The Late Show

People who come to my auctions think they know me, and honestly I work hard at making sure they do. Evangeline Caine, twenty-eight years old, the slickest hammer on this half of Newfoundland, the woman who never blinks and never stumbles and always knows exactly which pocket the money is coming out of. I built that reputation one lot at a time over six years, and I'll tell you a secret about reputations, which is that they're mostly posture and a good blazer. But posture carries you a long way, until the night it doesn't.

The trouble started, the way trouble usually does, with something small and stupid and completely harmless right up until the moment it wasn't. It was a charity sale at the community hall in Bricel Cove, the kind where half the lots are donated jam and the other half are things people's dead relatives left in barns, and I was moving through the catalog at my usual clip, which is fast, because a slow auction is a dead auction and I didn't get where I am by letting crowds think.

Lot forty-one was a cast iron skillet, well seasoned, handles worn smooth, donated anonymous like a lot of things that night. I held it up, I made a joke about cornbread, somebody in the third row laughed on purpose, and the bids came fast. Forty dollars, fifty, sixty, and the hammer came down at seventy-five to a fellow in a windbreaker I'd never seen before, a visitor, maybe, or somebody new to the cove. Cash in hand, skillet wrapped in a grocery bag, done, next lot, gavel, onward.

Except it wasn't anybody's skillet. It belonged to the planetarium.

Now, most people in a town like ours don't even know we have a planetarium, but we do, a little dome attached to the community college out past the harbor road, and it has one full-time mechanic who keeps the projector and the seats and the ancient heating system all limping along, and that mechanic's name is Emile Sawyer. What I knew about Emile at that point in the evening could have fit in a thimble with room left over for the thimble. He was thirty, he was quiet, he fixed things, and apparently he lent his skillet to the hall kitchen for the fundraiser chili, which was exactly the kind of detail that never gets written down and always comes back to bite you.

He was waiting for me after the doors cleared. I was stacking chairs, because the slick auctioneer also stacks her own chairs, posture only goes so far, and I looked up and there he was in the doorway with his arms crossed and the expression of a man who has rehearsed this conversation in the truck on the way over.

"You sold my skillet," he said.

I did what any professional does when cornered by an accurate accusation, meaning I bought time. "I sold a lot of things tonight. There were eighty-two lots. You'll have to be more specific."

"The skillet. Cast iron. It was in the kitchen for the chili. I lent it and I need it back, because that pan is older than both of us and better seasoned than anything in my life, and some guy in a windbreaker walked off with it because you were too busy being entertaining to ask where it came from."

Well. There it was, laid out plain, and I couldn't even argue with the shape of it. I set down the chair I was holding and gave him the honest version, which I don't hand out often. "You're right. I didn't ask. That's on me. I assumed the hall knew its own donations, and the hall assumed I knew, and nobody knew anything, which is how a skillet ends up on the highway to somewhere else in a grocery bag."

He blinked, and I got the sense he'd prepared for more of a fight than that. "So you admit it."

"I admit it. I owe you a skillet or the money to make it right, and since the man paid seventy-five dollars for it, I suspect he's fond of it now." I wiped my hands on my trousers and thought, and here is where the evening went sideways in a way I still can't fully explain. "Look, the sale money goes to the roof fund, so I can't just claw it back, but I can find him. Windbreaker, paid cash, said something about catching the late bus east. There's one night bus that comes through the junction at half past eleven. If he's on it, we intercept him before it leaves, and I buy your pan back with my own money, cash, tonight, settled before anything else, that's the deal."

Emile unfolded his arms slowly, the way a man does when the trap he set turns out to have a door in the bottom. "You'd ride the bus."

"I'd ride the bus. It stops at the junction, it waits twenty minutes for the fog to lift, and then it's gone, so we'd better go now."

He looked at the clock, and then at me, and something in his face shifted from suspicion to a kind of wary curiosity, like I was a machine behaving oddly and he wanted to see what it did next. "All right," he said. "But I'm keeping the receipt."

"You'd better," I told him, and grabbed my coat.

The night bus in these parts is not a glamorous thing, and I want you to picture it properly, because the picture matters. It's a single old coach that runs the coastal loop once after ten, mostly carrying nurses home from the regional hospital and one or two determined fishermen, and the driver, Cyril, has driven it so long that he greets regular passengers by their stop rather than their name. The fog was already sitting on the harbor when we got to the terminus, thick and white and patient, the kind of fog that doesn't lift so much as get bored eventually.

"Two for the junction," I said, and Cyril looked at me, and then at Emile, and then back at me, and said nothing in the eloquent way only small-town bus drivers can.

The coach was empty except for a woman asleep against the window near the back with her coat over her face, so Emile and I took the middle seats, side by side, with the skillet-shaped absence sitting between us like a chaperone. The engine rattled us out of the cove and into the white, and for a while neither of us said anything, which was fine, because I was busy being annoyed at myself and he was probably busy being annoyed at me, so at least we were agreeable that way.

"So," he said eventually, "auctioneer. Is that a real job or did you win it in a raffle?"

"It's a real job. Six years. I took over the house from old Eddie Pike when he retired to Gander, and I've kept the books balanced and the crowd awake ever since, which is harder than it sounds." I turned to look at him. He had a long face and steady hands and he was watching the fog eat the road ahead like it personally interested him. "What about you, keeping a dome full of dead stars spinning for a living?"

