Beatrice Cole stood on the porch at 12 Elm Street at half past nine on Wednesday morning with a foil-covered pie plate in one hand and her checkbook in the other, and she announced herself through the screen before Genna had the door halfway open.
"Grape pie," she said. "Concord, from the winery kitchen. And before you put the kettle on and we spend an hour being neighborly, I'd like to buy Elspeth's studio. Every spool, every scrap. Name a number."
In Seneca Quay, grape pie was what you brought to a house where someone had died. Genna took the plate and held the door.
"The estate has to be inventoried first," she said. "Arthur Vance wants the list signed by four o'clock Friday."
"Then we have until Friday." Beatrice stepped past her into the hall and set her pocketbook on the telephone table. She looked down the corridor toward the studio the way a woman prices a field. "Six thousand dollars. I'd write the check on the spot and carry the whole room out myself, and you'd be back in Philadelphia by the weekend."
Genna closed the door. Six thousand was close to fair, and Beatrice had named the number without looking at a single spool. That meant the figure had been settled somewhere else, by somebody who had already counted the contents of the room.
"You should see it first," Genna said. "It's a working studio."
"Of course. Show me."
The furnace had come on at six that morning, the first time since April, and the house still smelled of it — dust burning off iron. Genna led her down the hall and stood aside at the studio door. North light came in gray and even off the yard. The thread cabinet stood open where Genna had left it, its shallow drawers labeled in Elspeth's small hand: indigo, madder, logwood.
Beatrice toured the room the way Genna assessed a historic textile — slowly, hands behind her back — and stopped at the cutting table.
"She kept notes on everything," she said. "You must have found boxes of them."
"Notebooks. Patterns. Receipts going back to the eighties."
"Receipts." Beatrice turned.
"She kept the historical society's books for years. Every invoice from every bake sale, filed by month. Louise has cartons of the same paper in the society's basement." She let that sit. "So if you're holding a folder dated 1994 and wondering about it, don't. It's bookkeeping."
Genna had been wondering about exactly that folder. She set the thought down where she could pick it up again.
"There was a commission, too." Beatrice drew her phone from her pocket and turned the screen toward Genna: a watercolor sketch of a quilt, bright with autumn leaves and a white tent. "Last fall the society asked her for a Founder's Day piece. She took the deposit in June and never delivered. If that's what's sitting at the top of your pile, the society would pay well for it. So would I."
Genna gave the sketch a polite half minute. The work folded under the muslin at the far end of the table had no tent in it, no banner, no leaves. She had spent nine days reading its seams.
"Nothing like that has turned up," she said.
A knock rattled the screen door. Mabel Henderson came as far as the hall with her car keys in her fist.
"Genna, I'm running up to Wegmans in Geneva. Do you need anything? Coffee's on sale and I've got two coupons."
"No, thank you. I have company."
"Beatrice." Mabel's voice climbed half a step. "I didn't see a car on Elm."
"I walked. Cole Harvest is a short walk if you know the shortcut."
"Not past the creek, it isn't." Mabel looked from the pie plate to Genna. "You'll call me if you need anything."
"Thank you, Mabel."
The screen door banged. Then the wall phone rang in the kitchen — the old one Genna still answered, because Elspeth always had — and she excused herself to take it.
"Genevieve Martel? Arthur Vance. Is this a decent time?"
"It's fine."
"Two items, then. Friday at four holds. And I had a call yesterday from counsel for Cole Harvest, asking to purchase the studio contents, sight unseen. I declined to discuss it pending your inventory. I thought you should know."
"How long ago did they call?"
"Yesterday afternoon."
"Thank you, Arthur."
Genna hung up and stood a moment with her palm flat on the receiver. Beatrice had offered cash for a room she had not yet walked through, and she had gone to a lawyer first. Neighbors did not buy thread that way.
Back in the studio, Beatrice had drifted to the worktable. Under a sheet of muslin lay the folded weight of the quilt. She did not lift the cloth. She laid two fingers on it, the way a person tests the heat of an iron.
"You spent four summers with her," she said.
"Four."
"What did she teach you?"
"How to read cloth. How to date a seam." Genna moved a stack of patterns off a chair. "Nothing about herself."
"No. She wouldn't." Beatrice's fingers stayed on the muslin. "Did she ever talk to you about Julian?"
"Julian Croft?" Genna kept her voice flat, the tone she used with auction houses. "He turned up in the society's clippings. That's all."
Beatrice let the silence run, and Genna let it run with her.
"She never mentioned the summer of ninety-four."
"We didn't talk about the town."
"She was a vault, that woman." Beatrice smiled at the covered quilt. "People think Elspeth was kind. She was. She was also the most careful woman in this town. She understood what a story costs a family."
"The clippings said he painted the boat just before he left," Genna said. "Croft Vineyard Green."
Beatrice's hand came off the muslin.
"Green." A short sound in her throat, not quite a laugh. "Franklin will say anything into a microphone. That hull was navy blue. Julian waxed it himself every spring and he wouldn't have let anyone near it with a brush."
She heard her own voice then, and her face closed like a door.
"Not that it matters now. Obviously."
"You went to the historical society on Thursday."
"I was looking at bandstand photographs."
"Louise mentioned the request slip." Beatrice adjusted her cuff. "The roof was replaced in seventy-eight, if that's what you were after. Obviously that was before my time."
Genna had wondered on Sunday whether Mabel's kindness ran downhill to the mayor's office. That sentence settled it. Beatrice knew about Thursday because Louise had pulled a slip from a drawer, not because a neighbor talked.
"People in this town are careful with the past," Beatrice said. She started for the front door. "Whatever you decide about the studio, decide it before Friday. There's no sense in drawing things out."
"I'll note your offer on the inventory."
"Do that."
At the door she turned, one hand on the frame, and gave Genna the full benefit of her smile.
"Elspeth knew the value of a tidy story. It's a shame to unravel things just for the sake of curiosity."
The screen door clicked. Genna watched her go down the walk — no car at the curb, just as Mabel had said — then went back to the studio. It had not been a condolence call. Beatrice had come to count what was in the room and to learn how much Genna knew, and she had made up her mind on her way down the steps that the answer was very little.
Genna uncovered the worktable and opened the estate inventory to the page headed Item 14, Contents of Quilting Studio. Under it she wrote out the thread cabinet, the Featherweight, the bolts of muslin, the flat files. In the margin, small, she added three words: not for sale. The signature line stayed blank, waiting on Friday.
Then she turned to the notebook she kept for the quilt and wrote two lines under Wednesday's date. Hull was navy. And beneath it: Two stories, not one.
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