We arrived on a Sunday morning. On any other day of the week, the islanders would have been lobstering, and I would have been spared the dubious welcome I got as our ferry nosed into port.

I stood at the rail and watched a passel of big kids clustered on the end of an old black wharf that sagged and tilted with age and effort. They wore wet cut-offs and T-shirts and were a bit blue from an ocean that would still be cold in August but was truly frigid on that June Sunday.

All around them, yachts on moorings drizzled their reflections onto the sea. Many were motorboats, but there were a few sailboats, too, most of them white, with names and home ports painted across their sterns. The Commodore out of Jekyll Island. Poseidon from Myrtle Beach. Leviathan from Sag Harbor.

Just beyond the old wharf where the kids perched, a newer marina with a fueling station reached out into the harbor, smaller boats tucked into slips all along it. Whalers, mostly. A couple of Starcraft. Boats for puttering around the bays and inlets. Nothing meant for big water.

Still farther down the shore, a dozen brawny lobster boats in carnival colors rode their own moorings near a fish pier.

“Hey, New York!” someone yelled. One of the kids. A girl, maybe thirteen.

She was staring straight at me, so I reckoned she thought I was a New Yorker. Or perhaps that was just her way of saying stranger.

I didn’t know what she wanted, so I didn’t know how to respond except to raise a flat hand, palm out, which could have meant either hello or stop.

In reply, she launched herself off her perch, high into the air, wrapped her arms around her tucked legs, and cannonballed into the sea.

Her splash reached a gleaming motorboat anchored nearby. It was a cabin cruiser, big enough to motor down to Boston in a single day. A woman sitting in the stern with a coffee cup and a newspaper leaped to her feet, shrieking, and most of the kids laughed.

I watched as the girl climbed back up a ladder fixed to the wharf.

Her smirk was for the woman in the cruiser. And for me, too.

I hadn’t even set foot on the island yet, and I already knew I wasn’t welcome.

“Pay no attention to Murdock,” said a man who’d suddenly appeared at the rail alongside me in old jeans and a canvas jacket, wild white hair, skin like tree bark. “She’s a show-off.”

I squinted up at him. “Murdock?”

“It means sea, protector of the sea, sea warrior. Take your pick. Her father chose it for sea warrior. He was counting on a boy. But he stuck with the name when she showed up instead.”

We both pondered that as the deckhands below us tied the ferry to its berth with ropes as thick as my arm.

“You here for the summer?” He dropped all of his caboose r’s—the ones at the ends of his words—so here came out he-yah and summer came out summah.

“Here for good,” I replied. “My mother and I.”

I could see questions in his eyes, but he didn’t ask them. Perhaps he could see the answers in mine.

“I’m Lucretia,” I said, holding out my hand, which he took after a thoughtful moment.

“Lucretia. Unusual.”

“I was named for a warrior, too. A Quaker warrior.”

He lifted his brows. “Now, there’s an oxymoron. I thought Quakers were peaceful folks.”

The oxymoron made me smile. I liked a well-schooled tongue.

“Lots of ways to fight,” I said.

He nodded. “Ayuh. That’s so. I’m Big Seb Kelly. I run the boatyard over there.” The there came out in two syllables: they-ah. He nodded toward a cluster of outbuildings whose shingles had curled and darkened in the salt air.

“You’re not that big,” I said, measuring him with my eyes.

He smiled in a way that made my heart hurt. “My son was much bigger, but he was called Little Seb.”

I understood that dark smile. His son was gone.

He gazed again at the kids on the old wharf, all of whom were now doing cannonballs, to the consternation of the woman in the cruiser.

I watched as she retreated into the cabin. “You know all those kids?”

“Every one of them. Some better than others.” He peered at them as they climbed the ladder. “The sea warrior is my granddaughter. My son’s girl.”

Which meant that she had lost her father when Big Seb had lost his son.

In an instant—in a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of an instant—I felt the distance between Murdock and me shrink to nothing.

“And that one there”—he pointed—“the tall one, second fella from the top. That’s my grandson. My daughter’s son.”

The boy on the ladder below Murdock was fit, like a leopard is fit, as if he’d been poured into his skin. Lots of wild hair, like his grandpa.

“Is he a Seb, too?”

“Ayah, he is.” Big Seb waggled his head. “And no, he ain’t.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but I left it alone. “I’ve never known a Murdock before. Does she have a nickname?”

