The town buried Win Prentiss on Tuesday and fed him on Wednesday, and the feeding drew the bigger crowd.
By four o'clock the Grange hall at the head of the Landing had every folding chair down off the rack and forty people standing anyway, coats steaming from a rain out of the southeast that quit at noon like it had somewhere better to be. Nell Whitcomb stood at the end of the long table and priced it, because that was what her hands did when the rest of her had nothing to hold.
Item one: nine casseroles, masking tape on every bottom and a name in ballpoint. Item two: eleven pies and a Hannaford sheet cake in its plastic, under a card that said TAKE A SLICE, where Saturday's card in the same hand would say two dollars. Item three: most of Merrow Harbor in its good coats, in a room smelling of coffee, wet wool and floor wax.
They had done this for Cass in May, in this same hall, and there had been four pies.
"You're the niece."
The woman at Nell's elbow came up to her shoulder, with three pencils in her cardigan pocket.
"Nell Whitcomb."
"Isabel Crockett. Iz. I ran the county library twenty-six years, and I keep the parish reading room now, which pays worse. Your aunt sold me the same Kenneth Roberts three times. I kept giving it away and she kept finding me another one."
"That sounds like her bookkeeping."
"It was her charity, and she'd have thanked you not to say so." Iz's eyes went past Nell's shoulder and stopped there. "Who is the navy coat?"
"Delphine Rood. Harrowgate Coastal Partners."
"The buyer."
"The buyer."
"Mm," said Iz, and looked at her a good while after the conversation had ended.
The pass-through window banged and Ro Pelletier's voice came through it running the way it ran on bean-supper nights, and a plate reached Nell before she finished turning around.
"Blueberry, or the apple. Don't you tell me you ate."
"You buried a friend Tuesday, Ro. Sit down."
"And do what, watch that urn?" Ro had her sleeves shoved past the elbow and flour on the same acorn cardigan she hadn't thought to change out of. "Poor Win. I told that man a hundred times about those cellar stairs. A hundred times, and he'd say we'll see, same as he said to everything."
One of the Grange women asked it plain. "What happens to you, Ro, if she sells?"
The laugh came out a size short of the one Ro kept for a room.
"New owner brings their own girl, hon. Eighteen years, and I come with the shelves." She was already reaching past Nell for the next plate. "Blueberry, then."
Curt Prentiss found her at the urn in a black golf shirt, toothpick still working.
"Chief. Good crowd for him."
"It is."
"Listen, while everybody's under one roof." He tipped his head at the hall the way another man tips it at a boardroom. "Quick, clean sale. That's what Uncle Win would've wanted. Sixty grand for the load, maybe better, and no lawyer eating it a slice at a time."
"Your uncle wouldn't stand behind two thousand four hundred volumes until he'd had his hands on every one of them."
"And look where careful got him."
He heard it leave his own mouth and moved the toothpick. Nell let the silence cost him. Silence was free, and she had been spending it in depositions since 1996.
Theo Rackliff had two men from the co-op cornered at the pie table, telling them what Edwin Prentiss had been, in a voice too large for the room.
"He made me. Twenty-one years old, no trade, and he had me out in that barn every Saturday on points and price and provenance—"
His phone went off against the table edge. He turned it face down without reading it, which took two seconds, and then he read it anyway.
"Sorry. That's nothing."
"You've said his name four times in a minute," Nell said. "Thursday you couldn't finish a sentence with it in."
"That's grief, Mrs. Whitcomb." The phone went into his jacket. "Some of us do it out loud."
Del Rood stood by the coat rack with her hands in her pockets and nothing at all on a plate.
"I wouldn't have thought a buyer belonged here."
"I am paying respects."
"You met him twice."
"Three times. He declined to give me a number on all three occasions." Del read the hall the way she walked the Neck at dawn, in measured lengths. "Your town does this well. Mine did not."
"Where's yours?"
"Away," Del said, and the vowel came out flatter than the rest of her.
Somebody had set a bag of potato chips among the casseroles with his name on it in ballpoint, and Junie had been telling people about it all afternoon.
"Store-bought," she said, catching Nell at six. "In this hall. I'd have expected better from a Dole."
"He came."
"He came with chips." Junie pulled Nell's collar straight, which was all the affection on offer. "You've been doing the room. You did it to Ma's hutch and you're doing it here. He's dead, Nell. Not defrauded."
Nell had the answer and kept it, because out loud in that hall it would have been the widow from away finding fraud in a flight of old stairs. The answer was: then why won't the file close?
Her phone rang on the Grange steps at ten past six, with the hall roaring behind the door and the harbor going the color of the sky.
"Mrs. Whitcomb? Alden Fitch, for the estate. I'd have come down today, but I had a probate calendar in Wexford."
"You've got bad news or you'd have put it in a letter."
"Nothing's bad. Nothing's anything, and that's the trouble. I can't file an inventory without a completed appraisal, and until it's filed nothing settles — not the shop, not the accounts, not one stick of your aunt's personal property — and that includes the chest. Mr. Prentiss's engagement, I'm sorry to say, ended with Mr. Prentiss."
"So engage another."
"That's what I'm calling about. There's a house in Portland and a fellow in Rockland, six weeks out and eight, and both start at lot one, because no appraiser alive will certify another man's—"
"I'll finish it."
The line went quiet long enough to hear a radiator ticking twelve miles away.
"You would be valuing a property you stand to profit by selling."
"I would. I'd also be the only person in this county who spent thirty years reading inventories to find what walked out of them before anybody counted. He was three-quarters done. The lot numbers are in his notebook, and I'll charge this estate nothing to finish it."
"That notebook is with the nephew."
"Then I'll start on the shelves and pry the notebook loose after."
Fitch made a sound that was not quite surrender. "An engagement letter, then. Executor to herself — Eleanor Whitcomb for the estate of Catherine Thistle — and an independent review at the close, or a judge sends it back at us."
"You'll have it Friday."
She put the phone in her coat pocket. Behind that door, in the coffee smell and the warm, every person who wanted that count finished a particular way was standing in one room with pie on a paper plate — and by Friday morning the counting was going to be hers.
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