Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Tammy’s in the early afternoon had the particular quality of a place that had done its main work for the day and was resting between efforts.
The lunch rush was over. Two tables in the front were occupied — a man with a newspaper, a woman with a laptop — and the counter had one regular nursing a coffee and reading something on his phone.
The smell was the usual: coffee and something with butter in it and the faint ghost of the morning’s bacon.
Ruth was already in the booth when Jill and I arrived, pie in front of her, notebook open, completely at home. Tammy produced two more coffees before we’d even sat down. I ordered pie. Jill ordered pie. It seemed like a pie kind of afternoon.
“How was Camden?” Ruth asked.
“Useful,” I said. “Voss said the desk was very valuable. She drove down the morning of the auction and found the police — she’d had an appointment with Halverson that morning before the auction. She also said that lots of people were asking about it.”
Ruth made a note. “And Pruitt?”
“Frightened,” Jill said. “There’s something going on with him for sure.” She wrapped both hands around her cup.
We drank our coffee. Outside the window the harbor went about its business in the afternoon light. Rosaria hadn’t appeared since the coven meeting two nights ago and I was trying not to make a thing of it, with mixed results. I ate my pie and kept it to myself.
The bell above the door rang at half past one.
Lori came in and I remembered she was meeting her cousin, Eileen, for lunch. When I recognized the woman with her my mouth hung open.
White hair. Small frame. It was the woman from the auction preview, the one who had been pretending not to look at the lap desk. .
Ruth’s foot found mine under the table. I looked up and nodded at her.
Jill had her back to the door and couldn’t turn without being obvious. She read my face instead and got what she needed from it.
Lori guided Eileen to the table one removed from ours — close enough that the conversation would carry, far enough that nothing about our proximity would seem deliberate.
She did it with the naturalness of a woman choosing a table based on the light.
I did not look up as they settled. Tammy appeared, took their order, disappeared without glancing at our booth.
She had been told, or she had noticed, or she was simply Tammy.
I ate my pie and listened.
Eileen Walsh had a good voice — low, unhurried, with the slight lilt of someone who had grown up in New England and left young and come back to find the accent had waited for her.
She talked about the drive up from Portland, where she’d been living.
About the way the town had changed and hadn’t changed, which was how people always talked about coming home after a long time, the inventory of what survived and what hadn’t.
Lori was doing what Lori did. She asked one question and then listened. She said mm at the right intervals. She let Eileen find her own way around the edges of whatever she’d come back for, not pushing, just making room.
They talked about the Marchetti relatives.
Names I half-recognized from things Lori had mentioned in passing — aunts and cousins and the particular genealogy of a family that had been in one place for a very long time and had therefore become everyone’s relative to some degree.
Eileen was warm on the subject. She had the ease of someone who had been thinking about these people for thirty-eight years and was glad to finally say their names to someone who knew who they were.
Then Lori’s voice dropped slightly.
“Can I ask you something?” she said. “A strange question.”
A pause. “Of course,” Eileen said.
“In the old family stories have you ever heard of someone being bound to stay? A ghost, I mean. Someone who hd died but you can still communicate with them and now they are starting to fade being — anchored. Kept.” She said it the way Lori said difficult things, without decoration, but carefully.
“Whether you’ve ever heard of anything like that being done. In the old families.”
The silence that followed was only a few seconds long. It felt longer.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Eileen said.
Lori said, “All right,” in the tone she used when she was filing something rather than accepting it.
The conversation moved on. They talked about the historical society, about Constance Waverly’s estate, about the weather turning. Ordinary things, said with ordinary warmth. But the tone of her voice had changed — a slight tightening, the ease of a few minutes ago not quite recovered.
Then she mentioned her grandmother.
“Olive was — she was the person I called when anything happened,” Eileen said.
The wistfulness in her voice had deepened.
“Good things, bad things, everything in between. She was the one who always knew what to say.” A pause.
“Her dying was a long thinning. That’s the only way I can describe it.
Not the body — the body went quickly at the end.
But she herself — the part of her that was most her — that had been going for years before.
A little more each time I came to see her. ”
Ruth’s foot pressed against mine again, softer this time.
