Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
We left the station at a pace that was not quite running but was everything short of it.
The afternoon had gone gold and long-shadowed the way late October afternoons did in Starfall Bay — the light coming in at an angle that made everything look significant, the harbor catching it and throwing it back in pieces, the town settling into the particular stillness of a place preparing for evening.
It was beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when you have no time to look at them properly.
Halverson and Sons was three blocks from the station. We covered them quickly.
The door was unlocked. Margot was inside, alone, at the partners desk that had been Edmund Halverson’s, working through a stack of papers with the focused efficiency of a woman who had decided that grief was something she would attend to once the administrative obligations had been met.
She looked up when the five of us came through the door.
To her credit she did not look alarmed. She had dealt with enough in the past four days that five determined women arriving at closing time apparently registered as simply the next thing.
“Ms. Ferraro,” she said.
“Margot.” I came to the desk. “Last night’s auction. The Waverly estate lots — the ones that weren’t taken the night Mr. Halverson died. We need to know what sold and who bought it.”
Margot looked at me for a moment. Then she opened the laptop on the desk and turned it toward herself and typed. “Is this connected to the investigation?” she said.
“Yes,” I said, which was true enough.
She typed. She scrolled. She turned the laptop so we could see the screen — the auction records from the previous evening, lot numbers and descriptions and hammer prices and buyer names in neat columns. The Waverly estate lots were grouped together near the middle of the list.
Ruth had her notebook out. She ran her finger down the screen beside Margot’s list, cross-referencing with what she’d documented at the preview.
The jewelry — sold in three separate lots to two different buyers.
The watercolors — sold together to a single bidder.
The lamps. The silver salt and pepper shakers. The books in two lots.
And then, near the bottom of the Waverly grouping: Victorian dip pens, leather roll, set of six. Decorative. Estimate $40-60.
Ruth’s finger stopped.
I looked at the description. Six dip pens in a leather roll. Not quill pens — dip pens, the kind a careful writer used when she wanted precision, when she cared about permanence, when she was putting something down that was meant to last.
The writing knows where the rest of it is.
Not the desk. Never the desk. The desk was the landmark, the pointer, the thing that said look here, look at what travels with me. It was so obvious that I wanted to put my head in my hands, except there was no time for that either.
“A piece of paper,” Lori said, very quietly, beside me. “Rolled tight. Tucked inside one of the barrels.” She said it the way she said things she had just understood and was certain of. “Small enough to fit. Hidden in plain sight for a hundred years inside a pen that nobody was going to use.”
“Who bought them?” I said.
Margot had already been looking. She turned the laptop back toward us and pointed at the buyer column next to the dip pen lot.
Walsh, E.
The name sat there in the neat auction database font, perfectly ordinary, perfectly devastating.
“Eileen,” Jill said.
“She knew,” Tammy said. “She knew it was never the desk.”
I thought about the preview — the older woman moving through the back room with the careful casualness of someone working very hard not to look like they were doing what they were doing.
The way she’d handled something in the lot with a care that had nothing to do with assessing value.
Ruth had noticed it. I had noticed it. We had both filed it and moved on because we’d been so focused on the desk that we’d missed what she was actually there for.
She hadn’t been there for the desk at all. She’d been there for the pens.
“She has them,” I said. “She has the remedy. She has had it since last night.”
“Does she know what to do with it?,” Lori asked.
“If she knew about the pens this whole time wouldn’t she have tried to get them from Constance?
Surely she couldn’t have managed that. Which makes me think she might not know exactly what to do.
” She looked at me. “Otherwise Olive would already be moored.”
That landed in the room and stayed there.
“She needs us,” Ruth said.
“And we need her. And the Hunter’s Moon —” I looked at the window. The gold light was going. The shadows were lengthening. The moon would rise in — I did the math and felt it in my chest. “We have maybe three hours.”
“Address,” Tammy said to Margot. “Do you have an address for her?”
Margot was already looking. She read it out and Tammy had her phone in her hand before the last word.
“I’ll drive,” Tammy said as we sprinted out of the auction hall.