The postmark on the envelope was nearly illegible, but Eugenia Crick had spent forty years sorting mail by hand, and her eyes still knew how to coax secrets from smudged ink. She tilted the envelope beneath the desk lamp in the back room of the Crick family pie shop, adjusting the angle until the cancellation stamp emerged from beneath a coffee ring. Atlanta, Georgia. A street address she did not recognize, followed by a suite number that no longer existed. She knew this because she had looked it up that morning, after the first envelope arrived, and found only a vacant lot where the mail drop once stood.
She set the envelope down on the scarred oak counter and reached for the second piece of correspondence, the one that had stopped her cold when she sorted the morning's delivery. Same paper stock, same careful block printing, same faint trace of lavender water along the seam. But it was the return address that made her pulse trip, that made her press one flour-dusted hand flat against the counter to steady herself.
P.O. Box 17. Hollow Creek, Georgia. The name printed beneath the box number was Archibald Crick.
Her husband had been dead for eleven months. She had buried him in March, beneath a sky the color of old dishwater, with the whole town bringing casseroles she could not eat and flowers she could not keep. She had signed the death certificate herself, had held his hand in the hospice while the monitor traced its long, flat line. Archibald Crick was gone. She had rearranged the bedroom, donated his suits, and given his reading glasses to the Lions Club. And now someone was sending letters from beyond the grave.
The shop bell chimed, a bright brass note that scattered her thoughts. She slipped both envelopes into the pocket of her apron, the paper crackling softly against the muslin, and pasted on the expression she had perfected over decades of early mornings and difficult customers.
"Pauline," she said, without turning around. "You're early today."
Her mother-in-law stood in the doorway between the shop and the kitchen, a tall woman still handsome in her late seventies, silver hair pinned with the precision of a bank teller. Pauline Crick surveyed the back room the way a health inspector might survey a restaurant, her gaze landing on the sifted flour, the cooling pies, the ledger open to the day's receipts.
"I am precisely on time," Pauline said. "You, Eugenia, are the one who is behind. Mrs. Tomlin's lemon meringue was supposed to be ready by nine."
"It's nine-fifteen, Pauline. And the lemon meringue is in the cooler, setting."
"Setting." Pauline repeated the word as though it were a minor moral failing. "I suppose setting is what you call everything these days. The shop. The mail. The family reputation."
Eugenia turned back to the counter, aligning a row of pie tins with more attention than the task required. The envelopes in her pocket seemed to burn against her hip, two small rectangles of impossibility demanding attention she was not ready to give. Not here. Not with Pauline's sharp eyes cataloging every pause, every breath.
"Archie would have had the meringue torched by now," Pauline continued, moving into the room with the measured tread of a woman who believed that floors were beneath her. "He never let a pie sit."
"Archie," Eugenia said carefully, "is not here."
The words landed harder than she intended. Pauline's mouth thinned to a colorless line, and for a moment the two women regarded each other across the stainless steel worktable, the morning light falling between them in a pale, dusty column that smelled of butter and lemon and the faintest trace of something older, something carried in the lining of an envelope.
Eugenia softened her tone. "I'll have the meringue browned in ten minutes. Would you like a cup of coffee while you wait?"
"I would like," Pauline said, "to understand why you were standing at that counter looking like you'd seen a ghost."
The word ghost hung in the air, and Eugenia felt the pocket of her apron grow heavier. She had a choice here. She could lie, could manufacture a plausible explanation involving a difficult customer or a letter with insufficient postage. She had been lying to Pauline for the better part of a year, in the small ways that widows learn to lie: smiling at the mention of her husband's name, accepting sympathy she no longer required, agreeing that he was surely in a better place when what she really wanted to say was that a better place would have been a porch swing on a Tuesday afternoon, not whatever waited beyond the hospice curtain.
But Pauline was not stupid, and Eugenia was tired, and the envelopes were scratching at her thoughts like a cat at a closed door.
"Someone is sending mail," Eugenia said, "with Archie's name on the return address."
