“No, Squeaky, I don’t. But did you?” Even as she said it, she thought of Hattie Benson safe downstairs in the laundry, with Claudine apparently looking after her, and Squeaky supposed to keep everyone else from going down and seeing her.

His face was full of conflicting emotions: anger, hurt, fear, and also a kind of gentleness. “No, I didn’t. I s’pose I had that coming, for my past life, and if I’d’ve known what Parfitt was, I might have. I’d also have more sense than to write him a note on paper from here!”

“Is it from here?” Hester asked.

He looked at it again. “No. We don’t spend that sort of money on paper. Even the ledger isn’t that good. But just ’cos it’s quality don’t mean Claudine had anything to do with it. She may be an odd old article, but when you get to know her, she’s solid. She’s got guts, and she don’t never tell no lies. You can’t think that of her. It’s wrong.”

“I didn’t,” she admitted.

He winced. “You thought I did it.” It was a statement. “Well, I could have. He needed doing, best at the end of a rope. And I wouldn’t help you catch whoever did do it. But it weren’t me.”

She believed him.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. “Tomorrow I’ll ask Claudine if she remembers writing this, and what she did with it.”

“Don’t you let her feel you think as she done it!” he warned. “It’d hurt her something terrible, and she don’t deserve that.”

In spite of herself, Hester smiled. She could remember very clearly how Claudine and Squeaky had hated each other in the beginning. She had thought him obscene, both physically and morally. He had seen her as arrogant, useless, and cold, a middle-aged woman sterile of mind and devoid of passions. It had been her crazy pursuit of Phillips’s pornographic photographs, at fearful risk to herself, that had finally changed his mind. And it was his effective, if rather quixotic, rescue of her that had changed her mind about him.

“I won’t,” she promised.

HESTER WAS IN EARLY on Monday morning, but a brief and businesslike meeting with Margaret in the pantry delayed her meeting with Claudine.

“We are rather short of laundry supplies,” Margaret warned. “I have just been down there and cautioned them to be a little less generous in their use. We cannot afford to replace them at this rate.”

“Thank you,” Hester said briefly. “Is there anything else?”

Margaret hesitated, seemingly on the edge of saying something more, then changed her mind and went out of the room. Hester heard her footsteps on the wooden floor, brisk and purposeful.

She found Claudine in the medicine room and showed her the paper, holding out only the side with the list on it.