CHAPTER SEVEN
The Cormorant Cove Historical Society occupied the old customs house at the top of Wharf Street, a squat brick building with green shutters and a hand-painted sign that had clearly been repainted by someone with more enthusiasm than skill.
Inside, it smelled like dust and lemon polish, and every surface was covered in the particular, anxious clutter of an institution that had far more history than storage space.
Marjorie Fenn ran it the way, Marin suspected, she ran most things in her life: with a clipboard, a firm sense of correct procedure, and an expression that suggested she'd been personally inconvenienced by Marin's arrival before Marin had said a single word.
"You'll be wanting the Wharf Street commercial records, I expect," Marjorie said, before Marin had finished explaining herself. "Everyone who buys a building on this street eventually wants to know what used to be there. It's very common. I have a whole binder."
"Actually, I wanted to ask about Walter Kessler's research. His book project."
Something in Marjorie's face closed, quick and complete, like a shop pulling its shutters at the first sign of weather. "Walter's research was his own affair," she said, in a tone that suggested the conversation might already be over. "I don't see that it's any of the Inkwell's business."
"He left some materials at my shop before he died. I'm trying to understand what he'd found."
"He found a great many things over the years, Ms. Ashworth, most of it perfectly ordinary — shipping manifests, church records, the usual bones of a small town's history.
I don't know what particular thread you imagine he was pulling on, but I can tell you that Walter had become, in his last few months, rather less careful about verification than the Society requires.
He wanted to publish sensational claims about people still living in this town, based on decades-old rumor and his own sense of grievance about the Vance family, and I told him, repeatedly, that the Society could not and would not lend its name to that kind of work without proper substantiation. "
"You argued with him."
"I disagreed with him. Professionally." Marjorie's chin lifted a fraction. "There is a difference, though I don't expect a bookshop owner to appreciate it."
"When was the last time you saw him?"
"The Tuesday before he died. He came in demanding access to the harbor deed records from the nineteen-nineties, which are not, strictly speaking, part of the Society's holdings, they're county property, and I told him so, and he left in a temper.
That was the last I saw of him." Something flickered across Marjorie's face — not quite guilt, but adjacent to it.
"I've thought about that conversation a great deal since.
I don't imagine it reflects well on me, being short with a man two days before he died.
But I stand by what I told him. This Society has a reputation for accuracy that took decades to build, and I wasn't going to let Walter Kessler burn it down chasing thirty-year-old gossip about a fishing accident, however sincerely he believed in it. "
"Do you know what he was hoping to find in the deed records?"
"He wanted to know exactly when the Whitfield dock rights transferred to Harold Vance, and whether the paperwork matched the date everyone in town remembered. That's all he'd tell me." Marjorie sniffed. "I told him county records don't lie, whatever a grieving man wants to believe about them."
Marin left the historical society forty minutes later with a photocopied map of Wharf Street circa 1962, which she hadn't asked for and Marjorie had pressed on her with the air of a woman making amends she wouldn't admit to needing to make, and the distinct impression that Marjorie Fenn's irritation with Walter Kessler was several sizes too small to have led anywhere near a pier in a storm.
Territorial, prickly, protective of her institution's good name — but not, Marin thought, dangerous.
Just difficult, in the specific way of people who have organized their whole sense of self around being right about small, careful things.
Still. County records don't lie. It was, Marin thought, walking back down Wharf Street in the gathering dusk, exactly the kind of thing someone said right before finding out that, in fact, sometimes they did.