Perrin walked him through the season ticket by ticket, and Venn was masterful. He spoke of his duty to the Seattle owners, of the trust the fishermen placed in the cannery, of his own anguish at discovering the theft — he used the word anguish, and his voice roughened on it, and Dr. Laird made a note. He described finding the discrepancies himself, late at night in his office, going over the settlement sheets. "I prayed about it," he said quietly, and the room held still. "I am not a man who brings charges lightly."
Perrin entered the tickets into evidence — the altered tickets, the ones with the ink figures laid over Ellen's pencil, and Ellen's stomach went cold because she recognized every one of them and knew, with a certainty that sat in her like a stone, that no one in that room could tell from looking which hand had held the pen last.
Whitfield's cross-examination began gently. He established that Venn had filed the complaint himself, that he had suspended Ellen himself, that he had controlled access to the weigh station books before, during, and after. Venn conceded each point with graceful ease — of course, that was his duty as manager.
"Mr. Venn," Whitfield said, "the cannery files a pack report with the State each season, does it not? Cases packed, by species, from which the fisheries business tax is calculated."
"It does," Venn said.
"And you certify those reports."
"I sign them, yes. As manager."
"Who prepares the figures you sign?"
"My office staff. The tally clerk — Mrs. Marsh, at that time — compiles the season totals from the fish tickets."
Whitfield let a silence stand. "So the tickets you have entered into evidence as Mrs. Marsh's falsifications — the same tickets feed the State pack report. If the recorded weights were reduced, as you allege, the reported pack would be reduced as well. Is that correct?"
Venn's smile did not move. "I am not an accountant, Mr. Whitfield."
"No," Whitfield said pleasantly. "But you are the man who signs. Let me ask about the barges, Mr. Venn. The Monday barges to Seattle."
Something crossed Venn's face then — not fear, not yet, but the faintest tightening, like a line drawn briefly under water. "The cannery ships canned salmon south by barge, as every cannery does," he said. "I don't see —"
"How many barge shipments left Kestrel Bay in the 1978 season, Mr. Venn?"
"I couldn't say precisely. A dozen. Perhaps more."
"Would it surprise you to learn that the harbormaster's log shows nineteen?"
Perrin was on his feet objecting, Hollis sustained it — beyond the scope, the complaint was about the tally clerk — and Whitfield withdrew the question with a small bow that did not look like surrender. Venn resettled himself in the chair, smoothed his tie, and smiled at the panel as though to say: you see how this goes. But Ellen had seen the tightening. She held onto it the way a drowning person holds onto rope.
When Venn stepped down, he inclined his head to the panel once more, a man who had done his painful duty, and resumed his seat beside Bexley with the composure of someone already vindicated. Perrin rested the complainant's case, and Chairman Hollis looked at Whitfield over his glasses.
"Mr. Whitfield. Your witness."
Ellen's legs did not feel like her own as she crossed to the witness chair. The oath came out of her mouth in someone else's voice. She sat down and the room arranged itself around her — the panel's three faces, the reporter's machine, Venn at his table with his hands folded and that terrible patient sorrow, Anna in the second row with her jaw set. Whitfield stood beside his table, and his face was calm, and that steadied her more than anything.
"Mrs. Marsh," he said, "how long did you work at the Northlight weigh station?"
"Six years. Since the spring after my husband —" She stopped, swallowed. "Six years."
"Describe your duties."
"I recorded the deliveries. Every boat that came to the dock, I weighed the brailers, I wrote the fish ticket in pencil — species, weight, boat name, date — and I kept a duplicate in my own notebook, also in pencil. That was my habit. Then the ticket went to the office for settlement."
"Why the duplicate notebook, in your own words?"
Ellen looked at Chairman Hollis, because he was the one she had to convince, and she told him the truth, which was smaller and plainer than anything she had rehearsed. "My husband was a seiner. Tom Marsh. He drowned in seventy-three, off Cross Sound, and for a year after I couldn't look at the water. When Mr. Venn gave me the tally job I took it because it was numbers, and numbers don't —" She stopped again. "I kept the duplicates because Tom used to say a man who won't write a thing twice doesn't trust his own memory. It was a habit. I never thought it would matter."
"Show the panel," Whitfield said gently.
She opened the satchel. Her hands shook as she laid out the notebooks — eight of them, pencil-worn, the elastic bands gone slack — and Whitfield handed the top one to her, and she turned to July 18th, and her voice came back to her as she read.
"The Sea Wren," she said. "Captain Anna Lindqvist. Delivered at eleven-forty in the morning, July eighteenth. I recorded fourteen thousand two hundred and ten pounds of sockeye. In pencil, in my notebook, at the dock, with Captain Lindqvist standing beside me." She held up the fish ticket Perrin had entered into evidence, the one with the same date, the same boat. "The ticket filed at the cannery says thirteen thousand six hundred and forty pounds. The figure is in ink, over my pencil. I did not write the ink figure. I never wrote in ink at the weigh station in six years. The difference — five hundred and seventy pounds — is what the Sea Wren was short-paid for that delivery."
She turned pages, and her voice steadied with each one, the numbers doing what numbers had always done for her — holding still, refusing to flatter or accuse. August third, the Kittiwake, four hundred and ten pounds shaved off. August eleventh, her own careful pencil under someone else's ink again, six hundred and ninety pounds gone. She laid each ticket beside each notebook page so the panel could see: pencil beneath, ink above, the same hand in the pencil every time — hers — and a different pressure, a different slant, in the ink.
Chairman Hollis leaned forward. "Mrs. Marsh. You are asking this panel to believe that someone altered these tickets after you recorded them. Who had access?"
"Mr. Venn. His office. The tickets went to his office for settlement." She met Venn's eyes across the room, and he looked back at her with that sorrow, and she did not look away. "I recorded what the scale said. Every delivery, all season. My notebooks are the true weights."
Dr. Laird spoke for the first time, her voice crisp. "Mrs. Marsh, do you understand that these notebooks are in your hand, unverified, and that Mr. Venn has testified under oath that you are the one who altered the tickets? What you are offering is your word against his."
"Yes, ma'am," Ellen said. "I know."