Chapter 16 of 19For Her Own Good

The mayor had lied, and Genevieve Martel could prove it. Franklin Croft had told the Founder's Day committee that the Wanderer's hull was Croft Vineyard Green. Elspeth's quilt showed navy blue in double thread — witnessed, in her journal's grammar. That was the risk: a lie with a name on it, and three people in Seneca Quay who wanted her quiet.

"Say it again," David Chen said. He had come into the Quay Diner with his collar turned up and his hands still red from the walk down Main Street in the cold.

Genna set her mug down. "Vance told me yesterday morning that Elspeth left him one instruction about the quilt. It was meant to correct the town's memory."

"Correct it how?"

"Her words. 'The story everyone knows is the one Franklin Croft needed. The quilt is the one that's true.'"

David studied the specials board behind the counter — salt potatoes, grape pie, the last of the harvest — and then looked at her. "That's a name. Not a hint. A name."

"I noticed."

Della came past with the pot and filled them both. "Pie's from the last of the grapes," she said. "After this week it's frozen or nothing." She left the check folded under the sugar jar.

Genna counted the people who mattered. Franklin Croft had stood in this room and named a color that was never on that boat. Beatrice Cole had carried an envelope of cash into a stranger's kitchen. Sam Gable had sworn the marina kept no records and that every locker had been emptied years ago, and she had a photograph in her desk drawer that had sat in locker nine for thirty years.

"Three of them," David said. "One story."

"One lie. And I've been watching the mayor."

"Wrong one."

She looked up. "Say that again."

"I've watched Franklin for thirty years. It's the other two I'd worry about, and it's the quiet one I'd worry about most."

Movement on the far sidewalk pulled her eyes up. Sam Gable stood in front of the bank across Main Street with his hands in his coat pockets and his hat down over his eyes, doing nothing at all in a place he had no business being.

"Don't turn around," Genna said.

"I saw him before I sat down."

"How long has he been out there?"

"As long as I've been here."

"He's never in town."

"No."

Genna did the arithmetic on fifteen years of Main Street and one Monday morning.

"Fifteen years, and never once?"

"Never sold him a nail." David stood and reached for his coat.

"David."

"It's Main Street. I'll be at my counter before you finish that coffee."

"David."

"It's daylight."

From the booth she watched him cross. Sam came off the far curb and fell in beside him, and the two men walked together, slow, Sam doing the talking and David doing the listening. She could not hear a word through the glass. Twice David stopped walking. Once he didn't.

The screen door of Chen's Hardware closed behind him. Sam stood on the sidewalk a while longer, then went to the blue pickup at the curb and drove south.

Genna left two dollars and a quarter on the check — coffee at the Quay had cost that since she arrived — and walked up Elm Street with her collar up against the wind coming off the lake.

She had the kettle on and a chair pulled around to face the front step when David knocked.

"You look cold," she said.

"I walked."

She poured him tea. He wrapped both hands around the cup and didn't drink for a while.

"Word for word," she said.

"Word for word." He set the cup down. "He was on the sidewalk by my door when I came out. He said, 'You're helping the Finch woman.'"

"And you said?"

"I said, 'I'm selling lumber.'"

"Then?"

"Then he said, 'Stop.'"

Genna waited. He went on.

"'Stop,' he said again. 'Some things are better left buried.'"

"What did you tell him?"

"That I'd been minding my own store for fifteen years and intended to keep at it."

"Did he raise his voice?"

"Sam doesn't raise his voice." David looked past her toward the window, where a streetlight had come on over the elm. "He said, 'Tell her to finish her business and go home.'"

"Home to Philadelphia."

"He didn't say where."

"Then what?"

"Then he said, 'For her own good.'"

Genna had heard that shape of sentence before, from Franklin Croft, at a planning table, about the good of Seneca Quay.

"Anything else?"

"One thing." David set both hands around the cup again. "When he was finished, he took a rag out of his back pocket and wiped his hands on it, both of them, and put the rag away, and went down the street."

"Were his hands dirty?"

"No."

He gave her the shortest true answer he had, and he had always given short answers.

"Had he touched anything?"

"My door frame. He leaned on it to say the last part."

"So he wiped clean hands on a rag in front of you, and then he left."

"That's what he did."

Genna got up and lifted the marina block off its hook. The tiny man with the single red stitch on his left forearm sat at the dock, and the boat beside him carried the word Wanderer along its stern.

"Are you going to stop helping me?" she asked.

"No."

"Sam Gable told you to."

"He did."

"That's a no?"

"That's a no."

David picked up his tea and drank it, which he had not done since he sat down.

"I've been building this around the mayor," Genna said.

"So have I. Thirty years of it."

"And now?"

"Now I'd build it around the quiet one instead. Sam stood on a sidewalk in daylight to warn a man he has never sold a nail to. Franklin gives speeches and sleeps fine. Sam doesn't leave the water."

"Why would he?"

"Because he thinks there's something in this he can be charged with."

David said it without lifting his voice.

"A charge for what?"

"For helping bury it." He looked at the block in her hands. "Men don't wipe their hands over a rumor. They wipe them when they think they're accomplices."

Genna sat down at the table and opened her notebook, because she did her thinking on paper. She had spent every day since she arrived reading this as a town protecting a memory — a boy, a boat, a family name. What David had carried down from Main Street was a different shape entirely, and she wrote it out flat so she would not lose the edges of it.

She wrote: Sam Gable left the marina and walked up Main Street on a Monday. He told David Chen to stop helping me. He said, for her own good, which is a Croft sentence if ever there was one.

Under that she wrote the question the day had handed her, and left the page open on the table where she would see it first thing in the morning.

What is Sam Gable afraid of that would make him walk into town and say it to a man's face?