She watched Pauline's face, looking for the shock, the confusion, the theatrical gasp she had half-expected. What she saw instead was a stillness so complete it was almost sculptural, a pause that lasted two beats too long, a flicker of something in the older woman's eyes that was not surprise.
"Then someone," Pauline said, her voice dropping to a register Eugenia had never heard before, "has made a terrible mistake. Or a terrible choice."
"Pauline."
"I will take my coffee in the front," Pauline said, turning toward the door. "And Eugenia. Whatever those letters say, you will bring them to me before you show them to anyone else. Do you understand? Before anyone."
The door closed behind her with a soft click, and Eugenia stood alone in the kitchen, the scent of cooling lemon curd rising around her, her hand already moving toward the pocket of her apron. She drew out the second envelope, the one with Archie's name, and held it up to the light. The paper was heavy, cream-colored, the kind sold at stationery stores in Atlanta. The block printing was meticulous, each letter formed with the steady hand of someone who had learned penmanship in a classroom rather than at a kitchen table. Archibald Crick. P.O. Box 17. Hollow Creek, Georgia.
She turned the envelope over. The seal was unbroken, the gum still tacky along the flap. Whoever had addressed this had done so with care, with intention, with the quiet deliberateness of someone who wanted the letter to arrive in pristine condition. The postmark, she now saw, was dated three days ago. Atlanta, Georgia. A mail drop that had been closed for six years, according to the county records she had pulled up on the shop's ancient desktop computer while the first pot of coffee brewed.
The first envelope, the one without a return address, had contained a single sheet of paper, folded precisely in thirds, covered in the same block printing. She had not yet read it. It sat in the locked drawer beneath the cash register, tucked between the day's receipts and a dog-eared copy of the Hollow Creek telephone directory, waiting for a moment when she could be alone with its contents.
But the second envelope, the one addressed to her, the one with her dead husband's name on the return line, was sealed and waiting. She could open it now, in the quiet of the kitchen, with only the hum of the cooler and the distant clatter of Pauline arranging coffee cups in the front room. She could slide her finger beneath the flap, break the seal, and learn what message the dead had seen fit to send.
The bell above the shop door chimed again, and a familiar voice called out, deep and unhurried, with the particular cadence of a man accustomed to waiting.
"Gene? You got a minute? I got a situation over on Dunmore Lane that could use a witness."
Sheriff Dale Tatum stood in the doorway, his hat in his hand, his boots leaving faint prints of red clay on the linoleum. He was a broad man, gone soft around the middle in the way of men who ate too many of their own biscuits, with a face that favored patience over speed. He had been sheriff of Hollow Creek for nineteen years, and Eugenia had known him since they were children racing bicycles down the hill behind the Methodist church.
"Dale," she said, slipping the envelope back into her pocket. "I'm a little busy."
"You got meringue in your hair," he observed, stepping into the kitchen with the easy authority of a man who believed all doors should be open to him. "And your mother-in-law is giving me the look she gives people who park crooked."
"That look is reserved for people who park crooked and know it."
"Then I'm in trouble," Dale said, but his smile faded as his eyes found her face. He had known her too long not to notice when something was off, when the warmth in her expression curdled into something else. "Gene. What is it?"
She hesitated. The envelopes pressed against her hip, their weight disproportionate to their size. She could tell him. She could hand them over and let the law do what the law did, follow paper trails and interview postal workers and file reports in triplicate. But Dale was Archie's friend, had stood beside her at the grave in his dress uniform, had caught her when her knees had buckled on the way to the car. Telling him that Archie's name was on a letter from Atlanta would make the thing real in a way she was not prepared for.
"I'll tell you tonight," she said. "Come by the house after seven. I'll have something stronger than coffee."
Dale studied her for a long moment, his thumbs hooked in his belt, his jaw working slightly as though he were chewing on a question he had decided not to ask. Then he nodded, once, and touched the brim of his absent hat.
