Chapter 14 of 14The Corners Are Wrong

Iz Crockett had the parish album open on the reading-room table before Nell Whitcomb had her coat off.

"The corners are wrong on that page," Iz said. "Lifted, and laid back down."

The historical-society room at First Parish smelled of furnace dust and old paste — the parish house on the common in Merrow Harbor, one lamp on the long table, a jam jar of pencils sharpened to needles, and the album open to 1983. Four square prints to the page, each captioned in the parish's white ink. The mount at the top left had been worked twice. The card had gone gray and bloomed where the sticky came up, and a clean pale rectangle sat where a fifth print used to be.

"Somebody took one," Nell said.

"Took it before I had the room. I found it that way in August, and I have not slept well since."

"The haul is a week from tomorrow." Nell straightened up. "When Tidewater backs a truck to that door, the shelves ride to Wexford in boxes and nobody counts anything again, ever. This page is the only 1983 on paper in this town that is not locked in my aunt's chest."

Iz turned to the register. "Harvest boxes. The parish packed them every fall, and in 1983 they went inland, up to the mills."

Her finger stopped on a line in a narrow upright hand: Ashfield — mill families. Under it, smaller: boxes to the Grange hall; the store being gone.

Nell read it twice. "That is my family's store they are not naming."

"It is not named. That was the habit."

"Whose habit?"

"Mine, Nell. I was not going to be the one who wrote it down."

Nell got her notebook out and wrote the line, then wrote it again underneath, because David used to say a fact you write once is a fact you are guessing at.

"Who had this album in July?"

Iz brought the loan slip from the desk drawer. The album had gone up to the Grange hall for the heritage table and come back with a coffee ring on the cover and forty-one names on the sheet. Since July it had not left the room. Delphine Rood's name was on nothing — not the sheet, not the card file Iz still kept because she did not trust the computer.

"That crosses the buyer off."

"It crosses her off the sheet." Iz squared the slip. "She has been in this room twice, and she asked for the Wexford papers and the county histories and never once for the album. I noticed, because everybody asks."

Nell turned back to the empty rectangle. "Who was in the missing print?"

Iz reached for her coffee and knocked the pencil jar instead. Pencils went across the floor. She got down on her knees and picked them up one at a time, and when she stood she had her cardigan buttoned wrong and her face had closed like a door.

"Delegation," she said. "Parish people, and the mill families that met the truck. Nine or ten of them, out on the store steps."

"Including my aunt."

"I could not tell you who was in it." She set the jar down square. "Some ledgers, Nell, the Lord keeps. Not us."

Then she asked whether Nell had eaten, and talked about the furnace man a while, and Nell let her.

Nell ran the page and the register line on the machine by the door, forty cents a copy, and paid Iz in quarters out of her coat pocket while Iz held out the change dish and looked at the window, and neither of them said anything about it.

Monday noon the Gull's Nest had the co-op crews in it — four men at the counter in rubber boots, a line at the register for coffee, the grill going.

"Chowder?" Paulie called through the pass.

"I came for the chowder."

Junie set the quart on the counter, then a whoopie pie Nell had not ordered, then a coffee with a Dunkin' lid on it, a dollar twenty-nine, that had not come off Paulie's urn. "That is from the drive-through in Wexford and I will deny it in front of any judge. Twelve ninety-five, and the pie is on the house. Paulie made too many."

"She always makes too many."

"That is how she says she loves people." Junie wiped the counter in front of her. "Hear you have been up at the parish, going through the album."

"News is quick."

"News is free." Junie topped off the cup. "Half this town is in that album twice and nobody has looked at it since the bicentennial."

Nell laid the photocopies face down. "Who put that cellar light out, June. And what is in the chest."

"Do not put that on me. I have been asking it since September."

"Nobody in town can answer either one."

"Which is what worries me." Junie glanced at the pass, then leaned in. "Del Rood has not asked after the album?"

"I checked. She never signed it out."

"Then it is one of ours, and that is worse." Junie slid the pie closer. "Curt has three more ads in Uncle Henry's this week. Same barn, same picture of himself. He is calling it a collection now."

"A collection," Nell said.

"That is what he is calling it." Junie dried her hands. "Nobody here ever knew Cass came from anywhere. She was Cass. Just Cass."

"When is the truck, Nell?" Paulie shouted through the pass.

"A week from today."

"Then eat the chowder while it is hot."

The Neck at dusk was mostly wind with a harbor under it, coming off the northwest and cold enough to remind Nell's knees what month it was. She went out past the co-op with the quart in a paper bag against her coat and met Delphine Rood coming the other way in the navy coat, hands in her pockets, walking the point like a woman checking a fence line.

"You are a long way from the inn."

"It is not far, and the inn has a wedding in the function room." Del fell in beside her. "Has the estate opened the chest yet?"

Nell stopped. Gulls went up off the fish pier and settled again on the flats.

"At the select board you said the parcel conveys with its contents, including anything still in the office and the chest. Tonight it is has anybody opened it." She looked at Del over the top of her readers. "An inventory does not ask the same question twice."

Del stood in the wind a moment and did not deny a thing. "No. It has not been opened."

"No what?"

"No, it has not been opened. And no, I do not ask twice by accident."

"Then why the chest?"

"Because it is the only thing in that building that was never for sale." Del watched the light come around. "Mrs. Whitcomb. Do you remember your aunt's handwriting?"

Nell kept her hands in her pockets. "Which hand of hers?"

The wind took that one out over the water, and Del did not answer it. She pulled her collar up and stepped back onto the path.

"I asked whether you remembered it."

"That is not an answer."

"No. It is not." Del started up toward the co-op road, unhurried. "Good night. It is cold to be standing still."

She did not look back.

Nell stayed on the Neck until the wind got into her knees and the harbor light swung around and lit the empty bench and the gulls standing on it.

A month of the Landing, of the bean-supper line and the eight stools and the chowder counter, and Delphine Rood had never once asked where Ashfield was. She had known the name from the first morning. She had asked after the chest twice, in two different ways, and she had asked a stranger in a barn coat to remember her aunt's hand, which is not a question a buyer asks about a building. And nobody in Merrow Harbor had thought to mention any of it to Eleanor Whitcomb.

Del Rood knew Cass Thistle.