The Jewett first went out the door for a dollar.
Eleanor Whitcomb — Nell to the whole Landing — found the line at ten o'clock Friday morning, in the second of Cass's stock ledgers, and read it twice before she believed the column. *Country of the Pointed Firs, 1st, boards worn — clearance — 1.00.*
"One dollar," she said out loud, which she never did, and blamed on the empty shop.
The book lay beside her on the office table at Thistle & Vine, Win Prentiss's reference slip still marking the place: seagull on the spine, Boston imprint, one period after the word *firs* on page 14. It was a fact, and facts got filed.
Down on the Landing, in the bay where the first had lived, stood a book-club copy in the first's dust jacket. Glued boards, no device, a dollar's worth of paper dressed in a two-hundred-dollar coat.
So the shop had logged its good stock out at clearance prices, one jewel at a time, and set a reprint in the jacket to hold the shelf's place. Nobody had to falsify a total. The totals were true. Seventeen years of true totals.
Ro Pelletier had left the coffee on the table and twelve parcel boxes by the register for the Friday run up to Wexford.
"Tin's full," she'd said on her way through. "It's October, Nell. Nobody buys a book in October but us."
"Then we'll drink it ourselves."
"Twelve boxes to Wexford and back before dark."
"I'll be here."
"You'll be here at eight, same as always, with the light on over the stairs."
Nell had not answered that. She poured a cup, which cost nothing and tasted like it, and counted.
Seventeen volumes stood on the cabinet shelf, one to a year. The earlier ones had ridden up the Ridge Road with Win in the spring. She read every ledger she had in reach before noon.
A first a year, near enough. An *Arundel*, one dollar, logged out in a wet April. A slim White, signed, forty cents, on a Tuesday in August. Another Jewett, two dollars, with a check mark in the margin in Cass's own hand.
Cass had signed off on all of it, and why wouldn't she? The figures balanced and the count balanced. In the last four years those check marks got large and loose, then stopped.
"She couldn't see the page by then," Nell said, to the empty office. "She trusted the hand that kept the books."
David would have called it a nice piece of bookkeeping. He'd have said it dry, holding the page, and been right. That was the ache. Nell put it where she kept the others.
Every line read the same way — *clearance, shop, cash.* Not one carried the letters *onl.*, Ro's shorthand for the mail-order side, and not one named a buyer. These came one at a time, in weeks when nothing else on the page had a mark against it. A bargain draws a crowd. This was a diet.
It was lovely work, that hand. A hand like that gets trusted twice.
The seventeen she could name came to thirty-four hundred dollars. She wrote that on the corner of an envelope and folded it into her coat pocket. A number in a coat pocket is a fact. A number in a head is a mood.
Two men would have loved that page. Curt could walk it into Fitch's office and argue the stock down by half. Whoever wrote those one-dollar lines got hurt by one person only, and that person was anybody who read the book to the end.
Thirty years of watching heirs move the silver had taught her one more thing. A thief cannot take the inventory he is standing in. Pull one volume out of a live appraisal and the shelf reads like a missing tooth. Whoever's problem this ledger was, they were stuck watching her read it.
At noon she walked down the Landing to the Gull's Nest, north wind at her back, past the co-op with one boat still working the harbor.
"That's a face," Junie said.
"It's a face."
"Paulie. She's got the face."
Paulie leaned into the pass-through with the dish towel over her shoulder. "Chowder or the haddock chowder?"
"The small."
"There's no small."
"The board says small."
"That board's from April. Twelve ninety-five a quart, and you'll take a cup of it or you'll insult me."
"I'll take the cup."
Junie set it in front of her, better than the Dunkin' up in Wexford and cheaper, and went back to wiping the counter under the bean-supper card, two dollars a slice, Saturday.
"The Landing's got this solved already," Junie said. "Art Crowley's had Theo hung since Tuesday."
"Theo lied to me. Those are two different sentences, and only the first one is on paper."
"You want him to be innocent."
"I want him to be a liar and nothing else. It's tidier."
Junie stopped wiping. "And?"
"The books never shipped. Every one I can find went out the front door in somebody's pocket, and the shop never saw a cent of it."
"Seventeen years of that and never once a box."
"That's not a thief. That's a neighbor."
Junie laughed, a real one, the kind that carries the whole counter. Then she didn't, and reached for the coffee pot to cover it.
Curt Prentiss called at two, from the truck. She could hear the blinker ticking.
"You've had my uncle's ledgers out on the table since breakfast."
"Word travels."
"It's a small town, chief. Talk to me."
"The stock's thin, Curt. Every line I can find reads clearance, shop, cash."
"Right. A dollar a book. I've seen the same page you have."
Nell switched the phone to her other ear and waited, the way she used to wait on opposing counsel.
"Then you know there's no buyer's name on any of them."
"Give me a flat number for the room and I'll have it cleared before the frost."
"You'll get a number you've seen counted."
"That's not how an estate works, hon."
"At the Grange you said sixty for the load. Today on the Landing it's fifty."
"Fifty's today's number."
"Then I'll wait for tomorrow's."
He pulled the toothpick out and put it back in. "You're going to make it hard on everybody," he said, and hung up, which was the only part of the call she believed.
Ro came back after five with the truck still warm and the boxes gone. She brought a whoopie pie in wax paper, one apiece, and set it beside the open ledgers.
"You'll want that with the coffee," she said. "Not after."
"Where's yours?"
"In the truck. I ate mine on the Ridge Road like a criminal."
"How's the inventory coming?"
"Slow."
Ro pulled a chair out with her foot and sat down. "Anything I can do? I kept those books for Cass eighteen years. If a page is wrong in there, that's mine to answer for."
"It's all where it ought to be."
Ro laughed her usual laugh and pulled her gloves on one at a time. At the door she turned around.
"You'll tell me if you turn up anything strange in those old books, won't you."
"Why?"
"Because Cass would have wanted to know. And because I'd hate to think of you sitting up here nights with something on your mind."
Nell said nothing, which Ro took for assent, and the door pulled the cold in behind her.
For the first time, Nell heard the sentence twice. The first time it had been a kindness. The second time it had a shape to it, the way a hand laid flat on a page has a shape, and she sat in the lamplight with the whoopie pie going stiff in its paper, and heard the question she had missed.
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