"Dunmore Lane," he said. "You sure you can't come now?"
"Positive. Whatever it is will keep until I've had my coffee and Pauline has had her say."
"Fair enough." He turned to go, then stopped, one hand on the doorframe. "Gene. Whatever's in that pocket, you be careful with it. Strange things have a way of getting stranger in this town."
The door closed behind him, and Eugenia was alone again, the kitchen settling into the particular silence of a room that had been full of voices and now was not. She drew the envelope out once more, studying the careful printing, the precise lines, the way the ink had soaked into the paper just enough to suggest permanence.
The mail drop in Atlanta had been defunct for six years. The return address pointed to a P.O. box that belonged to a dead man. And Pauline Crick, who had spent the last eleven months finding fault with everything from Eugenia's pie crust to her posture, had heard the news and told her to bring the letters home.
Eugenia slid her finger beneath the seal of the envelope, feeling the paper yield, the old gum releasing with a soft, papery sigh. Inside was a single sheet, folded in thirds, covered in the same meticulous block printing. She unfolded it carefully, smoothing the creases against the counter, and read.
The first line was a date. March 15th. The day Archibald Crick had been admitted to the hospice. The second line was a single sentence, and the sentence changed everything she thought she knew about the year her husband died.
The sentence was not addressed to Archibald. It was not addressed to Eugenia. It was addressed to no one at all, or perhaps to someone whose name had been erased from the record, scrubbed so thoroughly that only the ghost of the letter remained, a paler rectangle where ink had once lived.
The witness was never interviewed.
Eugenia read the sentence again. The words were plain, unadorned, the kind of language a man uses when he is stating a fact he believes no one will ever question. Her hands had gone still against the countertop. The morning light through the kitchen window had shifted, the sun climbing past the oak out front, and the shadow of its lowest branch lay across the floor like a pointing finger.
She read the sentence a third time, and then she set the letter down, very precisely, in the center of the cleared space, and she went to find Pauline.
The back of the pie shop was Pauline Crick's domain, though she preferred the phrase family business when others could hear, and the word office when she was alone with the filing cabinets and the ledgers and the small framed photograph of Archibald Senior that she had positioned to watch over her work. The room smelled of lemon oil and old paper and the faintly sweet, faintly rotten undertone of a space that had been closed up for too long. Pauline had not set foot in the pie shop proper since the funeral. She had her groceries delivered. She had her meals sent up on a tray. She conducted the business of the Crick family enterprise from behind a desk that had belonged to her husband, conducting it with the particular ferocity of a woman who had decided that if the world would not give her a seat at the table, she would simply claim the table itself.
Eugenia paused at the door. Through the gap, she could see the back of Pauline's head, silver hair pinned tight, and the slow movement of her hand across a ledger page. The woman was humming. It was a hymn, one of the old ones, the kind that Archibald Senior had whistled on Sunday mornings while he sharpened the carving knife. The sound of it in that room, at that hour, made something cold move through Eugenia's chest.
She knocked. The humming stopped.
"Pauline."
"Eugenia." Pauline did not turn. "I see you are still wearing that apron. I have told you about the apron. This is a place of business."
"Pauline, I need to ask you about a P.O. box."
The pen in Pauline's hand went still. For a long moment, the only sound was the tick of the small mantel clock and the distant, muffled complaints of a screen door somewhere at the front of the building. Then Pauline set the pen down, precisely parallel to the edge of the ledger, and turned her chair to face the doorway.
"Which box," Pauline said. Her voice was the temperature of well water.
"Archibald had a second box," Eugenia said. "For his church correspondence. I only learned of it yesterday."
"Ah." Pauline's mouth did something that was not quite a smile. "That."
"Yes. That."
Pauline studied her for a long moment, the way a woman studies a piece of fruit at the market, calculating ripeness, calculating price. Then she gestured, a single motion, toward the wooden chair opposite the desk.
"Sit," Pauline said. "And close the door. This is not a conversation for the hallway."
