Chapter 6 of 7The Arm Around Her Shoulder

Thea Quinn wrote four names on the back of a utility envelope and propped it against the tax bill. The bill had a due date on it and no money behind it, which meant the shop on Main Street in the tiny town of Cascade Ridge — the walk-in, the tempering machine, the ledger, the apartment, all of it — could slide into Javier Rios's hands without her signing a thing. The four names were the other problem, and the worse one. Each belonged to somebody with a reason to keep Annelise Vogel's missing partner where she was.

"Read them out to me," Fina called from inside the closet.

Thea had carried two coffees up from The Daily Grind, and Doreen had charged her for one and handed over two. Wednesday, the shop still closed, and Fina had claimed the closets for the morning. The back-wall closet had been packed with Annelise's overflow long before the keys changed hands, and Fina wasn't going back down to the counter until it was empty.

"Javier Rios," Thea said.

"That one's easy." Fina's answer came out muffled. "He wants the building."

"He wants the building and he wants the recipes, and right now he can afford to wait for both." Thea peeled a length of tape off the roll. "The minute a second name attaches to this shop, he isn't buying a storefront anymore — he's buying a partnership dispute with lawyers in it and a court date he can't control."

"Okay. Wow." Fina's head came around the closet door. "That's a reason."

"Ben Coleman."

"Ben?" She frowned. "Ben's nice."

"Ben is owed money." Thea set the tape on the windowsill. "He supplied this place for years, and he never got paid for the last of it. If the estate has to be untangled, his invoice goes to the back of the line behind whatever else comes crawling out of the paperwork."

"You said his name at the market."

"He stopped counting hazelnuts."

"Maybe he was being polite."

"He said she wasn't always so fancy, and then he changed the subject."

Fina sat back on her heels. "Fine. That's a reason too."

"Eleanor Penhaligon."

"No."

"She's writing the town's official tribute, and she has spent years guarding that memory, and she's still setting it down for the historical society in fountain pen." Thea wiped her hands on her jeans. "When I met her, she wrote my name in a small book and watched my hands the whole time she was writing it down."

"She's a retired librarian. She does the whole town's history."

"Which means she ran its records for a living. If somebody has been lifted out of every file and every photograph in Cascade Ridge, then Eleanor either did it herself or knows who did."

"That's a mean thing to say."

"It's arithmetic."

"Simon Trent."

Fina dragged a box out and set it on the drop cloth. "The lawyer."

"He was her lawyer and her friend for twenty years, and he sat in that chair and told me he never learned the partner's name, which is either the truth or the first lie he has told me." Thea stacked the empty boxes against the wall. "He also wrote a will that says nothing moves and nothing sells until I have walked through the building. That clause has nothing to do with me."

"Then who's it about?"

"Whoever isn't on the paperwork."

The wall phone rang, and Thea took it standing with tape still stuck to one knuckle. Simon Trent introduced himself, and then he waited.

"I have a question about the law book," she said.

"I imagined you might." Paper moved on his end of the call. "Well, that's one way of looking at it."

"That isn't an answer."

"It's the answer the will allows me."

She worked the tape off her knuckle and pressed it to the edge of the counter.

"Did you ever ask her the name out loud? To her face?"

"Once." He let the word stand by itself.

A drawer opened and closed behind his voice, and Thea pictured the office she had sat in, the law books, the blinds half down.

"She cried in my office for an hour, and then she talked about the rain. I didn't ask twice."

"Then you have a name in your head that you're choosing not to say."

Leather creaked, and then a chair. "I have a client who's dead, Miss Quinn, and a duty that outlives her. Good morning."

The receiver went down. The phone rang again before Thea had crossed the room.

"The Gilded Truffle."

"Miss Quinn, this is Eleanor Penhaligon." Crisp, unhurried, every word set down squarely. "I'm assembling the tribute for the historical society's autumn meeting, and I need a photograph of the shop from its first year. I'm told the apartment upstairs is full of boxes."

"It is."

"Then I'll ask a favor. If you come across early pictures, I'd like to see them before they get sorted, handed to anyone, or carried off to the dump."

Thea looked at the envelope on the counter. "Before they get sorted," she said. "Or before I see them."

"The record shows I am careful with this town's history. That is all I meant."

"Mrs. Penhaligon, did Annelise ever mention a partner? Somebody who was here at the beginning, before the awning went up?"

Eleanor took her time, and a pen clicked down behind her voice. "As I recall, Annelise kept her early years to herself. She was a private woman, and I was a friend who respected it."

"You were her best friend."

"I was. Which is why I'd thank you not to dig at her with a shovel and call it research." The receiver clicked down.

Thea went back to the closet. Fina had the last box open on the drop cloth, laying out prints in rows: a shoebox of loose photographs and a drugstore envelope with its corner torn away.

Eleanor in a cardigan at a library fundraiser holding a book up like a trophy, the two of them at a long table with a sheet cake and a paper banner behind them, and a man in flannel beside a booth of hazelnuts whose shoulders Thea knew from the market.

"Look at that." Fina tapped Eleanor's face. "Front row of everything."

One print had come out face down, and Thea turned it over. The shop was behind the two of them, the sign freshly painted, and in front of it stood two women with their arms around each other. The woman on the right was young Annelise, dark hair to her shoulders, her head tipped back at whoever held the camera. Of the woman on the left, a ragged wedge had been torn out of the print from the top edge all the way down, taking her body, her face, and a sliver of the doorway with it. What the tear left was an arm across Annelise's shoulder, a bare wrist, and four fingers on the fabric of her sleeve. On the back, someone had penciled a year: 1999.

Thea carried it to the light. The torn edge had gone furred and soft, worked over by a thumb that had gone back and forth until the paper gave up and tore ragged.

"Somebody did that on purpose," Fina said.

"By hand." Thea looked at the fingers resting loose on Annelise's shoulder, no tension in them anywhere.

"Why keep it, then? Why not burn it?"

"Because they couldn't stand to look at her and they couldn't stand to throw her away." Thea slid the print into her apron pocket with its face turned inward. "Somebody in this town has been dusting around that woman for years, and they kept the proof of it."

"Who was she?"

Thea picked up the envelope with the four names on it, went down the stairs, and laid the photograph on the kitchen counter in the place where the tax bill had been. "That's what I'm going to ask Eleanor Penhaligon."