Chapter 23 of 23It's What's Left

The break-in cost Genevieve Martel the photograph and the coroner's report, and it left her a single letter in a zippered bag and a side door at 12 Elm Street in Seneca Quay that she no longer trusted. Whoever searched Elspeth's studio had known about the false bottom in the sewing table, so the search had not been a guess, and whoever it was would come back for the letter. On Monday morning she sat at the kitchen table with her coffee going cold and made up her mind to say all of it out loud, to the people it belonged to.

She called Arthur Vance first.

"Arthur? It's Genevieve."

"Miss Martel." Pages turned at his end of the line. "You're calling early."

"Someone was inside the house last night."

"Was anything taken?"

"Yesterday, between the diner and dark. They took the photograph and the coroner's report and left the quilt on its frame."

"Anything else disturbed?"

"The letter is in my bag. He walked right past it."

Arthur cleared his throat, the sound she had learned to wait for.

"Then he knew what he came for and left the rest."

"I know. That's why I'm calling you."

"To that point." A drawer opened and shut behind his voice. "Say it to me before you say it to anyone else."

She laid it out in the order she would use for a condition report: the letter signed with one initial and postmarked from Arizona five years back; the bank statement with the cash Elspeth drew out the same week the county closed its file on the man at the docks; the knots stitched in gray thread along the quilt's border that fixed a date, a boat, and a hull that was navy blue when the mayor of Seneca Quay had gone on record calling it green.

"You have your evidence," Arthur said. "Do you have your witnesses?"

"I want you to be one. You're the executor of the estate, and you can require the heirs to come and look at what Elspeth left them."

"I can require them. Whether they listen is another matter."

"Listening is their business. Showing is mine."

"Name them."

"Franklin Croft. Beatrice Cole. Samuel Gable."

She heard him write it down, and the pen stop.

"That is a list, Miss Martel."

"It is."

"Be that as it may." He cleared his throat again. "I'll telephone Louise Brennan about the reading room, and I'll be there when the door opens."

She made the calls standing at the kitchen window, where the lake showed between the last of the leaves. The mayor's office picked up at once.

"Mayor Croft's office."

"Genevieve Martel here, on estate business. Is he free for a moment?"

A chair creaked. "Miss Martel. You have caught me between appointments."

"Arthur Vance has called a meeting at the historical society this afternoon, and he asked me to bring you word. Something out of Elspeth Finch's estate is going on the table."

"What item?"

"Something Elspeth made. I would rather you saw it than heard me describe it."

The chair creaked again. "I'll be there."

Beatrice answered with her own name.

"Beatrice Cole."

"Ms. Cole, this is Genevieve Martel."

"Of course it is."

A keyboard clicked somewhere behind her.

"Arthur Vance wants you at the historical society this afternoon. There's an item from Elspeth's estate he means to lay out, and you're one of the people it concerns."

"And what item would that be?"

"The contents of the studio you offered me six thousand dollars for."

A door shut in the background. "Obviously I'll be there." Then, quickly, "Will Franklin be there?"

"He will."

"Then I'll come early."

Sam answered as though he had been standing beside the phone.

"Gable's Marina."

"Mr. Gable, it's Genevieve Martel."

"I know who it is."

Wind came off the water through whatever door he had left open.

"There's a meeting this afternoon. Arthur Vance is putting one of Elspeth's things in front of the people who should hear it."

"Don't know anything about any quilt."

"You don't have to know anything. You only have to sit and listen."

Metal rang once against a workbench and stopped.

"Yep."

He had not said he would come and he had not said he wouldn't. She wrote the names on the back of an envelope and put the envelope in her coat.

By late morning the frost had burned off the lawn. She locked the front door and the side door, tucked the letter into the inside pocket of her coat, and walked into town with the quilt in its cotton bag over her shoulder.

Chen's window carried the hand-lettered bake sale card and, beneath it, a new one for storm windows. A Wegmans flyer flapped under the wiper of a pickup outside the post office. The Quay Diner had chalked grape pie on its board, which meant the season had turned for good, and the town crew's leaf bins waited at the curb on Water Street with the maples still holding color above them.

She took the lane behind the old library because it cut the corner, and because she wanted the quilt spread on the table before anyone else came into the room.

Samuel Gable was standing in it.

He had his boots planted and his hands at his sides, and the lane was a cedar hedge on one side and the library's brick on the other, so there was no way past him that did not mean turning around.

"Martel."

"Mr. Gable."

He shifted his weight but did not move out of the lane.

"Cancel the meeting."

"No."

"You found a picture down at my marina." He looked at his boots. "You don't have it anymore."

At the far end of the lane the lake moved, gray and steady, past the roofs.

"I've told nobody but my lawyer, and I told him this morning."

He worked the rag out of his back pocket, wiped his hands with it though his hands were clean, and put it away again.

"Doesn't matter how I know."

"It matters a great deal."

He looked at the hedge instead of at her.

"I've kept my mouth shut for thirty years."

He said it low, without heat.

"Franklin wrote the story, Beatrice wore the black dress, I found the boat. Not one of us has said a word past what we agreed on. I've got a wife who doesn't know and a granddaughter who thinks her grandfather is an honest man."

"You talk as though you were the one who did it. I've watched you wipe clean hands on that rag for weeks."

He stepped closer and stopped. The letter pressed against her ribs through the coat.

"Then drop it. Sell the house, take your papers, go back to Philadelphia."

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"A man died at the docks the same week your friend's boat came up empty, and nobody in this town has ever said his name."

Sam didn't answer that.

"Go home, Miss Martel. Before somebody gets hurt."

"Is that a threat, Mr. Gable?"

He looked at her a long moment and then stepped sideways into the hedge to let her pass.

"No," he said. "It's what's left."

She came out of the lane onto Main Street with the letter still against her ribs and the quilt bag cutting into her shoulder. Lights were on in the reading room above the library doors, and someone had propped one of those doors open with a brick. Whatever she laid out upstairs, she would lay it out without the one thing she had learned in the lane: a photograph had vanished from Elspeth Finch's studio, and Samuel Gable, who had been told nothing, knew it was gone. She would keep that knowledge where she kept the letter, and watch the faces across the quilt to see which of them looked back at her as though they already knew what she had lost.