Eugenia did as she was told. The chair was harder than it looked, and the seat cushion had been pushed to one side, as if the comfort of visitors was an afterthought. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, the apron still on, the letter still in her apron pocket, the weight of it against her hip like a small, insistent hand.
"Archibald took that box out in nineteen seventy-eight," Pauline said. She was not looking at Eugenia. She was looking at the photograph of her late husband, the one on the desk, the one that watched everything. "He said it was for the deacon's correspondence. Private matters. Church business that should not mix with the household mail. I thought nothing of it. A man is entitled to his privacy, even from his wife."
The word wife landed in the room like a dropped dish.
"Whose name was on the box," Eugenia said.
Pauline's eyes came back to hers, and for a moment, just a moment, something flickered there. Something that might have been guilt, or might have been fear, or might have been the particular exhaustion of a woman who had been carrying a weight for a very long time and was tired of the carrying.
"Archibald's," Pauline said. "And the church's. P.O. Box 117, Maple Street Station. He paid the rent quarterly, in cash, out of the household account. I signed the checks. I never asked what was in it, and he never offered to tell me."
"And after he died."
"After he died, the rent came due. There was no one to authorize the payment. I went to the post office and I closed the box. I brought everything that was in it home. I put it in the attic in the camphorwood chest. I have not opened the camphorwood chest in eleven months, Eugenia. Not once. Whatever is in there has been waiting, and I have not been curious."
The room felt smaller than it had a moment before. The lemon oil smell had thickened, or perhaps Eugenia's senses had sharpened, the way they did when she was trying to read a person the way her mother had taught her to read a recipe, by instinct, by the spacing of the ingredients, by the silence between the lines.
"Pauline."
"Yes."
"I need to see what is in that chest."
Pauline was quiet for a long time. Outside, somewhere, a dog began to bark, and then another, and then a third, and the sound of them traveled through the walls of the pie shop like the rumor of a thing that could not be stopped.
"You will go up there," Pauline said, and her voice had gone careful, the way it got when she was trying not to say something, "and you will find that Archibald was a man who believed in the separation of his affairs. His business. His church. His family. He kept them in different drawers, in different rooms, and he believed that a woman who understood which drawer was which was a woman who understood the value of what she had been given."
"Pauline, I am not asking for a philosophy. I am asking for a key."
"I know what you are asking." Pauline's hands had come together on the desk, the fingers laced, the knuckles white. "And I am telling you that there are letters in that chest that I have not read, and there are letters in that chest that I have read, and there are letters in that chest that I burned the night I brought them home, in the yard, in the dark, with the garden hose running, because I could not bear to have them in the house another night. I burned what I burned. I kept what I kept. And I will not open that chest for you, Eugenia, because the woman who opens that chest is not me, and I will not be that woman. Not today. Not ever."
The clock on the mantel ticked. The dogs outside had stopped barking. The light through the window had shifted again, and now the shadow of the oak branch lay across Pauline's face, bisecting it, one eye in light and one in dark.
"Pauline," Eugenia said, and her voice was very steady, very quiet, "what was in the letters you burned?"
Pauline looked at her for a long moment. Then she opened the top drawer of the desk, reached in, and produced a small key on a brass ring. She set it on the desk between them, in the exact center of the cleared space.
"That key opens the camphorwood chest," Pauline said. "The letters I burned are gone. But there is a letter, Eugenia. One letter, in a white envelope, in a wooden box at the bottom of the chest, that I did not burn. I could not burn it. I could not read it. I could not bring myself to throw it away. It has been sitting in that box for eleven months, and I have not touched it, and I have not looked at it, and I have told no one of its existence until this moment, because I was a coward, and because I am a coward still, and because I am tired, Eugenia. I am so very tired of being the woman who knows things and cannot say them."
Eugenia looked at the key. She did not pick it up.
"What does the letter say, Pauline."
"I do not know."
"You do not know."
