The only open seat at the Quay Diner on Sunday morning was a two-top wedged against the wall, close enough to the long table by the window that Genevieve Martel could hear every word.
She took it. The refrigerator at 12 Elm Street held a jar of mustard, a carton of milk, and nothing else, and the diner sat a short walk downhill into town.
"Just coffee and the home fries," she told the waitress.
"Kitchen's backed up." The name tag read DELLA. "Committee's got the window table and they all want their eggs at once."
"I can wait."
"You're the one staying at Elspeth's place."
"I am."
"Refills are free on Sundays." Della wrote the order without looking at her pad. "Don't tell the tourists."
The coffee came in a heavy white mug, hot enough to fog the window beside her elbow. Across the room, six people had arranged themselves around the long table like a photograph waiting to be taken.
At the head sat Mayor Franklin Croft with a legal pad he never wrote on. Beatrice Cole had the chair to his right, cream sweater, one gold earring and one bare lobe. Carol Ann Petty clicked a pen and took minutes nobody would read. Mabel Henderson had walked down from two doors past Genna's. Louise Brennan from the historical society sat beside her. At the counter, alone on the third stool with his jacket still zipped, Sam Gable held his mug in both hands and watched the door.
"—so I told Louise Brennan," Franklin said, "that the harbor display needs a centerpiece, and I know exactly what it ought to be."
"We don't have the boat, Franklin," Louise said.
"We have her name."
Carol Ann set her pen down. "You're not going to believe this, but I kept the Gazette photo. The one with him standing on the deck, grinning like the whole lake belonged to him."
"Keep it," Franklin said. "That's the boy I want people to remember in October."
Mabel folded her napkin into a triangle. "He was a good kid."
"He was a Croft, Mabel Henderson. The lake came first and everything else came second."
Beatrice said, "Of course," and reached for the sugar.
Franklin turned his cup a quarter turn on the saucer. "He'd finished painting her that September. Mixed the color himself, out on the lawn, and then he named it. Croft Vineyard Green."
Louise put her fork down. "You're putting a boat color on the festival sign?"
"As I've always said, the vineyard can spare a gallon."
"It was a lovely green," Carol Ann said.
"Of course it was," said Beatrice.
From the counter, without turning around: "Boat's gone."
"Samuel Gable, nobody is arguing with you."
"Nope." Sam wiped his hands on a gray rag he kept folded in his jacket pocket.
Genna set her mug into the ring of its own condensation. Four evenings she had spent with the marina block on Elspeth's quilt, a magnifying lamp angled over the dock pilings, counting stitches. The Wanderer sat tied at the last finger of the dock with her hull worked in a close, flat navy blue, two strands carried through every stitch. The Grammar of Stitches put words to patterns and nothing to shades. Color, in Elspeth's hands, was testimony. Her journal listed doubled thread under one heading only, and that heading was *witnessed*. Where a fact had changed on that quilt, Elspeth stitched the change. On the bandstand block, a bright red line of roofline had been laid over with green, thread by thread, so the correction showed.
The Wanderer's hull carried no second color. No green over the navy. No seam, no patch, no note.
"Genevieve Martel." Franklin had turned in his chair without hurry. "I hope the estate is treating you kindly."
"It's keeping me occupied."
"Good. Elspeth Finch was this town's memory for a very long time. We intend to do right by her."
"Oh, she'll be missed," Carol Ann said.
Genna's home fries went cold on the plate. She paid at the register and stepped out into a morning that still smelled of lake fog burning off, though the maples up Elm Street had gone rust-orange two weeks early.
David Chen stood on the sidewalk with the Rochester paper folded under his arm.
"Well," he said. "You've got a look."
"Which look is that?"
"The one a case gets right before it opens up."
"Franklin Croft told a room full of people the Wanderer was green."
"Was she?"
"Elspeth stitched her navy. Two strands through every stitch. Her journal lists doubled thread under *witnessed*."
David considered that. "Thing is, a paint color's a strange thing to lie about."
"That's how I know he chose it. He sanded the story smooth and handed it to the two women in this town who repeat everything."
"Or he's sixty-eight and remembering a boat he saw twice in his life."
"Beatrice Cole let it stand." Genna nodded back toward the diner window. "She was there when they found her. So was Sam. Three people in that room knew that hull. Two of them said nothing, and one of them called it lovely."
"Sam doesn't say much of anything."
"Sam says *nope* and puts a rag in his hand. He's got people in that house above the water, and every morning he looks down at the slip where the Wanderer used to sit. He wants it to stay thirty years ago. Beatrice has spent three decades being the woman whose boyfriend drowned, and she isn't going to unsay that sentence over a paint chip. Franklin's got a festival in three weeks and a family name on the sign."
"That's three," David said.
"Elspeth makes four." Genna zipped her coat. "She left instructions with her lawyer that certain things were to be said only after she was gone. That's a woman who kept a fact she couldn't carry anymore."
David looked at her a moment. "So what do you want?"
"Louise Brennan has the Gazette negatives from that year. Harbor shots, marina shots, boats going out. If the Wanderer was ever green, it's on a piece of film in that basement."
"Historical society's closed on Sunday."
"Tomorrow, then."
"Well." David folded the paper in half and tucked it against his side. "I'll walk over with you. Two people asking questions looks like research. One looks like trouble."
They parted at the corner. Genna took Elm uphill, past the bakery with its cider-donut sign and the tidy bungalows with their storm windows already up, her hands in her coat pockets.
A man retelling a family tragedy tells it a little differently each time. A date blurs, a detail gets traded for a warmer one. Franklin Croft had told his the way a man tells something he has practiced, with the laugh landing in the right place and the committee nodding along. He had spent a color to do it. A color that carried his own vineyard's name, spoken in front of the postmistress and the woman who keeps the historical society's records, both of whom would repeat it by Tuesday.
Franklin Croft had stopped remembering his nephew's boat a long time ago. What he was doing now was building it.
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