Chapter 13 of 13No Record of Her Dying

Simon Trent could end it with a lookup. If Margot Dubois had died in Washington in 1999, the state kept a certificate, and Thea Quinn had asked him to find it. If there was no certificate, Annelise Vogel had lied to everyone she knew, for years, on purpose.

Thea stood in the doorway of his office above the hardware store on Main Street, rain beading on her collar, an oilcloth bundle under her arm. Cascade Ridge had gone gray and slick overnight. The gutters on the old brick ran like taps, and a truck with Oregon plates hissed past below.

"Come in before the floor gets a puddle," Simon said. "Coffee's from this morning. Or yesterday morning. I lose track."

She came in and sat. He cleared a space on the desk between a stack of probate files and a dish of butterscotch candies gone soft in their wrappers, and she laid the bundle down, and then the ledger beside it, open to the back pages where Eleanor Penhaligon's account and Ben Coleman's were written out in Thea's own small hand.

"That's a lot of paper to carry through a rainstorm," he said.

"It's a lot of paper to leave in a drawer."

He picked up the top letter, angled it toward the window, and studied the signature at the bottom — a single M, brown ink, sloping slightly to the right.

"You told me you'd come to me when you had something solid," he said.

"I have three somethings solid and one thing missing."

"Which is?"

"A death certificate."

Simon set the letter down and squared it against the edge of the desk, a tidy gesture that bought him a moment. His nameplate was brass and needed polishing. Outside, the rain picked up against the glass.

"All right," he said. "Tell me the three."

Thea counted them off on her fingers, slowly, so that nothing got skipped.

"One, the flavor. Cardamom and rose in ratio, not weight, with a hazelnut praline underneath. I made it in Chicago, in a test kitchen on Grand Avenue, from a woman who taught me everything I know about chocolate. Eleanor ate that truffle in my shop on Sunday and turned the color of parchment. She tasted the same thing at a library reception years ago, made by Annelise's partner, and she has never forgotten it."

"Eleanor told me that story herself, a long while back," Simon said. "She also told me Annelise asked her never to repeat it."

"Then somebody ought to have asked Annelise why."

"Two," he said. He was a man who finished what he started.

"Two, the letters. Postmarked through the nineties, signed M, arguing about formulas — bitter orange praline, whether a ganache would hold on a shelf through August. Whoever wrote them counted costs down to the cent and drew little five-petaled flowers in the margins."

Simon turned the page over. In the corner, faint as a watermark, the flower.

"And three?" he said.

"Ben Coleman. He says the partner went by Em. She was never an employee, she was Annelise's partner in the business, and after she disappeared the sign got gold leaf and the rose truffles stopped, because they weren't Annelise's to make."

Simon leaned back and the chair creaked. He looked at the rain on the glass for a while.

"Annelise told me the partner died," he said. "I sat where you're sitting. She cried."

"Crying isn't a certificate."

"No," he said. "It isn't."

Thea pulled the ledger toward her and turned it so he could read. "Two witnesses, each dated, in their own words as best I could take them down. Ben will say it again if you call him. He told me he would."

Simon reached for the desk phone, and Ben answered somewhere out past the edge of town, where the rain would be falling on hazelnut rows. Simon pressed the speaker button so Thea could hear.

"Ben, it's Simon Trent. Thea's here with me. She tells me you remember a woman called Em at the shop."

There was a stretch of static.

"Yep."

"You're sure about the name."

"Yep."

"And the rose truffles."

"She stopped making 'em." A chair scraped somewhere on Ben's end. "Wasn't hers to make."

Simon thanked him, wrote something on the back of an envelope, and hung up. He sat a moment with his hand still on the receiver.

"Well," he said. "That's one way of looking at it."

"It's the only way of looking at it."

He stood and went to the doorway of the outer room, then stopped with his fingers on the frame. "Margot Dubois," he said. "That's the name you want me to search."

"Margot Dubois. Washington. 1999."

"I have an account with the state's vital records index. Small firms use it for probate work — it's a public index, deaths only. If she died in this state, she's in it."

"Then look."

He went out. Thea sat with the rain and the cold coffee and the dish of butterscotch candies, which she did not touch, because taking one felt like settling in for news she might have to leave with. The radiator under the window ticked and cooled and ticked again. She kept her eyes on the ledger's open pages, on Eleanor's careful sentences and Ben's short ones and the empty space below them where a third account might go, and she made herself read the whole page down to the bottom, one line at a time, before starting over at the top.

The printer in the outer room coughed twice.

Simon came back with a single sheet of paper in his hand and did not sit down.

"Nothing," he said.

"Say the whole thing."

He set the sheet on the desk and turned it so she could read it herself. Search fields across the top: Dubois, Margot. State of Washington. Death records, 1999 and the five years following. Below the fields, one line of plain type. No records match this search.

"No death certificate for a Margot Dubois in Washington in 1999, or in the five years after," Simon said. "Not under that name. Not in that window."

Thea pressed the sheet down with her palm and left it there. If Simon Trent were hiding this, he had just handed her the way to unbury it, and the thought loosened something in her chest that had been cinched tight since Sunday.

"Annelise told this town her partner died," Thea said. "She never once said the woman's name out loud."

"She told me," Simon said. "And I have repeated it. To you, among other people."

"You repeated what you were told."

"That isn't the same as being innocent of it."

Thea folded the printout along its creases and slid it into the back of the ledger, under Ben's statement, under Eleanor's. She took the pencil from behind her ear and wrote one line above it in the same small hand as the rest: *No record of her dying.*

Then she looked up.

"So she didn't die here."

"Or she died somewhere else, under another name, in another state. It happens more than you'd think."

"Or she's alive."

Simon said nothing for a while. The rain eased off to a fine mist and the hardware store's delivery door banged once below them.

"Thea," he said. "What are you going to do with that sheet of paper?"

"I'm going to look for a living woman."