"I could not read it. I tried. I tried for an hour. The words moved on the page, or I moved, or the room moved. I could not make it stay still long enough to make sense of it. I sealed it back in the envelope. I put it in the box. I have not opened the box since."
The kitchen clock ticked. The shadow of the branch shifted another inch.
"Where is Archibald's second P.O. box now," Eugenia said. "The one on Maple Street. Is it still closed."
"No," Pauline said. "I did not close it."
Eugenia's hand, the one that had been reaching for the key, stopped in midair.
"You did not close it."
"I could not. I went to the post office to close it, and I stood at the counter, and the woman behind the counter asked me for the box number, and I could not speak. I gave her the wrong number. I gave her our home box, the one we have had for thirty years. I signed the form. I walked out. The box on Maple Street is still open, Eugenia. It has been open for eleven months, and the rent has not been paid, and I do not know who has been putting mail into it, and I do not know who has been taking mail out of it, and I have not slept a full night since the funeral because of it."
Eugenia looked at the key on the desk. She looked at the photograph of Archibald Senior. She looked at the back of Pauline's silver head, the tight pin, the set of the shoulders, the way the woman sat in her husband's chair as if she were holding down a grave.
"I am going to open that chest," Eugenia said. "And I am going to read that letter. And then I am going to call Sheriff Tatum."
"Yes," Pauline said. "I believe you are."
Eugenia did not sleep that night. She lay in the brass bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to the house breathe around her, the tick of pipes, the creak of the frame settling into another hour without Archibald in it. Sometime past two, the rain stopped. The silence that replaced it was worse, a held breath, a room waiting to be told what came next.
At five, she rose. She put on the coffee. She stood at the kitchen window and watched the light come up gray and thin over the square, the fountain standing in its basin of black water, the flag at the post office hanging limp. At six, she called Sheriff Tatum's office. A recorded voice told her the sheriff was out on a call and would be back by seven. She left no message. She sat at the table and drank her coffee and did not touch the key.
At quarter past seven, the phone rang. It was Sheriff Tatum himself, his voice smooth and unhurried, a man who had learned long ago that the early morning hours were for the business no one wanted to conduct in daylight.
"Mrs. Crick. Velma said you might be calling. She said you'd had a visit from Pauline last night, and that I ought to be prepared for whatever you were about to tell me. I have to tell you, I have been sheriff of this town for fourteen years, and I have learned that when those two women put their heads together, the result is rarely dull. What's on your mind?"
Eugenia told him. She told him about the chest, about the key, about the letters from Mrs. Pemberton and Miss Smiley. She told him about Pauline's silence of seven months. She told him about the second P.O. box, the one on Maple Street, the one that was still open. She left out the letter, Archibald's own letter, because she had not yet read it, and she did not intend to read it alone.
"Sheriff," she said, "I would like you to come to the house. I would like to open the chest with you present. I would like you to see what is inside before I do anything with it."
The line was quiet for a moment. She could hear the faint sound of him setting his coffee cup down on his desk.
"I'll be there in twenty minutes," he said. "Don't open it without me. And Mrs. Crick, Pauline is welcome to be present as well, if she wishes. This is, after all, her son."
"She wished it, Sheriff. She wished it before I did."
The front door of the Crick house had a glass panel in its upper half, and Eugenia watched the sheriff's cruiser pull up to the curb and watched Sheriff Dale Tatum step out of it and stand for a moment on the sidewalk, looking up at the house as if he were taking its measure. He was a tall man, broad through the shoulders, with a weathered face and pale eyes that missed very little. He had been a boy in this town when Archibald Crick was a young man, and he had been a young man himself when Archibald brought Eugenia home as his bride, and he had stood at the back of the church at Archibald's funeral and sung the hymns with the rest of them and meant every word.
He came up the walk. He knocked. Eugenia opened the door.
"Morning, Eugenia," he said. He did not call her Mrs. Crick when it was just the two of them, had not done so in the eleven months since the funeral, though he was careful of the proprieties in public. "How are you holding up?"
