Peg had the plate down before Dot got her coat off the hook.
"Fisherman's breakfast, and don't tell me you ate." Two eggs over easy, three strips of bacon, rye toast cut thick. The chalkboard above the coffeepots at Lu & Peg's Bait & Breakfast still said $7.50. "You've got the squint."
"The squint you get when a number's lying to you."
Lu came up from the back with a case of half-and-half and set it down hard enough to rattle the salt. She saw the laptop open beside Dot's plate. "Well. Dorothy Mercier, you get that off my counter."
"It's an appraisal file."
"It's Tuesday's weather and a picture of a boat, is what it is."
"It's Thursday," Dot said. She turned the screen so they could both see.
"BadgerlandMemorabilia," Lu read. "That's a name?"
"That's the name on the shipping labels." Dot forked an egg. "Six of them in a crate in Orv's apartment. All cut the same way, not one mailed yet."
"Whose account?"
"The seller's from Green Bay."
Peg leaned in. "Is that the Hamm's sign? That thing hung by the coat room since before you were married."
"That's it. And the signed Bart Starr photo, and the Kermiss booyah ribbons." Dot scrolled with one finger. "Forty-one sales since April, every one posted between nine and eleven at night, or on a Sunday afternoon."
Lu wiped the counter where it did not need wiping. "Back door. Marv saw boxes going out the back door."
"He saw the boxes. This is where they went."
"Dot, that's Dale."
"It's Dale."
Peg hummed in three-four time and went back to the grill.
Dot put her finger on the date line. "Here's one. Sunday, 9:58 p.m."
"Which Sunday?"
Dot counted on the counter with her finger, past the ketchup. "Last Sunday was four days ago. One back. Two back. Three back." She stopped. "The fourth Sunday back is the night Orv filled his organizer and somebody swapped it out after. Nine at night to seven the next morning."
"From Green Bay," Lu said.
"Four more listed that same hour, all logged Green Bay. That's a man at a card table with a tape gun."
"So he's out."
"I didn't say that."
"You just said it."
"I said the back door finally has a reason. It's had one since March." Dot closed the laptop. "For thirty-two dollars a ribbon, I'd want the kettle too."
"Take the kettle," Peg said. "Kettle's in the way."
The north wind had the bay up in whitecaps by ten. Dot drove the bay road half a mile north out of the Four Corners and parked beside Dale's truck in the gravel lot.
He was upstairs in Orv's apartment, the recliner shoved against the wall, the card table where it used to be.
"Chief." He set the tape gun down. "You're the only person in this county who still knocks."
"Five minutes."
"Take ten." He picked the tape back up. "You know what this building's worth? Terri looked it up. Water on two sides—"
"The building isn't my file."
"—you're pricing the silverware, I know, but—"
"Dale." She set the laptop on the card table, opened it, and turned it around.
He looked at the screen the way a man looks at the scale at the doctor's office.
"Oh," he said. "Hon."
"Forty-one sales since March. Out the back door. On your key."
Dale took the toothpick out of his mouth. First time since Labor Day.
"Marv called it old junk going out the door," Dot said. "That was March. Today it's inventory."
"I've got two households." He said it in one breath. "Child support's two households deep, and the franchises — you know what a gym franchise does in a town this size? It eats. I'm upside down in Ashwaubenon and upside down in De Pere, and I've been taking my dead uncle's walls apart to keep one of them from bleeding." Then he sat down on the arm of the recliner and looked smaller.
"Why didn't you ask him?"
"Uncle Orv woulda said yes." Dale turned the toothpick between two fingers. "He'd have said yes before I got to the end of the sentence. And then he'd have asked me twice what for, and I'd have had to look at him."
"The cremation."
"Estate closes faster." He shrugged with one shoulder. "Every week it sits there, the estate pays the insurance on a kitchen nobody's cooking in. I never touched his pills."
"Your prints are on the organizer."
"I carried the pills to the coroner." He said it flat, no arguing around it. "The funeral home told me to get the medication list down to Sturgeon Bay, so I put the whole box in a grocery sack and drove it. That's every fingerprint there is."
Dot looked at him a while.
"The crates come with me," she said. "Estate property, and the insurer's paying me to count it."
"Take the crates, then."
She crouched by the first one and lifted the flap. The Hamm's sign lay wrapped in a moving blanket. The Bart Starr photo was flat between two squares of cardboard. Under the ribbons, in a green cover, she found the club's own old logs — Office Supplies and Maintenance, the same title as the binder on the office shelf, dated 2001 through 2019. Old books, he'd figured.
Dot opened the 2004 one and turned three pages.
Bonnie's hand. The slant, the closed loops, every line started on the rule without a ruler under it. Twenty years of it, stacked in a banker's box in a dead man's apartment, headed for a card table in Green Bay.
Handwriting was weather to Dot. Her mother's postcards had come in a hand like that for six years.
She closed the box.
Downstairs she stood at the shelf above the office sink. The current year's binder sat where it had sat the afternoon she pulled it herself — September full to the last day, October three days in.
Three weeks of appraisal, and Bonnie had carried her every other book in the building, one armload at a time. Register tapes. Invoices. The insurance file. The maintenance sheet for the walk-in cooler she'd priced at $4,200. Nobody had ever handed her that binder.
Dot left it on the shelf.
She called Rollie from the truck with the crates in the back.
"Dale Detloff's been selling the club off the walls since March."
"Say that again."
"Forty-one listings on an online account, seller in Green Bay. I've got the crates and the labels."
"Any of it from the night?"
"One listed from Green Bay at ten o'clock that Sunday, and three more after it." She turned the key. "He's a thief, Rollie."
"And that's all he is."
"That's all he is."
"Then that's one down."
"Two. Kurt's schedule did him last week."
"Go home, Dorothy. Send me the rest in the morning."
She went home the long way, south on County K, crates rattling in the back.
At the kitchen table she laid out her cards — nine of them, in her own hand, one line to a card.
She read them the way a stranger would. Nine cards, four names, a window, a bottle, a shelf, in the time it took water to boil.
Nobody had been in her kitchen. The butter dish sat where it sat, the screen door was latched, and nothing in that room had moved since morning.
She squared the pile and set it beside the toaster, and for the first time since Labor Day she did not like how easy it would be to read.
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