“Ruth.” I put the page on the table. “Cady signed for hers. Toby signed for his. You signed for yours. Somebody paid you to keep my rooms empty.”
The refrigerator kicked on and she flinched. “I didn’t keep anybody from staying here,” she said, but her voice had gone thin.
“The envelopes.”
“He said it was temporary.”
She sat down. The kitchen smelled like coffee that had been on the burner since morning. I stayed standing, because if I sat I would cry.
“He came to me in February,” she said. “He said the bank would take the building by fall and there was no sense in me going down with it. He’d pay me through the winter if I kept the book straight and sent the overflow up the road.”
“The overflow.”
“The people who called. I told them we were closed for repairs and gave them a card.” She looked at her hands. “He left the envelopes in a coffee can in the breezeway. Mine had my name on it. I signed for what I took and handed the others out. I wrote D.P. so I’d know where it came from. I wasn’t going to lie in my own book.”
“Who else?”
“Cady took the day envelopes. Toby Fenn took the ones for the boathouse rooms. Cady thought it was bonus money.”
I let that sit.
“How many cards?”
She went under the sink, behind the dish soap, and brought out a cardboard box. Cream cards, a line drawing of a lodge with a dock. Cedar Hollow Lodge. Lakefront rooms. Four miles north. Present this card at check-in. At the bottom, in small type: A Pike Hospitality property.
“Pike,” I said.
“Desmond owns a third. Him and two men from Ashland bought it in April.” She said it quietly. “He told me not to put his name on the cards.”
“Since when?”
“Memorial Day.”
Memorial Day. I had been full that weekend. I had turned a family from Peoria toward the highway and felt sick, and Ruth had been handing them a card with somebody else’s dock on it.
She opened the desk drawer by the stove, under the dish towels, and came out with a paper folded into quarters.
“You’ll want this more than the cards,” she said.
A photocopy, gray at the edges. PIKE MARINE AND STORAGE. LOT 4, LAKE SABLE. SITE PLAN. TWELVE SLIPS, FUEL DOCK, LAUNCH.
Twelve slips. A gangway over the water, a gravel lot where the swimming beach had been. The motel wasn’t on the drawing. Not the twelve rooms with the green doors I painted in 2016. Just the lot, the water, and the slips.
In the margin, in pencil: D.P. 6/2. Check frontage.
“He left it on the front desk in June,” Ruth said. “I copied it before he came back for it.”
“You should have brought this to me in June.”
“I know.”
“Before Memorial Day.”
“I know that too.” She faced the sink. “I’m sixty-eight. No pension, no husband, and I was scared. That’s not an excuse. It’s what I had.”
I left her standing there. I didn’t say I forgave her. She didn’t ask.
The town hall opens at eight. I was there at eight. Merle Deakin, who I knew from the library board, asked twice if I was all right before she went in back.
“I need the file on the marina variance. Lot 4.”
“That’s Pike’s.”
“I own the lot.”
She set a manila folder on the counter and kept her hand on it. “You can look. You can’t take anything out.”
Variance 26-14. Applicant: Desmond J. Pike, Pike Marine and Storage. Relief requested: expansion of nonconforming use, Lot 4, Lake Sable. Twelve slips, fuel dock, launch.
A staff note was typed in the margin: Applicant must demonstrate ownership or control of the upland parcel. No variance may be granted without it.
The date stamp: RECEIVED JUN 03.
June third. Three weeks after the first payment went missing, two months before I understood the summer was gone. He had filed it while I was still telling people May had been a good month.
“What’s the upland parcel?”
Merle looked at the page, then at me. “The land behind the slips.”
“That’s my motel.”
“That’s your lot,” she said. “There’s no other frontage on that cove wide enough. He needs yours.”
The hearing notice was paper-clipped to the back: Public hearing, October 16, 7:00 p.m., Harlow Bay Town Hall.