"I have been better, Dale. I have also been worse. Come in. Pauline is in the parlor. The chest is in the bedroom. I thought we might start with the chest, if that suits you."
He followed her through the house. He nodded to Pauline, who was sitting in the same chair she had occupied the night before, though someone, Eugenia suspected Pauline herself, had placed a folded blanket across her lap, though the morning was not cold. The older woman looked up at him with the same silver composure she had shown Eugenia, and he touched the brim of his hat and said, "Mrs. Crick," and she inclined her head.
"Dale," she said. "Thank you for coming."
They went down the hall to the bedroom. The cedar chest sat at the foot of the bed where Eugenia had left it the night before, the key still on the desk, the morning light falling across the lid in a long pale stripe. Sheriff Tatum stood for a moment looking at it, his thumbs hooked in his belt, his head slightly tilted, the way a man looks at a thing he is not in a hurry to approach.
"All right," he said. "Let's see what's inside."
Eugenia picked up the key. It went into the lock with the same soft resistance it had offered the night before, as if the mechanism had been waiting for this particular hand, this particular morning. She turned it. The lid gave a little sigh of released air, the smell of cedar rising into the room, sharper than it had been, as if the opening had let something else out along with it.
Inside, as she had seen, lay the bundle of letters. But beneath the bundle, half-hidden by the folds of paper, was something she had not seen in the dark of the night before. A smaller box, wooden, about the size of a cigar box, with a hinged lid and no lock. She set it aside on the bed and lifted out the bundle of letters and set it beside the box.
The letters were tied with a length of kitchen twine, the kind Pauline used to truss a chicken. Forty-seven of them, by Eugenia's count when she spread them on the bedspread, forty-seven envelopes of various sizes and colors, some white, some pale blue, some a soft gray, some the cream of older stationery. The postmarks were from towns across the state, the dates all falling within the last twelve months of Archibald's life. The return addresses were all different. The handwriting on the faces was all different. But the name on every one of them, written in a careful hand that Eugenia did not recognize, was the same: Archibald Crick, in care of the Maple Street Post Office, the box number written beneath it.
Sheriff Tatum leaned over the bed and studied the top envelope without touching it. He did not pick it up. He simply looked at it, the way a man looks at a thing that has just become evidence.
"May I," Eugenia said, and he nodded, and she took the top envelope from the pile and held it so he could see the return address. A Mrs. Cornelia Doss, of a town Eugenia had only ever passed through on the way to somewhere else. Beneath the return address, in smaller handwriting, a single line: For Archibald, in answer to yours of the 14th.
"Open it," the sheriff said. His voice was quiet, and his eyes were not on the envelope but on Eugenia's face. "Read it aloud, if you can bear to. I want Pauline to hear it too. Go and bring her in."
Eugenia went to the parlor. Pauline had not moved from her chair, but her hands were folded tightly in her lap, and her eyes were fixed on the doorway as if she had been counting the minutes.
"He wants you in the bedroom, Pauline," Eugenia said. "He wants you to hear what is in these letters."
Pauline rose without a word. She drew the blanket from her lap and folded it over the back of the chair with the care of a woman performing a small ritual, and she followed Eugenia down the hall. The three of them stood at the foot of the bed, the bundle of forty-seven letters spread between them, the morning light falling now across the shoulders of Sheriff Tatum's uniform and the silver crown of Pauline's head.
Eugenia opened the first letter. She cleared her throat. She read.
"Dear Archibald," she read, and her voice was steady, though her hand on the paper was not. "I received your letter of the 14th and I have read it twice. I will not pretend to you that I was not surprised, though I will confess I was not entirely unprepared. You asked me a question, and I will give you the courtesy of an answer, though I fear it is not the one you came to hear. I am not free to leave. I am not free in any of the ways that matter. I have made my bed, as my mother used to say, and I must lie in it, though I will tell you, Archibald, and I will tell no one else, that there are nights when the bed is very cold and the lying is very long. I think of you. I will continue to think of you. I will not write again unless you ask me to, and I will understand if you do not. Yours, in the silence, Cornelia."
