Chapter 20 of 20Behind the Loading Door

The one thing Eleanor Whitcomb had left of her aunt was a sentence handed down at her father's kitchen table: Cass Thistle took the payroll and ran. Delphine Rood came into the Gull's Nest at closing to say it was a lie.

Paulie was at the far end of the grill, ladling the last of the chowder into quart containers for the morning, and Paulie's back was doing all the listening in the room. There was a sheet pan of brown bread cooling on the back counter, because Paulie baked it when the mood took her and the Grange took the rest on Saturday. The wind had come round to the northeast, and Junie had the door propped and the heat on at the same time, which is what October looks like in Merrow Harbor.

Del came in with a folder under her arm and stood inside the door instead of sitting. Junie let her stand there and kept working the same stretch of counter, her Reny's flannel rolled past the elbows.

"Coffee?"

"No."

"Chowder?"

"I did not come in here to eat."

"That has never stopped anybody yet," Junie said, and went to the register to close it out.

Del took the end stool by the window, which wobbled, and put the folder on the counter and left it shut. Nell set her mug down and came at it straight, because straight was how you got anywhere with a person who walked in carrying paper.

"Then I have a question," she said, "and a morning I would like accounted for. The Friday Mr. Prentiss died. And the Sunday, when you stood on the Landing past the co-op in a navy coat and never came to my door."

"Those are the two I came to answer." Del did not put the folder down. "The Friday Mr. Prentiss died, I was at our company dinner in Wexford, at a table full of people who will be glad to be asked. You may have every name."

"You have spent the season letting Merrow Harbor believe you are from away."

"I have told this town nothing. It filled in the blank by itself."

"And the Sunday."

"I got as far as the co-op sign and the ambulance was already at your door. I turned around and drove back to Wexford and sat in that room until dark."

Junie stopped with the drawer half open. "The county has a file open. Everybody knows it."

"I know it. That is why I am here and not at the inn."

Eleanor Whitcomb had spent thirty years listening to depositions for what they left out, and she had one rule she trusted: when somebody hands you the thing you did not ask for, put the pencil down and listen to what comes next.

"You knew the name Ashfield before you heard it in this town," she said. "You told me that on the Neck and I have been carrying it around since."

"I was born in it."

Junie shut the drawer. "Ashfield," she said, to nobody. "Like the store."

"Like the store," Del said. "Thistle and Rood Dry Goods. My father had the dry goods half and your aunt kept the books and the front counter, and she was better at the work than he ever was." Ashfield had come back into her vowels.

Paulie set a cup of chowder in front of her without ceremony. The quart sign behind the register said twelve ninety-five and always had.

"Now the whole town can say what the buyer eats," Junie said.

"Now the whole town can say a good deal more than that."

Paulie went back to her pots.

"I want you to understand that I am not here to make you feel better," Del said.

"I did not think you were."

"I was seventeen the autumn of 1983, and I was behind that store where I had no business being, having a cigarette I had no business having." Del's hands went back around the cup. "The office light over the loading door was on. Your aunt was at my father's desk on her feet, and your father was sitting in my father's chair with his coat still buttoned and his face in his hands. Then I heard the trucks coming up the hill, and I ran home, and I have never told a soul in that town I was there."

"Did they see you."

"Nobody saw me. That has been the whole of my life since."

Nobody in either family ever put the two of them in the same room that night. Nell turned it over once and set it down.

"The next week," she said.

"The next week the bank men were in our front office in their coats, and your aunt stood up in front of them and said it. 'It was mine. He knew nothing about it.' Your father stood behind her with his hat in his hands and let her say it."

Nell waited.

"Then the town stopped buying from us and stopped nodding to us on the street, and we were gone in 1984. My father never had a store again."

Junie had come back down the counter with a rag in her hand and was not pretending otherwise.

"You were seventeen," Nell said.

"I was seventeen, and nobody asked me anything." Del looked at the chowder and then past it. "I have been in this town since the summer telling myself I came for the parcel. I came to hate her. She was already dead when I got here."

"You have been here long enough to have hated her and gone home."

"I read her handwriting on the back of every receipt in that office instead. It is an inconvenient way to spend a season."

Nell thought of David, who had said once that a witness who walks in on her own is worth more than one you have to go find, and that she generally charges more.

"You came down that hill to ask me something," Nell said.

"I did."

"Then ask it."

Del opened the folder. There was nothing in it but a survey of the harbor-front block under a company letterhead, and she left it open and face up and did not push it across the counter.

"I came to ask about your aunt's chest. Some papers went out of my father's office that last year, and I have never known where they went, and I have wondered a long time whether any of them came down the coast."

"The chest is sealed until the estate settles."

"I know. I read the same paragraph you did." Del's hand lay on the survey. "Do you remember your aunt's handwriting?"

"I have her hand in every margin upstairs."

"Then you will know it when you see it."

The room was quiet except for the fan over the grill and the tide going out under the wharf.

"The company is calling me home at the end of the week," Del said. "I am going to go, and I am not going to come back up this road, and I have one thing left to say to you. Then this folder is yours, and my room number is on the top sheet, and I would take it as a kindness if you used it."

"Say it."

"Your aunt didn't run from you, Mrs. Whitcomb. She stepped in front of your father."

Del closed the folder and laid it on the counter between them.

"And somebody up in Ashfield wrote to her about it for forty-two years — because somebody had to carry those letters down the coast, and I always figured it was one of mine."