"Alden Fitch, Nell." The lawyer's voice had the pump and sigh of a man three calls into his morning.
"Which means what, exactly."
"It means Tidewater moved the haul a week." A chair creaked, twelve miles up Route 1 in Wexford. "Their side, not ours."
"One week."
"The shelves sit where they are until the Monday after next. Nothing you did. Nothing the sheriff did. A truck, a driver, somebody's vacation."
"Then the clock's paused."
"Paused is not stopped, Eleanor."
She said she knew the difference and hung up.
Northwest wind off the harbor, and the front room of Thistle & Vine cold enough for the radiator to come up for the first time since May. The bean supper had been Saturday, two nights back. Fitch's news let her off nothing. It only moved the wall she was going to hit.
Dole's sold composition books for ninety-nine cents, marble covers, multiplication tables on the back. She opened one and wrote across the top the way she had written across a thousand pages in thirty years: ESTATE OF CATHERINE THISTLE. APPRAISAL NOTES. ELEANOR WHITCOMB. Then she took Cass's key ring off its nail and began the log.
Eleven keys. The office door took the long one. The walnut case, the signed things behind glass, took the one with the dab of green paint on the bow, marked by Cass in a year when her eyes were better. The oak case at the back, the boats and the two Kenneth Roberts, took the one that stuck unless you lifted as you turned. Two she did not try. The map-chest keys. That chest was sealed inside the estate, and she was the estate's hands, not its mind.
By eleven every case in the building sat on one page of her own book.
At noon she made a tuna casserole in Cass's kitchen, crackers crumbled on top, and carried it up the lane behind the church with a towel over it, into a wind with the first cold in it. Theo turned over the whole way.
Isabel Crockett's kitchen smelled of pencil shavings and yellow soap, and she was drying a bowl that had been dry since noon.
"You made this," she said.
"I did."
"In Cass's kitchen."
"It was that or starve."
"Set it on the stove before you drop my supper."
Nell set it down. Iz hung her towel on the oven bar and sat, and waited, which was the librarian's whole method.
"Iz. What do you know about Ashfield."
"What the reading room knows."
"Which is."
"The newspaper. The parish. The county histories."
"Thistle and Rood Dry Goods."
"Two families' names in one order."
Iz folded her towel once, lengthwise. "The fire."
"That fall." Her hands lay still on the table. "Nobody was hurt. And the payroll was gone out of the office safe. And the Roods were ruined and gone the next year."
"And Cass."
"Cass left over the store going bad." Iz said it without weight.
"Says who."
"It came out in the same words in Ashfield and here, which tells you one mouth said it first."
"Whose."
"Not mine, and not hers." Iz looked at her. "I've been forty years behind a desk, so I know what swearing costs."
Nell turned her cup a quarter turn. "Did Vine ever talk about it."
Iz stood and took the dry bowl off the shelf. "Vine was—" She set it down again.
"I couldn't tell you what Vine knew. And I won't guess at a dead woman's knowing in my own kitchen. Don't ask me twice."
The towel went back on the bar. "The parish keeps that county on a shelf in the reading room. Public hours."
"I'll come in."
"You're welcome to it."
"Well."
She walked down to the Landing in the lull between lunch and supper, when the co-op trucks are gone and the Gull's Nest holds three stools. Junie was wiping a counter already clean.
"Chowder's twelve ninety-five a quart," Junie said. "Bowl's the same and I'm not apologizing for it."
"Bowl."
Junie set it down and leaned on both forearms, which meant she had something.
"Iz tell you anything."
"The store, the fire, the payroll, the Roods." Nell broke a cracker into the bowl. "The family wrote her off. She says it the same way everybody says it."
The rag stopped.
"The family," Junie said.
"Yes."
"Say which family, because I'm not a Thistle." She straightened up. "My mother was your mother's sister. I sat in that kitchen too. Nobody called her. Nobody got in the car. Your father read one letter at that table and after that everybody knew what Ashfield had done, and not one of them asked the woman herself."
Nell looked at the bowl.
"You kept sending letters. Every one answered, you said."
Junie's voice had gone flat, and that was worse. "That's not proof she owed the rest of us an explanation. That's you being you, and don't hand it to her like a bill."
"Friday night," Nell said. "Who was in the shop."
"Theo. Paulie had that off Sandy the next morning."
"Doing what."
"Begging. All spring he's been at it."
Junie wiped the same square of counter twice. "He's never worked past dark in his life."
She took the bowl away and brought it back. "You made a casserole? Paulie'll want the pan."
That got the laugh out of Nell it was meant to. She ate half the chowder and left a dollar fifty on the counter for the whoopie pie she carried out with her.
Whoever unscrewed that bulb had known the height of the socket without looking up. Theo wanted the last quarter — the cellar, the good shelves, the number — and the last quarter was in a Hannaford bag under Curt's arm.
David used to say every family keeps one drawer shut and dusts around it. She had always taken that for a line about his own people.
Half past five, and the light had gone the wrong way for anything but lamps. The walls. Nine frames, and frames on a shop wall are shop contents. She took them down one at a time: the storefront with Cass and Vine at the door in 1984, the harbor from the Neck, a whoopie pie on a plate, six more of the same kind. She logged each and priced the frames at four dollars apiece. Then she came to the last one and stopped.
It was from away: a two-story wooden store with a covered walk and a painted sign across the width of it, THISTLE & ROOD. At the left edge, half cut off by the mat, a woman's shoulder and the back of a hand. Nell would have known that shoulder on a dark street. Cass, thirty-six that year, in a cardigan and a rolled sleeve, before the fire.
She turned the frame over. The backing paper was brittle, and the framer's label came from a shop in Wiscasset that had closed years ago. The print had been cut down by hand to fit; the mat showed it, an uneven margin on the right, the store shoved off center.
She carried it to the lamp. In the corner, faint, stamped into the paper by the finisher: NOV 83.
Nell held it under the light a while. The store burned in the autumn of 1983. If the stamp could be believed, the roll went in to be developed weeks after there was no store left to photograph. It was a question, and questions were her line of work. Somebody had finished it, paid for it, and waited on it.
Then the cut edge had more to say. The trim was hand work, blade and straightedge, taken off the right side. Where the lamp bent across the paper there was a second blade line and a pale sliver where an edge had been taken off a second sleeve altogether.
Whoever cut the print had wanted the store in it, the doorway, and Cass. Somebody else was standing at that door. The blade had been used slowly, by hand, and afterward the picture had gone back into its frame and back up on the wall.
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