Chapter 7 of 7The Space Beside Her

Thea Quinn carried the torn photograph the two blocks from The Gilded Truffle up Main Street to the Cascade Ridge library, folded inside a paper napkin. If Eleanor Penhaligon would not name the woman who had been torn out of it, the recipes in the ledger belonged to nobody, and the tax bill under the register would take the shop.

The photograph showed a young Annelise Vogel with her arm around another woman. The other woman had been ripped away with a thumbnail and a great deal of patience.

Fina stood in the doorway with a maple bar in one hand. "You want me to come with you?"

"Somebody has to be here when Javier calls to be friendly at me."

"Then take the good napkin."

Thea checked the fold with her thumb.

"This is the good napkin."

Fina squinted at the pocket of Thea's apron. "That one's from the bakery case at Safeway."

"It is."

"Then it's the good napkin."

She went back inside. The smell of the maple bar stayed in the doorway, maple and fried dough.

The historical society kept to a back room of the library, where a card table sat between two glass display cases and the flat files of plat maps. Eleanor Penhaligon sat with her legal pad and a pen she was not using, and behind her the old radiator ticked and then went quiet again.

"You're early. I haven't got the cases unlocked yet."

"The door was unlocked."

"It always is. Sit down or don't, but don't stand in my doorway."

Thea sat.

"You wanted an early photograph of the shop," Eleanor said. "The record shows the oldest one we hold is from the year the awning went up."

"I came about a different photograph."

Eleanor turned to a clean sheet on the pad.

"Then say what you came to say."

"I need to know who was in the shop with Annelise Vogel when she first came to town."

Eleanor set the pen down.

"You have barely got the dust off those shelves."

"Four people in this town had a reason to keep that question closed. Javier Rios wants this building, and a shop with a scandal attached to its history comes cheaper than one without. Ben Coleman is owed money and he doesn't care to have old business stirred. Simon Trent held Annelise's will while she was alive, and he holds it yet. And you are writing the version of her that this town will keep."

Eleanor took off her reading glasses and looked at Thea.

"You've come to the fourth first. That is either brave or rude."

"Both, most likely."

"What is it you want from me?"

Thea unfolded the napkin and laid the photograph on the card table. The tear had fuzzed with handling, soft as the edge of a recipe card.

Eleanor carried it to the window, held it by the edges in the gray light, and turned it over to read what was written on the back. Then she set the legal pad face down on her notes.

"Someone did that on purpose," she said.

"Yes."

"With a thumbnail. You can see where the paper stretched before it gave." She put her glasses back on. "Anyone can tear a photograph. Whoever did this kept it afterwards, and that is the part I cannot account for."

"Tell me about her."

Eleanor was quiet.

"Quiet," she said at last. "That's the first thing. She didn't come to the market, she never came to a church supper, and in all the years I knew her she never once stood up at a town meeting to be introduced."

"She had a sketchbook with her always, and she drew the shop window before there was a single chocolate in the case."

"Was she good?"

"Annelise said she was an artist and didn't care for crowds, and I believed that." Eleanor folded her hands on the pad. "They took the shop together. That I will swear to."

Thea waited, but nothing else came.

"The two of them painted the trim in that front room together while I brought them coffee and a plate of oatmeal cookies and listened to them argue about which blue."

"What happened to her?"

"Annelise said they'd had a falling out. She used those same two words every time, in the same order, and they always came out smooth, as if she'd practiced them in front of a mirror." Eleanor's hands stayed folded. "Later she told me the woman had passed away, standing in the kitchen with her apron still on. I believed her. Everyone believed her."

"Did you ever hear a name?"

"Never. Annelise never said one, and I asked her more than once."

Thea let the radiator tick before she asked the next thing.

"You left her out of the tribute."

"I asked Annelise about her once, much later, when I was writing something else." Eleanor straightened the pad. "She said the woman isn't part of the story. So I wrote the story she wanted."

"Simon Trent told me there had been a falling out and that the partner died," Thea said. "He heard it from Annelise."

"I gave him half of that myself, over sandwiches at the market, when he asked."

Eleanor looked at the photograph again.

"The other half he had from her."

"Then why tear the woman out of a picture and keep the picture?"

"Because the tearing was the point." Eleanor turned it so Thea could see the pale, ragged space beside Annelise. "If you want a person forgotten, you throw the whole photograph away. You keep it when you want to sit with the space."

Thea studied the empty half of the picture, the white where a shoulder should have been.

"The society keeps the town's photographs."

"We do."

"May I look through them?"

"Not today." Eleanor slid the picture back across the table. "I need to decide what I owe Annelise and what I owe the record, and those are two different women."

Fina had the supplier invoice on the counter, four names penciled down the side.

"She said it?" Fina asked.

"She said it. There was a woman, and the two of them opened the shop together."

Fina set down her towel.

"So Simon wasn't making it up."

"Simon Trent told me the same story from the other side of town, and neither of you knew the other had said a word to me about her."

Thea took the pencil and wrote building beside the first name.

"Javier's easy." Fina leaned on the counter. "He wants the address, and a shop with a scandal in it goes cheaper than one without."

Thea wrote bill beside the second name. "Ben is owed money and he remembers. He called it a bad business, and he doesn't want a bad business walked back into his barn."

"Simon Trent." Fina chewed the end of her pencil. "He held her papers while she was alive, and he's holding them now."

"And Eleanor." Thea wrote tribute beside the fourth name. "She has spent a long time keeping the story tidy, and today she put her pen down before I finished asking."

Fina looked at the four names.

"So she was real."

"She was real."

"Then why does everybody in this town act like she never was?"

Thea folded the napkin around the photograph and set it on the shelf beside the ledger, where she could see the torn edge and the coded pages together from the end of the counter. "I don't know yet," she said. "But somebody did careful work to keep her gone, and work like that doesn't stop on its own."

She pulled the ledger across the counter and opened it to the first page.