Chapter 24 of 25The Only Warning

"You can put that down, Nell."

Rowena Pelletier stood in the shop doorway with a whoopie pie folded into wax paper and the dark at her back. On the reading table, under the one lamp Nell had left burning, lay the current stock ledger, open to the page where seventeen years of first editions had gone out at a dollar apiece, and Monday's audit had been promised out loud in front of the whole Grange.

Ro stepped in and shut the door on the northeast wind. The hanging sign swung once against the clapboard. She set the pie beside the lamp, sat down in Cass's chair on the far side of the table, folded her hands, and then unfolded them.

"Where do you want me to start?"

"Wherever you like." Nell moved the pencil off the ledger page and laid it on the blotter.

"The Jewett." Ro looked at the lamp instead of at Nell. "That's the one he pulled. *The Country of the Pointed Firs.* He had it in his reference stack and I knew by his face before he ever opened his mouth. I watched the good spines go out of here one a year — a green one, a red one, a blue one — and then a book-club reprint slid into the same jacket and got faced out on the shelf so the title showed, and nobody ever counts what's inside a jacket."

"Bought where?"

"The Grange box lot. Church sales. The transfer station, the table by the gate." She touched the ledger page without reading a word of it. "A dollar, most of them."

Nell turned the lamp so the light fell between them instead of into Ro's eyes. "The notebook page."

"Cut out in the kitchen with a paring knife." Ro said it plainly, the same tone she used for the deposit run to the bank, and she kept her hands on the table while she said it. "It had the cellar lots on it. He'd written down every one that was gone, neat as a bank draft, and the numbers on either side were still there. That page was the whole case against me."

"The bulb."

Her hands went still. "I unscrewed it." She looked up at the fixture, dark above them both. "That's all I'll say about it in this room."

Nell turned a page of the shipping binder and smoothed it with the side of her thumb. The furnace kicked on under the floor and ran for a while like something clearing its throat.

"He kept a second pair of glasses for the road," Nell said.

"He did. Close pair for the shelf work." Ro's mouth pulled. She picked up the waxed corner of the pie and set it back down without opening the paper. "He was going down with his hands full. I knew which pair he'd have on."

"Monday you wrote it in the supply ledger. Cellar bulb, replaced."

"Monday I replaced it because it wanted replacing." A short breath that was almost a laugh and had nothing behind it. "I log everything, Nell. Eighteen years. That's the whole trouble with me."

Nell ran her finger down the column in the binder in front of her, the way she had run it down a hundred thousand columns of somebody else's arithmetic. "Eleven fifty-two."

"Eleven fifty-two at the Wexford drop, and I filed that slip myself, same as every Friday."

"The light over that drop has been out all fall."

"It has." Ro did not look away from her.

"Seventeen years," Nell said. "Every one of them at a dollar a book."

"Every cent of it went to Denny, and I have never once been sorry about the money. Only about the man on the stairs, which is not the same thing, and I know it isn't." Ro said it straight at her, no apology anywhere in it. "Cass couldn't see the shelf in front of her those last years and she trusted me with the money and the keys. Win's eyes were too good. He could tell a Boston imprint at arm's length, and he was going to count the cellar shelf by shelf and write it in that notebook and hand it to you on a Monday."

Nell closed the binder. "And the note. *Some books are better left on the shelf, Mr. Prentiss.*"

"That was the only warning I ever gave him."

Behind Nell, on the top step, the boards creaked.

Merle Doughty came up out of the stairwell in his shirtsleeves with his hat in his hand and a dead flashlight in his fist, having stood down there since eleven on a step with no rail on the open side, on knees sixty-one years old and not improved by the damp.

"Mrs. Pelletier," he said. "I heard all of it."

Ro didn't jump. She looked at him a while, and then she turned back to the table and squared the ledger against the blotter and set the whoopie pie on top of it, centered, as if the shop still owed somebody something.

"I'd like my coat," she said.

"It's on the chair behind you." Doughty lifted it off the chair and held it open.

"It's late," he said, and he said it gently, and he did not look away.

He walked her out to the cruiser with a hand near her elbow and never on it, and at the car he took out his phone and said, "Send another unit to the Landing. Leave the lights off coming down the hill."

The doors shut. The cruiser went up past the co-op and turned at the common, and the Landing was empty again.

Nell sat with the lamp and the open ledger and a quart of haddock chowder from the Gull's Nest going cold in its tub on the radiator, twelve ninety-five, bought before any of this and eaten by nobody. She had logged everything for eighteen years — the register tape, the tracking numbers, the bulb, the drop receipts — and the logbook she could not stop keeping was the thing that had walked Ro Pelletier out to a cruiser in the cold. The note Cass tacked beside the cellar turn said MIND THE STEP, in Cass's own hand, for whoever came down. Nobody had ever tacked one for Ro.

She did not feel like a winner. She felt like an auditor who had found the error, which was never once the same as fixing it.

Doughty came back to the doorway with his hat on and an envelope in his hand, and he stayed out on the step.

"Fitch's girl brought this down from Wexford an hour ago."

Eleanor Whitcomb took the envelope and held it under the lamp. One page of the estate's letterhead, and Fitch's small type across it: with the stock question answered on the record and the inventory filed that afternoon, the chest that had been sealed personal property since May came to the executor to open, with the sheriff present.

"Cleared this afternoon," Doughty said. "You ought to be the one to open your aunt's chest, Mrs. Whitcomb."