Sandy Rackliff stood in the apartment doorway with a Dunkin' receipt pinched between two fingers, the way a person holds a bill they have already paid.
"I'm not here to make him look worse," she said. "I'm here because you've got a file, and the file's got a hole in it."
Nell Whitcomb laid the receipt flat on the oilcloth and read it twice. Two coffees, four dollars and thirty-eight cents, the Route 1 store in Wexford, 10:41 p.m.
"Friday night," Sandy said. "The night. He was home by ten past eleven. I heard the truck in the dooryard and I looked at the clock, because I always look at the clock."
Nell read it back slowly, the way she read a deposition back.
"Wexford. Ten forty-one at night. Home by eleven ten. That's twelve miles and two coffees in twenty-nine minutes."
"He drives fast when he's got something to tell me and slow when he hasn't."
"Where was he before?"
"That's his to tell you." Sandy's hands stayed down at her sides. "I found it in the glovebox with a rubber band around forty others. Grocery ones. I keep them."
"Two coffees."
"One's mine. He brings me one home and I drink it in the morning and hate it." She picked her keys off the table, set them down, picked them up again. "This doesn't clear him. Nobody knows what time that man went down those stairs. But it's paper, and you're a paper person, and I'd sooner you had it from me than from a deputy who writes it down wrong."
"When did he leave the shop?"
"That's his."
"He told me the memorial."
"Then he told you wrong." She got the door open with her hip. "Anyway."
The door pulled shut behind her on its own weight. Nell sat with the receipt and did not move it.
The appraisal did not stop for any of it. She worked the front room all day, keeping Win's lot numbers in Win's sequence, and at five she heard Ro's car take the turn at the bottom of the Landing and head up the Neck road, home, as always.
Then she went back to the office and got the carton.
It had sat under the window since the first week, flaps gone soft, four books standing on their tails. The shop's own label was pasted to the side and wrapped twice in tape, the way Ro wrapped everything, and the tracking number ran down the edge in a clean row of digits.
Nell copied it onto the back of a Hannaford receipt from her coat pocket, then pulled the shipping binder off the shelf.
Black, three rings, the whole of the shop's outgoing trade. Ro's hand throughout, every letter upright, a copperplate a person could set type by. One line to a book. Date, title, account, number.
She found the number, and the line it lived on. The date at the head of it put that order weeks before Nell drove up from Boston with a suitcase and a set of keys.
Two ideas had been running side by side in her since the carton came open. The first was that the card in block capitals had been meant for the appraiser, Win Prentiss by name. The second was that it had been meant for the job and not the man, and would do as well for whoever took up the count after him.
She had never said the second one out loud. Not to Junie, not to the sheriff, not into a mirror.
The binder settled it. That book had gone out the shop door and over the county line before Eleanor Whitcomb put her name to an engagement letter for the estate of Catherine Thistle. Whoever set that card against a page had Win Prentiss in mind, and only Win Prentiss.
She squared the binder to the shelf edge and closed it.
"Well," she said, to the empty office.
Thursday she walked down to the Gull's Nest at seven, because the coffee in Cass's cupboard had gone to dust in the can. Wind had come around to the northeast and the harbor had gone gray to the wharf.
The co-op crews were through. Junie had a pot in her hand.
"You look like a Tuesday," she said.
"It's Thursday."
"That's what I said."
Paulie slid a whoopie pie across on wax paper and a coffee too hot to drink. The pie was a dollar seventy-five and the coffee a dollar ninety, and when Nell put four dollars on the counter Junie took the coffee money and pushed the rest back with two fingers.
"Sandy Rackliff was on the Landing before eight," Junie said. "That woman won't cross the road to watch a fire."
"What did she want?"
"To hand me a receipt."
"From where?"
"Dunkin'. Route 1."
Junie turned that over the way she turned over weather. "Two coffees?"
"Two."
"One's hers," Paulie said from the grill, not turning around. "She keeps receipts in the glovebox the way some people keep grudges in a drawer. It isn't the same thing."
"It's cousins," Junie said.
Nell laughed into the cup and burned her lip.
"So he's in Wexford at a quarter to eleven and home at ten past." Junie leaned on both forearms. "Does that put him somewhere, or take him out of somewhere?"
"Both," Nell said. "That's the trouble with paper."
The First Parish reading room kept public hours Thursdays from two to five, and Iz Crockett kept them six minutes early with a pencil in the jar.
Nell climbed the hill past the church and came in with her coat on. Iz had the accession book open and did not look up when the door went.
"Iz."
"Mrs. Whitcomb."
"It's Nell."
"This is a reading room."
Nell sat down across from her. "I want to ask you about 1983."
Iz wrote a line in the accession book, blotted it, and looked at the line while she answered.
"Two o'clock to five," she said.
"You knew her longer than anybody."
"I knew the library longer than anybody. I'm not going to hand you your family across this table, and you can't make me. So we'll be quiet in a public room instead."
They were quiet until ten of five, when Nell stood to button her coat. Iz got up, walked the length of the county shelf without hurrying, and came back with her hand closed.
She slid it across the table with two fingers. A strip of newsprint the color of weak tea, halved and folded twice, a photograph at the head of the fold, and 1983 penciled on the back in a librarian's small hand.
"You didn't get that from me."
"Iz—"
"Hours are two to five." Iz closed the accession book. "Same tomorrow."
Nell put it in the inside pocket of the barn coat and buttoned the flap over it.
The shop was dark by six. She drew the front shade and went up. The map-chest sat in the alcove off the kitchen where the estate had left it, brass corners, a brass lock, and no key Cass had left to anybody.
Cass had written to her every Christmas for forty-two years and Nell had answered every one, and nowhere in that long column of cards had either of them put 1983 on a page.
She filled the hot-water bottle for her knees and set the kettle on and forgot both, the way she forgot them when the wind held northeast.
The clipping was soft as cloth at the folds. One corner had been mended with tape gone yellow past the paper.
Nobody in her family had ever put paper about that year in front of her. Her father had told it once at a table and never again.
She spread the clipping flat under the lamp, pressed the crease down with her thumb, and started at the top.
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