Chapter 4

By two o'clock, the club had settled on its story.

Delphine heard it at the ballroom bar while she set the tray for the toast. Two members of the house committee, a woman in a navy sheath and a man with a regatta tie, working it out over iced tea.

"Thirty-one years," the woman said. "You don't start stealing in year thirty-one."

"Then she didn't start in year thirty-one," the man said.

"She never says anything. Have you noticed that? You ask her a question and she just - looks at you."

"That's because she's staff. Staff don't chat."

"Staff don't have a hundred-and-thirty-year-old cup in their bag either."

Behind them, someone mentioned Nora's husband, who had drowned off Brenton Point twenty-two years ago and left her with a boat loan and no children. It was said in a low voice, the way people say things they know aren't relevant and intend to use anyway.

Delphine polished the same wine glass three times.

At half past two, she carried a box of votive candles up to the north cabinet room to see if the family silver needed a wipe before the photographs, and found Bitsy there with the cabinet open.

Bitsy had her mother's photograph out. She was holding it the way you hold a cup of hot tea, both hands, and she didn't look up for a while.

"I keep waiting to be angry with her," she said finally. "And I just feel sick. My mother gave that woman the cottage. She gave her the job when nobody would hire a woman to run launches. She gave her everything."

Delphine looked at the cabinet. The cup sat on the middle shelf in its plastic bin, and beside it, dust rings where other things had been.

"She never even denied it," Bitsy said. "That's the part I can't get past."

She said it well. She said it so well that Delphine stood there for a second and believed her - that Nora, who had taught her to read a tide chart and how to take a line off a moving boat, was exactly what the ballroom had decided she was.

Then she remembered the seam.

At three, Delphine carried Nora's cardboard box down to the shed, because someone had left it in the office doorway and nobody else was going to do it. She set it on the desk, and the ditty bag was on top, and when she picked the bag up to move it, she felt paper in the inside pocket.

A folded carbon slip, soft at the creases, the pink of it gone gray with handling.

FAIRWEATHER SAILING FOUNDATION. PURCHASE ORDER NO. 2019-114. 1 ea. Christening cup, silver plate over pewter, scrollwork. Ship to: P.O. Box 22, Newport, RI. Terms: card on file. Total: $140.00. Date: March 2019.

At the bottom, in the vendor's neat machine print: SER. FW-19-0114.

Delphine sat down on the shed's wooden chair with the carbon in both hands.

A hundred and forty dollars. A post office box. A purchase order number that belonged to the foundation whose books were in Bitsy Coyle's name. And a serial number she could not compare to anything, because the cup's base was too smooth to read under the office lights, and the cup was locked in the north cabinet.

She folded the slip and put it in her back pocket and walked back up the dock.

The cup would be on a tray at four-thirty in front of a hundred people. She only had to make sure it was under the light.