By Jessie Clark. A free reader bonus.

THE NINETY-FIRST NAME
### A Crestwick Chronicles bonus scene
by Jessie Clark
Set in January, between A Bitter Cup to Swallow and Steeped in Secrets.
 *
Her name is Marguerite Sowerby and she is on page three hundred and eighty-four, and the entry says school — 1998 and nothing else at all.
I had put her off for six weeks. I want to be honest about that, because I had told myself it was scheduling and it was not. I had a list of a hundred and nine people, and I could put a face to ninety of them, and Marguerite Sowerby was the ninety-first, and she was the first one I was going to go and actually knock on.
The trouble is that there is no manual for this. Aldous did it for forty years and left me four hundred and eleven pages that record who and when and never once how. Ruth Ashby says her own way is to send a card at Christmas and never call on anybody, ever, on the grounds that a Keeper at your door is a Keeper with a problem. Which is sound, and is also a rule made by a woman who has never once had to look at a hundred and nine names and understand that all of them are older than they were.
Marguerite Sowerby is seventy-eight. She retired from the elementary school in 2016. She has been doing whatever it is she agreed to do for twenty-eight years, and there is not one line anywhere in a dead man's records that says what it was.
So I baked, because I am my grandmother's granddaughter, and because arriving with something means the door has a reason to open.
 *
She lives out past the reservoir turning in a house with a ramp built onto the front step and a cat in the window that looked at Fig's carrier with open contempt. I had brought Fig because I had had an idea in the car about how this might go and the idea required him, and he had let himself be carried in a way that told me he had had the same idea some while earlier.
"You're the tea shop," Marguerite Sowerby said, before I had got a word out.
"I am."
"Aldous Bright's girl."
I stood on a stranger's doorstep in January with a lemon cake in a tin and had to take a second with that one.
"Yes," I said.
"Well." She looked at the tin, and at the carrier, and at my face, in that order, and stood back from the door. "You'd better bring the cat in. Mine will be unpleasant about it and there's nothing to be done."
 *
We talked for fifty minutes about nothing.
The winter. The reservoir road, which is a disgrace. Her hip, which is titanium and which she describes as the good one in a way that suggests a longer story about the other. The lemon cake, which she ate two slices of and pronounced "correct," a word I have thought about a good deal since and intend to steal.
And then she put her cup down and said:
"You'll want to know about the September thing."
I did not say anything, which is the only skill this job has so far required of me that I already had.
"Because that's why you've come," she said. "You've got his papers. Everybody knows you've got his papers, Harriet, the whole town knows, it's the most interesting thing that's happened out here since the Aldecott business." She refolded her hands. "And I've been waiting since October for somebody to come and ask, and nobody has, and I have not slept properly for three months because I couldn't work out whether that meant it was over or whether it meant it had been forgotten."
"Tell me about the September thing."
"Every September," said Marguerite Sowerby, "for twenty-eight years, a man I liked very much rang me in the third week of August and gave me between one and four names. And I made sure those children were not in Room Six."
I have had a number of moments in the last five months where the floor of my understanding has shifted under me. That was one.
"Room Six," I said.
"Room Six. The old part of the building, north side, the one with the original windows." She said it evenly, the way you say a thing you have said to yourself several hundred times and never once out loud. "I was to put them anywhere else. That was the whole of it. That was the entire job for twenty-eight years and I did it every single year and I never asked him why, because he asked me not to, and because he was the sort of man you didn't."
"Did you ever want to?"
"Constantly." She almost laughed. "I made up nine or ten reasons over the years. Asbestos, at first. Then something to do with the families, some feud I wasn't clever enough to see. For about four years in the two thousands I was fairly sure I was involved in something criminal and had decided I didn't mind." She looked at her hands. "And then it stopped mattering what the reason was, because by about 2010 I had a system, and a system doesn't need a reason. That's the thing nobody tells you. You can carry a strange thing for thirty years if you turn it into paperwork."
Fig, who had spent the entire visit on the arm of the other chair being studiously ignored by a cat with a personal fortune of grievances, got down at that point, crossed the carpet, and sat directly in front of Marguerite Sowerby's feet.
He looked up at her.
She looked down at him.
"Well," she said. "He's not shy."
"He isn't."
"What's he want?"
"He wants me to tell you the truth," I said, "and I am not going to, and he knows I am not going to, and this is what he does about it."
Marguerite Sowerby went very still in her chair.
Then she nodded, twice, briskly, the way you nod at a diagnosis you had already worked out on the drive over.
"Right," she said. "So it's that kind of thing."
"It's that kind of thing."
"I always rather thought it might be." She picked her cup back up, entirely steady. "You'll not tell me, then."
"I'll tell you three things," I said, "and they are all true, and they are all I have got.
"The first is that not one child ever came to any harm in twenty-eight years, and that is because of you, and I would like you to sit with that rather than be modest about it.
"The second is that the man who rang you every August was not doing anything criminal and neither were you, and if it ever came out you would be the least interesting person in the room by a very long way.
"And the third is that it has not been forgotten, and it has not stopped, and I will be ringing you in the third week of August."
She was quiet for a while.
"I'm seventy-eight," she said.
"I know."
"I don't work at that school any more, Harriet. I haven't since 2016. My niece is on the board and I've a friend in the office and I have been doing it since I retired by asking a favour every August, and there is going to come a year when I can't."
"I know that too. That's the other reason I came."
"Then you'll want a name."
"When you're ready to give me one. Not today."
Marguerite Sowerby looked at me across a coffee table with a lemon cake on it, and something happened in her face that I have decided was relief and that could as easily have been the opposite.
"Her name is Priya Raghavan," she said. "Fourth grade. She's thirty-one and she notices everything and she has never once asked me why I do the September thing, though she has helped me do it twice." She set her cup down. "And I want it on the record, since we are apparently keeping one, that I have been waiting eleven years for somebody to come out here and ask me that question, and that a great deal of it was Aldous's fault, and that I forgave him at the funeral and would like that noted as well."
 *
I got as far as the car.
Then I put the carrier on the passenger seat and sat in a stranger's driveway out past the reservoir turning with the engine off and did not drive anywhere for about four minutes.
Room Six. The old part of the building, north side, original windows.
There are three fastenings and I have accounted for two.
Fig, in his carrier, on the passenger seat, said nothing at all, which is what he does when the slow person is finally in danger of catching up.
"I know," I said.
I drove back into town and opened the shop, because the shop does not open itself, and I did not go anywhere near that school for eleven days.
But I went.