"Price everything, list everything, and open nothing that's locked." The estate's lawyer, calling down from Sturgeon Bay, had a voice like a form being filled out. "Chiefly the safe, Ms. Mercier. Whatever it holds passes outside your inventory. Are we agreed?"
"Does the estate pay by the hour or by the item?"
"By the hour."
"Then we've been agreed since hello." Dorothy Mercier pocketed the loaned key and let herself into the Wagon Wheel, clipboard first.
Half past eight, Thursday, the club shut on its gravel above the water, a half mile up from New Ghent, Wisconsin. What was left of Wednesday's blow came thin out of the northwest. Breakfast had been a Kwik Trip glazer at the wheel, a dollar nine at the Highway 57 store. Four days she had circled this building like a gull. Now somebody was paying her to land.
The dining room went first — forty-two oak tables at thirty dollars apiece, worn pale by four decades of wrists. The walk-in cooler wheezed like it owed money; she wrote four thousand two hundred, and under CONDITION she wrote one word: tired.
Bonnie backed through the kitchen door at ten with a Thermos and two mugs, reading glasses low on their beaded chain, cardigan knitted over with oak leaves.
"Coffee, hon. The urns are scrubbed and put up, so it's my kitchen pot or nothing." She poured without asking and handed one across. "Payroll's tomorrow, and payroll doesn't know he's dead. Neither do the vendors, the linen man, the pop distributor. Somebody's got to sit with those books till the estate says different, and I'd sooner be here than home."
"How long have you been at it this morning?"
"Since seven. Habit gets up before grief does, hon."
Dot went back to counting chairs; Bonnie settled onto the register stool, and the talk turned to Orv.
"Two thousand three I asked that man for a new adding machine," Bonnie said. "He bought me a ribbon. One birthday I got a stapler with my initials engraved on it — B.T. — like it might make a run for the county line."
"You could have organized."
"Against Orv?" Bonnie waved the notion off with the Thermos lid. "He shorted me on staples and paid me for fifty-two weeks the year Carl passed, and I worked maybe thirty of them. There's no union grievance for a man like that. You'd stand up to read it and sit right back down."
She stayed the morning, topping off Dot's mug; she knew which leg of table nineteen was shimmed and with what — a matchbook from a bar in Algoma, gone since the eighties. "You holler when you want into anything, hon," she said, going for her coat at one. "I know where everything in this building lives."
"I'm learning that."
"Twenty-four years. Dust a place long enough and some of it turns yours." At the door she gave the room the look you give a sleeping child. "There's ham in the cooler from Wednesday. Make a sandwich before it turns, or I'll take it personal."
Upstairs, the estate had sealed the apartment the day they carried him down; the lawyer's key let her into air that tasted unbreathed — recliner, television, a bed made army-tight. In the little room over the kitchen, Orv's office since before she could drive, stood the safe: squat, older than the liquor license. One safe, she wrote, locked, contents not appraised, conveying per counsel.
What he had kept of Ellen Mercier's for thirty years sat four feet from her hand, behind a quarter inch of steel, further away now than while he was alive to keep it. She laid two fingers flat on the cold of it, the way you touch a casket going past, and went back down.
Dale's pickup crunched onto the gravel at two, radio going until the engine quit. He carried in a copier-paper box, toothpick parked in one corner of his mouth.
"Personal effects, hon. Coroner's office signed the release this morning — I was up at the county building anyhow, so I saved everybody a trip." He set the box on table one. "Lawyer says it goes on your list. Watch, wallet, whatnot. We got a ballpark yet?"
"Ballparks are in Milwaukee, Dale. You'll get a figure when the figure's true."
"And that's why you hire local." He told the photo wall. "Winter's coming, hon, and buyers don't idle in a lot forever. Anything speeds this along, you call me first." At the door he tipped his chin at the ceiling. "They tell you about the safe? Roped off like Fort Knox. It'll be war bonds and receipts, guarantee you. Man saved twine."
"Then the twine goes on the list," Dot said.
He idled in the lot, phone at his ear.
The personal-property list went item by item: one wallet, seventeen dollars and a car-wash punch card one punch shy of a free wash; the amber bottles listed by pharmacy and count, nothing further — Boulanger's Drug, the newest still heavy with pills.
Last out was the organizer, its Monday-through-Saturday doors hanging open, swept clean by a man who squared his days one dose at a time; the Sunday door still shut on its one survivor.
Adjuster's reflex, older than manners: verify the copy against the source.
She tore a sheet from her pad, tipped one pill from the Boulanger's bottle onto it, then thumbed the Sunday door and rolled that one out beside it. Two white pills on a white page, an inch apart.
She put her readers on. With the flat of her pencil, never her fingers — fraud-unit habit — she turned each pill face-up.
The one from the bottle was smaller — thicker through the middle, beveled where the other ran square. And the maker's mark pressed into its face, the little stamp she had read for a living, was not the mark on the pill from the Sunday door. Not a supplier's whim. Nobody who read pills for money would call them the same pill.
The cooler kicked on and wheezed at her. She sat until it quit.
Then she put each pill back where the estate believed it lived — the bottle's into the bottle, the survivor behind its door — and finished the list in a hand slower than her morning's. At the bottom she wrote: contents as received.
Sleep turned her loose at ten past two, heat first, then the thinking. The farmhouse kitchen on County K was the coolest room she owned; she cracked the window and set the box fan going, and down cellar the octopus furnace grumbled awake — the house running cold, the woman running hot, neither willing to change.
Claims discipline: say what is known, say it plain, sign it.
She took an index card and wrote. Then she read it back, testimony fashion, because a sentence spoken has to get past your own ears, and hers were the hardest audit in the county.
"The medication in the organizer is not the medication in the bottle it was filled from."
The fan turned its slow no. The furnace knocked twice and hushed.
She dated it. She initialed it. She propped it against the sugar bowl. It was true the way a discrepancy is true — before anyone knows what it costs — and it said the one thing the certificate, the coroner, and the grieving town had not: natural causes had a paperwork problem.
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