The Twelve Days of Marigold Lane

At four o'clock on Christmas Eve, with the snow coming sideways across Highway 40 and the radio on its third carol in a row, Mara turned off at the Belhaven exit, and drove down through the village toward the lake, and wondered, not for the first time, what exactly a notary was doing here.

Not the law. The law was simple. Mara had been over it so many times since September that it ran in Mara's head like a times table. Wilhelmina Ashdown, eighty-four, retired piano teacher, of No. 7 Marigold Lane, Belhaven, Quebec, had died in her sleep on the fourteenth of September. Her will was a notarial will, received in April by Mara at her own kitchen table, with one witness. It named Mara liquidator. The searches, the inventory, the notice of closure in October: done. The sixty days had run out a week ago, the debts were paid, and everything was in order.

Except the part where the will said the twelve particular legacies were to be delivered by the liquidator in person, one a day, from Christmas Day to the fifth of January, in the presence of her neighbour.

And the sealed envelope, to be opened on Christmas Eve, and not before.

"Follow it exactly, Maître," old Lussier had said on the phone that morning, from a golf course in Florida. "She was a very exact woman. She will have thought of everything. Merry Christmas." And had hung up.

Belhaven was small and white and shuttered, a church with a silver steeple, a dépanneur with its lights on, a diner, a Legion hall, a row of old brick and clapboard houses with wreaths on the doors, and beyond them, flat and grey and endless under the snow, the frozen Lake of Two Mountains. Marigold Lane ran off the main street at the bottom of the hill, between two stone gateposts, and went down straight to the shore: twelve houses, six on each side, porches and woodpiles and Christmas lights, and at the end of it nothing but a snowbank and the ice.

No. 7 was yellow clapboard, with a glassed-in sunroom on the side and a little hen coop behind. Its windows were dark. Somebody had shovelled the path.

No. 9, next door, was a long low workshop with a house attached, and every window in it was lit, and a thread of woodsmoke went straight up from its chimney into the falling snow.

Mara parked between them, and sat for a moment with the engine ticking, and remembered April: the kitchen table, the tea, the old woman's sharp blue eyes, and the witness, the neighbour, a tall quiet man with sawdust on his sleeves who had read every page before he signed, and said almost nothing, and carried the teapot.

He had the key, Lussier's office said. He had kept the place since September.

The lockbox was on the porch rail, under a cap of snow, and the code was the one Lussier's office had sent, and the key turned stiffly in the old door.

Inside, No. 7 smelled of cold wood and lemon polish and, very faintly, of somebody's pipe tobacco from years ago. Mara found the light switch. A hall, a coat rack with a single red scarf on it. A front room with an upright piano under a fringed shawl. A kitchen at the back, the same kitchen, the same table.

On the table there was a plate with a cloth over it, and a note in square capitals: SOUP IN THE FRIDGE. WOODSTOVE IS LAID. KNOCK IF YOU NEED ANYTHING. — B.L., No. 9.

Under the cloth were six butter tarts.

Mara was still standing there holding the note when there was a knock at the back door.

By nine o'clock the woodstove in Winnie Ashdown's kitchen was roaring, and the soup was gone, and Mara and Ben Lacasse sat at either end of the kitchen table with the envelope between them.

It was heavy cream paper, sealed with red wax, and on the front, in the old woman's tall, fierce handwriting: For my liquidator. Christmas Eve, 9 p.m. In front of Benoît. Not before.

"She made me promise to be here," said Ben. "I asked why. She said, Because you'll carry things."

Mara broke the seal.

Inside were three pages. The first was a list, numbered one to twelve, a date beside each, a thing, and a name. 25 December: my pear tree and the partridge, to Gaston Dufresne. 26 December: the two doves, to Hélène and Solange Corriveau, TOGETHER, IN ONE ROOM. Mara read down it, and read it again. 27 December: three hens.

"Three hens," said Mara.

"Chanteclers," said Ben. "They don't like me."

The second page set out what Mara already knew from the will, in plainer words: the house, the piano, and the rest held in trust, and on Twelfth Night, by midnight on the fifth of January, Mara as trustee to choose who got it, from three names. Her nephew Graham. Her grand-niece Pippa, held until she was twenty-five. Or the village, for a music room.

Not Benoît, it said. He witnessed. The law says he can't, and he wouldn't want it anyway. He'll argue. Don't let him.

Ben looked at the ceiling.

The third page was blank except for one line.

Watch them for twelve days. Then choose. You listened, in April, to an old woman going on about hens and pianos for three hours. That is why it's you.

Mara put the pages down, very carefully.

Outside, down at the end of the lane, the church bell in the village began to ring for midnight Mass, three hours early, the way it did in Belhaven, because the curé was eighty and went to bed at ten.

"Well," said Ben, at last. "Merry Christmas, Maître. The pear tree weighs about sixty pounds. I've got a toboggan."