“It’s not worth anything,” Laurie said.
“Doesn’t have to be expensive to be worth something,” he told her. He was wearing a Fiona Apple shirt that said THIS WORLD IS BULLSHIT. She liked him. But not quite as much as the first time he’d come over. He was attractive, but he wasn’t reading-room-in-the-dark attractive.
“Fair enough,” she said. She handed him the duck. He took the receipt he’d given her the other day off the coffee tables, and he added a note on the bottom that said she’d sold it to him for fifty dollars. He tucked it into his pocket and handed her the money. “Please don’t feel bad about it,” he said. “You’re doing a great job, and your aunt would be proud of you. I talk to ninety-year-olds more often than most, and the thing they really want is to know somebody’s going to care about what they left behind. You care. That means a lot.” He gave her another copy of his business card. “Drop by the shop anytime, okay? And I’ll talk to you soon.”
* * *
—
Laurie tried to keep the pity party short, with minimal fuss: a little wine, a little Julie London, and one of Dot’s feather boas wrapped around her neck while she stretched out on the sofa and tried not to think about any of it. No Nick, no duck. Just a lot more boxes, and a lot more books.
She was only one sip into the wine when she saw the paper from Wesson & Truitt out of the corner of her eye. It seemed very unfair that she had been taken in by the sheer coincidence of Kittery having a Bar Harbor studio. It seemed very unfair that Dot had not actually known him, that clearly the Polaroid was not of him, that the loveliest night she’d spent in probably two years had been a wild-goose chase （duck chase, perhaps） that had been a misadventure before it even began.
People raised in places like Calcasset developed a healthy lack of regard for tourist objects. They clicked their tongues at little lobster-trap Christmas ornaments, lobster cookie cutters, and dish towels printed with colorful buoys. These things were part of the economy, but it was undignified to have feelings about them. Or keep them. Or collect them. To confuse a mass-marketed gift-shop throwaway with a piece of art was something close to sacrilege to those who had seen their towns full of working boats become homes to Airbnbs and day spas and people who held clambakes ironically.
This was a profound failure. She couldn’t not ask more questions. Just how cheaply made was this? How could it possibly have made it into the possession of a woman who lived on the coast for ninety years, through the ups and downs of halibut and cod and the hipster interest in wild blueberries? Laurie picked up her phone and looked up the number of Wesson & Truitt, and she dialed.
“Wesson & Truitt.”
“Hi, I’m wondering if you can help me with some details from a consultation you recently were kind enough to do on a duck decoy from my aunt’s house. Well, my great-aunt. It turns out it’s not really valuable, but I was wondering whether whoever did the assessment might know anything that would give me a little bit more detail about how the piece got to my aunt. My great-aunt.”
“Okay,” said the cheerful woman on the phone. “Can you give me the document number from your copy of the consultation record?”
Laurie leaned forward and grabbed the paper off the coffee table. “Yes, hang on.” She pushed the boa out of her face. “Sorry. It’s 283491.”
“Huh,” the woman on the phone said. “Does it have a letter in the front? All our document numbers start with a letter. If it’s a decoy, it would be an S for Sporting. Can you look up in the top left corner?”
“It just says 283491.” What a pain in the patoot this duck had turned out to be.
There was a pause on the phone, and Laurie could hear the muffled sound of the woman talking to someone while holding her hand over the receiver. Then she was back. “I’m going to put you on the phone with our decoy expert, okay?”
“Okay, thank you.”
The next voice was a man. “This is Jim Baines. Can I help you?”
“Yes.” She twirled the boa in her hand. “I have a consultation report here, the document number is 283491. It was a replica, a Carl Kittery replica. You did it sometime this week, and I’m just wondering if you know anything else about it. It was my aunt’s. My great-aunt.”
He was quiet. “I’m a little bit at a loss. As Debra told you, that’s not our document number, and I haven’t evaluated anything from or related to Kittery in at least a few weeks.”