"Tall. Spare. Dark hair." Genevieve Martel kept her finger on the line and did not lift it. "And a small dark mark on the left forearm, which the coroner's hand called a tattoo."
David Chen set down the coffee he had carried over from the Stewart's on Routes 5 and 20 and had not touched. In the studio at 12 Elm Street, the light off Seneca Lake was flat and gray, fog still hanging past the glass.
"Go on."
"Male, unidentified. Found at the commercial docks on the first Monday of October, 1994. No wallet, no tags in the clothing, nobody who came forward to claim him." She squared the photocopy against the table edge. "Cause of death, a fall. Ruled accidental by Tuesday noon. Buried in the county plot that Friday, and there's a record in Waterloo of who paid for the grave."
"Arthur wants the inventory by four."
"He wants it by four, and this goes into it." She slid the print from its sleeve. "So does the report. Once they're in the estate file, they belong to the county, not to me."
David turned the photocopy toward the window. "Then be sure."
She walked the length of the worktable, turned, came back. Standing helped her think.
"The photograph came out of locker nine at Gable's Marina. The key to that locker was sewn into the binding of a quilt Elspeth left unfinished. She wanted it found. She also meant it to take a while."
"All right."
"Now look at the picture."
The print was grayed and water-curled, a tide line across the bottom third, the emulsion lifted into a pale bloom on the right side. The left arm had come through clean.
David leaned in. "Tall."
"Tall. Look at the doorframe behind him. Most men clear that lintel with room to spare. He doesn't." She tapped the print. "Spare, too. Narrow through the shoulders, long through the hands."
"Well, that's half the men in Seneca County."
"It is. That's why there's a fourth thing."
She opened the shallow drawer and took out the magnifying glass.
The left sleeve in the photograph was rolled above the elbow, and the light on that side of the doorframe was flat and high. Summer light, the kind a picture gets taken outside a store on a slow afternoon.
"There." She kept her head down. "The size of a grain of rice. I had it down as a scratch on the negative."
David came around the table. "And?"
"Under the glass it has an edge. A shadow has no edge. Neither does a stain." She straightened. "Left forearm. The same place the coroner wrote it down."
He sat back and rubbed his jaw. "Thing is, a mark on an arm is a mark on an arm."
"Then count the rest of it. Height, build, coloring, and a mark on the same arm, on a man nobody in this town ever reported missing, in a month when the county buried a stranger without a name."
"You checked the picker lists."
"You did. Every registered crew at Croft and Cole. Nobody came up short that October. He wasn't a picker, he wasn't local, and nobody went looking for him."
She slid the photograph back into its sleeve.
"I'm not saying I've got him. I'm saying the file doesn't rule him out, and Elspeth kept his face in a tin box behind a stone in a seawall."
David was quiet a while. "You think the man in that photograph is the John Doe."
"I think Elspeth hid a dead man's picture in a locker that only her quilt could open."
He nodded once, which from David Chen was as good as a signature.
"One more thing." She turned back to the table. "The bridge block."
"The car going off the bridge. Could that be him?"
"The report puts him at the docks. If Elspeth had meant the bridge, she had a block for the bridge and she didn't use it."
She crossed to the far end of the table, where the quilt lay open on muslin and pinned at the corners.
She had read the marina block a dozen times in ten days: the water, the boathouse roof, the pilings, the navy hull of the Wanderer against the far dock. She set the lens over the end of the dock and bent down.
"There's a man standing at the end of it."
"What?"
"Six stitches high, worked in the same brown as the pilings. I'd taken him for a bollard." She moved the glass. "His sleeve is rolled to the elbow. Two threads of pale floss for the arm." She held still. "And one stitch of dark red on the left forearm, set apart from the rest of him."
David stood up. "Deliberate?"
She checked the quilt block by block. The fisherman on the diner block had no such stitch. Neither did the children at the bandstand, nor the farmer in his rows, nor the three women on the church steps.
She took down the Grammar of Stitches, Elspeth's hand-bound key to her own cipher, and found the page she wanted.
"A single stitch set apart from its row," she read, "is a thing marked."
"Marked," David said.
"Marked. It's the word on both pieces of paper."
A rap at the side door, and Mabel Henderson came in with a foil pan under one arm and the smell of apples around her.
"From the tree out back. You'll want those in the freezer, not on the counter, or you'll eat the whole pan by Sunday."
"Thank you, Mabel."
"You've got papers everywhere. Am I interrupting?"
"Not at all. Mabel, was Elspeth ever asked to make a quilt for Founder's Day?"
"Asked?" Mabel pushed the pan square against the backsplash. "The committee's quilt is the church ladies' work. Ruth Ann does the binding."
"I heard Elspeth had been commissioned for one."
"Who told you that?"
"Beatrice Cole."
Mabel's mouth went flat. "Well, that's news to me, and I've sat on that committee since 1998. Elspeth made two show quilts a year and both went to the historical society auction. She never took a commission from the town. Not once."
After the door closed, Genna pulled the commission ledgers from the bottom drawer, five years of them in Elspeth's small upright hand. No Founder's Day quilt. No contract with the town. Beatrice's helpful detail had been a door with nothing behind it.
The phone rang at half past ten.
"Miss Martel. To that point about the inventory."
"I know. Four o'clock."
"Four o'clock. Anything added late must carry its documentation. An estate is not a rumor. If it goes in that file, it is filed."
"I'll have the documentation."
Arthur cleared his throat. "Be that as it may. I would rather you tell me now whether I ought to be worried."
"About the inventory?"
"About what you're putting in it."
She looked at the two papers lying side by side, and at the quilt beyond them, and at the small dark mark on the small dark man.
"I'll see you at four," she said.
After she hung up, she drew the inventory form from its folder and added two lines beneath the ones she had already written, dating them the fourth of October.
One photograph, water damaged, unidentified male subject. One coroner's report, same subject, October 1994.
She capped the pen and read it through twice.
Elspeth had stitched a key that opened a locker, and the locker had held the face of a man the county buried without a name. The quilt had been showing her that face all along, on a dock, at the edge of the block, six stitches high.
Ten days she had been reading two stories in one cloth, a boat that left and a stranger who died. There was one story. It had begun on the dock the same week the Wanderer went out.
In the margin, in pencil, small enough to rub out, she wrote the question she would be carrying to Arthur Vance at four o'clock.
Who paid to bury him?
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