Chapter 19 of 20Who Stacked Them

The card lay on the sheriff's desk in Wexford, a coffee ring drying on one corner, and the name on it was Rowena Pelletier. Nell Whitcomb had turned that card over Monday at the Gull's Nest. Merle Doughty was not asking whether she was right. He was asking what would hold up in court, and what a truck was going to carry off first.

He had the whole of Monday in a steno pad, taken down in shorthand while the chowder went cold at the counter, and he did not ask her to go through it again. It was Tuesday, and nothing in the pad had moved since Monday.

"Say the new part," he said. "The part that isn't in the pad."

Nell hung her barn coat on the chair back. The office ran on a space heater and a coffee maker that had quit on the county, and the window at his elbow looked out on the Route 1 lot, where a woman was scraping frost off a windshield with a credit card.

"Everybody's been asking who profits from the sale," Nell said.

"Curt profits." Doughty raised one finger. "Harrowgate profits. The town gets its waterfront block back on the tax roll. That is the whole world of profit, and none of it is new to me."

"Then nobody profits from a slow count." She let that sit on the desk between them. "And somebody is destroyed by one."

He set the pencil down and leaned back until the chair complained.

"Thirty years I read inventories," she said. "A fast sale audits nothing. The truck takes the shelves and the shelves are gone and nobody ever has to open a book. A careful appraisal reads the stock volume by volume, all the way down to the cellar, and the reading is the thing that had to be stopped. Not the shop sold. The reading."

"Win was the reading."

"Win was the reading."

Doughty looked at his hands. Then he pulled the pad around and flattened it with the side of his fist, and she understood he had been waiting since Monday for something to lay on top of what he already had.

"Here's what I've got," he said. "A fall on a cellar stair, ruled accidental, no autopsy to argue with the ruling. A supply ledger page you took a picture of, with a bulb in it. A parcel receipt you took a picture of. A notebook with a page cut out of it that rode up to Portland in the back of a pickup and rode home."

"All of that."

"The originals are still in the shop, and the shop has keys out in the world." He tapped the pad. "A defense attorney stands up and tells a jury from this county that a photograph of a page and the page are two different animals, and they nod, every one of them, because they have all held a picture that didn't match the thing."

Nell said nothing to that, which cost her something.

"He can say it," she said.

"And?"

"He can say it all week. It doesn't change what happened in that cellar."

"No," Doughty said. "It changes what I can carry into a room."

He turned to a fresh sheet of the pad.

"Eighteen years," he said. "That's what she has in this town. She sat with Cass at the end, when the rest of that family was mailing Christmas cards at a woman they had already tried and convicted. Most of Merrow Harbor has eaten her pie across a Grange table. I'm one of them."

"And?"

"And you want me to walk up to that counter and tell Junie Ouellette that Ro unscrewed a light bulb."

"I'm not asking Junie."

"No." He looked up. "You're asking me."

"I am."

The folder came out of the drawer, which stuck on its rails. He uncapped a marker and printed PRENTISS across the tab in capital letters. The folder was for the estate of Catherine Thistle. The woman who had asked him to open it was Eleanor Whitcomb, executor, thirty years in probate, and a widow who had buried her husband in the spring.

"That's a file," Nell said.

"That's a file." He squared it to the edge of the desk. "It has been in the drawer since before I had anything to put in it. I told myself it was a place to keep a bad feeling."

"The truck," she said. "You held it at the door Monday."

"I did. They were polite about it, and polite is not the same as held. Holds are paper, Mrs. Whitcomb. Paper runs out."

"There's one lever I can pull." He said it to the folder. "The state lab can raise indented writing. Whatever was written on the page underneath the one that got cut, they can sometimes bring it up."

"Sometimes."

"Don't hand it back to me like that. It's a form, and a courier box, and a chemist with a backlog older than this case, and it isn't proof, and I won't stand in front of a judge and pretend it is." He looked at her then. "But she doesn't know which one it is. Neither do I. That's the whole width of it, and I'm not spending it yet."

"Then don't."

"I'll send a deputy for the ledger and the shipping binder. If she hands them over, that's a shopkeeper helping an officer. If she doesn't, that's a shopkeeper with a reason."

"You'll tip her."

"She's been tipped since Monday. She stood on the sidewalk and watched me stand in front of that truck."

Nell put her coat on. Going down the county annex steps she thought about David, who had said once, in the car, that when the pieces line up that fast you should find out who stacked them, and then had gone back to his crossword. Up on the Landing, Cass's map-chest sat in a locked apartment inside a stalled estate, and would go on sitting there.

She had Junie on the phone before she was out of the lot.

"Did he take it?"

"He took it. He's got a folder with a name on the tab and one lever he's saving for later."

"Then why do you sound like a woman who just bought a used car."

"Because being taken isn't the same as being held."

"Mm." The Gull's Nest came through behind her, a fryer going and somebody's order called back. "Paulie's got a quart of chowder in the cooler with your name on it, twelve ninety-five, so come down before she gives it to somebody she likes better."

Fitch reached her at the light by the bank.

"Nell. Are you sitting?"

"I'm in the truck."

"Tidewater rebooked the shop and the cellar for Monday morning. Seven o'clock, boxes in at the door."

"The sheriff has a hold."

"The sheriff has a courtesy, and they were courteous for a week. That's the whole of it." A chair creaked on his end. "I'm telling you because you'd hear it at the counter by suppertime, and I'd rather it came from me."

Nell put her hand on the gear shift and left it there.

"Monday."

"Monday. After that it goes by the boxload, Nell, and the shelves are in a truck and the truck is on its way, and there is nothing you or I or Merle Doughty can do about it."

The light went green. She sat through it, thinking about a cellar with no rail on the open side and a truck backed to the door of Thistle & Vine at seven in the morning, and then she drove.