Chapter 18 of 20Who'd Have Believed Me

Tidewater's truck was due Monday morning, and once the shelves were hauled out to the boxload and scattered, nothing would be left to prove the shop had been hollowed one book at a time. Eleanor Whitcomb had a single card left to play, and the sheriff who could hold the truck was not answering his phone.

She had left two messages in Wexford with a machine that took them in Doughty's own voice. From the window over the Landing she could see the length of the street and no truck on it yet. Wind had come around to the northwest overnight and it came down the hill at a slant, and the puddles along the wharf had gone gray and stiff at the edges.

Then somebody knocked.

Theo Rackliff stood on the top step in a canvas coat zipped to his chin, ink on his cuffs, the loupe swinging on its lanyard.

"We're not open," Nell said.

"I'm not here for books."

She stood back and let him past her, and at the kitchen table he did a thing she had seen once, in a lawyer's office in Boston, from a man who had come in to be deposed with his hat already in his hands: he emptied his pockets onto the oilcloth.

Car keys on a ring, a phone, the loupe, a pen with the cap gone soft from his teeth, a Hannaford receipt, a book-fair badge from a fair he had stopped setting up at years ago, and change he squared with one thumb.

"That's all of it," he said.

"Sit down."

He sat. She filled the kettle and stood with her back to him, which gives a man room to say a hard thing without an audience in it.

"I was there Friday night."

"Which Friday."

"Don't." He turned the loupe over and set it down. "I came up the shop steps at nine-forty and I went out the door at quarter past ten."

"Say the rest."

"I stood at his table and asked him to put me on the Thistle count. Two of us and it's done in a week, I said. Me alone and it's a month, and I'll take the experience in place of the fee. I'd worked it out going down Route 1 and I worked it out again standing in his light."

"And he said."

"He said, 'We'll see.'" He had the loupe in his hand again and he set it down again. "He had the notebook open and a stack of books on the bench, and he kept writing while I talked. When I ran out of words he said it again and thanked me for coming in."

"Then what."

"Then I drove up to the Dunkin' on Route 1 and sat in the lot with two coffees I didn't want, and went home."

"Two coffees."

"One was for Sandy. She hadn't been sleeping."

Nell went to the drawer and took out the slip, the one Sandy had carried in and laid on this same table.

"Ten forty-one," she said. "The Wexford store. Your wife brought it to me."

Theo looked at the slip a while. "She never said."

"She keeps receipts in the glovebox."

"She does." He picked the loupe up and put it down again. "She found the folder too. The letters I sent out behind the bank's back. She had it on the table when I came in from the barn."

The kettle came up. She turned the gas off under it.

"You told me you last saw Win at the memorial. You told the deputy the same words."

"I know it."

"Why."

"Because who'd have believed me?" He said it looking at the table. "Stand it up and look at it. I'm the man who wanted his business. I'm the man the bank turned down in August. I'm in that room at ten o'clock with the appraiser at the head of those stairs and I have just been told no."

"You've got two stories," Nell said. "One puts you at the memorial and nowhere else. One puts you in the front room. Those are different nights."

"I know it," he said again.

"Well."

He put everything back where it came from, phone last, and at the door he stopped with his hand on the frame. "There's nothing else in the pockets," he said. "It's all of it."

Then he went down the stairs and out along the Landing past the shop window with his hands in his pockets.

She took his card off the board and turned it face down. She had carried the man around as a killer since the morning his wife sat at that table, and it had been shame that had made him lie. David had a rule for a liar. Find out whether he's lying to you or about himself; the first kind costs money.

She tried Wexford a third time and got him.

"There's a truck due on the Landing," she said.

"I know about the truck."

"You can hold it."

"I can ask."

"Ask with a cruiser at the curb and your name on the paperwork."

She heard him breathe. "I'll be down."

It came at seven and backed along the wharf side with the ramp down. Doughty walked the trailer with a notebook out of his shirt pocket and wrote the plate down, talked to the driver a minute, and the ramp went back up.

They took the rest of it across to the Gull's Nest, out of the wind.

"Tidewater," Junie said, setting two cups down. "A driver, a helper, and a hand truck, and they call it a moving company."

"You'll want the chowder," Paulie said.

"Won't," Doughty said.

"On the board it's twelve ninety-five a quart," Paulie said.

Junie slid a menu card under his elbow, which was what she did with people who had already decided.

"Coffee. Black."

"You want decaf."

"I want coffee."

Paulie poured him decaf and he drank it down and said nothing about it, and the whole counter let him have that, because a man's coffee is his own business.

"Win found the shelf wrong before he died," Nell said. "Good stock gone out, reprints standing in the jackets. He logged it as his last lot."

"The notebook went to the nephew."

"It came back. The page with that lot on it is cut out of it. There's a stub where the page was."

"Who'd cut a page out of his own notebook?" Paulie asked, wiping the counter with his rag.

"Somebody who needed the last number he ever wrote to go away. And there's a line in the shop's supply ledger for a new bulb at the turn of those cellar stairs, in the same hand, written the Monday after he fell. The bulb was not burnt. I have the entry photographed."

Paulie ran a towel around the rim of the pot and set two more cups down.

"You photograph a lot of things," he commented.

"Thirty years of it."

"The night he died, the week's orders went up to the Wexford drop. The receipt is filed in the shop's shipping binder, stamped eleven fifty-two at night."

"Initialed?"

"Initialed."

Junie stopped wiping the same three feet of counter. "By who?"

"By the hand that initials everything in that shop."

"Home for the nine o'clock news," Nell said. "I've had that line twice, and I never asked for it either time."

Doughty had his pen out and had not written anything with it.

"One more thing. Yesterday morning I said out loud, at a kitchen table, that the light over the Wexford drop had been fixed. I was corrected before I finished the sentence. Out all fall."

"That's a story with a shape to it," Doughty observed, tapping his pen on the counter.

"It's a story with a hole in it, and a name that fits the hole."

She took the card out of her coat pocket and laid it on the counter face down and rested her hand on it, and did not turn it over.

Doughty had his cup at his mouth. He put it down on the saucer hard enough to click.

"You're holding a card, Mrs. Whitcomb. Whose name is on it?"