Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Tammy’s restaurant after hours had a different quality than Tammy’s restaurant during service — the same space, the same tables, the same smell of good food and coffee and something perpetually baking somewhere, but quieter in a way that felt deliberate.
The chairs were still down. The lights over the counter were on but the dining room ran on the smaller lamps, the ones Tammy used when she wanted the place to feel like a room rather than a restaurant.
She had put coffee on and cut something and set it on the table in the back corner without being asked, because that was what Tammy did, and we had all long since stopped remarking on it.
We came in through the back. Ruth arrived last, at ten past seven, still in her town hall jacket, and slid into the booth across from Jill. Everyone had already heard about the murder.
I told them everything we’d seen that morning.
Margot at the door. Halverson in his office.
Diane Halverson with her two-week reconciliation and her voice catching.
Tony and the three missing lots. His instruction to keep the theft details quiet.
I told it in order and without editorializing because the shape of it was editorial enough on its own.
When I finished, the table was quiet for a moment.
“Three lots,” Lori said.
“Three lots. The cash box untouched.”
“Someone who knew what they came for,” Ruth said.
Tammy had her hands around her coffee cup and was looking at the middle distance with the expression she got when she was processing something she didn’t like the shape of.
“Halverson had a type,” she said, in the tone of someone offering context.
“Tall women with strong opinions and no patience for him. Red hair if he could get it.”
I thought of Diane Halverson on her chair in the front room of the auction house, genuinely wrecked, holding a reconciliation that had lasted two weeks.
“His ex-wife was a tall redhead,” I said.
Jill looked up from her coffee. “So — what if this was personal? A former lover. If he reconciled with the wife maybe someone else got mad. Killed him in a fit of passion. Took a few things on the way out, make it look like something it wasn’t?”
“That’s the theory Tony is working,” I said.
The room sat with that for a moment. Outside, the harbor was doing what the harbor did at night in October — a low consistent sound, the occasional creak of rigging, the lighthouse beam making its patient rotation.
“The preview,” Lori said. “Tell us who was there. Did anyone seem overly-interested in the desk?”
I told them about Voss first. Ruth added what she knew — Camden dealer, good reputation in the trade, someone who bought on value and moved things efficiently. She’d handled the desk twice, professionally, without sentiment. She knew what she was looking for.
“She could have gone back,” Jill said.
“She could have,” I said. “Or she could have told someone else what she’d found and let them go back.”
Then Pruitt. The careful way he’d stood in front of the desk without touching it, hands in his pockets, the deliberate distance of a man who wasn’t sure he wanted to get closer. The relief with which he’d moved away.
“He’s afraid of it,” Tammy said.
“That was my read,” I said. “He recognized it. He didn’t want to be near it.”
“Why would a reverend be afraid of an antique lap desk?” Jill asked.
“Why would a reverend be at an estate auction at seven in the evening looking at one specific lot?” Ruth said.
Nobody had a ready answer for that.
Then the older woman. I described her carefully — white-haired, small, well turned out, the practiced casualness of someone working very hard not to look like they were doing what they were doing.
The way she’d stood near the lot pretending to look at the watercolor.
The glances at the door and around the room.
The brief moment when she’d picked something up with a care that had nothing to do with assessing its value.
“And then I touched the edge of the table where she’d been standing,” I said.
The table went quiet.
“What did you get?” Lori asked.
“Not a death scene,” I said. “Something further away — no, not further away. Different in kind. A ghost, or the near-certainty of one. A signal fading in and out, the way a radio station drops and returns when you’re driving and the hills are wrong.
And underneath the signal, the reaching — she was trying to close a distance that kept not closing, and had been trying for a long time.
” I paused. “It wasn’t recent. Whatever it was, it had been happening for years. ”
Lori’s hands were still on the table. The pieces behind her eyes were finding each other — I could see it, the small inventory-taking that preceded her conclusions.
“I have no idea who she is,” I said. “I’ve never seen her before.”
“So,” Jill said. “What do we do?”
“We find the desk,” Ruth said.
“How?” Jill asked.
“We start by talking to the people who were interested in it,” Lori said.
“Camden first,” I said. “Voss has a shop. If she took the desk she may be in the process of moving it. I think we should go first thing tomorrow.”
Jill nodded. She had been sitting with the particular focused stillness that meant she was already thinking several steps ahead.
“I’m in Pruitt’s congregation,” she said. “I can go to him directly. A pastoral visit. It won’t seem strange.”
“Tomorrow?” I asked.
“Camden in the morning,” she said. “Pruitt right after. I know his schedule.”
“I can’t go,” Lori said. “I have the lunch with my cousin.” She said it with the slight weight of a woman who had waited too long to make a call and was now feeling the shape of that delay.
“Jill and I can handle it, Tammy has the restaurant and Ruth needs to work, so we don’t all need to go,” I said.
Lori looked around the table. “We’re three days out from the Hunter’s Moon.
The desk is gone. Whatever Ada left inside it or alongside it is gone with it.
” She said it evenly, the way she said hard things — not to soften them, just to make sure they were heard.
“We find the desk before the moon. That’s the work. ”
Nobody argued with that. There wasn’t anything to argue with.
I was looking at the window. The lighthouse beam came and went in the gap between the buildings across the street, its patient rotation indifferent to everything we were trying to do.
Four days. The desk somewhere in the hands of someone who either knew what it was or didn’t, either of which was its own kind of problem.
The room changed.
Just at the edge of perception — a narrowing of attention, a compression of the lamplight, the particular quality of a space that has acquired a presence it didn’t have a moment before. I kept my face still because the coven was watching me and I did not want to give them the wrong alarm.
Rosaria.
She was behind me and to the left, near the counter, and she was thinner than she’d been this morning in the kitchen.
I felt it before I saw it — the diminishment, like a candle burning in a draft.
Her voice had the compressed quality it always had when she came through at a distance, but fainter now, as if she were speaking from slightly further away than she actually was.
“Stella’s having something,” she said. “I just popped by to say hi but can’t stay.
” A pause, and in the pause the particular texture of her — the stubbornness, the affection she expressed as mild exasperation, everything that was most essentially Rosaria — compressed itself into the next four words. “Don’t catch the killer without me.”
Then she was gone.
I sat with it for a moment. One breath, two.
They couldn’t hear her. But they were all looking at me.
“Rosaria,” I said.
Nobody asked how she was. They could read it from my face, and they were kind enough not to make me say it out loud. Tammy refilled my coffee without being asked. Lori’s hands stayed folded on the table. Jill looked at the window. Ruth looked at her notebook.
After a moment Tammy said, “Three days,” and we got back to work.