Ellen did not answer. She already knew the answer, and the knowing of it sat in her chest like a stone. Only two people handled the white sheets after she filled them out: Bea, who would never have dared, and Harold Venn, who took them to his office each evening for what he called the filing. She looked at Bea's frightened face and made a decision in that moment, the way she had made all her hardest decisions since Tom died — quickly, and without flinching.
"Don't tell anyone you showed me these," she said. "Not Dutch. Not anyone."
Bea nodded, tears standing in her eyes, and Ellen felt a wave of tenderness for the girl, and of guilt for pulling her into it. But there was no one else.
That evening at her kitchen table, after Peter was asleep, Ellen opened her duplicate notebook and began a new page. She wrote: Alterations observed, July tickets. She listed the boats, the dates, her figures, the ink figures, the differences. The Sea Wren: 2,130 pounds gone. The North Star: 1,625. The Pelican: 1,340. When she added the column, her pencil hovered before she wrote the total, because the total was not a tally error. It was a harvest.
She did not sleep much that night either.
Over the next week, she watched, and the watching was the hardest thing she had ever done, because she had to watch with a still face and steady hands while the work she had done honestly was quietly rewritten above her name. She found more altered tickets — not all of them, and never the boats that delivered small loads, never the ones anyone would look at twice. Always the big deliveries. Always the boats whose captains were too busy or too trusting to check the settlement sheets line by line. She noted every one in the duplicate book. She told no one, not even Anna, though Anna Lindqvist came by the scale house twice that week and asked her, point-blank, whether Venn was giving her trouble, and Ellen said no, it was nothing, the season was just heavy.
She was lying to her best friend, and she hated it, but she did not yet know what she had, and she was afraid of what she might have. A cannery manager correcting fish tickets in ink was not, by itself, a crime anyone would act on. Venn would say it was a reconciliation. Venn would say Ellen's pencil figures had been estimates, made in the rush of the scale, and he had corrected them from the line's actual case count. He was affable. He was churchgoing. He had run the Northlight Cannery for eleven years, and half the town owed him a favor. Ellen Marsh was a widow who counted fish. If she accused him, she would be the one who sounded mad.
She kept her head down. She did her work. She waited.
The blow, when it came, came on a Tuesday in the last week of August, and it came in the most ordinary way imaginable, which was somehow the worst part. Ellen was at her desk in the scale house, reconciling the morning's tickets, when Bea came in with an envelope in her hand and a look on her face that Ellen had never seen there before. Behind Bea, in the doorway, stood two men Ellen did not know, in suits that marked them as from somewhere else — Juneau, or Anchorage, or Seattle. One of them was carrying a briefcase.
"Mrs. Marsh?" the taller one said.
Ellen stood. Her legs felt strange under her, as if the floor had tilted.
The man introduced himself and his companion, and the words "State Fisheries Licensing Board" went through the scale house like a cold draft, though Ellen would not remember afterward whether he had actually said them or whether she had simply understood. He handed her the envelope. It was heavy, sealed, addressed to her in typewritten block letters. She opened it with fingers that would not quite obey her, and the papers inside were legal papers, dense with formal language, and it took her a moment to find the sentence that mattered, because her eyes kept sliding off the page.
Harold Venn, manager of the Northlight Cannery, had filed a sworn complaint with the Board accusing Ellen Marsh, tally clerk, of falsifying salmon tallies and embezzling fishermen's settlement pay.
Ellen read it twice. The words did not change.
"You are suspended from your duties at the cannery," the taller man said, not unkindly, "pending a licensing hearing in Juneau. The date will be set by the Board. You'll be notified." He paused. "You may clear your personal belongings."
Bea made a small sound, like a gasp cut short. Ellen folded the papers carefully — carefully, because her hands had gone back to being steady, the way they always did when there was no longer any choice — and put them in her handbag. Then she began to clear her desk.
She had worked at that desk for six years. There was not much: the framed photograph of Tom in his oilskins, grinning on the deck of the seiner he had loved; a chipped mug Peter had made her in third grade, painted with a lopsided salmon; her pencils, her ruler. She put each thing into her canvas tote with deliberate care, aware of the silence spreading through the scale house and out into the cannery beyond. The line had stopped. She could feel them watching — the cutters, the packers, the women at the cans — the whole long room gone still. She did not look up. She kept her eyes on her hands, and when the desk was bare she picked up her tote and her handbag and walked out.
Bea was crying openly now, tears running down her face, and she reached for Ellen's sleeve as Ellen passed. "Mrs. Marsh, I —"
"It's all right, Bea," Ellen said, and her voice came out level, which surprised her. "You do your work."
Dutch was standing at the far end of the line, near the retorts, with his cap in his hands again, staring at his boots. He did not look up as she passed. She did not blame him. Dutch had a wife and a mortgage and thirty years at the Northlight, and Harold Venn was the man who signed his pay. She walked the length of the cannery floor with her tote on her arm, and the silence walked with her, and she held her head up because Tom Marsh's widow did not walk with her head down, even now, especially now.
Outside, the late-August light was thin and white off the water. The two men from the Board were already getting into their car. Ellen walked home the long way, past the harbor, and did not hurry.
The town turned on her the way a tide turns: slowly at first, and then all at once, and then there was no going back. Kestrel Bay was not, strictly speaking, a company town — the boats were independent, the stores were independent, the church was independent — but the Northlight Cannery was the reason Kestrel Bay existed, and Harold Venn was the reason the cannery ran, and in a town of nine hundred people, that was close enough. Ellen felt it first at the grocery, two days after the suspension, when Mrs. Halvorsen, who had sold her flour and sugar for a decade, went suddenly busy with the register tape and did not meet her eyes, and the two women behind Ellen in the line went quiet in the particular way people go quiet when they have been talking about you.