Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Lori’s house smelled like coffee and old paper and something with cinnamon in it that Tammy had brought.
It was just past four o’clock. The October light had gone flat and gray outside the windows — the brief gold of midafternoon already retreating, the harbor visible at the end of the street in the colorless way it had in the last hour before dark.
Inside, Lori’s front room was warm. Bookshelves on three walls, a round table with five chairs, a lamp in the corner that cast a yellow circle over everything.
The family library, Lori called it, which was accurate in both senses — it was where the family’s books lived, and it was where the family’s knowledge lived, and in this town those were sometimes the same thing.
Tammy had set out cups without being asked. She had produced the cinnamon thing — a coffee cake, still warm in its pan — and cut it into sections with the decisive air of a woman who had decided that whatever was about to happen would go better with something to eat.
Ruth sat to my left with her grandmother’s notebook on the table in front of her, both hands resting on the cover the way hands rest on something they have been carrying for a long time.
She was in her town hall clothes still — practical jacket, practical shoes — and she had the stillness of someone who had been waiting all day to say something.
Jill sat across from me. She had come from the bookstore; she still had her reading glasses pushed up on her head. She was looking at the table.
Lori sat at the head, the way she always did, not because anyone had decided this but because it had simply arranged itself that way from the first time we’d met here.
Silver hair, the two or three lines at the corners of her mouth that came from decades of reading people accurately and not always liking what she found.
We had our coffee. Tammy poured from the carafe without asking who wanted more.
“Ruth,” Lori said. “You first.”
Ruth opened the notebook to a page near the middle and smoothed it flat with one hand.
“Constance Waverly’s estate has been consigned to Halverson and Sons,” Ruth said. “The auction is tomorrow morning. There’s a preview tonight at seven. She didn’t have a lot but she did have some valuable things.”
She said it the way she said things at town hall meetings — information offered cleanly, without decoration.
“I’d like to bid on some of the items,” she continued. “Constance was family, however distant. Some of what’s being sold belonged to Ada. I’ve been tracking the estate since Constance passed.”
“What items specifically?” Lori asked.
Ruth turned the notebook slightly. “My grandmother’s entry from 1962 describes a lap desk.
Walnut, hinged, ivory and ebony inlay. Ada’s.
” She paused and looked up at us. “My grandmother wrote that ‘the writing knows where the rest of it is.’ Those were her words. It seems significant, like it has something to do with what happened at the Merriwell building.”
The room was quiet for a moment.
“Ada’s lap desk,” Lori said. “I think we should make sure its safe.”
“It’s Lot 47 at Halverson and Sons.” Ruth looked up. “There are other lots — about ten of them. Costume jewelry, nothing of significant value. Two lamps. Some writing pens. Silver salt and pepper shakers. Two paintings.” She paused. “But the desk is the one that matters.”
I looked at Ruth. “Do you want company at the preview tonight?”
Something in her face loosened by half a degree. “I was hoping someone would ask that.”
“I’ll go,” I said.
Tammy set her cup down. “Good. Now.” She looked at me across the table, and her dark eyes had the quality they got when she had decided to stop being patient about something. “Tell us about Rosaria.”
I told them.
Not everything at once — it came out the way things came out when you had been holding them for two months and had finally been given permission to set them down.
The morning after the Merriwell. The thinning that had been there from the first day and that I had been cataloguing and not naming.
Stella’s report. The conversation this morning in the kitchen, Rosaria sitting in her chair by the window saying we are not pretending anymore, Gina in that voice she used when she meant every word.
I told them what she wanted to see. Josie. Tony. A grandchild. Enough. That’s all she’d asked for. Not forever. Enough.
By the time I finished, Tammy had refilled everyone’s coffee and nobody had touched the second round.
Lori had her hands folded on the table. She had been listening the way she always listened — completely, without interruption, storing everything.
“I’ve been through Ada’s documents again,” she said. “The ones Constance left us in her will. The ones from the safe deposit box. I have read them many times.” She paused. “There is no counter to thinning in anything she wrote that I have found.”
The flatness of it landed in the room.
“Nothing?” Tammy said.
“Not in what I have.” Lori’s eyes moved to Ruth’s notebook. “Which may not be everything.”
She was quiet for a moment. Something had shifted in her expression — not quite recognition, but its approach. The look she got when pieces that had been sitting separately for a long time were beginning to find each other.
