Chapter 25 of 25Nobody Signed a Name

By Monday morning the estate of Catherine Thistle would close, and a closing meant the shelves sold and the sign off the wall. Eleanor Whitcomb had one box in the building still sealed, a letter from the estate lawyer in her coat pocket that said she might open it, and no clear idea yet what Thistle & Vine was going to be.

Saturday she drove the twelve miles up Route 1 to the county jail, a paper sack riding on the passenger seat and a Dunkin' coffee going cold in the cup holder at a dollar twenty-nine.

The desk deputy looked into the sack and shook his head. "Nothing past this desk. Not even that."

"It's a whoopie pie."

"Then it's a whoopie pie that stays here." He set it under the counter beside a coffee can full of pens and slid a form across to her. "Rules are rules, ma'am."

"Well," Nell said. "Eat it, then. Chocolate ones keep better than deputies."

He tapped the form twice with the cap of his pen. "Commissary or property?"

"Commissary." She put forty dollars on the account in Rowena Pelletier's name and signed the slip.

Then she sat at the glass with the telephone in her hand, and Ro came in with her hair down and no cardigan, and picked up the receiver as if she had been expecting the call all week.

"You put money on," Ro said.

"I did."

"You didn't have to." Ro looked at the cord, then away from it.

"That's true."

"How's Denny?" Nell asked.

"He asked me what the water does at night." Ro shifted the receiver against her ear and watched the deputy's desk. "He's got a window over the parking lot. He counts the cars in."

"Then he's counting something."

"I'd have baked for him," Nell said. "Pumpkin, with the maple cream in the middle, if the desk would have let it through the door."

"He won't eat pumpkin. Never would." Something crossed Ro's face that was almost her old face. "You'd have brought him the ones with the shortening, and he'd have eaten four and blamed the dog."

They talked about Denny until the deputy tapped the glass.

"You're not going to ask me about the notebook," Ro said.

"No."

"And I won't ask you about the shop."

"Then we're square," Nell said, and Ro hung up first, which was her right.

The frost came in out of the northwest that week and took the last of Paulie's window boxes, and by Sunday the puddles in the Landing ruts wore lids. Merrow Harbor held the Cranberry Frolic anyway, because the Frolic has been held through worse, and the parish had already ordered the rolls from Hannaford.

First Parish filled at ten. The choir sang two verses of a hymn nobody's voice was made for, and then the year's names were read out slowly, the reading taking longer than the list. Cass Thistle. Edwin Prentiss. Two names off the same short street, the whole front of the church knowing both, which does not make it easier, only closer.

By noon the common had its tables up: the historical society's cranberry bog display with the real vines laid across it, apples by the half-peck, a Reny's flannel on the man selling cider because the morning never warmed past forty, and Paulie's chowder at twelve ninety-five a quart.

"You'll want the chowder," Paulie said, "and you'll want it before the Boy Scouts get into the pie."

"Twelve ninety-five a quart," Nell said, "and not one soul has argued yet."

"Because it's haddock and everybody knows it." He wiped the ladle on his apron.

Junie came around the end of the table with a paper plate and looked at the cranberry display a while. "That looks like a crime scene," she said. "A pretty one."

The boats were blessed at the wharf at one, a short blessing and a long line of men in boots, and then the town went back to eating. Curt Prentiss crossed the common with a folder under his arm and stood at Nell's elbow until she looked up.

"Hon," he said. "That's the itemized list, every title out of the barn, every price I got for it, and the check is inside the folder with it."

Nell took the folder. "You didn't have to type it."

"Fitch's office asked. I'd rather hand it to you than have a lawyer hand it to me." He looked at his boots. "I sold my uncle's books and I'm not proud of the margin."

He went back across the common.

At the shop that morning there had been an envelope pushed under the door, no stamp, a Wexford postmark at the corner and an Ashfield street written on the back. Del Rood's hand, small and square: The parcel is dead and I am going home. If the chest opens, I would like to know what is in it. I will not come back for it.

After the tables came down, Nell walked up the hill with the key, and Doughty's cruiser was already parked square to the shop.

"You could do this alone," he said.

"I could."

"Fitch's letter says with a witness." He looked at the map chest, then at her.

"Then witness."

The map chest had ridden the whole season sealed inside the estate, and the lid came up on cedar and cold. Item one was a jeweler's envelope, and inside it Vine's ring — plain gold, worn thin along the underside, with a mark stamped in the band. Item two was a single page, folded into quarters, in her father's hand, and the first line of it told her everything the family had spent forty-two years getting wrong. I took the payroll out of the drawer on the Thursday and let my sister sign for it.

Item three was a bundle tied with grocer's string, and the bundle was letters. Forty-two years of them, one or two a season, addressed to Catherine Thistle in a hand that never varied and never signed a name. The newest was postmarked weeks before Cass died.

Doughty turned the top one over. "Forty-two years of letters and not one name on the back of them."

"No."

Doughty waited.

"You know who writes like that?"

"No," Nell said. "That's the trouble."

She carried one of them down the hill in her coat pocket, because she could not bring herself to sit in that apartment with all of them at once. Iz Crockett was at the pie table working through a slice of mince with her gloves still on. Nell sat down across from her, unfolded the page between the paper plates, and watched.

Iz stopped chewing. She looked at the handwriting a long moment, and then she looked older than Nell had ever seen her, and very still, with the fork stopped in one gloved hand.

"You know that hand," Nell said.

Iz set her fork down and did not pick it back up.

"Somebody in Ashfield wrote to my aunt for forty-two years," Nell said, "and signed nothing, and knew all of it, and this one is weeks old. Who carried the letters?"

Iz squared the page against the table edge, slow, and looked out over the common, where the last boat was still coming around toward the wharf with the blessing water on it.

"Not at the pie table," she said. "Not with the whole town eating."

So the question went home in Nell's pocket, up the hill to a shop that still had its sign, and above the counter the cellar light was on and staying on.