were her portable CD player and her coffee maker, which she took straight to the kitchen. She placed a Sarah McLachlan in the CD player, filled her coffee maker with bottles of Poland Spring Water left over from her trip, and scooped in a generous amount of dark roast. Coffee was one of Margaret's vices. "They're going to have coffee in heaven," was her pronouncement to anyone who commented on her addiction to the bean.

Five more loads from the car and she was finished. Just in time, she thought to herself, gazing at the rain-laden sky. There was a certain relief when she had shut and locked the front door for the last time. A good number of the boxes she had brought with her contained art supplies. Most of her finished art work she had left in Fredericton with her friend Joyce. The last time she had seen Joyce the two of them had sat together in Joyce's little living room on George Street sipping red wine from slender glasses. Margaret had stood in the front window, her back to her friend. A brown paper cup from a Tim Hortons coffee shop skipped along the sidewalk in the wind.

"I have to leave, Joyce. I have to get out of here. I have to find things. I have to go."

"I think you're making a mistake. But I'll stand by you. You know I will," Joyce had said.

Now, Margaret poured fresh coffee into a white ceramic mug, crack-lined but clean enough, and drank it black while she hummed along to her CD. Then she swept the floor with an ancient but serviceable broom she found next to the back door. Her own place. This wouldn't be so bad.

Robin would like it here, she thought. He liked old houses and rocky beaches and the smell of the sea. He liked sail boats and sand castles and watching sea birds up close. Gentle, sweet, laughing Robin. He, of all people, didn't deserve what had happened.

She stopped, feeling suddenly very weary. She poured herself a second cup of coffee and sat for several minutes until the CD stopped and the world fell silent.