The Vault List

The woman who took everything is teaching somebody how.

Ruth Loew meets the December boat. There is a woman on it she has been expecting - Alma, off the four o'clock, with a suitcase and a letter and no idea yet how small the town is going to turn out to be.

Ruth walks her up from the harbor and points out the store, the school, the hall, the church and the Harbor House, in that order.

Then she starts handing things over.

The phone tree first. Then the flowers, the food shelf, the library round, the Harbor House rota, the tablecloths, the vault list, and the hall. She does it carefully and she does it well - how each one works, who to ring, what the real deadline is, and the one thing about it that nobody has ever bothered to tell anybody.

She is the best teacher that island has ever had.

Rennie Drayton is seventeen now, and she is the only living person who has watched this happen before.

Nobody is cruel. Nobody lies. Nobody is caught.

It ends the way it began - with a woman carrying a box up from the harbor on her own, and nobody offering to help.

The fourth and final Provenance novel.