The beach and harbor¶
The beach and harbor is the Marblehead shoreline near the center of the offshore blast, littered with dead fish and lined with taped windows, where Kurt spots and the team recovers a severed arm.
| Type | Location (shoreline) |
| Region | Marblehead, Massachusetts |
| First appearance | Summer Service 01 |
Description¶
The old working docks sit near the beach: weathered buildings that each look "10 percent like a lighthouse", with yachts, fishing boats and lobster boats crowded in the harbor. Along the beach are broken windows, freshly repaired windows and windows covered with tape, all from the explosion a week and a half before. Dead fish lie along the shore (Summer Service 01).
Notable places within¶
- The docks. Briggs, the drunk, one-footed fisherman, lives on a barely floating boat here, asleep in a lawn chair beside it when Andrew finds him.
- Harvard's Bait Shop and a beach supply store. Huell buys a trash bag for $1 (paying $5 and taking no change) at the bait shop, whose owner's cousin draws axolotls; the team buys a cooler, ice and duct tape at the beach store.
History of events there¶
At about three o'clock, after church bells strike three, the team walks the beach. Dante's Kurt rolls a 12 on Investigate a Mystery and establishes that the blast came from out in the harbor and moved inland. He finds the center of the damage and sees something black bobbing among the dead fish (Summer Service 01).
It is a bloated, fish-eaten human arm in a soaked black turtleneck sleeve and black glove, running from the fingers to past the elbow, with the bone violently splintered. See The severed arm. Huell bags it, the smell lessens but does not go away, and the team leaves the glove on in case the hand comes apart. Andrew phones Diane ("I found an arm... Ocean."), who promises forensics (Summer Service 01).
Kurt's Tiger Balm, a cooler rinsed at a beach foot faucet and the open windows of the Biz's car turn the arm into a running gag for the rest of the day. A little boy cries when Andrew blames the smell on the Biz. The beach is also where Lena Scott, who loves it, wandered off from a school field trip the day after the blast and was found unconscious (Summer Service 01); see Lena Scott.
Inhabitants¶
Briggs is the only named resident. Briggs reports dead fish, odd weather, headaches and bad moods since the blast. For a separate stretch of glassed coast found in later sessions, see Melted shoreline.