Genevieve Martel laid the manila envelope on the counter at Chen's Hardware and kept her palm flat on it. Through the front window, past the hand-lettered bake sale sign taped in the corner of the glass, Main Street in Seneca Quay had the loose, unhurried look of a Saturday in late September: two cars at the post office, a truck idling outside the bakery, the lake gray and flat at the bottom of the hill.
David Chen came out of the back room with a clipboard and a pencil behind his ear, and the smell of coffee came with him.
"That envelope's got something in it that isn't a receipt," he said.
"It does."
"Give me a minute. I've got a hinge order half counted."
She waited. A man in a canvas jacket came in for a gate latch, paid seven forty-nine in ones, counted them twice with his thumb, and asked after David's knee, and David said it was fine and would be finer once the Concords were in. The bell over the door swung twice before it quit.
Then Carol Ann Petty came in with her coat unbuttoned and a list in her hand.
"Genna! I was going to call you tonight." She held up one finger. "You are not going to believe what the bakery has. Grape pie. The Naples recipe. She made six, and I got the fourth."
"I'll walk down after this," Genna said.
"Do it before noon or don't bother. And the bake sale table count is due to Franklin by Friday, and you know how he is about a table count." Carol Ann picked up a card of cup hooks, put it down, and picked it up again. "David, will these hold a bulletin board?"
"Depends on the board."
"Never mind. I'll take them." She paid, told them both the weather was turning, and was gone.
David watched the door settle, then looked at Genna's hand on the envelope.
"You kept that shut the whole time she was standing there," he said.
"I did."
"All right." He came around the counter, pulled the stool out from under the register, and set his cup where he could reach it. "Go on, then."
She slid the photograph out of its sleeve. A soft-gloss print with a white border, water damage along the bottom edge, the emulsion lifted at one corner. That morning she had cut the sleeve at her kitchen table and pressed the print flat between two pieces of board before she trusted herself to carry it across town.
David took it by the edges without being asked. He carried it to the task lamp over the parts drawers, angled the head down, and studied it for as long as it takes to read a page twice.
A young man against a pale wall. Short dark hair, cut badly, as if he'd done it himself with the wrong scissors. A work jacket with the collar turned up. He was squinting into the light, and he stood as though somebody had said his name a second before the shutter went.
"Don't know him," David said.
"You're sure."
"I've been in this county long enough that the ones I don't know, I know by type. He's not local. Or he is, and nobody has said his name out loud in thirty years."
"Where did you find it?"
"With Elspeth's things."
He let that sit. "That's a careful sentence."
"It's a true one."
He turned the photograph over, looked at the blank back, and turned it again. "She labeled everything."
"You're the one who told me that."
"Which makes the blank back the interesting part." He set the print face down on a square of clean paper. He hadn't asked permission, and that told her he'd handled evidence before, back when it was still his job. "Late September of ninety-four is harvest. Crews come up for the Concords, they work the season, they sleep in a bunkhouse, and they're gone before anybody learns a last name. A stranger in this town that month wouldn't have had to hide."
Genna took the notebook from her coat pocket and opened it to a page of pencil columns — what she saw, where she saw it, what it might mean, the way she wrote up damage on a textile. She laid it flat beside the photograph, where the light from the parts drawers fell across it.
"Four names," she said. "Tell me which one doesn't belong."
David pulled the page toward him. "Go."
"Franklin Croft." She tapped the first line. "He has spent thirty years as the man whose nephew drowned at sea. He gives the Founder's Day speech every October. He decides which version of this town gets told out loud, and he decides it in front of everybody."
"He'd call that duty."
"He'd call it a lot of things. That's the point."
David drank his coffee, and his eyes stayed on the second name.
"Beatrice Cole. Julian's girlfriend. She owns Cole Harvest, and a vineyard is not a business you can run with a question mark in front of your name." Genna's pencil moved down the column. "When I said the bandstand and the year 1978 in the same breath, she shut it down fast."
"Bea doesn't shut down. Bea goes polite, which is worse." He shrugged one shoulder. "Still, she built that place out of nothing after he was gone. Take the story away and you take the reason she started."
"Samuel Gable. He told me the old lockers at the marina were cleared out years ago. He told me twice."
"Were they?"
"No."
David raised his eyebrows a little and let it pass.
"Sam found the boat," he said. "The Wanderer. He was out before dawn, saw her sitting on the mooring with nobody aboard, and had Franklin and Bea with him inside the hour. That much is in the file. It doesn't say why the three of them needed each other for that."
"Elspeth Finch," Genna said.
The cup stopped halfway to his mouth. "Say that again."
"My mentor. The woman who left me a house full of paper and a lawyer who won't read her instructions out loud." She wrote the fourth name at the bottom of the column, then underlined it. "You told me she knew where all the bodies were buried. I took that for a figure of speech."
"It wasn't one."
"Somebody kept a photograph of a man this town won't name, and it ended up in her keeping. That's either a kindness or a debt. Either way, it's a reason."
David looked at the four names for a while without saying anything. Down the street the bakery door banged and somebody laughed.
"You know what you've got here," he said.
"Four people with a reason to keep something quiet."
"No." He tapped the page. "Four people who were all in the same place the same week, and not one of them has ever told it straight. That's not four suspects. That's one story with four mouths on it."
He went to the register, tore a sheet off the pad by the phone, and wrote a number down. "Make me a copy of the picture. I'll take it to Waterloo. The county clerk keeps the old registers — sheriff's log, state police reports, whatever the county wrote down that October. I still know two people who'll pull a drawer for me and not ask why."
"You've been telling me to leave this alone since Wednesday."
"I've been telling you to be careful. There's a difference, and I'm not sure it's a big one." He slid the slip across the counter. "Thing is, I'd be looking for what nobody looks for. Anyone brought in that week and never claimed. Anything logged near the docks that reads unusual. It takes a few days, and I'll do it quiet, because the second somebody hears I'm asking, the whole town hears it."
Genna folded the slip into her notebook.
David put his hand flat on the counter, close to the photograph and not touching it.
"If this man was involved, it means the story everyone knows is more than just a tragedy. It's a lie. Be careful who you ask."
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