Chapter 1 of 12The Book That Came Back

"You'll want the chowder," Paulie said, and had it down on the counter before Nell Whitcomb got her coat off.

Twelve ninety-five, haddock, chalked over the grill at the Gull's Nest, six of the eight stools full at eleven in the morning. Nell sat and did what she had done in every room for thirty years. Item one: eight stools, chrome pitted at the base, worth nothing and everything. Item two: one window with the whole of Merrow Harbor in it, wharf and fish co-op and mast tips, and a family from away wedging duffels into a station wagon while the fog went off the water in strips. The Tuesday after Labor Day emptied this stretch of the Maine coast the way a plug empties a sink.

"You're pricing my counter," Junie said.

"I'm eating."

"You're pricing it. You did it to Ma's hutch at her funeral. You looked at that hutch like it owed you money."

"It did. Appraised at four hundred, sold for sixty, because somebody's nephew came for it with a truck the week before the inventory." Nell pushed her readers up into her hair on their beaded chain. "That was the job, Junie. Thirty years of finding the good silver after somebody had already moved it."

Paulie put down oyster crackers nobody had asked for and went back to the grill, humming something out of the hymnal a half step under where the Lord meant it.

"That coat of yours is older than my marriage."

"It's an L.L. Bean barn coat. It'll outlive the both of us and it knows it."

"And a firm paid you for that."

"A firm paid me to prove it in a form a judge would read. Then they bought me out in June." Nell tried the chowder. Salt pork, cream, haddock in pieces you could see. "That's good."

"Course it's good." Junie stirred her own bowl and did not eat any of it, which she had been doing since she was nine years old. "You going to tell me about David, or am I supposed to ask you like a stranger?"

"He died in the spring. Eleven days after Cass, which I'd call poor scheduling if he'd had any say in it."

"Nell."

"He'd have said it first."

Junie let that stand, which was as close to mercy as she came, and slid the pie list down the counter instead. Nell did not want pie. What she wanted was to stop doing arithmetic on her aunt, and she had been at it since May: forty-two years of Christmas cards going one direction up the coast, and every last one of them answered. Her father had gone to his grave saying the woman took the money in 1983 and turned her back on her own blood. Nell had been fourteen, and nobody had ever shown her a paper that said so.

"Sell the shop," Junie said. "Settle it, pay your mother's home, go back to Boston."

"That's the plan."

"That's not a plan. That's a sentence you keep saying out loud to see if it holds."

Thistle & Vine Books stood ninety yards down the Landing, between Dole's General Store and the wharf road, its hanging sign swinging a little on a breeze out of the northeast. Inside it smelled of cold paper and furnace oil. Rowena Pelletier had the front counter and a cardigan with acorns knitted into the yoke, and she came around it fast for a woman of fifty-nine.

"There she is." Ro had a whoopie pie out of the case and into wax paper before Nell reached the register. "Take it. I made four dozen for the Grange Saturday and they'll never miss one."

"I've just had chowder."

"Then have it at four o'clock when the damp gets in you." Ro pressed it into her hand and held on a second longer than the handoff needed. "Eighteen years I stood here with your aunt, hon, and I'd have told her she was going to leave me in a shop by myself if I'd known she'd go and do it."

At the long table under the window, a small dry man in half-glasses looked up from a clipboard. Edwin Prentiss had two pairs of glasses on his person and a flashlight clipped to his belt, and Nell had learned in one week that all three got used.

"Mrs. Whitcomb." He turned the clipboard so she could see the header he'd printed himself — ESTATE OF C. THISTLE, ELEANOR WHITCOMB, EXECUTOR — because Win Prentiss believed a person should always be able to read what was being written about them. "I have you at two thousand four hundred volumes and change, which is a guess, and I don't like giving you a guess."

"How much of it is finished, Mr. Prentiss?"

"The front room and the loft. What's left is the office, and the good shelves down cellar." He tipped his chin toward the back, where the stairs went down steep, turned once, and had no rail on the open side, one bulb hanging at the turn on a length of cord. A card in Cass's block printing was tacked beside it: MIND THE STEP. "Your aunt engaged me in March. She wanted it done proper before she sold, item by item, and she paid me a retainer I've still got."

"The estate will honor the engagement. Finish it the way she asked."

"We'll see how the number lands." Win wrote a line in a bound notebook, in a running sequence that started at lot one and had never skipped. "Folks around here would rather I said a room full of books is worth what a truck will pay for it. It isn't."

"No," Nell said. "It's worth what somebody can prove."

Ro laughed from the counter, warm as a kitchen. "You two. Listen to you."

At five Ro squared the register tape, wrote the day's total in a hand like a copperplate sampler, and went home to her Cape two lanes over. Win had gone up the Ridge Road an hour before that. Nell locked the front, put the fan on in the office because the flashes came evenings now whether or not the coast had cooled to forty, and started on the carton that had come back returned. Four books, mail order, refused by a buyer in Ohio with no reason given and the shop's own shipping label wrapped twice in tape.

Three of them were fine. The fourth had gone soft at the spine, the way a book does when it sits open a long time in a damp room, and it fell open where it had learned to.

Inside, folded once, was a card the size of an index card. Block capitals. No signature, no date, no hand she knew.

SOME BOOKS ARE BETTER LEFT ON THE SHELF, MR. PRENTISS.

Nell sat down on the stepstool with the card in her fingers and the fan turning behind her. Upstairs, in her aunt's kitchen, a locked map-chest sat sealed inside an estate she could not open yet. Down here, somebody had put a sentence like that in a book, in a shop where nothing had been read in years, and then that book had gone out in a box to Ohio and come home again.

Well.

Who wrote it — and which shelf was it supposed to stay on?