"Somebody has to. The projector's older than the college and it has moods. I fix the seats too, and the boiler, and last spring I fixed the roof gutter the college said wasn't leaking." He shrugged. "It's quiet work. I like knowing how things run."

"That's a funny answer for a man who just watched something run badly in public."

"No," he said, and here he almost smiled, the first crack in the whole dry surface of him, "that's exactly why I came tonight. Things that run badly interest me. Usually it's the boiler, though. Usually it's not my own cookware."

I laughed before I could stop myself, a real laugh, not the polished one I keep in the auction voice, and I felt him register it, a small turn of his head, like a man noticing a change in an engine note. Outside, the fog pressed against the glass and the world shrank to our headlights and the white.

Cyril pulled into the junction at eleven twenty-two, eight minutes early, and killed the engine. "Fog's thick as porridge out there," he announced to the whole bus, meaning me and Emile and the sleeping woman. "We wait. Twenty minutes, maybe thirty, maybe more. Coffee's in the machine and it's terrible."

The junction was nothing, honestly, a gravel pull-off with a shelter that was a faded, sickly beige, a vending machine, and a bench. We stood under the shelter with our hands in our pockets and watched the fog swallow the road both ways, and I did the arithmetic in my head and didn't like it. "If he's not on this bus, he's gone until the loop comes back around tomorrow, and by then that skillet could be anywhere in the province."

"Then I'll have sold it to a stranger for a good cause and the roof fund will thank me," Emile said, in a tone that suggested the roof fund would thank nobody.

Headlights bloomed up the east road, yellow and slow, and we both straightened. A second coach slowed, hissed, and stopped, its door opening into the white like a mouth, and Cyril walked over to talk to the driver.

Nobody got off, and nobody had been on it but the driver, who said no fellow in a windbreaker had boarded anywhere along the loop, and then he rolled on east into the fog. Cyril stood a while listening to the fog the way you'd listen to a knock at the door, and then he got back on our coach and tried the engine, and the engine made a sound like a spoon in a garbage disposal. "Ah," said Cyril, with the calm of a man who has seen everything twice. "Well. There's the other thing."

"The other thing?" I said.

"Alternator. She's been grumbling since the hospital loop, and now she's done grumbling. I've radioed the depot but in this fog they'll be an hour, maybe two." He looked at us over his shoulder. "You two can wait on the bus if you like, but the heater's tied to the engine, so I'd say shelter."

So we stood in the bandage-colored shelter at half past eleven at night, with a dead bus behind us and two directions of nothing in front of us, and I realized I was going to learn a great deal about Emile Sawyer whether I wanted to or not. He unzipped his jacket and produced, of all things, a steel thermos, dented at the shoulder like it had been dropped from a projector gantry, which I suppose it had.

"You carry coffee on a bus ride you didn't want to take anyway?"

"I carry coffee everywhere. It's a mechanic thing. You never know when you'll be stuck somewhere, and being stuck is most of the job." He poured into the cup lid and handed it over without ceremony. "It's not terrible. It's not good, but it's not terrible."

It was, in fact, not terrible. Strong enough to strip paint, sweet enough to forgive it. I held the cup in both hands and looked out at the white. "So here's my question," I said. "You knew the buyer caught the east bus. You knew this loop waits at the junction. Did you actually think this through, or did you just start walking and let the plan assemble itself?"

He considered that, which I liked. Most men answer fast and wrong. "The second one," he admitted. "I was in the hall kitchen, I saw the lot sheet, lot 41, and I was out the door before I'd decided anything. Then you showed up in a very good coat saying you'd fix it, and somehow that turned into standing at a junction with you at midnight."

"My coat is a work coat."

"It's a very good work coat."

"You'd know, being dressed like someone who irons his flannel." He actually smiled at that, a real one, gone in a second but real, and I counted it the way I count bids, quietly and with interest. I'm twenty-eight years old and I have auctioneered for six years, and I will tell you that reading a crowd and reading one stubborn man are nearly the same skill, except the man is harder because he won't raise his hand.

We passed the cup back and forth, which you could say a lot about, so I won't. The sleeping woman got off at some point, waved groggily at Cyril, and vanished into the fog toward a house we couldn't see, leaving the bus to us and Cyril, who had turned on a little radio and was listening to a phone-in show with the volume at a respectful mutter.

"She's not coming back," I said, nodding at the depot lights that weren't there. "Two hours, you said?"

"He said. I said twenty minutes, he said two hours, the fog will decide." Emile sat down on the bench, which creaked in a way I would have charged extra to fix, and looked up at where the stars should have been. "Funny place for a planetarium man to be stuck. Under a sky I can't see."

"You can see it fine, you just can't see it with your eyes."

"Oh, don't say things like that!"

"Why not?"

"Because it's midnight and I'm tired and it'll work on me." He said it dryly, but he said it looking at the fog instead of at me, which told me something. I sat down next to him, leaving what I judged to be a polite and deliberately not-quite-enough gap, and we looked at nothing together for a while.

"Here's a confession," I said. "I sold your skillet on purpose. Not knowing it was yours, obviously. But it was the best lot on the sheet and I worked it. I did the whole bit, the folksy bit, the bit about seasoned