Chapter 15 of 20Uncle Win Woulda Wanted

The haul was Monday. By Monday night Tidewater Estate Clearance would carry the shelves of Thistle & Vine out of Merrow Harbor by the boxload, unexamined, and the proof of seventeen years of substituted stock would go with it, scattered across two counties. Eleanor Whitcomb had four days.

She had been awake since three with it and had not slept again. The shop stayed dark on Thursdays, Cass's habit and now hers, so by ten she had the office to herself, a cold Dunkin' going skunky at her elbow, and four pages of printouts read top down with a pencil in her hand.

Somebody had been selling Win Prentiss's own books off the Ridge Road since spring. The somebody called himself DownEastFirstEditions.

"Same barn corner in every shot," she said to the empty office. "Same pine bench. Not one of them carries a Thistle & Vine price."

Half of the listings showed Win's hand inside the front cover: a penciled date and two initials, an appraiser's private mark on what belonged to him. Under each one the page printed a date and an hour. Ten past eleven, quarter of one, six forty in the morning — a man with a telephone job in Portland, listing his dead uncle's library between midnight and dawn. Then a Kenneth Roberts, Arundel, first edition in a jacket that had no business being that clean, listed on the Friday night Win died at 9:58, out of Portland, with two more going up before midnight.

"Well," Nell said to the empty office, and wrote the times on the back of her hand.

At noon she carried the printouts down to the Gull's Nest and laid them on the counter, and Junie read them with her chin in her palm while her own chowder went cold.

"You're telling me a man sat in Portland at ten o'clock with his feet up, posting books."

"Nine fifty-eight. Then ten thirty-four. Then twelve five."

"Then he didn't kill anybody."

"He took his uncle's shelves apart. That isn't nothing."

"It isn't murder, either." Junie turned the top page around and studied the account name, and her laugh came out of her like a cough. "DownEastFirstEditions. He named himself that. Like a dog that answers to Duke."

"Win's hand is in half these photographs," Nell said. "His own stock, out his own back door. You want to call that a tough market?"

Junie folded the page in half and pushed it back across the counter. "It's Thursday. Eat your chowder."

Paulie came around the end of the counter, took Junie's bowl, and set a fresh one in front of Nell with a spoon standing in it. "Eat that. You've got a Wednesday face on a Thursday."

Nell ate. Twelve ninety-five a quart, salt and haddock and no flour in it anywhere.

"Where's he at this afternoon, do you figure?" Junie asked.

"Ridge Road," Nell said. "Cutting tape."

The Ridge Road runs a mile inland and then flattens into fields gone red and brown, and the Prentiss barn stands on the rise with both doors open. A north wind came across the field, cold enough to fog the car windows before she got out.

Curt had the tailgate down and a tape gun in his hand. He saw her and set the tape gun down.

"Mrs. Whitcomb."

"Eleanor Whitcomb. You've had it wrong for three weeks."

"Hon —"

"No." She took the printouts out of her coat and squared them on the tailgate. "DownEastFirstEditions. That's you."

He looked at the top page a long while without picking it up. "Tough market's all."

"There's no market in it. That's your uncle's own library going out the back of this barn since April, and he hired you to drive him places."

"I never took one thing off the shop's shelves." He said it fast, and she believed him, and filed it.

"Then where did it come from?"

"Two households," he said. "You want to know what the state takes when there's two of them? Four time-shares upside down, a truck note, and I'm forty-four." He sat on the bumper with his hands between his knees and got smaller. "Uncle Win woulda wanted me looked after. He didn't have anybody else and he knew it."

"That's a sad story with a truck in it," Nell said.

"Your fifty thousand came on the phone last Friday. Sixty down to fifty." He shrugged, and she put the shrug where the rest of it was going: a man in a hurry to be paid, and not a man with anything to bury.

"Where's the rest of it?"

"In the loft. Eleven boxes, maybe twelve." He stood and wiped his hands on his jeans. "You want them, take them. I'm not a thief, I'm a guy who's behind."

"You're both," Nell said, and he laughed, which she had not expected, and it was the truest thing he had done since she pulled in.

The loft smelled of dust and a little of mouse. Win's books sat in cartons under the hay door, and in with them, four banker's boxes of the shop's old ledgers. Years of them, in Ro's copperplate, each bound at the spine with one staple and every page in place. Nell lifted out the oldest. Cass's tick stood in the margin beside a whole column of entries, and then, four years back, no more ticks.

"Whose ticks are these?" she asked.

"Miss Cass. She'd mark off what sold, is all." He shifted his weight. "Uncle Win had me bring them out in August. Back wall of the office, under the window. Said he couldn't count a thing without the history in front of him."

"The notebook. Where is it?"

"Bench, under the mug. Take it, I don't want the darn thing."

She went down and picked it up. Cloth-bound, soft at the corners, full of Win's small upright hand and a run of lot numbers unbroken since March. She had watched Curt carry it out of the shop the Sunday morning they found his uncle and read the taking as a thief's grab; standing in the barn, she understood it for the heir's errand it had been.

"Friday night I was in Portland. My own kitchen table. That Roberts went up at nine fifty-eight."

"I don't need it."

"Take it anyway," he said, and nodded down at the tailgate.

She drove back with the ledgers and the notebook on the seat beside her. The Landing was quiet, the streetlights on, the harbor a black floor. She carried the boxes up the back stairs and set them by the door.

She had been handed every record in that building. The old ledgers, the shipping binder, the register tape, the supply log with Monday's bulb written into it — Ro had put all of it in front of her and stood pleasant while she read.

"Every record in the building but one," she said, to the wall and the dark shop below. "The current-year stock ledger."

She took a pencil from the jar and wrote a card, and set it at the top of the board: CURRENT STOCK LEDGER — OFFICE.

Then down the inside stairs, through the dark shop, to bank the furnace and latch the cellar door, which she had done every night since the middle of September.

Upstairs, the board was where she had left it and the cards were squared. On the new card, square in the middle, sat a whoopie pie in a wax-paper fold with both ends tucked under. Whoever had come up the back stairs had stood at her table long enough to read every card on that board, and had left the polite thing on the one that mattered.