“I go to the Marchetti graves on Thursdays,” Eileen continued.
“The Waverly plots are well looked after, but nobody looks after the Marchettis.” She said it as a plain fact.
No bid for sympathy. The fact of a woman who had come back to a place partly because there were obligations that weren’t being met and she was the one left to meet them.
Lori said something quiet and genuine that I didn’t fully catch. Eileen said it was fine, it was good to be back, she had missed the water.
Twenty minutes later they said their goodbyes at the door — warm, unhurried, the end of a lunch between women who had found more common ground than expected. The bell rang. Eileen left. Lori stood at the door for a moment, and then she came to our booth and slid in beside Jill.
None of us said anything immediately.
I was looking at the table Eileen had just vacated. Tammy hadn’t cleared it yet. The coffee cup was still there, Eileen’s lipstick on the rim, a sugar packet she’d picked up and set down without opening.
I stood up. “Excuse me a moment,” I said, and crossed to the adjacent table. I picked up the sugar packet — tidying, to any eye in the room — and held it for just a moment in my closed hand before setting it on the tray Tammy had appeared with.
I sat back down.
The three of them were looking at me.
“Give me a second,” I said.
I let it settle the way I let things settle.
What I got from the sugar packet was not a death or violence or anything cold.
It was warm — the specific warmth of someone tending a presence they loved, a channel worn smooth from years of use.
A ghost on the other side reaching toward her.
Someone she’d been talking to the way I talked to Rosaria.
And underneath that warmth, steady and persistent: grief.
Not the sharp kind. The long slow kind that comes from watching someone fade by degrees and not being able to stop it.
“She has a ghost,” I said quietly. “Someone she loves. She’s been in contact with them for years — it’s practiced, it’s real.
And that ghost is fading and she knows it.
She came back for the desk because she’s been looking for Ada’s remedy for thirty-eight years and she finally figured out where it was. ”
Lori had her hands folded on the table. “She told me she had no idea what I was talking about,” she said. “She told me that without moving a muscle.”
“She’s had a long time to practice that answer,” Jill said.
“Yes,” Lori said. “She has.” She looked at me. “She’s been carrying this since Olive started to fade. That’s a long time to carry something alone.” Lori’s tone was sympathetic. “She wants the desk for the same reason we do. I’m certain of it.”
Ruth had been quiet through all of it. Then she put down her coffee.
“Then she didn’t take it,” she said. “If she already knew where the desk was and what it was for — she would have gone to the auction and bid on it like everyone else. She wouldn’t have killed Halverson and taken it.
She’d have been outbid before she’d have done that. ”
The table held this for a moment.
“Unless she couldn’t afford to be outbid,” Jill said quietly.
Nobody had a ready answer for that.
It was the post lunch lull and Tammy pulled a chair up to the end of our booth and sat down. We filled her in — the short version, no repetition needed, just the shape of it. Tammy listened with her chin in her hand.
“My money is on Pruitt," she said when we finished.
"He's the only one who insisted on meeting with Halverson. He could be the buyer that Voss said Halverson was wary of,” Jill said. Ruth nodded. “Halverson was worried enough to mention it to Voss.”
“Pruitt knows more than he told us. I felt it when I held his pen,” I added.
“Then we need to pay him another visit,” Tammy said. “First thing tomorrow morning. Before he has time to talk himself back into his prepared answers. But Ruth and I work.” Jill looked at me. “Gina, you in? Lori?”
“I’m in,” I confirmed.
“We’ll bring muffins,” Lori said, which was not a joke.
“Well, that’s settled.” Tammy straightened up. “I heard this morning the police have cleared the auction house. They have a stand-in auctioneer and are running the rest of the lots tomorrow — everything except the desk, since that’s still missing.”
The table went quiet.
“Wait, does that mean they found the killer?” Ruth asked.
Everyone turned to me. I picked up my phone. No message from Tony.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe we won’t need to visit Pruitt after all if it was him and they have him in custody, Tony said he would let us see the desk.”
“If the police found it in the killer’s possession,” Tammy said.
“Right. That’s a lot of ifs.” I reached for my coat. “Looks like I better get home and find out for sure. I’ll text you guys an update.”