Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
Mrs. Wexler was at the back door a little before six, same as always, with the croissants and the cinnamon rolls and a box of the chocolate eclairs that sold out before the breakfast rush had properly begun.
She was a round, soft-spoken woman who’d been baking the things I didn’t have the hours to bake for as long as I’d owned the shop, and she had flour worked permanently into the creases of her knuckles where other women wore rings.
“Morning, sugar,” she said, handing the boxes across one at a time so I could stack them in order. “Eclairs are heavy on the chocolate today. The good stuff came in from my supplier and I couldn’t help myself.”
“You’ll have Mrs. Pinkerton proposing marriage.”
“Let her. I could use a rich widow.” She laughed, peered past me into the kitchen the way she always did to make sure I’d kept the place standing, and was gone again in under five minutes, her van rattling off down the alley toward the next stop.
I had the case filled and the chalkboard rewritten and the front door unlocked by half past six, and the morning came in behind it like a tide that had no intention of going back out.
Mondays in the off-season ran slow enough that I could read a magazine between customers. Summer Mondays did no such thing. I hadn’t had a quiet hour since Memorial Day, which was a fine thing for the register and a cruel thing for my feet, and I’d long since made my peace with the trade.
Howard took his window table. Mrs. Pinkerton took her chamomile and her silence. Greta came and went without cracking a single piece of intel, which told me she was saving something and wanted an audience bigger than the breakfast crowd could give her.
By nine the worst of it had passed, and Carly and the new girl, Audrey, had the floor in hand, and I trusted them enough now to leave without standing in the doorway giving instructions nobody needed.
I’d dressed for a day of driving and door-knocking in a vintage shirtwaist in butter-yellow cotton with a full skirt and a row of covered buttons down the front, a thin brown belt at the waist, and flat brown sandals because I had learned my lesson about heels and crushed-shell driveways.
My hair was pinned back at the temples and already plotting against me in the humidity.
I made up a plate before I left. Lemon scones, two of the brown butter, a few of the little almond cookies that traveled well.
A woman did not show up at a stranger’s door asking questions with empty hands.
My grandmother would have risen from her grave to scold me, and I had enough ghosts to manage already.
Chowder was behind the counter on his cushion in a chambray bow tie with tiny white anchors, having spent the morning accepting tribute from regulars and contributing nothing to the running of the business.
“Hold down the fort,” I told him.
Estelle Pruitt lived directly across from Henry’s old house, in the pale yellow Charleston single with the black shutters and the three tiers of piazza I’d stood under a hedge admiring on Friday.
I’d half expected it to feel different up close, the way grand things sometimes shrink when you stop looking up at them.
It didn’t. The boxwoods were clipped to within an inch of their lives and the ferns hung heavy and green between the columns, and the brass knocker had been polished so recently I could see my own red mouth in it.
She answered before the second knock, which meant she’d watched me come up the walk.
She was somewhere in her late sixties, slim and upright in a linen blouse and pressed slacks, her gray hair set in the soft waves that required a standing weekly appointment.
Reading glasses hung from a beaded chain at her throat, and her eyes went over me head to foot, the dress, the plate in my hands, the car at the curb, and filed all of it somewhere for later.
“Good morning,” I said. “I’m sorry to come by unannounced. My name is Mabel McCoy. I own the tea shop down on—”
“I know who you are.” She said it pleasantly enough, but there wasn’t a flicker of surprise in it. “You’re the one with the bulldog who dresses him up like he’s running for office. And you’ve been seeing the new sheriff.”
“News travels.”
“Like a rocket on this island.” She looked at the plate.
“Greta Carmichael told Patsy Hindman you’d reopened, and Patsy told my hairdresser, and my hairdresser told me you’d been asking after Henry Wainwright.
” A pause that had a whole verdict folded inside it.
“I wondered if you’d find your way to my door. ”
“And here I am.”
“Here you are.” She stepped back and held the door. “You’d best come in out of that heat before it ruins your hair.”
The inside of the house was cool and dim and smelled of lemon oil and old roses, and she walked me back through rooms full of good furniture, to a sunroom at the rear with a view of the garden and, past it, the river.
