Chapter 20 of 23Somebody Signed for It

The estate inventory fell due on Friday, and Genevieve Martel had not signed it. Arthur Vance had called twice about the deadline, and she had a name to get into the record before the county put the file away, because a file like that, once closed, stays closed, and nobody in Seneca Quay would have cause to open Elspeth Finch's last year again.

David Chen brought it up the porch steps of 12 Elm Street in a manila envelope stamped with the address of Chen's Hardware. His truck sat at the curb with the engine running, the bed already loaded with ice-melt pellets for a winter that had not arrived.

"You're not going to like how long this took," he said.

"I've got today."

"Then it came on the right day."

He came through the storm door scraping his boots on the mat. In the studio he set the envelope at the far end of the maple quilting table, clear of the quilt, which lay where she had left it: a signature quilt, its center held open, the opening doubled and stitched down twice. A frame, not a hole.

"Coffee?" she said.

"I've had enough." He pulled out the chair and sat.

"Microfiche."

"Microfiche," she repeated.

"The parcel registers went to film in ninety-four, and the film has sat in a drawer at the post office archive ever since, with nobody asking after it. I spent every favor I had left."

"That many?"

He looked at the envelope instead of at her, and that was answer enough.

"Don't ask what they cost."

She opened the envelope and laid the copies out flat, still warm from the machine. David turned the first one so the columns faced her and ran the stem of his reading glasses down the page instead of pointing at it, since he had carried it a long way to hand it over.

"Registered parcel. Mailed at the window here in town. Sender, E. Finch."

The date of mailing read October 18, 1994. Genna held it a moment. That was the day of the cash withdrawal on the Seneca Savings statement, the one with the blank margin where every other margin carried a note. She did not say the amount aloud.

"There's no number in the weight column," he said.

She looked at the column and found one word there, in a clerk's slanting hand: heavy.

"Carol Ann used that word. She weighed it twice."

"Then the record agrees with her, which happens less often than you'd think." He squared the second sheet against the first. "Addressee."

"Finch. Post office box, Oracle, Arizona."

Genna shook her head. "Not Elm Street."

"That's the first sheet." He slid the second across. "Thing is, boxes get rented. Renting one leaves a card behind."

The card was a copy of a copy, gray where the film had gone soft, and the typed line along the top was plain enough. Registered to J. Fisher.

Genna set it down square with the edge of the table.

"Fisher."

"Never heard the name." He said it without apology. "I've lived here my whole life and I've never heard it."

"Elspeth kept a box at the post office for years. Carol Ann would know."

"That's a box here. This is a box there. Same words, two different doors."

He was right, and she sat with it. A box does not appear on the morning a parcel needs one. Someone rents it and signs the rental card, and the parcel in the first copy had been addressed into it. Registered mail is signed for at the far end, which meant a receipt existed somewhere in Arizona with a name on it, written by hand, and that receipt had a home in some drawer or file she would never see.

"Whoever took delivery put a pen to paper," David said.

She called the post office, and Carol Ann picked up with a drawer rolling shut behind her.

"Carol Ann, it's Genna Martel."

"You're not going to believe this, but I was thinking about you not an hour ago."

"I need you to describe that label to me again."

"I told you about the label. Brown paper, twine, taped twice, and me weighing it twice because the scale kept sliding."

Genna drew the two copies side by side and waited, because Carol Ann would get there in her own time.

"Was there a street on it?"

"A box number and a town, and that's all, because I typed the slip myself."

"Do you remember the name of the town?"

"Not then and not now." The drawer rolled again. "Little place. I said so at the time and I meant it."

Behind Carol Ann a radio played low, a song Genna half knew, and she waited through it.

"Was there any other name on that package? Any name at all besides the one you typed."

"Finch," she said. "Finch, in her own hand. I'd know Elspeth's writing on a hay bale."

Genna wrote the name on the pad by the phone.

"And nothing ever came back."

"The other end never answered, if that's what you're asking. Not once in all these years."

Genna thanked her and hung up, then sat with the two copies in front of her and looked at the second name until it stopped being a smear of gray film and became a fact in the room.

She called the law office.

"Vance."

"It's Genna Martel."

"I know your voice, and I know what day it is." A chair creaked back from a desk.

The two copies lay squared on the table in front of her, the card on top.

"I'm not signing it the way it stands."

"The inventory is a list of assets. It isn't the place for—"

"You told me she left something to be revealed. I have something. I want it in the file."

She rested her hand on the corner of the top sheet and left it there.

"To that point." He cleared his throat. "Attached how?"

"As a schedule, and I'm writing a second name onto it before I sign anything at all."

"Whose name?"

"J. Fisher. It's the name the Arizona box was registered under. E. Finch sent the parcel, and J. Fisher's box received it, and I want both of them in the county's copy rather than only in mine."

A pen clicked on his end of the line.

"You understand what you're asking me to do with a client's estate."

"I understand exactly what I'm asking."

"Then bring me the copies, the bank statement, and the box card before they lock the doors, and I'll file the schedule the way you've written it." He cleared his throat again, which meant he had decided to say a thing plainly. "I have wondered for a long while what she was keeping."

Genna hung up. She took a fresh sheet from the drawer and ruled a line under E. Finch, then wrote J. Fisher in block letters, pressing hard enough to leave a groove in the page beneath, because a name set down in block letters is harder to argue with later than a name written in a hurry.

She would walk the copies down Main Street before the office closed. On Elm, the leaf truck had reached the far corner, and Mabel's bags stood at the curb in a row, and the day went on being an ordinary Friday in a town that believed it knew what it had buried.

The two records faced each other across the second name: Finch on the label, written in Elspeth's own hand, and Fisher on the rental card in a clerk's type, one heavy parcel carrying two names and nothing on either sheet to say which of them was a person.

Registered mail is signed for. Somewhere in a small town in Arizona she could finally name, in the fall of 1994, somebody had put a signature on a slip of paper, and the parcel had not gone west to settle a debt. It had gone into a place that was waiting for it.