'We're divorced,' Mort said bluntly. 'I'm living in our place on Tashmore Lake. We only used it during the summers, but it's got a furnace and is livable during the cold months. Unfortunately, I hadn't got around to moving the bulk of my things out of the house up here. I'd been putting it off.'
Don Strick nodded sympathetically. Ted crossed his legs, fiddled with his pipe, and generally gave the impression of a man who is trying not to look as deeply bored as he is.
'Do the best you can with the list,' Evans said. He took the clipboard from Strick and handed it across the desk to Amy. 'This can be a bit unpleasant - it's a little like a treasure hunt in reverse.'
Ted had put his pipe down and was craning at the list, his boredom gone' at least for the time being; his eyes were as avid as those of any bystander gleeping the aftermath of a bad accident. Amy saw him looking and obligingly tipped the form his way. Mort, who was sitting on the other side of her, tipped it back the other way.
'Do you mind?' he asked Ted. He was angry, really angry, and they all heard it in his voice.
'Mort - ' Amy said.
'I'm not going to make a big deal of this,' Mort said to her, 'but this was our stuff, Amy. Ours.'
'I hardly think - 'Ted began indignantly.
'No, he's perfectly right, Mr Milner,' Fred Evans said with a mildness Mort felt might have been deceptive. 'The law says you have no right to be looking at the listed items at all. We wink at something like that if nobody minds ... but I think Mr Rainey does.'
'You're damned tooting Mr Rainey does,' Mort said. His hands were tightly clenched in his lap; he could feel his fingernails biting smile-shapes into the soft meat of his palms.
Amy switched her look of unhappy appeal from Mort to Ted. Mort expected Ted to huff and puff and try to blow somebody's house down, but Ted did not. Mort supposed it was a measure of his own hostile feeling toward the man that he'd made such an assumption; he didn't know Ted very well (although he did know he looked a bit like Alfalfa when you woke him up suddenly in a no-tell motel), but he knew Amy. If Ted had been a blowhard, she would have left him already.
Smiling a little, speaking to her and ignoring Mort and the others completely, Ted said: 'Would it help matters if I took a walk around the block?'
Mort tried to restrain himself and couldn't quite do it. 'Why not make it two?' he asked Ted with bogus amiability.
Amy shot him a narrow, dark stare, then looked back at Ted. 'Would you? This might be a little easier . . .'
'Sure,' he said. He kissed her high on her cheekbone, and Mort had another dolorous revelation: the man cared for her. He might not always care for her, but right now he did. Mort realized he had come halfway to thinking Amy was just a toy that had captivated Ted for a little while, a toy of which he would tire soon enough. But that didn't jibe with what he knew of Amy, either. She had better instincts about people than that ... and more respect for herself.
Ted got up and left. Amy looked at Mort reproachfully. 'Are you satisfied?'
'I suppose,' he said. 'Look, Amy - I probably didn't handle that as well as I could have, but my motives are honorable enough. We shared a lot over the years. I guess this is the last thing, and I think it belongs between the two of us. Okay?'
Strick looked uncomfortable. Fred Evans did not; he looked from Mort to Amy and then back to Mort again with the bright interest of a man watching a really good tennis match.
'Okay,' Amy said in a low voice. He touched her hand lightly, and she gave him a smile. It was strained, but better than no smile at all, he reckoned.
He pulled his chair closer to hers and they bent over the list, heads close together, like kids studying for a test. It didn't take Mort long to understand why Evans had warned them. He thought he had grasped the size of the loss. He had been wrong.
Looking at the columns of cold computer type, Mort thought he could not have been more dismayed if someone had taken everything in the house at 92 Kansas Street and strewn it along the block for the whole world to stare at. He couldn't believe all the things he had forgotten, all the things that were gone.
Seven major appliances. Four TVs, one with a videotape editing hook-up. The Spode china, and the authentic Early American furniture which Amy had bought a piece at a time. The value of the antique armoire which had stood in their bedroom was listed at $14,000. They had not been serious art-collectors, but they had been appreciators, and they had lost twelve pieces of original art. Their value was listed at $22,000, but Mort didn't care about the dollar value; he was thinking about the N. C. Wyeth fine-drawing of two boys putting to sea in a small boat. It was raining in the picture; the boys were wearing slickers and galoshes and big grins. Mort had loved that picture, and now it was gone. The Waterford glassware. The sports equipment stored in the garage - skis, ten-speed bikes, and the Old Town canoe. Amy's three furs were listed. He saw her make tiny check marks beside the beaver and the mink - still in storage, apparently - but she passed the short fox jacket without checking it off. It had been hanging in the closet, warm and stylish outerware for fall, when the fire happened. He remembered giving her that coat for her birthday six or seven years ago. Gone now. His Celestron telescope. Gone. The big puzzle quilt Amy's mother had given them when they were married. Amy's mother was dead and the quilt was now so much ash in the wind.
The worst, at least for Mort, was halfway down the second column, and again it wasn't the dollar value that hurt. 124 BOTS. WINE, the item read. VALUE $4,900. Wine was something they had both liked. They weren't rabid about it, but they had built the little wine room in the cellar together, stocked it together, and had drunk the occasional bottle together.
'Even the wine,' he said to Evans. 'Even that.'
Evans gave him an odd look that Mort couldn't interpret, then nodded. 'The wine room itself didn't burn, because you had very little fuel oil in the cellar tank and there was no explosion. But it got very hot inside, and most of the bottles burst. The few that didn't ... Well, I don't know much about wine, but I doubt if it would be good to drink. Perhaps I'm wrong.'
'You're not,' Amy said. A single tear rolled down her cheek and she wiped it absently away.
Evans offered her his handkerchief. She shook her head and bent over the fist with Mort again.
Ten minutes later it was finished. They signed on the correct lines and Strick witnessed their signatures. Ted Milner showed up only instants later, as if he had been watching the whole thing on some private viewscreen.
'Is there anything else?' Mort asked Evans.
'Not now. There may be. Is your number down in Tashmore unlisted, Mr Rainey?'
'Yes.' He wrote it down for Evans. 'Please get in touch if I can help.'