Chapter 20 of 23A Finger to Her Lips

Renata Colby had her room at the Bayside Inn paid through Friday, and Orv Detloff's cremation permit was still sitting on Rollie Schuette's desk in Sturgeon Bay with Monday written on it and no signature under it. Dot wrote both lines on one index card and slid it into the inside pocket of her Fleet Farm coat, where she kept the things she meant to keep. A witness who checked out of town took her answers with her.

Wednesday had gone gray early. Behind the counter at Lu & Peg's Bait & Breakfast, the six-stool place on the New Ghent harbor, Lu Mercier-Haas was turning stools upside down on the countertop, and Peg was working a putty knife along the griddle where the noon chowder had cooked itself on. Burger night at Legion Post 114 had the whole town, so the shop held nothing but coffee that had been on the burner since noon and the smell of hot iron.

"You've counted those twice," Dot said.

"It's six. I was stalling." Lu set the last stool down. "You've got the look you had the week you quit the company and told me you'd be reading other people's sad mail from a card table."

"It paid."

"Everything pays something." Lu picked up a rag, didn't use it, and looked at her sister. "Well."

Dot took the card out and read it instead of answering, which answered it.

Then the door came open on the cold and stayed open.

Renata Colby stood a moment with the northwest wind at her back, then stepped in and pulled the door until the latch caught. She had the navy coat on and a scarf that cost more than the coffee urn, and she set a leather folder on the counter without opening it.

"Coffee?" Peg said.

"Please."

Peg poured it before the word was done, then slid a plate down the counter — the last wedge of prune Belgian pie, three seventy-five a slice, which Lu brought up every fall — and stood there with the knife still in her hand.

"That's the last of the prunes," Lu said from the end of the counter.

"Then it's a good night to eat it." Peg set the knife in the sink.

Dot had a bite. Prune and clove and too much crust, and she had eaten it in this room since she was a girl.

"I'm leaving in the morning," Ren said. "The deal's papered. Harborline doesn't need me standing in this wind any longer."

Lu folded the rag. "You came to say goodbye at closing."

"No. I came to say it to her."

Lu looked at Dot, and Dot tipped her head toward the back stairs.

"Take the pie with you, then," Peg said, untying her apron.

Lu took her by the oven mitt. "You'd feed the man who towed your truck."

"I fed him twice."

The two of them went up the back stairs arguing about the pan and the bake sale, and their voices faded, and the upstairs door shut.

Ren drank her coffee. Dot took two more bites and let her.

"You told the village board in September that the inventory conveys, safe and all," Dot said. "Now you're leaving before the safe opens. Those are two different exits."

"I know what I said."

"I write things down."

"I figured that." Ren set her cup on the saucer. "My name isn't Colby. It's Kolbeck. Renata Kolbeck. My father was the loan officer at the Namur Farmers State Bank branch, and in this township that name was poison. We left in the spring of 1990, under my mother's name, and the bank went down behind us. It's easier to be a Colby in Green Bay."

The urn ticked. Dot put her fork on the plate.

"I don't remember a Kolbeck girl."

"You wouldn't. You sat two rows over by the window. I kept my head down and my father kept the ledger."

"Then why the gravel lot. The morning they found him, half the town saw you out there watching the upstairs windows."

Ren didn't answer right away. Outside, the flag rope slapped the pole and nobody came up the walk.

"I came to ask him about the safe." She held the cup with both hands. "I've been trying to buy that parcel for a year, and I sat in his kitchen often enough to understand that a man who keeps a safe in a supper club keeps things in it. Things, not money. I came that morning to ask what was in it and whether any of it had anything to do with your mother. Then the ambulance came down the bay road and the sirens got there first."

"Why would Orv Detloff have anything of my mother's?"

"Because he was the one man in this town who never said a word against her." Ren set the cup down. "Take that for what it's worth."

Dot pulled the card out and wrote a line on it. Then she asked the next question straight. "The Sunday night before he died. Where were you."

"The Bayside Inn dining room, in Sturgeon Bay. The walleye, and a pot of coffee I sent back. The girl on the front desk talked at me about her son's wedding until ten o'clock."

"Give me a name."

"Marcy."

Dot walked to the wall phone and dialed the inn from memory — she had appraised a house out that way in August — and a young voice said Bayside Inn.

"This is Dorothy Mercier, over in New Ghent. I'm on the estate inventory for the Detloff property. Was Ms. Colby in your dining room the Sunday night before Mr. Detloff was found?"

"The navy lady? Corner table, under the moose." The girl laughed. "She had the walleye and she sent the coffee back. I remember, because that pot was twenty minutes old and it wounded me."

"Thank you."

Dot hung up and wrote on the card. Ren watched her do it and didn't object.

"November 1989," Ren said. "Sturgeon Bay."

Dot sat back down on the stool.

"I was at the bus depot with my mother, meeting my aunt off the four o'clock. Ellen Mercier came in with one suitcase, bought a ticket at the window with cash, and sat down against the wall with the suitcase at her feet." Ren put both hands around her cup. "She looked around that room. She saw me seeing her. Then she put one finger to her lips."

Dot had a bite of pie in her mouth and nothing to do with it.

"She knew your face."

"She knew my father's name. Everybody did." Ren folded her napkin in half, then in half again. "The bus came. She got on it alone. There was no man with her, Ms. Mercier. There wasn't any man at all."

"The town says a man from the boat show."

"The town says whatever it can stand to say."

Dot thought about a shoebox in the closet on County K with six years of cards in it, every one in her mother's hand, and about how she had read that handwriting a hundred times and never once asked who put the stamp on the envelope.

"My mother is dead," Dot said. "Or she isn't. Either way she left on purpose."

"She did. But somebody in this town knew." Ren picked up her coat off the stool. "Because somebody drove her to that depot. And I always figured that's who mailed the cards."

"One more thing."

"Ask it."

"Since 1989. Have you told anybody."

"You're the first."

Dot slid the index card across the counter and laid the pen on top of it. "Write your name. Your real one."

Ren wrote it slow, lowercase except the R. Dot looked at it, blotted the ink with her thumb, and put the card in the coat pocket next to the one with Monday on it, and the one with BONNIE TETZLAFF in her own block letters.

"Good night, Ms. Mercier."

"Good night."

The door took the cold again and latched.

Lu came down the back stairs with the rag still in her hand. "Well."

"She didn't run off with anybody from a boat show," Dot said. "She ran from something."

"And?"

"And somebody in this town drove her to that depot, came home, and said nothing. All this time."