The rain had settled into its steady night rhythm, and the dock planks shone under the cannery lights. Ellen walked home the long way, along the harbor road, her coat collar up, her shoes finding the boards by memory. The Sea Wren's anchor light swung slow out past the breakwater. The retorts had gone quiet behind her, and Kestrel Bay lay dark and dripping under the hills, every window she passed lit yellow and warm.
She passed the Lutheran church, dark now, its white steeple lost in the rain. On Sundays Venn ushered there, handing out hymnals with the same flourish he used for the doughnut box, and Ellen had sat three pews behind him more Sundays than she could count. She tried to fit the man with the hymnals together with the man behind the desk, and could not make them match, and the failure of it sat in her stomach like something she had eaten too fast.
She kept seeing the ticket from that afternoon — her pencil figures, and his ink drawn hard across them. She kept hearing Dutch's voice bawling the weight, clear as a bell. And she kept seeing Venn's face across the desk, the smile that had stayed in place while something behind it went still and watchful, like water closing over a stone.
She told herself it was nothing. A man under pressure in the middle of a heavy season, asking a favor he shouldn't have asked, taking no for an answer. No harm in asking. But her hands were cold inside her pockets, and they were not cold from the rain, and all the way home along the black water she could not shake the feeling that she had stepped off some edge she hadn't seen, and that the fall, when it came, would be a long one.
The morning after, the rain had stopped, and Ellen Marsh woke with the flat, tired feeling that follows a night of thin sleep. She got Peter's breakfast on the table, packed his lunch in the waxed paper the way he liked it, and walked the mile to the cannery with the damp hem of her skirt slapping her shins. She kept telling herself that Harold Venn would not mention what had happened in his office — that men like Harold Venn, having been refused, simply moved on to some other arrangement. She believed it because she needed to believe it. Believing it let her hold her head up as she climbed the cannery steps.
For the first two or three days, she was right, or nearly right. Venn was cordial. He greeted her by name in the yard with the same easy smile he gave the fishermen, asked after Peter, commented on the weather. But underneath the cordiality a small machinery of distance began to turn. Ellen had worked for Harold Venn for six years, and she knew the temperature of his attention the way she knew the calibrations on the scale-house weights. The change was not in what he said. It was in what he stopped saying. He stopped coming to the scale house in the late afternoon to go over the day's tally with her and a cup of his terrible coffee. He stopped asking her opinion about anything at all. And one morning, Bea Callahan came in pale and said, in a rush, that Mr. Venn had asked her to double-check all of Mrs. Marsh's figures before they were filed, and Bea was sorry, she knew it was an insult, but what was she supposed to do, he was the manager.
Ellen told her to do exactly what she was told, and to do it carefully, and Bea, who was twenty-eight and looked up to Ellen the way a younger sister might, nodded with her eyes bright. It was not Bea's fault. Ellen knew that. It was the first small pebble rolled downhill.
The overtime went next. For years, Ellen had worked an extra hour each evening during the heavy part of the season, reconciling the day's tickets, and Venn had written it into the pay schedule without her asking. Now, in the second week of August, she found the overtime line struck, and when she asked, he smiled and said the Seattle office was tightening up on labor costs, nothing personal, Ellen. She had never believed a word about Seattle being involved in anything. Meridian Packing Company was a name on the letterhead. Everything in Kestrel Bay ran through Harold Venn's office.
Dutch Kowalski stopped meeting her eyes. Dutch, the foreman, sixty years old, a man who had weighed fish since before Ellen was born, who called the scale house his own private kingdom and Ellen its queen — Dutch took to walking the long way around the scale house when he crossed the yard, and when he did come in, he kept his gaze on the tickets and the scale pan and said very little. Once, as he was leaving, he paused in the doorway with his cap in his hands, and Ellen thought he was going to say something, and then he only shook his head and went out into the yard. She watched him go and felt something cold settle in her stomach.
It was Bea, double-checking the figures as instructed, who first noticed that something was wrong with the July tickets. She brought a sheaf of them to Ellen's desk one afternoon when the line was running and the noise of the cannery covered everything. "Mrs. Marsh," she said, low, "look at this one. And this one. I thought I was misreading them."
Ellen looked. The fish tickets were the white top sheets, the official record, filled out in Ellen's own hand in pencil at the scale as each boat's delivery was weighed. And over the pencil, in a different hand, in ink, were corrections. The Sea Wren, July the ninth: Ellen's pencil figure had been 14,280 pounds of sockeye. The ink over it read 12,150. The North Star, July the fourteenth: 11,900 reduced to 10,275. The Pelican, July the twenty-first: 8,640 reduced to 7,300. Ticket after ticket, the same hand, the same ink, and every correction went one direction. Down. Always down.
Ellen's hands were steady. She had always been proud of her steadiness; it was the quality Tom had teased her about, the quality that had made the cannery hire her in the first place. She turned the tickets over, one by one, and Bea stood watching her, and neither of them said anything for a long moment, because there was nothing safe to say. Then Ellen opened her desk drawer and took out her private tally book for July, the duplicate she kept in pencil at her kitchen table each evening, copying the day's figures from memory and from the carbon slips she tucked into her apron pocket. She checked the Sea Wren entry. 14,280. The North Star. 11,900. The Pelican. 8,640. Her figures matched her own records exactly. The ink corrections were not hers. She had never written a word in ink on a fish ticket in six years.
"Who does this?" Bea whispered.