“Maybe,” she said. “I went by a store up in Wybeck, and the guy there told me it could have been made by somebody named Carl Kittery, who I guess was a famous duck guy? But it doesn’t have quite the right marking, so it’s apparently very hard to tell. I’m supposed to take it to this place in Hartford, Wesson & Truitt, so that somebody can tell me what’s going on with it.”
Matt leaned forward. “You’re kidding. I know that place. I’m taking a tennis racket down there that some lady thinks might have been used by Bobby Riggs.”
“The time he got his ass kicked?”
“No,” he said. “Not the time he got his ass kicked. A different time. Anyway, they’re basically sports generalists. I could take it for you.” He pointed at a legal pad on the coffee table. “I’ll write you a receipt, I’ll take it when I go, and they’ll do an initial consult and tell you whether they’d advise spending the money on a full appraisal. I’m going Tuesday and it’ll probably only take them a couple hours, so I can bring it back to you this week. Plus, because I do work with them a lot, I can get you a discount on the consultation. People in this business will really take you to the cleaners if you’re not careful.”
Laurie went to the mantel and took the duck down, running her hand over its smooth, brown back. She knew the feel of it by now, the crest that came to a rounded nub behind its neck, and the curve of the chest. She handed it to the Grim Reaper. “This is nice of you,” she said. “I can definitely use the help.” She gave him the legal pad and a blue ballpoint pen.
He smiled down at the paper as he wrote out the receipt that indicated he was taking a duck decoy for the purposes of an appraisal. “Well, I like selling old stuff, but what I really like is when somebody who’s going through a hard thing can go through a little bit less of a hard thing.” He dated and signed the paper and handed it to her. “We’re going to solve this mystery.”
When he was gone, she looked at her phone. It was 4:30, and Nick had said he’d swing by to get her at 6:30. Laurie could have spent the next two hours trying to figure out how she should try to look, but instead, she decided to watch three consecutive episodes of Veep on her phone, hop into the shower, and then slip on a close-fitting pair of black pants and a slouchy gray top with a deep V-neck and black booties. A little rosy lipstick, a little tinted moisturizer to even out the splotchy places on her cheeks that she blamed on her imperfect history with sunscreen, a little mascara, and she was ready to go. She was about to answer the knock at the door when she reached out and grabbed a pendant from Dot’s dresser—an enamel charm of a round blue Earth.
When she opened the door, Nick was there, holding three small yellow flowers. “I thought about roses,” he said. “But that didn’t seem like you. And I thought about lilies or something, but that didn’t seem like me. Fortunately, my neighbor saw me leaving the house, and she wanted to know where I was going. She gave these to me, right from her own garden.” He handed them to Laurie. “Lanceleaf…something. Corinthian? Lanceleaf Corinthian? That sounds wrong.”
Laurie smiled. “Thank you. That’s very sweet of your neighbor.” She turned and grabbed a tall glass off the counter. As she ran water in it for the flowers, she turned back to him. “You look great.”
“Thank you. So do you. It’s nice picking you up somewhere other than your parents’ house.”
“Yeah, now you can pick me up at my aunt’s house.” She dried her hands and, just as she started to follow him out, she grabbed one of the flowers and slid the stem into the top of her bag so the yellow petals peeked out. “I have to stay fancy,” she said.
The drive to the restaurant in the soft gold light took them through the middle of Calcasset, past the high school and the ballpark and the Compass Café, where two of Laurie’s brothers had worked in the kitchen when they were young. He pointed to the new Episcopal church and the new Best Buy, and three times, he gestured to a place where something had once been and wasn’t anymore. The saddest was the salon where Laurie had gone to get her hair done for the prom. They remembered together how she’d had it pinned up in back and how it had fallen down over the course of the evening because she danced too hard—with him, but with June, too.
The restaurant was called Tyler—not Tyler’s, and not The Tyler, and not Tyler’s Something-or-Other, but Tyler. As if it were less a restaurant than a toddler eager to get off the wait list at an exclusive preschool. Out front, a water feature burbled beside a sign that was made to look as if it had been hastily stenciled onto a wooden pallet but had probably cost more than the water feature plus all the water it would ever need.