Chapter 23 of 25Both Start Monday

Eleanor Whitcomb had one item left before Monday, and it was the worst of them. She had to stand up in the Grange hall at the head of the Landing and tell the town that the estate had ordered a full item-by-item provenance audit of Thistle & Vine's stock, plus a state-lab examination of Win Prentiss's appraisal notebook. Both start Monday. A man was dead on those cellar stairs, and the audit was the only thing left that could say why.

Junie drove her the short way down, because the wind was out of the northeast and it was October and Nell's knees had opinions. There was a folding fan in her coat pocket from the church basement and no plan to need it.

"You want me to go up there with you?" Junie said.

"I want you to eat your supper while it's hot."

"That wasn't the question."

"It's the answer I've got."

The Grange hall at suppertime ran on beans, and nobody had ever improved on it. Folding tables end to end, masking tape on every casserole with a name written on it, the enamel roaster of red snappers working its way down the line, brown bread cut thick as a thumb, and the pie table under a hand-lettered card — TWO DOLLARS A SLICE — with a coffee can for the money and one Hannaford box somebody had tried to pass off as homemade. Paulie had walked down from the Gull's Nest to help and stood at the far end in an apron over her church dress, humming a hymn a half step flat.

"Take the brown bread," Paulie said, and put a slice on a plate before Nell had asked for anything.

"I don't have a plate yet."

"You do now."

Junie laughed into her coffee cup, which was the first real laugh Nell had heard in a week.

Ro Pelletier was working the serving line. She was most herself there. Acorn cardigan, sleeves shoved past the elbow, reading glasses on the knitted cord, and the long spoon going from pot to plate and back, steady as a clock. All evening she was funnier than usual — a word for every man off the co-op boats, a second helping for anyone who looked like they'd had a week of it, and a question about Raylene Dole's mother that proved she had remembered the answer from a month ago.

"Whoopie pie's in from the freezer," Ro said. "Gifford's. You'll want one."

"You always say that."

"And you always take one."

Nell took one. It cost her nothing and told her nothing new, and she ate it standing at the end of the pie table, which is how the town does dessert.

Then Harlan Trip, who chaired the select board, stood up at the head table with his napkin still tucked in his collar and said the Grange had an estate update, and would Mrs. Whitcomb take the floor.

Nell took it. She left the fan in her pocket.

She said it plainly, the way she had read depositions back against the file for thirty years. The estate of Catherine Thistle had ordered a full item-by-item provenance audit of the shop's stock — every lot, every jacket, every point of issue checked against the record. The state lab would examine Mr. Prentiss's appraisal notebook. Both start Monday.

The room took it as procedure. That is the thing about a Grange hall. Half the people in it had filed a probate inventory, or buried a husband, or signed a quitclaim somewhere along the way, and not one of them thought an audit was a strange thing to do with an estate.

"About time somebody counted," Harlan said, and sat back down.

"Does the truck still come Monday?" said a woman at the back table.

"The haul is still booked," Nell said. "The audit is the estate's, and it's mine to run."

"Will the sale hold, then?" Harlan said.

"That's the question the audit answers."

Doris at the back nodded like that settled it. It settled nothing.

Iz Crockett sat at the second table with her cardigan buttoned to the neck and a plate of beans she was not eating. She caught Nell's eye when Nell sat back down and said nothing at all, which from Iz was a full paragraph.

Junie leaned in. "You could have told me before you told the hall."

"You'd have spent the whole drive down arguing with me."

"I would have."

"That's why."

Nell watched the serving line.

Ro's hands on the spoon did not miss a stroke. She served the woman behind Nell, then the two men from the co-op, then a boy holding his plate in both hands, and between plates she wiped the rim of the pot with the flat of the spoon, the habit of eighteen years. Twice her glasses slipped, and twice she pushed them up with her wrist because her hands were full.

That was the part Nell could not stop looking at. Behind those lenses, in the second between one plate and the next, something ran. Nell knew the arithmetic of it, because she had spent thirty years sitting at kitchen tables while people did it: the current ledger, the shipping pages for September, the one record nobody had ever offered her a look inside, and one night and a Sunday to make the shelves say something they had never said.

Ro looked up and smiled down the length of the hall. Same warm, tired, wide smile she had brought up the stairs that first morning with a whoopie pie in wax paper. Nell smiled back, because that is what you do.

"The beans go fast," Ro called. "You want a second pass, you come now."

"I'm all right."

"You're never all right at a supper. You just sit still."

Paulie came around the end of the table with the coffee pot and poured first and asked later.

"You going to say anything else tonight?"

"Not tonight."

"Good. If you're going to ruin a man's supper, do it before the pie."

"Whose supper am I ruining?"

"Mine. I only get one of these a week."

Junie laughed, and two men at the end of the table laughed along without knowing what about, which is how a Grange supper works.

Nell ate her two dollars of pie and stayed to clear. She stacked chairs, shook Harlan's hand, and told Doris the hall smelled like every good Saturday of her childhood, and it did. She watched Ro wipe down the serving table, fold the towel through her apron string, and walk out to her car with her collar up against the north wind, looking like exactly what she was: a woman going home to a Cape two lanes off the Landing, geraniums in the window, a woodpile squared to the inch.

That was the ache of it, and Nell carried it up the hill in her coat pocket next to David's line about good liars keeping receipts, which was the one thing he ever said that she now wished he hadn't.

"You never answered me in the truck," Junie said, at the top of the Landing.

"What was the question?"

"Whether I should go up there with you."

Nell looked at the shop. Both windows dark. She had latched the cellar door at four o'clock, the way she had latched it every night for weeks, and she did not say so, because out loud it had begun to sound like a woman counting her locks.

"Monday's the question," she said.

Midnight. The Landing was empty, the wind had gone around to the north, and the windows of Thistle & Vine stood dark, both of them, the way they had stood every night since the Sunday the ambulance came.

Then the cellar sash lit. A thin yellow line at sidewalk level under the glass, where no light had shown since Ro took the inventory card out of the window.

A car came up the wharf road with its lamps off, slowed at the corner where the streetlight does not reach, and stopped.

Monday was four hours closer than it had been at suppertime.