She packed the notebooks back into the duffel, each in its place, the sweater around them. She laid out her clothes for the morning: the navy dress, the good coat, the shoes with the low heels. She stood at the window a while, watching the rain and the lights strung along the waterfront, and the dark bulk of the mountains beyond, invisible but there.
Morning came gray and raining, as mornings in Juneau did, as if the town had one weather and saw no reason to vary it. Ellen dressed carefully — the navy dress, the coat brushed, her hair pinned the way she wore it for church. She looked at herself in the small mirror over the dresser and saw a woman of thirty-six with lines at her eyes and her jaw set, and she thought, absurdly, of the first day she'd walked into the weigh station eleven years ago, twenty-five years old, Tom alive, everything ahead of her, the pencil already behind her ear.
Anna knocked, already dressed in her good skirt and the jacket she wore to the Fishermen's Association dinners, her hair combed back fiercely. "You look like a woman who's going to win," she announced.
"I look like a woman who's going to a hearing."
"Same thing, today." Anna picked up the duffel — "No arguments; it's heavy and I'm the muscle" — and they went downstairs, where Sam Whitfield was waiting in the lobby, improbably early, his cardigan visible under his suit jacket, a briefcase in his hand and rain on his shoulders.
"Mrs. Marsh," he said. "Captain." He looked at the duffel. "The army travels with us, I see."
"The army travels," Anna confirmed.
They walked out into the rain together — the three of them, the lawyer with his briefcase, the seiner with the duffel of notebooks, the suspended clerk in the navy dress — up the steep street toward the State office building, where the gold dome rose dulled by weather and the hearing room waited on the fourth floor. Ellen held her coat closed against the wind off the water. In her mind she laid out the columns one more time: date, boat, ticket number, scale weight, ticket weight, variance. The truest thing in the room. She lifted her chin, and walked with Anna and Whitfield toward the doors.
The hearing room was on the fourth floor of a State office building on Fourth Street, and the rain was already falling when they arrived, a thin cold rain that the November wind in Juneau drove sideways against the windows. Ellen Marsh followed Sam Whitfield down the corridor with her satchel of notebooks pressed against her ribs like something alive, and Anna Lindqvist walked at her elbow, saying nothing, which was Anna's way of saying she was there.
The room itself was smaller than Ellen had feared and somehow worse for being ordinary. Wood paneling halfway up the walls, then plaster painted the color of weak tea. A long table at the front for the three members of the State Fisheries Licensing Board, with a brass nameplate in front of each and a water pitcher between them. A witness chair angled toward the panel. Two rows of chairs for everyone else. A court reporter's machine already set up, its operator a young woman with her hands folded. Fluorescent light that flattened everything it touched.
Harold Venn was already seated at the right-hand table with his attorney, a Juneau man named Bexley, and he was smiling. He rose when they entered — he rose, which Ellen had not expected — and inclined his head to her with an expression of such practiced sorrow that she felt her stomach turn over. It was the look he had worn at the cannery picnic two summers ago when he'd told the men their cannery bonuses would be smaller that year, the look of a man bearing burdens no one else could carry. He wore his good suit, the one he saved for the Seattle people. His hair was combed back. He looked, Ellen thought with a sudden helpless clarity, exactly like an honest man, and the thought frightened her more than anything else had that morning.
Whitfield set his briefcase down at the left-hand table and put a hand briefly on her shoulder. "Breathe," he said quietly. "You know everything you need to know."
The panel filed in. Three men: Chairman Hollis, broad and gray and heavy-eyed, who had run the board for a decade; a younger man with a fisherman's hands named Okafor, the card said; and an older woman, Dr. Laird, an economist from the university, who carried a thick folder and looked at no one. They took their seats. Hollis called the hearing to order in a voice worn smooth by a thousand such rooms, stated the case number and the matter before them — the complaint of Harold Venn, cannery manager of the Northlight Cannery at Kestrel Bay, against Ellen Marsh, tally clerk, license number read into the record — and reminded everyone that all testimony would be given under oath. The court reporter's fingers hovered.
The board counsel, a thin man named Perrin, rose and made his opening statement, dry as kindling: the complainant alleged that the respondent had falsified salmon tally figures and embezzled fishermen's settlement pay over the course of the 1978 season, that the evidence included altered fish tickets in the respondent's own hand as filed at the cannery, and that the board was asked to revoke her license and bar her from licensed fisheries employment in the State of Alaska. He sat down.
Then Harold Venn took the witness chair, and everything in the room changed its temperature.
He was sworn in standing, his right hand raised, his voice clear on the words. He sat. He folded his hands. Perrin began with the easy questions — name, occupation, how long at Northlight — and Venn answered with the unhurried cadence of a man who had told the truth so long it came without effort.
"Mr. Venn," Perrin said, "in your own words, what did you discover?"
Venn looked at the panel, not at Ellen. "I discovered," he said, "that the woman I had trusted with the books of my weigh station for six years had been stealing from the men who fish for us. Not in any crude way. She reduced the recorded weights on fish tickets — a few hundred pounds here, a few hundred there — after the fishermen had gone home, and she drew the difference in the settlement pay. Cash. The boats were short-paid and never knew it, because who questions the tally clerk? Who questions the numbers on the ticket?" He shook his head slowly, and his sorrow seemed genuine. Ellen felt Anna's knee press hard against hers under the table. "I confronted her with the altered tickets. She denied it. I had no choice. I swore my complaint because the fishermen of Kestrel Bay deserved better, and because the State deserves to know who it licenses."