“My great-aunt Olive died about twenty years ago,” she said. “The family was there. It was expected — she was old, she’d been declining for years. What none of us expected was Eileen.”
“Eileen,” I said.
“My cousin. Distant — Olive was her grandmother, not mine. But we knew each other.” Lori turned her coffee cup without drinking from it.
“At the funeral Eileen was inconsolable. Not the ordinary grief of losing a grandmother. Something else. She kept saying her ability to talk to her was diminishing. That she could feel Olive slipping away and she had to do something, she needed to find something, there had to be a way to bring her back.”
Tammy set her cup down. “Bring her back.”
“We thought she meant she couldn’t accept the death.
Grief does that — it looks for solutions to things that aren’t problems to be solved.
” Lori paused. “But she wasn’t speaking in metaphor.
She was speaking literally. She tore apart the attic at the old family house — their great-grandmother’s things, boxes that hadn’t been opened in decades.
Looking for something she wouldn’t name.
She searched for days. She never found it.
Eventually she left town and we assumed she’d come to terms with it. ”
The room was very still.
“You think she knew about the thinning,” I said.
“I think she watched it happen to Olive and understood what it was in a way the rest of us didn’t.
” Lori looked at the table. “I assumed it was grief. I was wrong about that.” Something settled in her face — the expression of a woman taking accurate inventory of her own errors.
“Whatever she was looking for twenty years ago in that attic — I think it was the same thing we’re looking for now. ”
Ruth’s hands were still on the cover of the notebook.
“Ada always wrote the fix beside the working.” Ruth said it quietly. “That was the pattern. My grandmother documented it. Every working Ada wrote, she wrote the counter alongside it. She didn’t believe in leaving a door open without knowing where the key was.”
“You think there’s a counter,” I said.
“I think if Ada wrote a binding that could thin a ghost, she wrote a way to undo the thinning.” Ruth looked at Lori. “She wouldn’t have done that without a remedy. She wasn’t built that way.”
Lori was quiet for a moment. Something was working behind her eyes — the reading of it, the assessment, the slow process she used when she was deciding whether a thing was true.
“No,” she said at last. “She wasn’t.” A pause. “Eileen came back to Starfall Bay a few months ago. I’ve been meaning to reach out. After tonight —” She stopped. “I think I need to have lunch with my cousin and it should be sooner rather than later.”
Lori opened up a binder and pointed at a printout of an old document.
“Ada’s record of a mooring she performed.
For a woman named Hannah.” She paused. “The marginal note reads: on the night of the full Hunter’s moon.
The moon is required. Without it the mooring will not hold.
” She looked up. “That is not circumstance. That is instruction.”
The room was quiet.
“The Hunter’s Moon,” Tammy said. “October’s full moon.” She pulled out her phone, looked at the calendar, and set it face-up on the table without a word.
Four days.
I looked at the number and felt it settle into my chest like a stone dropping into still water. Four days to find what Ada had left, perform a working none of us had ever done, and anchor Rosaria to a world she was already being pulled away from.
“Four days,” I said.
“Four nights,” Lori said. “The mooring happens at night. Under the moon.” She closed the document. “We need that desk.”
We broke up at half past five. Tammy wrapped the remaining coffee cake without being asked. Jill replaced the lamp bulb from a box she had apparently started keeping in her bag. Ruth and I agreed to meet at Halverson and Sons at quarter to seven.
At the door, Lori touched my arm.
“She made it possible,” she said. “What Rosaria did under the Merriwell. The town is standing because of it. Whatever Ada left us — it was written for this. For someone exactly like Rosaria.” She looked at me steadily. “We’re going to find it.”
I nodded. I didn’t trust myself to say anything more than that.
The walk back to the cottage took ten minutes.
The harbor was dark now, the lighthouse beam starting its steady rotation, the boats settled for the evening.
I walked with my hands in my pockets and thought about walnut desks and quill pens and four nights, and whether a woman who had been dead for a hundred years had been clever enough to leave exactly the right thing in exactly the right place.
I thought: Ada Waverly had been clever enough to leave an entire binding scattered across three locations and have it survive intact to 1962 and then to now.
I thought she probably had.
My phone was in my pocket. Still no answer from Josie.
I went home to get ready for the preview.