Chapter 3 of 12Ten O'Clock on the Landing

Nell Whitcomb stopped the car in the middle of the wharf road, forty yards short of her own shop, because there was nowhere left to put it.

The county ambulance stood backed to the door of Thistle & Vine, lights turning, no siren. Curt Prentiss's truck sat skewed at the curb with one wheel up on the granite. The sheriff's cruiser was parked square to the building behind it, nose out.

Up the hill First Parish was letting out the ten o'clock service, and half of Merrow Harbor came down to the Landing in its good coats to stand on the sidewalk and say nothing at all.

Junie got to the car first, apron on over her church clothes.

"Don't go in yet."

"Who?"

"Win."

Nell laid her hand flat on the roof of the car. The Dunkin' she'd bought in Kittery at half past six sat in the cup holder, a dollar twenty-nine, cold since Brunswick.

"Ro found him at quarter of ten," Junie said. "He's been down cellar since Friday night."

"Since Friday."

"That card's been in the window since yesterday morning. Closed for inventory."

Nell did the arithmetic before she did anything else, because thirty years of contested inventories had trained the order of it. Item one: Saturday at the Grange, four hundred people through the line for beans and brown bread and red snappers, pie two dollars a slice at the far table. Item two: the whole town in that hall, and not one soul in it asking where Win Prentiss had got to. Item three: a card in a shop window, lettered in ruled capitals, and forty feet behind it and one floor down, a man who had promised her a number by Monday.

Ro sat on the shop step in yesterday's cardigan with a foil pan on her knees.

"I brought him brown bread," she said. "Isn't that a thing to be carrying."

"Ro."

"He'd have worked Friday straight through and never ate a bite, so I said to myself Sunday I'll bring him down some—" She stopped and began again, careful, the way she set a figure into a ledger. "I took the card out of the window at twenty of. The cellar door stood open. I went down with my phone for a light, because that bulb at the turn is no good and never has been, and I got three steps and I could see his shoe."

"You shouldn't have been the one."

"Who else, hon."

Sheriff Merle Doughty stood in the doorway at the back of the shop and did not move out of it.

"Mrs. Whitcomb. Stop right there."

"I'm executor of this building. Eleanor Whitcomb — it's on the letters testamentary in my glovebox."

"You're a woman about to walk through a place I'm not done looking at. Stand where you are and I'll let you look all you want."

So she looked. The staircase dropped steep, took its one turn halfway down, and gave a person nothing to hold where it opened out, and Cass's MIND THE STEP card was tacked at the turn where it had hung since before Nell's father died. At the bottom Win Prentiss lay on his side with one arm folded under him, and his half-glasses were still on.

"He's wearing the close pair."

"The what?"

"Sheriff, those are the glasses he reads a title page through. He kept a second pair for the road. He'd have had them off and folded in his shirt before he set foot on that stair."

Doughty took it without moving anything but his eyes. "Where's the harm in a man keeping his glasses on?"

"Where's his flashlight?"

"On the workbench."

"On the workbench where?"

"Along the wall at the foot. Set down flat, lens pointing out at the room." He recited it like a list he had already made once that morning.

"He wore it on his belt every hour I ever spent with him. He didn't go down anybody's cellar without it lit and in his hand." Nell put two fingers on the switch plate at the head of the stairs and did not press it. "And this?"

"Leave that be. It's dark, and it was dark when she came down here with her phone."

"Has anybody put a ladder up to it?"

"It's a light bulb, Mrs. Whitcomb." Doughty almost smiled and did not finish the job. "They go. Mine went in my own front hall in July and I broke a toe on the dog and blamed the dog."

"I told him Friday that thing wasn't a light, it was a rumor of one."

"Then he knew what he was going down into, and he went anyway, with books in both hands at seventy-two years of age. That's not a mystery. That's an old man in a hurry."

Curt came down the hall at a clip, the bound notebook wedged under one arm and a Hannaford bag holding his uncle's keys and glasses case.

"Coroner's fella wants a list of effects," he said. "Next of kin. That's me, chief."

"That notebook is estate work product," Nell said. "There is a lot number in it that is the last thing your uncle wrote in his life."

"He was working for a dead woman."

"He was engaged by an estate I am executor of, on a retainer he still had."

"Effects go to family," Doughty said, in the flat voice of a man who has said it at forty kitchen tables. "You want that book, get a lawyer to ask for it, and he'll have it inside a month."

"And what goes on your form?"

"Accidental." He looked past her at the crowd, then back. "The county is not going to open up a seventy-two-year-old man for taking a bad step in a dark cellar. There's one box on the paper and today it gets a check in it."

The stretcher came up the hall then, and every good coat on the Landing took its hat off, and Paulie, out of the Gull's Nest with a dish towel still through her apron string, put a hand over her mouth and left it there.

"You've gone quiet," Junie said. "That's the part that worries me."

"The appraisal isn't finished."

"Nell. The man is dead."

"He is, and the appraisal still isn't finished, and nothing in that building moves until it is. Not the shelves. Not the sale. Not the chest upstairs in her kitchen with forty-two years locked inside it." Nell watched the ambulance doors come shut. "David used to say Cass would leave me a lock and no key, purely to see what I'd do about it."

"And what are you going to do about it?"

"Well."

The wind had come round to the southwest in the night and the harbor lay flat as a dinner plate, the kind of Sunday summer people write home about. The church coats stood in twos and threes down the Landing, saying the things a town says. Down past the co-op sign, where the sidewalk gives out, a woman stood by herself in a navy coat cut for a city, hands in her pockets, face turned to the shop.

Del Rood kept a room at the Wexford inn, twelve miles off up Route 1. She had a chowder habit and a deal she could have closed over the telephone. She had nothing to be doing on the wharf road on a Sunday morning, and she had not come down the hill with the rest of them.