"Because I initialed those tickets too." Bea's voice was small but steady. "And if he can say you falsified them, he can say I helped you. I have a little girl, Ellen. I need this to be over, and I need it to be over with the truth." She stood up. "Don't tell anyone I was here. Please."
After Bea left, Ellen laid the ticket on the table next to her notebook and her carbon and Anna's stub, four pieces of paper that told one story four ways, and the story was that Harold Venn had altered the record and stolen the difference. She had the altered tickets. She had the unlogged barges. She had Dutch's dates and Harlan's sailing notices and Ray's plain cans. She had the shape of it, whole and clear, the way a boat takes shape in the fog before you can read its name.
What she didn't have was Seattle. She didn't have the broker, the buyer, the money. She didn't have a single piece of paper that connected Harold Venn to a dollar of it. And sitting at the table in the gray afternoon light, with the evidence spread around her like a hand of cards she couldn't quite play, she felt the frustration rise in her like a tide — frustration, and under it the fear, cold and steady: Venn's sworn word against hers. The manager against the clerk. The tie against the pencil.
She gathered the papers and put them away, each in its place, and went to start supper, because Peter would be home soon and the arithmetic would still be there after.
She first noticed the stranger on a wet Wednesday in the second week of October, standing outside the harbormaster's office in a gray coat too thin for the weather, writing in a small notebook. He was a slight, middle-aged man with the patient, unhurried movements of someone accustomed to waiting. She saw him again two days later at the cold-storage warehouse, copying numbers off the receiving receipts while the clerk talked more than he was asked, the way people do with quiet men.
Anna saw him too. They were mending a seine net in Anna's shed when he walked past on the dock road with his notebook in his pocket and his gray coat buttoned against the wind.
"There goes your ghost," Anna said, jerking her chin. "Third time this week. Asking about barge schedules, Ernie says. Copying receipts like they're love letters."
"What do you think he is?" Ellen asked.
"Another Juneau paper-pusher." Anna bit off a thread. "They come up every few years, count something, write it down, go home."
Ellen watched him until he turned the corner by the fuel dock. There was something about the way he walked — not hurried, not idle, like a man following a line he could see and no one else could — that stayed with her. But Anna was probably right. Juneau sent men with notebooks the way the weather sent rain. It meant nothing. It had to mean nothing, because she had enough to carry without adding a stranger's business to it.
Still, that night, she wrote in the margin of her ledger, next to the barge dates: gray coat — asking about barges. It was a habit now, writing everything down. Tom had been right. A number wasn't real until somebody swore to it. She was swearing to all of hers, one by one, in pencil, at her kitchen table, and she would keep swearing until someone listened or until there was no one left to listen.
The letter came on a Friday, in a flat manila envelope with the state seal in the corner and her name typed with one letter smudged: ELLEN MARSH. Peter brought it in from the mailbox, holding it like it might be important, and it was. She opened it at the table, with the notebooks stacked around her like a fort, and read it twice.
The State Fisheries Licensing Board would hold a hearing on the complaint filed against her by Harold Venn, manager of the Northlight Cannery, alleging falsification of fish tickets and misappropriation of fishermen's settlement funds. The hearing was set for the fourteenth of November, in Juneau, in the state office building on Fourth Street. She was advised of her right to counsel, her right to present evidence, her right to call witnesses. The letter was signed by a clerk whose name she didn't know, and it wished her nothing at all.
November fourteenth. Four weeks.
Peter was watching her face. "Is it bad, Mom?"
She folded the letter and put it on top of the April notebook. "It's a date," she said. "It's just a date."
That night, after Peter was asleep, she sat at the table and looked at what she had. The notebooks, eleven of them, pencil-dark and thumb-worn. The shoeboxes of carbon copies. Anna's settlement stubs, tied with seine twine. Dutch's slip of paper with the six dates. Harlan's copied sailing notices. Bea's folded fisherman's copy, the one with Venn's ink beside her pencil. The ledger, twenty-three pages now, boat by boat, delivery by delivery, the true 1978 season reconstructed as close as one suspended clerk could bring it.
It was all she had. There would be no lawyer she could afford — she had done that arithmetic too, and it didn't work. There would be no subpoena power, no way to reach into Seattle and pull out the other end of the line. There would be her, and her notebooks, and Anna if Anna could get away from the boat, and Dutch if Dutch found his courage, and Bea if Bea dared.
She thought of Venn in his office, altering her tickets in ink, and of the Monday barges going out in the dark with their plain cans, and of the gray-coated stranger copying receipts at the cold-storage warehouse, and she felt the fear again — Venn's sworn word against hers — and under the fear, something harder and older: the stubbornness that had kept her at the scale house through eleven seasons, that had raised a boy alone, that had kept every carbon copy because Tom had told her to.
She got up and went to the bedroom and pulled the canvas duffel from under the bed — Tom's old gear bag, the one he'd taken on the seiner. She shook out the dust and began to pack. Not clothes first. The notebooks first, wrapped in oilcloth, then the ledger, then the shoeboxes of carbons, nested tight so nothing shifted. The stubs. The sailing notices. Dutch's slip. Bea's ticket. She packed her evidence the way a fisherman packs gear: everything in its place, everything ready to hand, because when the moment came there would be no time to look for anything.
When the bag was full she sat on the edge of the bed and looked at it, and then she went back to the kitchen and sat with the November fourteenth letter in her hand until the clock ticked past midnight and the rain settled deeper into the roof.
Four weeks. Juneau. She would go, and she would lay her notebooks on the table in front of whoever would listen, and she would swear to every number in them, one by one, in her own voice. It was all she had. It would have to be enough.