Curt Prentiss left his truck idling at the curb and came into Thistle & Vine with a toothpick already working.
"Chief," he said to his uncle, who was seventy-two and nobody's chief. "Hon," he said to Nell. "Tell me we're close."
"Close to what?"
"A number. Something a man can carry to a buyer." He rocked back on his heels and priced the room out loud, which was Nell's own habit performed badly. "What've you got in here, forty grand of books? Fifty? There's an outfit down the coast would write a check Friday for the whole load, sight unseen."
"A truck's price," Win Prentiss said. He turned a page in the bound notebook and wrote the next lot number in the sequence he had kept since March. "We'll see how the number lands."
"That's a no."
"That is a we'll see."
Nell filed the room the way she filed everything. Item one: a Portland truck idling on the Landing in Merrow Harbor at three nineteen a gallon, in a town that counts sixteen hundred people in February. Item two: a nephew wearing a golf-shirt tan in the second week of September. Item three: an uncle who would not be hurried, in a shop that had not turned a dollar since this stretch of the Maine coast had two boatyards.
Theo Rackliff had been at the long table twenty minutes with a loupe on a lanyard, not touching Win's reference stack and not walking away from it either.
"Points, price, provenance," he said when Nell came near. "That's the whole job. You want a man on those shelves who can tell a first from a book that's only dressed like one."
"Do I."
"Two of us finish this in a week. Him alone, it's a month." He checked his phone, put it away, checked it again. "I learned every bit of it in his barn. He'd tell you so himself, he'd say—"
He stopped there and looked at the floorboards.
Ro came through from the office with the coffee pot and four mugs nobody had asked for, and the room went easier the way it did when she was in it.
"Don't you two mob him." She set a mug down at each elbow. "Poor Win saves the cellar's good shelves for Friday nights, always has. Landing's quiet, nobody in and out, and he can hear himself think. Eighteen years I've watched him do it."
"Rowena," Win said.
"Am I wrong?"
"You are not wrong."
"Friday night, in a cellar, at his age." Curt moved the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. "Hon, what that room wants is a hand truck, not a magnifying glass."
"He's careful," Ro said, and it came out sounding like a compliment, and every person there took it as one.
At five Nell walked the ninety yards up to the Gull's Nest for a quart of chowder to carry home, and a woman in a good navy coat stood at the register ahead of her, ordering the same thing.
"Sixteen even," Junie said, and made change out of the drawer.
The woman turned with the container in both hands. Silver bob, no lipstick, shoes that had never once been on a wharf.
"You are Eleanor Whitcomb," she said. "The executor."
"Nell."
"Delphine Rood. Harrowgate Coastal Partners." A card came out of the navy coat, dry as a bank statement. "Is the appraisal near finished?"
"You'd know before I would. This town talks before it's had coffee."
"I would like to hear it from the estate."
"It will be finished when it's finished."
"That is not a date."
"No," Nell said. "It isn't."
Del Rood held the look a beat past what the exchange wanted, then thanked Junie by name, which she had no business knowing, and carried her chowder out.
"Five weeks at the inn up in Wexford." Junie wiped a counter she had already wiped. "Five weeks, for a block of buildings a woman could buy over the telephone. Comes in every other day and eats it standing in the parking lot like a gull."
"You could seat her."
"I've offered. She likes the view of us better from out there." Junie bagged the quart and set it by the register. "You going down Friday?"
"Two nights. The house, and a man from the firm who wants one more signature."
"Sleep in your own bed for once."
"It's a bed I bought with David." Nell took the bag. "I'll sleep in it, and I'll be back Sunday morning."
Friday the wind swung around to the northeast and the harbor went the color of a nickel by noon.
Ro had the week's outgoing orders spread over the office table when Nell came down with her overnight bag — padded mailers stacked by size, a Reny's shopping bag holding the small ones, the shipping binder open at her elbow. She wrote each tracking number into the binder in that copperplate hand, one line to a book, squaring the stack after every third.
"Twenty-two going out," she said. "Best week since the Fourth."
"You're driving those up tonight?"
"Same as every Friday. Twelve miles to Wexford, drop them at the twenty-four-hour, home for the nine o'clock news." Ro capped her pen. "Nothing ships out of this town, hon. Never has. You want a package to move, you drive it."
"I could run them up before I go."
"You're headed the other way entirely. Don't be foolish." She nodded at the door to the back hall. "Besides, I've got beans to put to soak before I'm anywhere. Grange supper's tomorrow and I'm not sending brown bread alone."
Win came through with the notebook under his arm and his close-work glasses already down on his nose. The flashlight rode on his belt where it always did.
"Cellar tonight?"
"The good shelves. It is the last lot, and it wants the most light I can give it."
"There's one bulb on a string at that turn, and that isn't a light, that's a rumor of one."
"I have this." He touched the flashlight without looking down at it, the way a man touches his wallet on a strange street. "Mrs. Whitcomb, I will have a number for you Monday, and it will be a number you can stand behind in a courtroom, which I am told is the only sort you accept."
"Now you're flirting, Mr. Prentiss."
"We'll see."
Nell put her bag in the car at six, and Ro was at the front window with a mailer in each hand and lifted one at her, and Nell pulled out onto the wharf road with both shop windows burning gold behind her in the blue.
The Landing empties by nine after Labor Day. Dole's sign goes off, the co-op goes dark, and the harbor light takes over the work.
At ten past ten one window was still lit at Thistle & Vine. Low at the back, down at sidewalk level, a thin yellow line lay under the cellar sash.
A car came up the wharf road with its lamps off and stopped where the streetlight doesn't reach.
Somewhere between the nine o'clock news and morning, the line under the cellar sash went dark.
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