He shrugged. “You can call her Murdy, but I wouldn’t stand too close if you do.”

I watched as she leaped high into the air again, her arms flung out like wings, before dropping into the sea with another mighty splash.

He sighed. “They do it to annoy the summer people, like that lady on the boat.”

“Seems mean.”

He shrugged. “They give what they get, those kids. People come here, treat them like rats. Ought not to do that.”

I couldn’t argue with him there. “What’s that old wharf for, besides cannonballs?”

It seemed lonely. Abandoned.

“Used to be our only wharf, back when the ferry was just a small one. Back before we had so many visitors. And now the summer folks want to tear it down. They say to make room for more of their moorings. But what they really want is to drive away the rats.”

“Just because they splash a bit on Sundays?”

He looked away. “A time or two, someone has thrown a stone from the end of that wharf. Done some damage to a couple of them big yachts. But I’m not saying those kids were the ones did it. You ask me, it coulda been the summer kids, just as likely. They get bored out here, all season. Make their own mischief.”

“But the island kids get blamed?”

“Ayuh.” He nodded. “A horse gets loose down at the riding stables, it’s a townie did it. A skiff drifts away from the sailing school, a townie’s to blame. It rains on someone’s picnic, musta been one of ours behind it.”

One of ours.

I had thought Big Seb was trying to welcome me to the island. Now I wasn’t so sure. “Are you saying that the summer kids did all that?”

“Hard tellin’ not knowin’. But I’ve seen some things that make me wonder.”

“What kind of things?”

He paused. “You ever heard of a Kittery Kite?”

I shook my head.

“It’s a twenty-five-foot gaff-rigged sloop. Wooden hull. A fine boat, built right. Not so many of them ever made, and every one by hand.” He made a noise in his throat. “There’s a standing challenge: Anyone who can tip a Kite stands to win a money prize. Quite a sum. Because they can’t be tipped, those Kites. But that hasn’t stopped some dubbahs from trying.” At the look on my face, he said, “What we call fools.” He shook his head sadly. “And to watch a crew of brats doing harm to such a boat . . . and doing it to win money they don’t need and don’t deserve . . .” He trailed off.

“I see.” And I did see. “Well. I wouldn’t do that to a boat.” At the sound of clanging from the ferry ramp, I said, “I’d better go, Mr. Kelly. My mother’s waiting for me.”

He turned for the companionway to the deck below. “You can call me Big Seb, or just Seb, same as everyone else.”

I followed him down and watched him walk away along the ramp to shore, waving goodbye without looking back, before I headed to where my mother sat in our truck, which was packed to the gills with everything we hadn’t had the heart to leave behind.

Hitched to the back of it: a horse trailer and a horse to go with it.

“Where were you?” she said as I climbed aboard just in time for the crew to wave us down the ramp.

Before I could answer—even as my mother put the truck in gear and began to roll forward—the car behind us honked its horn. One long, loud blast amplified by the cavernous belly of the ferry.

I felt the trailer rock and shudder as the horse inside it startled.

“Good grief!” my mother said, glancing in her mirror. “What’s the matter with those people?”

She drove carefully down the ramp and quickly pulled off to one side to let the others go ahead.

As the car behind us passed, the people inside it glared at us, shaking their heads. Their license plate said they were from New Jersey.

“They probably think we’re islanders,” I said. “And the islanders think we’re from New York.”

I told her how Murdock had called out to me from the old wharf.

“People think things,” my mother replied as she pulled back onto the road.

There was a big, bright blue sedan with Connecticut plates directly in front of us. As I watched, someone threw a brown paper bag out the window. And then a big paper cup.

Without a word, my mother stopped the truck so I could get out to retrieve the litter.

But before I could open the door, someone rushed past, a blur of movement and color. Murdock, a towel slung around her shoulders. She grabbed up the big cup, plucked away the plastic lid, and sluiced the purple dregs at the car as it drove on, yelling something I couldn’t make out.

When she turned back toward us, I was shocked by the rage on her face.

But then she saw me watching and slammed herself shut.

Went back the way she’d come.

“That was Murdock,” I said as we drove on. “The girl from the wharf.”

My mother swallowed. “Did you see her face just now?”

I nodded. “She looked like a pot with a tight lid.”

“At the boil,” my mother said. “Best not to get too close.”