"And Venn," Whitfield said.
"Mr. Venn called me into the office in September," Ellen said. "He said there were irregularities. He said my position was suspended pending review. Then the complaint came — the sworn complaint to the Licensing Board. Falsifying salmon tallies. Embezzling fishermen's pay." Her voice did what it always did on the word embezzling — thinned, went somewhere tight. "He signed it under oath."
Whitfield nodded slowly. He had been making notes in a legal pad, in a handwriting so bad it looked like a seismograph reading. May I see the notebooks?
Ellen unwrapped them from the sweater and laid them on the one clear corner of his desk — three notebooks, covers soft with handling, pages dense with her pencil columns, plus Bea's ticket copies and Dutch's barge dates on the back of a cannery work order. Whitfield put on taped reading glasses and went through them page by page, his finger tracking the columns, while Anna watched with her arms crossed and Ellen watched the rain move down the window behind his head."
It took a long time. When he finally set the last notebook down, he took off the glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Well," he said. "That's — that's something. That's genuinely something."
"Is it enough?" Anna asked.
Whitfield looked at her, then at Ellen. "It's enough to prove the weights were altered. It's enough to prove boats were short-paid — the Sea Wren among them. It's enough to prove product left this cannery on barges that never made the state pack report." He held up a hand before Anna could speak. "It's not enough to prove where the money went. And that, Mrs. Marsh, is the whole field of battle."
Ellen felt something cold settle in her stomach. "Say it plainly."
"Plainly: this is an administrative hearing, not a criminal trial. The Licensing Board convenes a panel — three members, usually. Mr. Venn will testify under oath, as the complainant. He's managed that cannery for eleven years. He's a respected man in the industry. He will say, under oath, that you falsified tallies and skimmed fishermen's pay, and that he discovered it and reported it, as was his duty. On the other side is you. A suspended clerk. With private notebooks."
"They're true," Ellen said quietly.
"I believe you. Your notebooks have the ring of truth — the boring, meticulous, unglamorous ring of it. But a panel hears a respected manager's sworn word against a suspended clerk's private ledgers, and I have to be honest with you about what usually happens in that room." He paused. "Usually, the manager is believed."
The radiator knocked. Somewhere below, a door closed. Anna said, "That's a hell of a thing to say to a client on day one, counselor."
"It's day one because Anna badgered me into taking the case over the phone last Tuesday, and I don't lie to clients on any day." Whitfield smiled, but it was a tired smile. "Here's what we do. I walk you through the hearing procedure — how the panel runs, who asks what, when you speak, when you don't. We go over your testimony until you can give it in your sleep. We enter the notebooks, the ticket copies, the barge dates into the record. We make the panel look at the pattern, not just the pieces. And we hope —" He stopped.
"Hope for what?" Ellen asked.
"Hope that the truth has a weight of its own. Sometimes it does. Not always. But sometimes."
They worked for three hours. Whitfield explained the hearing: the panel chair would open, Venn would testify first as complainant, then Ellen, then Anna as witness, then closing statements, then the panel would deliberate on whether Ellen kept her license and whether the complaint was sustained. Venn would have counsel, from a Juneau firm that represented the industry. Whitfield told her to answer only what was asked, not to argue, not to cry — "not because crying is wrong, but because they'll read it as guilt, and I need them reading the numbers."
He drilled her on the testimony until she could give it in her sleep. He asked her the cruel questions — "Mrs. Marsh, isn't it true you kept these notebooks secret from your employer? Isn't it true you had access to every ticket you claim was altered? Isn't it true you bear a grudge against Mr. Venn for suspending you?" — and made her answer them straight, without flinching, until the answers came out steady.
At some point Anna went downstairs for coffee and came back with three paper cups and a bag of doughnuts, and they ate them over the files.
It was late afternoon when they finished. The light outside had gone from gray to a deeper gray. Whitfield walked them to the door, and at the door Ellen stopped.
"Mr. Whitfield," she said. "Do you think I'm going to lose?"
He looked at her for a long moment. The humor went out of his face, and what was left was something older and kinder.
"Mrs. Marsh," he said, "I think you kept the truest set of books in Kestrel Bay for three years, in pencil, in the evenings, because it was the right thing to do and nobody asked you to. Whatever happens in that room on Thursday — whatever three tired people on a panel decide — those notebooks are the truest thing in it. Don't you forget that. Don't let them make you forget that."
Ellen nodded, because her throat had closed. Anna put a hand on the back of her neck, warm and solid, and steered her out into the marble stairwell.
The next morning Ellen went to the State office building alone — Whitfield had asked her to confirm the hearing time at the Board's clerk window and pick up the complainant's filing. Anna had wanted to come, but Ellen had insisted. "I need to do one thing in this town by myself," she'd said. "Just one. To prove I can."
The State office building was the one with the gold dome, up close more like a courthouse anywhere: marble, brass, a directory board with little sliding letters. The Licensing Board was on the fourth floor. Ellen was halfway down the corridor to the clerk's window when she saw him.
The gray-coated man.
She knew him at once, though she had only ever seen him at a distance in Kestrel Bay — on the dock in September, standing apart from the cannery crew with a notebook, watching a barge load; once outside the company store, in the rain, writing something down. She had asked Dutch about him, and Dutch had shrugged his big shoulders and said he was some kind of government man, asking questions, best not to get in his way. Now here he was in Juneau, in the corridor of the State office building, carrying a file box, speaking quietly with a clerk who nodded and pointed down the hall.
Ellen stopped. Her heart was doing something irregular. The man finished with the clerk, turned, and saw her looking at him. He was younger than she had guessed from a distance — forty-seven, perhaps, with a narrow face and eyes that gave away nothing and hair going gray at the temples. He wore a gray coat, as she had remembered, and carried himself with the stillness of a man accustomed to waiting.