And then, somewhere past midnight, with the lamp burning low and the house silent around her, she saw the second column.
She had been thinking about it all wrong. She had been thinking about the fishermen — about who was being shorted, about the settlement pay, about Venn stealing from the boats. That was what his complaint accused her of, and she had let the shape of the accusation shape her thinking. But the fish tickets did not only record what the fishermen were paid. They were the foundation of everything the cannery reported: the pack figures, the production totals, the numbers that went to Juneau, to the State, to the Seattle office. If the tickets said fewer pounds of salmon had come in, then the cannery's books would say fewer pounds had been packed. And if fewer pounds had been packed —
She sat very still. The lamp ticked as it cooled. Outside, somewhere down by the harbor, a halyard clanged against a mast in the night wind.
The fish had to go somewhere. That was the thing she kept coming back to, the thing as solid as the scale-house weights. Twenty-one hundred pounds of sockeye from the Sea Wren alone did not vanish. It was canned, or it was sold fresh, or it was barged out in cold storage — but it existed, and it had value, and if it was not on the tickets and not in the reported pack, then someone was selling salmon that officially did not exist, and keeping the money.
Venn. It had to be Venn. He was the only one who touched the tickets after her. He was the only one who could move fish through the cannery off the books. And he had accused her — her, the tally clerk, the woman whose name was on every ticket — because her name on the tickets made her the perfect shield. If anyone ever looked closely, the pencil figures were hers. And now, suspended and disgraced, she could not walk into the cannery and look at the books. She could not ask Dutch anything. She could not even get near the white sheets.
It was clever. She sat at the table among her notebooks and her carbons and she almost admired it, the way you might admire a well-tied knot that was holding a door shut against you. Almost.
But she had the notebooks. Six seasons of duplicate tallies, in her own hand, made every evening at this table, with no knowledge that they would ever matter. And she had the carbons. And she had her memory of the ink. Venn could file his sworn complaint. He could have her suspended. He could turn the town quiet around her. What he could not do — what he had not thought to do, because who would ever imagine a tally clerk keeping six years of duplicate books — was reach into her kitchen and take the true numbers out of her hands.
She did not yet know where the missing fish went. She did not know who bought it or how the money moved or what name was on the other end of it. She had no one to take it to — the Board had Venn's sworn word, and she had pencil figures in marbled notebooks, and she knew exactly how that would sound in a hearing room in Juneau. A widow's notebooks against a churchgoing manager's oath.
So she would not go to Juneau empty-handed.
Ellen closed the current notebook and opened a fresh page at the back, and at the top she wrote, in her small, precise hand: The true season. Beneath it, she ruled her columns again — boat, date, true weight, ticket weight, difference — and she began, methodically, from the first delivery in June, to reconstruct it all. Every boat. Every ticket. Every pound. She would work through the whole season, and then she would work through July, and then August, and she would build the true record out of pencil and carbon and memory, and when she walked into that hearing room, she would carry the one thing Harold Venn could not alter, because he had never known it existed.
The lamp burned. The night wind moved in the eaves. At the kitchen table in Kestrel Bay, in the last week of August 1978, Ellen Marsh bent over her notebooks and began to write, and she did not stop until the eastern sky went pale over the water.
The rain had come back to Kestrel Bay the week after they suspended her, the kind of steady, gray rain that didn't fall so much as hang in the air and settle into everything. Ellen Marsh spread the oilcloth on the kitchen table and laid out the notebooks in the order of the season: April first, on the left, working forward to the last week of August, which sat by her right hand like a hand she didn't want to shake. Peter was at school. The house was quiet except for the tick of the wall clock and the kettle she kept refilling without remembering she'd made tea.
She opened the April book. The pencil writing was hers, small and tight, the way she had always written when she was trying to be accurate, and the first page was headed in the corner with the season's first delivery: F/V Dawnbreaker, April 14, king, 1,842 lbs. Below it, in Bea's rounder hand, the same figure, initialed. That was how they worked it in the scale house: one of them read the scale, the other wrote it down, and they both initialed every ticket before it went to the fisherman for his signature. She remembered Tom telling her, years ago, that a number wasn't real until two people had sworn to it. Tom had sworn to a lot of numbers. She turned the page.
By noon she had worked through May and her back ached. She made the tea she hadn't drunk and started again. The method was simple and it was the only method she had. For every delivery in her notebooks she wrote a line in a fresh ledger she had bought at Harkness's store: boat name, date, species, weight as recorded. Beside it she set the carbon copies of the fish tickets — hundreds of them, saved in shoeboxes under her bed because Tom had taught her to keep everything that had her signature on it. A third column, what the fishermen had actually been paid, she filled from settlement stubs and marked with a question mark where she relied on memory, which she refused to trust.
She was on the June pages when the knock came. Anna Lindqvist filled the doorway with her yellow slicker dripping and a canvas bag over her shoulder, smelling of diesel and wet wool.
"You look like a woman who's been doing arithmetic," Anna said, dropping a canvas bag on the oilcloth so the stacks of notebooks shifted.
"I've been doing arithmetic," Ellen said.
Anna pulled out a bundle of paper slips tied with seine twine, settlement stubs from the cannery office, each one stamped PAID. "The Sea Wren's. Every delivery this season. I kept them all because my father kept everything and I married a man who lost everything, so I split the difference."
Ellen untied the twine. "Anna, I don't want to ask you to—"