Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The muffins were from the bakery on Elm — blueberry, still warm, in a white paper bag that smelled like butter and sugar and the particular optimism of baked goods.
I picked them up at seven-thirty and met Jill and Lori on the sidewalk outside St. Andrew’s at ten to eight.
The morning was cold and bright, the sky the hard blue of late October, the kind of day that looked warmer than it was.
Lori glanced at the bag. “Good,” she said.
Jill had her scarf wound twice and her reading glasses on her head. She’d made a decision overnight and was settled in it — you could see it in the set of her shoulders. She pushed the side door open without knocking and we went in.
The nave was empty. The coffee urn on the side table was on this time, which meant Pruitt had been here long enough to make coffee, which meant he hadn’t slept well and had come in early to sit with whatever he was sitting with.
Jill went to the office door and knocked twice, the particular knock of someone who was expected even when they weren’t.
“Come in,” he said.
He looked worse. Not dramatically worse — he was still in a clean sweater, still composed in the surface way of a man who had been maintaining surface composure for a long time — but underneath it something had shifted.
The eyes were the giveaway. The eyes of a man who had been awake at three in the morning arguing with himself and had not resolved the argument.
He took in the three of us, and the white paper bag, and had no idea what to do with any of it.
“Sit down,” Jill said, gently. “We brought muffins.”
We sat. Jill poured coffee from the carafe on his desk without asking. She set a muffin in front of him and one in front of each of us and she didn’t say anything else, just settled into the chair across from him with the patience of a woman who knew how to wait.
Pruitt stared at the muffin, then at his hands. “I told you everything I know,” he said. “Yesterday. I don’t know why you’ve come back.”
“We came back,” Jill said pleasantly, “because we don’t think you told us everything.”
“I told you I went about a donation—”
“Garrett.” Jill’s voice stayed warm but something underneath it changed register.
“We know Halverson told Maggie Voss he had to visit with someone that was being rather insistent about the desk on Friday and we know that person was you. You even admitted he was here.” She let that sit for a moment.
“Help us understand how none of that connects to what you know.”
Pruitt’s jaw tightened. “It was about the donations, for the restoration fund. I’ve told you—”
“You’ve told us the prepared version,” I said. “We’d like the real one.”
He pushed back from the desk slightly — not standing, just creating distance. “I think you should leave,” he said. “I’ve been cooperative. I don’t appreciate being accused of—”
“Nobody’s accusing you of anything,” Lori said it quietly, with the weight of a woman who had been reading people for sixty years and was rarely wrong. “We’re asking you to help us. There’s a difference.”
Pruitt stared at the desk. His hands were very still.
Jill leaned forward. “Garrett. We know there was more to your relationship with Halverson than a donation conversation. We know you’d been in contact with him multiple times. The police know it too.”
She let that land for a moment. “A man is dead. The wrong person could pay for it. And you’re sitting here protecting yourself with a story that has more holes in it than you think.
” She paused. “You’re a man of faith. You know what God would make of this silence.
You know He wouldn’t want this from you. ”
The office was very quiet. The coffee urn in the nave made a small sound and went still.
Pruitt put his face in his hands. He stayed like that for a long moment. Then he sat back, and whatever he’d been holding since Friday night visibly left him.
“I’ve been taking things,” he said.
He said it with the exhaustion of a weight carried past the point of sustainability.
“From estate sales,” he said. “For three years. Small things — nothing of real monetary value. A set of books. A prayer card collection. A small landscape painting that had been in someone’s family for four generations and was about to go to a dealer who would have sold it to a hotel lobby.
” He turned toward the window. “I told myself it was stewardship. That these were objects that deserved better homes. I have a closet full of things that belong to people who are gone, and I convinced myself for three years that I was doing right by them.”
“And then your conscience got the better of you,” Lori said.
“I talked to Edmund on Friday to negotiate returning them quietly. He knew the families, the estates. I thought we could make it right without—” He stopped. “Without it becoming something larger than it needed to be.”
“How did he take it?” I asked.
Pruitt’s mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile.
“Edmund Halverson was not a man who took things quietly. He was angry. He said what I’d done was theft regardless of my intentions.
We argued. I told him I was prepared to return everything, make proper restitution.
He said he would think about it.” He picked up the muffin and set it down again without taking a bite.
“So I went back the morning of the auction to see if he’d thought about it. ”
I leaned forward. Had there been an argument and Pruitt killed Halverson by mistake? Why did he take the lapdesk and, more importantly where was it? “What happened?”
“He said he was busy, but that we could work something out. Needless to say, I was relieved.”
“You didn’t argue?” Lori asked.
Pruitt shook his head.
“What time were you there?” I asked.
“Half past six. Perhaps quarter to seven.”
“And did you see anyone — arriving, or nearby — when you left?”
Pruitt’s hands went still on the desk. “A woman was coming up the walk as I left. I recognized her from the preview. The antique dealer from Camden.”
The room went quiet.
“You’re certain,” Lori said.
“Red hair. Dark coat. She was walking quickly and didn’t even notice me.”
“And you’re sure Halverson was alive when you left?” Lori asked.
Pruitt looked taken aback. “Of course… why you don’t think…”
I held my hand up. “No, of course not. Have you told the police?”
