Chapter 21 of 21Mind the Stairs

The cards were not where Eleanor Whitcomb had left them. One lay face down on the oilcloth, and she had not turned it, and the cellar door at the bottom of the back stairs stood open though she had latched it at closing. Nothing was missing. She went through the file. Every page was there, and that was worse.

The fan ran on the kitchen chair, turned toward her, because the furnace under Thistle & Vine came up late and weak and the flushes came at night now. Below her the Landing was empty to the last streetlight. She had been at this table since three with the hot-water bottle against her knees.

She turned the card over. R. Pelletier, in her own printing, with the dates beside the name — the receipt, the log page, the Sunday at a kitchen table in a tidy Cape with geraniums in the window.

Somebody had stood in this room in Merrow Harbor and read the whole of it and turned one card over on the oilcloth to say so. In the front room her aunt's map chest sat where it had always sat, lid down, and the estate had it and she could not touch it. She wiped the card on her sleeve, which did nothing, and put it back where it had been.

Then she took the flashlight out of the shop desk and stood at the top of the cellar stairs and put the beam down across the treads. She did not go down. The light caught the corner of her aunt's card tacked at the turn, MIND THE STEP, the pencil pressed hard into the card stock. A man had gone down that turn with his hands full, and she stood there a while, and then she shut the door and dropped the bolt and sat in the back hall with her hand on it.

She telephoned the county line and got the dispatcher in Wexford, twelve miles up Route 1, who wrote it down without any change in her voice.

"Anything taken?"

"Nothing."

"Then it's a door, Mrs. Whitcomb. I'll leave a note for the sheriff."

"Thank you."

She went back up and sat with the fan until the window grayed.

Paulie Ouellette came down the Landing from the Gull's Nest a little before seven with a quart tub against her apron, knocked on the glass with her elbow, and set the chowder on the counter.

"I didn't order chowder."

"You'll want it." Paulie wiped her hands on the towel at her string. "Grill was on at five. I had a quart over. Twelve ninety-five to anybody who asks."

Nell got down two bowls and a sleeve of crackers, and Paulie looked around the shop at the shelf cards and the gaps where the appraisal had pulled books out into the open, and her mouth did something.

"Ro looks wore out."

"Wore out how?"

"Peaked. Thin in the face. She came in for the haddock yesterday and ate half of it, and that woman eats." Paulie folded the towel over her string a second time. "She said you've been up nights."

"Did she."

"She said it kindly." Paulie looked at her. "Everything Ro says, she says kindly."

"You're not sleeping," she added.

"Knees."

"Sure. Knees."

Ro came in at nine with the register tape and a box of paperbacks a woman from up the Neck had left for the shop, acorn cardigan, glasses on the cord, and she worked down the day's list while the flower-committee woman waited at the counter with a two-dollar bill and a slip for a cookbook she had special-ordered in August.

"It's quiet since Win," the woman said.

"Oh, it's quiet." Ro squared the tape against the edge of the counter. "She's still out here nights, though. Counting." She said it low, to the woman, four feet from Nell and the box cutter. "Her husband passed in the spring. Then Win. Then this. Imagine the year that woman has had."

"Poor thing."

"She's not poor, dear. She sold the firm in Boston." Ro wrote the order in her copperplate and tore the page off straight. "She's tired is all. Thirty years of finding what heirs moved before the count, and you start seeing it everywhere. Even in a flight of old stairs."

The woman took her change and her slip and looked once at Nell, and it was not an unfriendly look, and that was the part Nell would have to hold in both hands later.

When the door shut, Ro turned around warm as a stove. "I brought you a whoopie pie. You want coffee? You look like you want coffee."

"I look like a lot of things this morning."

"You do." Ro filled the kettle. "Go home, honey. Your aunt would have told you the same."

Cass had written to her every Christmas for the years nobody else in the family did, and Cass had never once told her to go home. Nell let the question sit where it was. Ro laughed and set the kettle on the burner and went back to the counter.

At noon Nell walked down to the Gull's Nest and took the end stool where she could see the whole counter, and Junie poured her coffee and did not ask about chowder money, because Junie never charged her.

"They're talking," Junie said.

"About what?"

"About you." Junie set the pot down on the mat. "What they're saying is, she's from away, she has her money out of Boston, and she's up here hunting fraud in a flight of old stairs because she can't stand to sell the shop and leave it."

"That's Ro's sentence. I heard it at my own counter this morning."

"That's everybody's sentence now." Junie wiped a stretch of counter that was already dry. "Here's the thing of it, Nell. They like you. They like her more. She made four dozen whoopie pies for the bean supper, and you asked the man in front of you in the line what he told the selectmen in September."

"I was right."

"You were right, and you were standing in front of his wife." Junie shrugged. "David used to say you could be right, or you could be asked back."

Nell drank her coffee. It was too hot and she drank it anyway.

"If you're going to keep interrogating this town," Junie said, "eat a cracker first. Nobody in the history of Merrow Harbor has ever hated a woman with a cracker in her mouth."

Nell laughed, once, and it surprised them both.

"You want the cot in the back tonight?" Junie said. "Paulie keeps it made up."

"The shop needs locking."

"The shop's a locked box. It'll keep."

Nell shook her head and put her cup on the saucer.

On her way back she stopped at Dole's for the paper. Raylene had the Uncle Henry's swap guide open on the counter and a Moxie in her hand, and she said good morning, and looked past her at the door, and did not ask after her aunt.

"Well," Nell said, and paid for the paper.

She rinsed Paulie's tub at closing and set it on the shop step with the lid under it, as she did every night, because Paulie came by for it in the morning on her walk up the Landing. Then she locked the front door and dropped the bolt on the cellar door and tried the back stair door twice.

At first light she went out for the paper with her coat over her nightgown. Wind off the northwest, cold enough that her breath showed, and the tub was where she had left it. Something was under it.

A sheet of the shop's own blank order paper, folded once. Block capitals, ruled in careful pencil, unsigned.

MIND THE STAIRS, NELL.