And a man, sitting in a rocking chair on the porch, smoking a cigarette. He was eyeing her warily, and Agnes panicked. She was trespassing, no doubt about it, but she could just say that she’d turned down the wrong driveway; she was lost. She was looking for her mother, Dabney Kimball Beech. Would she be brave enough to say that?

The man dropped his cigarette into a jar of water. He stood up and moved out of the shade of the porch, into the late-afternoon sun. The man, Agnes saw, had only one arm. There was something about him. She had never met him before, she thought, but she knew him somehow.

She put down her window so that they could speak, although the man was huge and bearded and scary-looking and might easily have been dangerous. The man peered into the car at Agnes and his face opened in surprise, and she thought, He recognizes me. And the thought that tumbled right on top of that was Oh my God.

It was her father.

Couple #14: Shannon Wright and David Kimball, married sixteen years. Couple #29: Shannon Wright Kimball and Hal Green, together four years.

Shannon: I am the only person Dabney has set up twice. The first time, of course, was with her father.

I started working with David Kimball at the police department in 1973. My father had been on the job in Brockton, and so even though I came to Nantucket in the summer of 1972 intending to wait tables and get a good tan, it was no surprise that I ended up as the dispatcher at the Nantucket Police Department.

I met David the year before his wife disappeared. My first impression was: solid guy, Vietnam guy, maybe a bit angry, with the bitter edge of any vet. He was patriotic, serious, dedicated to his job in law enforcement. He was a fourth-generation islander, he had inherited some pretty nice real estate, and I’d heard he’d married a fancy summer girl, a Sankaty Beach Club member and all that. He had a young daughter named Dabney; he kept a picture of her on his desk, but I never saw the wife or the daughter in person that first year. They didn’t stop by and say hello like some of the other families.

Then, in December of 1974, the wife, Patty Benson, pulled an unbelievable stunt. She took the daughter to see The Nutcracker in Boston. David talked about their impending trip more than he talked about other things—the orchestra seats, the suite at the Park Plaza Hotel downtown, the black velvet coat for Dabney. “Patty knows how to do things right that way,” David said.

Patty really knew how to do things right. She left the child in the hotel room and vanished—with twenty bucks to the concierge and a phone call to David saying, Come to Boston and get our daughter.

He never heard from her again, and I thought, Isn’t curiosity, at the very least, killing him? Then, one night late at the station, he admitted to me that he had hired a private investigator who had found Patty in Midland, Texas, working as a flight attendant on a private jet.

“Are you going to see her?” I asked. “Or call her? Write a letter?”

“What for?” he said. “She doesn’t want me.”

David was, in the years that followed, a sad, resigned man. He lived for his daughter—but a man raising a daughter alone was a delicate thing. He had his mother, Agnes Bernadette, to help, but the original Agnes Bernadette was something of a battle-ax, with fiery red hair even at age seventy, and a thick Irish accent. So I helped out behind the scenes with raising Dabney. I went to Nantucket Pharmacy and bought her sanitary pads when she got her period. I advised David about the stumbling blocks of training bras and curfew and a frank discussion about sex.

Here, please let the record show that I did advise on birth control. But Agnes Bernadette was an old-school Catholic, and David was afraid to defy her. No information about birth control was provided for Dabney—and look what happened.

Was I interested in David in a romantic way all those years? I would say that, most of the time, our relationship was professional and platonic. David had moods, the most common of which was serious and focused with an edge of gruffness; he wasn’t one to joke or flirt. But there had been times when we were working nights and David had returned from a particularly unpleasant call—a drunken domestic, say, where a man had shattered his wife’s nose—when David would relay the whole grisly story and then he would look at me in a certain way and I knew he felt something. I had been married once upon a time to a scalloper named Benjamin Copper, who had left the island for Alaska. Ben was long gone, and although I occasionally enjoyed a one-night stand when I was off-island, I had never had any inclination to replace him.

One night, late in the empty, quiet station, David nearly kissed me. But he stopped himself, for reasons I have never figured out.

And then, Dabney got involved. It was her senior year in high school; she was newly accepted to Harvard. Agnes Bernadette was very sick and didn’t have much time left. Dabney was, perhaps, concerned about leaving her father alone. When Easter rolled around that year, Dabney called the station and invited me to dinner. I accepted right away. For a woman who lived alone, Easter was hard to celebrate. In years past, I had gone to Mass, and by way of celebration, I watched The Wizard of Oz on TV and nibbled a chocolate bunny.

Once I accepted, I had second thoughts. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Does your father know you’re inviting me?”

Dabney said, “Not exactly. But he’ll be happy, Shannon. Trust me.”

I showed up at the Kimball house with tulips in a pot, trying not to feel like an interloper. By that point, I had been working alongside David for ten years, but I had never been invited to his house. He greeted me at the door wearing a shirt and tie. It was clear he had made an effort to look nice, and he smelled good. I was wearing a dress that I had bought for my niece’s confirmation; it was flouncy and flowery, maybe a bit too springlike for the cold, gray, early April day, but I felt attractive in it. I never wore anything like it at work.