Seventeen books logged out at a dollar apiece came to thirty-four hundred dollars. Eleanor Whitcomb wrote the figure on the back of a Hannaford receipt, and under it, in the same pencil, one word: Monday.
Monday was two days off. Monday was when Tidewater Estate Clearance backed a truck to the door of Thistle & Vine, on the Landing in Merrow Harbor, and took the shelves out by the boxload, unexamined and out of her reach. Nell pinned the receipt to the cardboard and stood back.
Four names, and no face she could put to any of them.
Curt Prentiss, who had said sixty thousand for the lot at his own uncle's reception. Theo Rackliff, who had lied about Friday night and then brought a wife and a coffee receipt. Delphine Rood, whose coat was too good for the county. And Ro Pelletier, who had kept the books eighteen years and could not have done any of it, because Ro was the shop.
Nell put on the barn coat. A northwest wind came off the Neck and rattled the hanging sign, and the maples along the wharf road had gone bare while she was reading ledgers.
The Gull's Nest had the fryer going and the fans off. Paulie had the chowder up in the big pot with the wooden spoon standing in it like a fence post.
"Sit," she said. "You'll want the quart, and you'll want it here."
Nell sat. Junie set a bowl in front of her and ordered nothing for herself, which meant she had eaten at ten and would eat again at two.
"Twelve ninety-five," Junie said. "Paulie's taking it to thirteen and a half after the Frolic and I've told her the town will riot."
"They riot every year," Paulie said. "Then they pay."
Nell ate two spoons and got where she was going. "Ro said she might do her kitchen."
Paulie turned from the fryer and looked at Nell the way she looked at a pan that was misbehaving.
"Ro's been saying that since Roland died. Two winters back she had a man out to measure. Gray counters, the sink picked out of a book. Never happened."
"Money?"
"Ro's never short." Paulie tapped the spoon twice on the rim and set it back. "Truck's paid. Woodpile squared. She gives to everything that asks. Sunshine fund, ten dollars a week, rain or shine."
Junie reached past her for the coffee pot. "Ten a week is five hundred and twenty a year."
"That's what I said." Paulie wiped a counter that did not need wiping. "Twenty years of tens. Not one of us ever thought to ask why."
Well, Nell thought.
At the shop Ro had the whoopie pies for the supper boxed by eleven, four dozen, each one twisted in wax paper at both ends and laid in a line like white stones.
"You're down for the second sitting. I put your name on."
"I don't know that I've got a name down for anything."
"You do now." Ro tore tape with her teeth. "Denny never could wait. He'd eat his beans off the truck lid with his coat over his head so nobody would see him at it. That was Portland."
Nell had the register open and kept her eyes on the page. "How's he keeping out there?"
"Seventeen years out there and he still calls it down to the city. Says the winters are softer."
"Which street's he on now?"
Ro's hands went on with the box. Nell counted two seconds, and they were long ones.
"Which street would you be needing?"
"Curiosity."
"Curiosity's a good horse." She smiled, tired at the corners. "You know how it is with a brother. You learn the house and not the address."
Well. Nell had answered a question with a question her whole working life, and she knew the look of it coming back over the counter at her.
Dole's had the wood stove going whether it was cold or not. Raylene Dole stood at the register with the Uncle Henry's open to the middle.
Nell wanted light bulbs. She set a four-pack on the counter beside a Moxie.
"One ninety-nine. You bought a pack last month."
"Ro bought that one."
"Ro bought that one." Raylene turned the book around. "Curt Prentiss is in the swap guide again."
Three lines, no picture. BOOKS BY THE BOX. HARDBACKS, NO JUNK. RIDGE ROAD BARN, BY APPOINTMENT. A phone number, and the word ESTATE.
"Again?"
"Fourth time since August." Raylene drank her coffee. "My Arnie runs propane out the Ridge Road. Cartons up in that barn past the rafters, and Curt up there at all hours."
"He's clearing his uncle's collection. He's the heir."
"He is." She closed the guide. "But Arnie was out there in June and the barn was half full then."
Nell paid for the bulbs and walked it back to the office, where she took Cass's keys off the nail by the door and opened the flat gray case on the bottom shelf. Item 14 on her inventory: ledger binders, small brass key. A carton that takes a ledger binder is long and flat and heavy, and she had measured that shelf for the estate. She knew now what a stack of them on the Ridge Road would hold.
She made the call from the office at two.
It was a number from the Hallowell estate. Marguerite Soley, who had run the reverse-directory desk for a Portland title company and could find a name the way Iz found a point of issue in a book.
"Marguerite? Nell Whitcomb."
"I remember you. What's the name?"
"Dennis Pelletier. Portland."
"Spelled how?"
"P-e-l-l-e-t-i-e-r."
Keys tapped. A drawer shut.
"Nothing this year. Nothing the four before it. I've got a Roger on Munjoy Hill and an auto body on Forest Avenue. No Dennis. No Denny."
"People move," Nell said.
"They do, dear." The chair creaked. "Some of them move a long way."
Nell thanked her and hung up. It proved nothing. A man could live seventeen years somewhere and keep out of a book. But it was a tab in the file now.
The Grange hall smelled of molasses and old steam radiators. Nell took beans and brown bread and two red snappers, and by the pie table the line had folded back on itself twice, which is the town's highest compliment.
The sunshine fund sheet was taped inside the kitchen door, names down the left and amounts across, and the tape had gone amber.
R. Pelletier. Ten dollars every week, up the page and off the top of it. The same hand as the register tape. The same hand as the supply ledger page she had photographed, a cellar bulb bought and written in ink on a Monday that came after Win Prentiss went down those stairs in the dark.
David used to say a person is what they don't buy. He said it the year she bought a new coat and wore the old one anyway.
"Second sitting's up," Junie said behind her. "Move or be moved."
At nine Nell made a card and pinned it beside the ledger card with its seventeen titles and its thirty-four hundred dollars.
DENNY PELLETIER. PORTLAND. NO STREET. NO NUMBER.
Two days to Monday. Two piles of paper that did not touch — the shelf skim on one side, the cartons on the Ridge Road on the other — and neither pile had a face she could draw on it.
What, she wrote underneath, does a shop clerk with no remodel and a brother on no Portland street do with seventeen years of good books?
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