Chapter 16 of 20A Hundred and Seven Minutes

Ro Pelletier had filed every drop receipt the Wexford hub printed, and one of them put her at the machine on the night Edwin Prentiss died, when she had told the town twice that she was home. Nell Whitcomb sat at the table in Thistle & Vine, the bookshop on the Landing, with the binder open and did the sum again.

The binder ran the year sleeve by sleeve, every gray slip stapled to its week's tally, the hub's type above and Ro's copperplate below: the count, the date, her initials. Nell had been in it since quarter past eight. Item one: the office table, worth nothing.

At half past, the shop door banged and Ro came through it backward, shouldering it, a Dunkin' tray in one hand and the mail in the other.

"You've let your coffee go cold," she said.

"I've let the binder go somewhere," Nell said.

"Cass wanted the slips by the week. Not the month. I tried the month in 2011 and she made me take it all back out and do the year over."

Ro set a fresh cup at Nell's elbow and squared the nearest sleeve with the table edge.

"By the week is fine."

"Twenty-two this week, and the tally's on the top sheet if the estate wants the runs matched to the orders."

"They're matched."

Ro looked at the page a moment too long.

"They're matched," she said. "You can count them."

"I intend to."

"And you'll want the cellar list." She was at the counter with the mail, sorting it into three piles without looking down. "I can bring it in."

"I'll go down for it."

"Take the light with you."

She pulled the cardigan straight over the Reny's flannel and went out to open, and Nell heard her laugh with the women up from the co-op.

"Morning, Nell. Paperbacks still two for a dollar?"

"Two for a dollar until the estate says otherwise."

"Then I'll take four," the woman said.

Nell worked the binder down through September while the furnace ticked and the fog burned off. March, April, the tall summer weeks when twenty parcels left the Landing on a Friday, every one of them riding twelve miles to Wexford to be stamped. Thirty years of deeds had taught her what a date could hide.

She found it at the bottom of a sleeve, in the fourth week of September: the Friday Win Prentiss went down the cellar stairs and did not come up. 11:52 p.m., in Ro's hand, with the count and the date and R.P.

Nell finished the tally, put the page back in its order, and at noon walked down the Landing into a northwest wind.

Junie had the second stool out before Nell got her coat off.

"You look like a woman reading a will."

"I am a woman reading a will. Four of them."

"Sit down. Paulie's got chowder."

"Chowder," Paulie said from the grill, and hummed four bars of something a half step flat.

"Since Easter with that one," Junie said. "I want you to hear it."

The chowder came, twelve ninety-five the quart, crackers already open on the saucer.

"Harlan's been in here. He says Tidewater's sending two trucks Monday and a boy with a clipboard who calls everything product. He'll stand in your aunt's door and price her life by the box."

"Then I've got until Monday."

"You've got until Monday." Junie looked at the window a while. "You want a quart put up for Sunday? Because you won't cook, and I know it, and Paulie knows it."

"Put up two."

"Two it is," Junie said, and took the bowl, and went to the register, and did not ask.

Ro loaded the week's carton by the back door and came back at two with a second cup, hot, set where the first had gone cold.

"You've been at that table since eight."

"It's a long count."

"It was a long count when I did it, and I did it out loud so Cass could hear whether I was lying."

"Did she ever catch you?"

"Not once."

Ro took the carton by the handle.

"I'm off," she said, keys in her teeth. "Bank first, and the run after supper."

"Drive careful."

"Ro."

"Mm."

"Nothing. Go on."

She waved without turning around, and Nell kept the question in her mouth.

The phone rang at three: Alden Fitch, out of Wexford.

"Mrs. Whitcomb."

"Alden."

"The haul is Monday at seven. Two trucks, at the door before the bank opens."

Nell switched the receiver to her other ear.

"Monday at seven."

"Seven," he said.

Nell pulled the inventory sheet toward her.

"Anything not on your inventory by Friday isn't the estate's to answer for."

"I know that."

"I know you do."

Nell did not answer that.

"I don't like saying it to you. I'm saying it because the nephew's in my office twice a week asking me who's ahead."

"I heard you the first time," she said.

After three, Nell took the flashlight off its hook and went down, knees complaining on the damp steps, and counted the good shelves: Maine fiction, maritime and the Arctic, one mixed shelf behind the furnace. Fourteen lots, written on the third page of her inventory in her own hand.

The shop was dark by six. Upstairs she laid Win's notebook beside the binder and turned the lamp on the board.

Win had logged the estate in a running sequence, 1,904 at the front room to 2,398 on the Thursday before he died, and it had never skipped once. Nell went back through the leaves and found the seam: two leaves met at the binding with one cut out between them, so that all that showed of it was the stub in the thread. The lot numbers stepped over the gap. 2,398 on the left of it. 2,412 on the right.

Fourteen lots between two numbers. She had counted the cellar's shelves that afternoon and written fourteen on the third page of her inventory.

Above the cards, the engagement letter she had signed in September: Eleanor Whitcomb, executor of the estate of Catherine Thistle. Under the last card, the one with Ro's name on it, she wrote the hub, the date, 11:52 p.m.

Ro had said it on her own, twice: "I was home for the nine o'clock news." Once to Curt and Theo, once at the Grange with a tub of chowder in her hand.

Two hours and fifty-two minutes lie between that stamp and the news. The drive up Route 1 is twelve miles, twenty-five minutes; back, the same; fifteen at the drop. Sixty-five minutes of errand, and a hundred and seven minutes of nothing at all.

Against it, three things off the file: the close-work glasses on a man who kept a second pair for the road, his flashlight set down on the bench with the lens turned out, and a page gone out of a notebook that had never missed a number.

Twice she picked up her phone and twice put it down. Then she brought the binder over, laid the slip under the lamp, and photographed it, the page and then the stamp alone, so the gray ink would read. She put the slip back in its sleeve, in order, and the binder on the shelf where Ro had left it. Monday a man with a clipboard would walk through that door, and everything in that room had better be exactly where it belonged.

David used to say a good alibi was the one thing people practiced. She wished he were in the room to say it, and she was glad he wasn't.

The photograph was in her phone, and she had told no one.

On the board, under Ro's name, in her own hand: the warmest woman on the Landing, and a hundred and seven minutes nobody could account for, in the middle of the night Win Prentiss died. Nell had never been able to leave a discrepancy alone, and she had never wanted to less.