The room was very quiet. Sheriff Tatum had not moved. Pauline's hand had come up, slowly, to rest against her collarbone, the way a woman touches the place where a brooch might have been, or a wound.
"There are forty-six more," Eugenia said. "Do you want me to read them all, Sheriff?"
He looked at the pile. He looked at Pauline. Pauline's face was the color of old paper, and her eyes were bright, and she did not speak.
"Not all of them," the sheriff said. "Not today. But I want you to seal them back in the box, Eugenia, and I want you to let me take the box down to the station, and I want to open a proper investigation. Not a criminal one, at least not yet. I want to find out who these women are, and I want to find out what Archibald was doing writing to them, and I want to find out who else knew. And I want to find out who has been opening that box on Maple Street, and who has been paying the rent, and who has been taking the mail out. Because that, Mrs. Crick, is the part of this that does not sit right with me. A man can write letters to whomever he pleases. A woman can answer them. But somebody has been standing in the middle of it, and I want to know who."
He looked at Pauline. Pauline looked back at him. Between them, in the long quiet of the bedroom, something passed that Eugenia could not read, an acknowledgment, a surrender, a long-delayed breath.
"Take the box, Dale," Pauline said. Her voice was the voice of a woman who had been holding a door shut for a very long time and had just been given permission to let it go. "Take it and do what needs to be done. And when you have found what you need to find, you will come back to this house, and you will tell me and Eugenia what it was. Because I am tired, Dale. I am very tired of being the only one in this family who has been carrying it."
Sheriff Tatum reached down and gathered the letters into a neat stack, and he slid them back into the cedar chest, and he closed the lid, and he turned the key in the lock and pocketed the key and the smaller wooden box both. He looked at Eugenia. He looked at Pauline. He touched the brim of his hat.
"I'll be in touch," he said. "By tomorrow evening at the latest. And Eugenia, the pie shop is yours today, and tomorrow, and the day after. Don't you go closing up on my account. This town needs its pie, and it needs you behind the counter, and it needs things to look the way they are supposed to look while I do my work. You understand me."
"I understand you, Dale."
He carried the chest out to his cruiser and set it on the back seat and drove away. Eugenia stood at the front window and watched the car go, and Pauline stood beside her, and neither of them spoke for a long time. The morning light had strengthened, and the square was waking up, the hardware store raising its awning, the barber sweeping his walk, the fountain catching the sun on the lip of its basin. Somewhere down the block, a screen door banged, and a dog barked twice, and a woman called out to a child in a voice that was not unkind.
"I am going to open the shop," Eugenia said, at last. "The blackberry pies need to go in, and the post office will want opening at nine, and there is a stack of mail on the counter that has been waiting for me since Tuesday."
"I will come with you," Pauline said.
Eugenia turned and looked at her. Pauline's face was still pale, but there was something different in it, a kind of release, the way a house looks when the storm has passed and the windows are open and the wind has gone through and taken the staleness with it.
"All right," Eugenia said. "You can come with me."
They walked together down the hall, through the kitchen, out the back door, across the little brick path that ran between the house and the shop. The air smelled of rain and of the first warmth of the season, and somewhere in the square a mockingbird was running through its whole repertoire, trill after trill, as if it had been saving them up all winter. Eugenia unlocked the shop door. She flipped the sign from Closed to Open. She untied her apron from the hook behind the counter and put it on, and Pauline Crick, who had not set foot behind the counter of the Crick Pie Shop in eleven months, took off her good coat and hung it on the same hook and took down a clean apron of her own and tied it at her waist.
They did not speak. They did not need to. The morning came in through the screen door, and the coffee maker began to hiss on its burner, and the first customer of the day, old Mr. Pruitt from the hardware store, pushed through the door and nodded to them both and asked for a slice of sweet potato and a cup of black, and Eugenia cut the slice and Pauline poured the coffee, and the day, such as it was, began.