A tea service was already laid out on a low table, the pot under a quilted cozy, two cups turned right side up and waiting.
“Sit,” she said, nodding me toward a wicker chair with a cushion that had never known a stain. “I’ll put the kettle on. You’ll take tea, and don’t tell me you won’t, because I’m having some and I won’t drink alone before noon like a degenerate.”
“I’d love some. Thank you.”
She disappeared toward the kitchen, and I heard the run of the tap and the click of a burner and the small domestic sounds of a woman who’d made tea ten thousand times and could do it without thinking.
When she came back she carried a tray with the pot and two cups and set it on the low table between us, and she handed me a plate’s worth of fuss in reverse, exclaiming over the scones, arranging them on a dish that matched the cups, asking which were which.
She poured, and I let her set the pace. It was her house and her story and she’d tell it when she was ready.
She told me she’d never once set foot in my shop, that she did her own baking and took her tea at her own table and didn’t see the sense in paying four dollars to drink it in a room full of strangers, and she said it without any meanness, the way some women her age stated their borders and expected no argument.
She told me her boxwoods had taken the heat hard this year and her gardener was useless and she’d half a mind to do it herself.
Then she set down her cup, folded her hands in her lap, and the social part of her face went somewhere else entirely.
“But you didn’t bring me scones to talk about my boxwoods,” she said. “You’re here about Henry.”
“I am.”
She didn’t answer right away. She set her cup down in its saucer and looked at me for a long moment, and something surfaced in her eyes that she didn’t bother to hide, something that had been waiting a great while for a door to open.
“In twenty-five years,” she said, “you are the first soul to sit in my house and ask me about that man on purpose. Do you know that? Not one before you.” Her voice stayed even, but her hands had folded themselves tight in her lap.
“Then I’m glad I came.”
“So am I, though I’ll want to know how much good it’ll do before I get my hopes up.
I had them up once.” She studied me the way you study produce you don’t quite trust. “You’ll forgive me if I take your measure first. The last person I trusted with any of this was the law, and the law told me I’d watched too much television. ”
There was a quiet to her that reminded me of Josephine— the same careful weighing, truth measured out in slow spoonfuls by women who’d learned not to spend it freely.
“You should understand something first,” she said.
“I am not a gossip. But I know what’s going on in my own neighborhood and I always have.
My binoculars have stopped more than one suspicious character and thwarted a home invasion when the Prescotts were visiting their daughter in Atlanta.
” She lifted her chin. “But I never told a soul. Not because I didn’t know things.
Because Harold told me if he ever heard my mouth running about the neighbors, especially about Henry Wainwright, he’d divorce me and take the children, and Harold was not a man who threatened things he wouldn’t do. ”
“Why Henry especially?”
“Because Harold respected him. Henry caught Harold’s diabetes before it took his feet, and Harold never forgot it.
” She picked at an invisible thread on her slacks.
“So I kept Henry’s business behind my own teeth for twenty-five years, and I watched that fool Milton bury a good man as a coward, and I have hated it every single day. ”
The garden ticked with heat beyond the glass. Somewhere out over the river a gull complained about something and got no satisfaction.
“You said you knew things,” I said. “About Henry.”
“I knew he had a woman.”
I kept my hands easy around the cup and my face arranged into nothing at all. “Go on.”
“Not for long. The last few months before he died, that’s all.
” Estelle’s gaze drifted past me toward the front of the house, toward a window I couldn’t see from this room but that she clearly saw fine all the same.
“We had a sewing room upstairs, faced the street. I’d sit up there of an evening once the children were down and the supper dishes were put away, and I kept a chair by the window and a pair of field glasses on the sill.
Bird-watching, I told Harold. There’s a great blue heron works that stretch of river at dusk.
” A dry pause. “Some nights the heron wasn’t the only thing worth the looking. ”
“And what did you see?”
“Henry had those thin curtains on his bedroom windows. Sheers. You can’t see a face through them, but you can sure see a body, and you can count how many there are.
” There wasn’t a scrap of apology in her gaze.
“Charlotte had been dead five years by then, rest her soul. And I guess a man has needs after a while.”
“Could you see who she was?”