The ferry came into Juneau under a low lid of cloud the color of dishwater, and rain standing in the air like something the sky had forgotten to finish. Ellen had seen the capital only in photographs — the photographs lied, or at least told only the flattering part. What rose to meet the boat was gray: gray water, gray mountains shouldering up behind gray buildings, the gold dome of the office building drowned out by the weather, the whole town clinging to the foot of a cliff as if it had been washed downhill and caught there. Anna stood at the rail beside her in her yellow oilskin, her hair dark with wet, and said, "Well. It's got a dome," which was not a joke so much as a survey finding, and Ellen found herself laughing a little too hard, the way she did at funerals.
"You're soaked," Ellen said.
"We're all soaked. It's Juneau. They soak you at the dock as a courtesy."
They had come on the overnight boat from Haines after the long haul south with the weather closing in behind them like a door. She was tired in a way that had settled into her bones three weeks ago and never quite left. The duffel she carried held four days of clothes and, wrapped in a wool sweater at the very center, the three tally notebooks and the folder of copied fish tickets Bea had slipped her through the scale-house window on her last evening, Bea's hands shaking so hard the papers had rattled.
Peter was not with them. Peter was in Kestrel Bay, finishing the school week at Marge Halvorsen's kitchen table, sleeping in his own bed, looked in on by Anna's sister Ingrid, who had moved into the spare room with strict instructions from Anna that the boy was to eat three meals and not be told anything he didn't ask. It had been the hardest decision of the whole mess, and Anna had made it for her, the way Anna made decisions about other people's lives: by announcement. "You're not dragging a twelve-year-old boy to Juneau to watch his mother fight for her name," Anna had said. "Ingrid's got the room. Go." And Ellen had gone, and hated going, and been grateful all the way down the coast, which was its own kind of guilt, layered like sediment.
The hotel was two blocks up from the waterfront, up a hill so steep Anna demanded they count it as exercise. The lobby smelled of radiator heat and damp carpet. Anna paid the deposit — the trip was on her, the Sea Wren's season having been decent enough despite everything, and any argument about it would be conducted at high volume and lost — and they followed the bellhop up two flights of stairs that smelled of old cigarette smoke and lemon polish. The room was small and clean: a bed, a chair, a window that looked out at the back of another building and a slice of gray sky. There was a radiator that knocked. There was a phone with a dial. On the wall, a framed print of a glacier, blue and immense, the Alaska every visitor was promised.
Ellen sat on the edge of the bed and put her hands flat on her knees and felt the full strangeness of being in a city where no one knew her name. In Kestrel Bay she was Ellen Marsh, Tom Marsh's widow, Peter's mother, the woman at the weigh station with the pencil behind her ear. Here she was a woman in a raincoat with a duffel, and the anonymity was both a relief and a terror.
Anna's knock came through the adjoining door, which she had opened from her side. "Room service has pie," she announced. "I asked. They have actual pie. This town may be redeemable."
"You can't afford room service for four days."
"I can't afford a lot of things. Pie isn't one of them. Wash your face. We eat, then we go see your lawyer before he changes his mind."
Sam Whitfield's office was on the third floor of a building that had once been a bank. The door said S. WHITFIELD, ATTORNEY AT LAW in gilt paint that was going, and beneath it, in a hand-lettered card: PLEASE KNOCK, I'M PROBABLY HERE. Anna knocked.
He was not what Ellen had expected. She had expected someone younger, or someone sharper — some version of the lawyers in the courthouse dramas she never watched. Sam Whitfield was forty-one and looked it in a way that suggested he had decided early not to fight it: thinning hair combed straight back, a cardigan under his suit jacket, ink on his cuffs, a desk buried so thoroughly in paper that the desk itself was theoretical. He rose when they came in, shook both their hands with a grip that was surprisingly strong, and said, "Mrs. Marsh. Captain Lindqvist. Sit anywhere there isn't a file. If there's a file, move it gently. Some of them bite."
Anna moved a stack of folders from the client chair and sat with her hands folded like a woman at a parent-teacher conference she intended to win. Ellen sat on the edge of the other chair and held her duffel on her lap.
"Anna's told me the shape of it," Whitfield said, settling back into his own chair, which creaked. "But I've learned, over the years, that the shape of it is never the thing itself. Tell me the thing itself, Mrs. Marsh. From the beginning, and don't skip the boring parts. The boring parts are where cases live."
So Ellen told it. She told it the way she had told it to herself a hundred times in the weigh station, in the long months before any of this had a name: the tickets coming in from the boats, the weights recorded at the scale, the copies she made in her own notebooks in pencil, in the evenings, because Tom had taught her that a man who keeps his own log never has to argue about what happened — Tom, who had kept a log of every set, every tide, every fueling, until the sea took him in '73 and the log came home in a plastic bag with his effects, the ink blurred but the numbers still legible, and Ellen had understood, reading it, that numbers were a kind of faithfulness.
She told him about the discrepancies. Small at first — a ticket here, a ticket there, a few hundred pounds shaved off a landing weight. She had assumed errors. Then the pattern: the same boats, the same weeks, the shaved weights always going one direction, and the pay sheets following the altered tickets, not her scale readings. Then the Sea Wren's tickets, and Anna's fury, and Dutch Kowalski's quiet word about the Monday barges — the barges that loaded canned salmon on Mondays, regular as church, and never appeared on any manifest Ellen was allowed to see. Then Bea Callahan, white-faced, slipping her the scale-house copies through the window. Then the reconstruction, Anna at her kitchen table with the calculator, the true 1978 season taking shape under their hands like a photograph in developer: the altered tickets, the short-paid boats, the unlogged pack going out on barges to Seattle, and the money — the money for all of it — going somewhere Ellen could not follow, because the Seattle end of the paper trail was a closed door and she was a tally clerk in Kestrel Bay with a pencil.