Pruitt’s expression turned guilty. “No… well… I didnt want to be associated with his death. I mean I was there that morning and I didn’t know who Halverson might have told about my little…donation issue.”
“You need to tell them,” Jill said. “Today. This morning.” She tore a page from his own notepad, wrote Tony’s number, and set it beside the untouched muffin. “Now, Garrett.”
He nodded — the nod of a man who had needed someone to say the thing he already knew.
“One more thing,” I said. “The lap desk. Lot 47 from the Waverly estate. It went missing after Halverson was killed.” I leaned forward. “Do you have it? Do you know where it is?”
Pruitt looked up, genuinely startled. “The desk? No. Why would I have that?”
“Because it matters,” I said. “More than I can explain right now. Someone’s life depends on what’s in it. If you know anything about where it went I need you to tell me.”
He shook his head slowly. “I don’t have it. I’ve never touched it. I saw it at the preview and I knew it was from Constance. It was a nice piece and thought it would make a nice donation, but I didn’t take it. I don’t know where it is. That’s the truth.”
“All right,” I said.
We left Pruitt to call the police and stood on the church steps in the cold bright morning.
The harbor was visible at the end of the street, the water hard and silver in the October light.
A delivery truck went past. A dog walker.
The ordinary morning of a town that didn’t know what the three of us were standing here knowing.
“Voss told us she drove down the morning of the auction and the police were already here. She never saw Halverson alive,” I said.
“Yes,” Lori said. “She did, but Pruitt saw her and says he left Halverson alive.”
We stood with that for another moment.
“One of them is lying,” Jill said.
“Yes,” I said. I took out my phone.
Tony picked up on the first ring, which meant he’d been expecting my call or had been about to make one. I told him what Pruitt had said. “He’s going to call you. If Halverson and Voss were having an affair and he broke it off to get back with his wife, then you were right about the motive.”
“I like being right. Gina —”
“The desk,” I said. “If she has it. You promised.”
A pause. “I know what I promised.”
“We have until tonight,” I said. “That’s all we have.”
Another pause, longer. “I’ll be in touch,” he said, and hung up.
I had been home for twenty minutes, standing at the kitchen window with a cup of coffee I wasn’t drinking, when the quality of the room changed.
Not dramatically. Just the shift I knew — the particular alteration of air and attention that meant someone had arrived who wasn’t visible in the ordinary way. I turned from the window.
Rosaria was in her chair.
She looked smaller than she had before she’d left — not thinner in the physical sense, because she had no physical sense to be thin in, but diminished the way a light dims when the source is losing power.
The housecoat was the same. The pinned hair was the same.
She had things to report and was going to report them whether I was ready or not — that much was clear from the set of her chin.
“You’re back,” I said.
“Obviously,” she said. Her voice had the compressed quality it always had, but quieter now, as if the compression had increased by a degree. “Stella is fine. The situation has been managed. I told you there was a great deal to attend to.”
“You did.”
“There is more than you know,” she said.
“Over there. The ones who have been — thinning, the way I am thinning. There are others, Gina. Not many, but not only me.” She said it as information, not complaint.
The tone of someone delivering a briefing.
“I spoke to two of them. An older man named Robert who has been going for perhaps five years. A young woman — younger than she should have been — named Clara.” She paused.
“They didn’t know what was happening to them.
Nobody had told them. They just knew they were going and they didn’t understand why. ”
I set my coffee cup down. “Rosaria —”
“I’m telling you because it’s relevant,” she said.
“Not because I want your sympathy. I want you to understand the scope of it. Ada’s binding — whatever happened when those founders made their agreement a hundred years ago — it has been thinning ghosts without their knowledge or consent for longer than anyone realized.
Robert has been going for five years. Clara for two.
” A pause. “And I have been going since the Merriwell.”
The kitchen was very quiet. The harbor moved outside the window, indifferent and steady.
“We’re going to fix it,” I said. “Tonight. If Tony finds the desk in time.”
“I know you’re going to try,” she said. Which was not the same thing, and we both knew it, and she was kind enough not to say so.
The housecoat, the pinned hair, entirely Rosaria, entirely herself despite everything being pulled away from her degree by degree. The light behind her eyes had not gone. Whatever was fading, that had not faded.
“The others,” I said. “Robert and Clara. If we fix the binding — if we find the counter and perform the mooring tonight — does it help them too?”
Rosaria considered this with the care she gave things she was uncertain about, which was not many things, but this was one of them. “I don’t know,” she said. “I hope so. Ada wrote a remedy. She would not have written a partial one.”
I thought about Ada Waverly in the 1890s, writing by hand, leaving pieces of herself in three separate places so that whoever came after would have what they needed. Writing the fix beside the working because she didn’t believe in leaving a door open without knowing where the key was.
“She wouldn’t have,” I said.
Rosaria made a sound that was not quite agreement and not quite complaint, which with her meant both.
Then she settled further into the chair, and I picked up my coffee, and we sat together in the kitchen in the quiet of two women who had said the important things and were now simply waiting to see what the day would bring.
The harbor was silver and cold outside the window. Somewhere across town, Tony was making calls. The Hunter’s Moon would rise in about ten hours.
We waited.