At church that Sunday, the pew where Ellen and Peter always sat — third row, left side, where Tom's parents had sat before them — had an empty margin of vacant wood around it, as if grief or guilt were catching. Ellen sat very straight through the sermon, and afterward, in the churchyard, people she had known for twenty years found somewhere else to look. Old Mr. Abernathy shook her hand and held it a moment too long and said nothing at all, which was, she understood, his whole statement.
Peter bore the worst of it, and that was the part that nearly broke her. He was twelve, old enough to understand everything and too young to carry any of it. On the third day of school, he came home with a split lip and a story he did not want to tell, and it took Ellen an hour of sitting with him at the kitchen table, not pressing, just being there, before it came out. Three boys on the playground. Your ma's a thief. Your ma steals from fishermen. Peter had swung first, which she could not bring herself to be sorry about. She cleaned his lip with a warm cloth and held him while he cried — he was too old to cry on her shoulder and he did it anyway — and when he was calmer she said, "Your ma is not a thief, Peter. I need you to believe that even when it's hard."
She did not grovel. She did not go to Venn's office. She did not write a letter to the Board protesting her innocence. She did not weep in public or explain herself to Mrs. Halvorsen or anyone else. She went to the grocery when she needed groceries. She went to church and sat in the third pew. She walked with her head up. The shame was there — it sat in her chest every morning when she woke and remembered, fresh, what had been said about her — but underneath the shame was something harder, something that had been forming since the day she found the ink corrections on the July tickets. A refusal. Let them whisper. She knew what she had done and what she had not done, and no sworn complaint could change the figures in her pencil.
Anna Lindqvist stood by her furiously, which was Anna's way of standing by anyone. Anna was forty-four, a seiner captain with hands like rope and a voice that carried across a harbor, and she had been Ellen's friend since they were girls. Three days after the suspension, Anna came to the house with a paper bag of smoked salmon and a face like a thunderhead, and she did not knock so much as announce herself. "I told Venn exactly what I think of him," she said, standing in Ellen's kitchen, "and I told him if one more ticket of mine comes back short, I'll take it to Juneau myself." Ellen made tea, and they sat at the table, and Anna talked the way she always talked, blunt and fast, about the settlement sheets and the short weights and the things the other captains were saying. Most of the captains, it seemed, were saying nothing at all. A few had told Anna, quietly, that they had noticed discrepancies in their own pay and had not wanted to make trouble. Nobody wanted to make trouble with Harold Venn. Nobody except Anna, who had never in her life not made trouble when trouble was warranted.
"He's setting you up, Ellen," Anna said. "You know that, don't you? He's hanging his own thieving on you."
Ellen looked at her friend across the kitchen table. "I know someone is," she said carefully. "I don't know what for, yet."
Anna stared at her. "What do you mean, you don't know what for? He's been shorting us for months. Where do you think the money goes?"
"I don't know," Ellen said, and it was the truth. She knew the fishermen's weights were being cut on the tickets. She knew the differences were large. But she did not know where the missing fish went — whether Venn was pocketing the settlement money outright, or selling fish off the books, or something else entirely, something she could not yet see the shape of. And she had no proof of any of it that would stand up anywhere. She had her duplicate notebooks and her word against Harold Venn's sworn complaint. In Kestrel Bay, in August of 1978, that was not a contest. That was a rout.
After Anna left, Ellen sat at the kitchen table for a long time, the tea going cold in front of her. Peter was at a friend's house — one of the two friends who had not gone quiet — and the house was still in the way it got in late summer, with the light lasting long into the evening and the sound of the water coming up from the harbor. She thought about Tom. She thought about the winter after he drowned, when the seiner went down with all hands in a November gale and she had sat at this same table and decided, minute by minute, to keep going. She had kept going then. She would keep going now.
She got up and went to the pantry, and from the high shelf where she kept the flour tins, she took down the stack of notebooks.
There were six of them, one for each season she had worked at the cannery, bound in marbled covers, the earliest ones soft with handling. Her private duplicate tallies. Every boat, every delivery, every weight, copied out in pencil at this table in the evenings, year after year — not because she had ever suspected anything, but because she was meticulous, because Tom had teased her about it, because getting the numbers right was the one thing she had always been able to do. She laid them out on the table in order, oldest to newest, and opened the current one to the page where she had listed the July alterations.
Then she did something she had not done before. She went to her desk in the front room and took out the bundle of carbon copies she had kept — the thin yellow slips from the scale house, her own carbons of the fish tickets, the ones Venn never asked for and she had never offered. She had kept them out of habit, the same habit that made her keep the notebooks: a bookkeeper's instinct that paper was memory and memory was fragile. She had carbons for most of the season's deliveries, going back to June.
She spread them on the table beside the notebooks, and she began to compare.
It was slow work. The kitchen light was poor, and she moved the lamp closer, and Peter came home and she fed him supper and sent him to bed, and then she went back to the table and worked on. Boat by boat. Ticket by ticket. Her pencil figures in the notebook against the carbon figures against her memory of the ink corrections on the white sheets. She made a new ledger page, ruled in her neat hand, with columns: boat, date, true weight, ticket weight, difference. The differences accumulated. The Sea Wren. The North Star. The Pelican. Boats she knew, captains she had drunk coffee with, men whose children's names she knew. Every correction cut their pay. Every correction was in Venn's ink.