Laurie nodded. “Yeah, exactly. There was a very nice guy in Wybeck who told me that your grandfather might have made it, and it didn’t make any sense to me, honestly. She never told any of us anything about it, she didn’t leave anything about it in her will, she didn’t say anything about him—I mean, I’m sure he was very important to her, but you said he was quiet about her? She was even quieter about him. Some of her friends probably knew, but not many of those friends are still living and around here, and her younger friends, the ones she made in the last ten years or so, I don’t think they had any idea.”
“I hadn’t thought about it for a long time, honestly, until Matt Pell came to see me. I guess he knew someone who knew I had done some work with my grandfather’s history, so he came by to ask me about your decoy. At first, I was confused, because the mark wasn’t quite right, and he’d never made wood ducks as far as I knew. But then he had a picture of Dot, and when he showed it to me, it looked so familiar. I couldn’t figure it out, but then I thought, ‘Oh boy, I think that’s his friend.’？”
“His friend?”
Rosalie shifted a little in her chair. “When I lived with my grandparents, I had left college. I was kind of taking a break, and I came up and lived with them. They didn’t have the Bar Harbor house anymore, they were in Waldoboro. My grandmother was in a nursing home full-time by then. Mostly, I spent my time with him. And one night, we were talking after dinner, and he started to tell me about this friend he had years earlier, this woman.”
Laurie nodded. “What did he say about her?”
“Well, let me say that you should understand that my grandmother was sick for most of her life. She had a lot of physical problems, she seemed like she was constantly having surgery, but she also had a lot of other problems that I still don’t know all the details of. I think some of it was depression, I think some of it was probably dependency on some of her pain medication and some of her anxiety medication. And she lived in various places, hospitals and things, from when I was little. I don’t ever remember her living at home, really.”
“Did he spend a lot of time with her?”
“He visited her every day he could, as far as I know. When I lived with him, he did. If he had to miss a day, he would make sure somebody else went. When I was little, they would just tell me she was in the hospital, so I barely knew her. But it was very hard on my mother, I know, that her mother was in this very difficult situation. And my grandpa didn’t want to make it worse, but I think he needed…company. Companionship. Something like that. And so he told me that he had this friend. He never told me her name, but he did tell me she had lived in Calcasset.”
“Do you know how they met?”
“Apparently, they had a friend in common. They wound up at the same, I think, New Year’s Eve party? And they got to talking. He said they had the same favorite book.”
Laurie nodded slowly, remembering the piles of books, the endless piles of books. “Did he tell you what book it was?”
“John le Carré,” she said. “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. He absolutely loved spy novels. Couldn’t get enough.”
“Dot did, too,” Laurie said. “I came across her copy of that book just the other day.”
Rosalie smiled. “You never know what it’s going to be that brings people together, I guess. Anyway, I remembered this when Matt talked about Dot and mentioned Calcasset. And I knew I had this one picture of this friend that he had showed me, so I went and I got it, and I put it with a picture of Dot that he brought with him, and I’ll be damned if they weren’t the same person. And even though he’d never made a wood duck that I knew of, he was holding it in this picture, and I hadn’t even registered it, really, in all this time. And when I saw the duck Matt had, even though it seemed different from some of his work in some ways, it was easy to recognize his technique, and it’s not that surprising that if he gave it to her, he may not have bothered with his regular mark. The photo was pretty convincing. So I wrote the letter to authenticate it, and I gave him the photo, and that’s the last I heard of it until you wrote to me.”
“Well,” Laurie said, “I wish that had been the end of the story.” She took a breath. “Unfortunately, Matt Pell was kind of a…he was a…con man, I guess I would say?” Rosalie looked startled. “He got the authentication from you, but he brought me a fake appraisal from Wesson & Truitt that said it was a junk piece, that it wasn’t real.”