"You're not asking. I'm volunteering." Anna hung her slicker on the peg by the door and sat down hard in Peter's chair. "Those bastards put a letter on the bulletin board that says you stole from us. From me, Ellen. From my boat. I want to know if it's true."
"It's not true."
"Then prove it with numbers, because words are cheap and I have heard enough of them." Anna pushed the stubs across the oilcloth. "Start."
They worked through the afternoon and into the rain-dark evening. Ellen found the Sea Wren's deliveries in her notebooks — June 3, June 17, June 29, July 8, July 21, August 2, August 15, August 26 — and beside each one she laid the settlement stub. The first three matched. Her handwriting, Bea's initials, the fisherman's signature, the weight. June 29: 4,210 pounds of sockeye, paid at 4,210 pounds. June 17: 3,875, paid at 3,875.
Then July 8. Her notebook said 5,120 pounds. The stub said 4,430.
Ellen stared at the two numbers until they stopped being numbers and became shapes. She checked her carbon copy of the fish ticket. 5,120, in her own hand, initialed by her and Bea, signed by Anna's deckhand, a boy named Mikkelson. The stub, in Venn's office hand — the round, careful script of the clerk who did settlements — said 4,430.
"That isn't mine," Ellen said quietly.
Anna leaned over the table. "What?"
"The ticket says five thousand one hundred and twenty. I wrote it. Bea initialed it. Your boy signed it. Somebody changed it after, before the settlement was figured." She flipped forward. July 21: her notebook, 4,660; the stub, 4,105. August 2: hers, 5,905; the stub, 5,200. August 15: hers, 3,480; the stub, 3,110. August 26: hers, 4,220; the stub, 3,755. Six deliveries, weights reduced after Ellen recorded them.
"How much?" Anna's voice had gone flat, the way it went on the boat when a line parted.
Ellen did the arithmetic on the back of an envelope, the numbers coming quick and sure the way they always had. "A little over three thousand pounds across the six. At this season's prices —" She stopped. She didn't need to finish. Anna knew what three thousand pounds of sockeye was worth. It was a winter's fuel oil. It was Mikkelson's wages for the season, twice over.
Anna stood up so fast her chair hit the wall. "He blamed tally errors. At the fishermen's meeting in August he stood up there and said the scale house had made errors, and I sat there, Ellen, I sat there and half-believed him, because who wants to believe they're being robbed by the man who signs the checks?"
"Sit down," Ellen said.
"I will not sit down." Anna paced the small kitchen, her boots loud on the linoleum. "It's not just me. If he did it to the Sea Wren he did it to every boat that tied up at that dock."
"I don't know yet."
"Then find out." Anna stopped pacing and put both hands flat on the table, among the notebooks. "You find out, and when you do, you tell me, and I will go boat to boat myself if I have to, and we will stand up in that hearing room in Juneau and we will bury him."
"Anna."
"What?"
Ellen looked at her friend's face, red with anger and something else, something frightened underneath. "I can't prove who changed the tickets. I can only prove the tickets were changed. And I have to be careful. If I go boat to boat asking questions, Venn will hear about it before I've asked the third boat, and he'll say I'm the one tampering with the records."
Anna held her stare for a long moment, then nodded once, sharply. "Careful, then. But not still." She gathered up the stubs and retied the twine. "Keep these. I have the boat's copies in the wheelhouse. And Ellen —" She paused at the door, her slicker half on. "My father used to say a thief counts on honest people being too embarrassed to count. So count."
After Anna left, Ellen sat for a long time with the envelope of arithmetic in her hand. Then she put it with the ledger and kept working — through Peter's supper and his bedtime, until the clock said midnight and the ledger had grown to eleven pages. She was not the only one counting. She was sure of that now. The question was who else had been counting, and what they had done with their numbers.
Dutch Kowalski came to the boat shed on a Thursday at dusk, which was where Ellen went when she needed to think without the walls of the house pressing in. The shed stood behind the cannery fence at the far end of the dock, half full of Tom's old gear that she had never been able to give away — cork lines, a spare leadline, the oilskins Tom had worn the last season. She had been oiling a block and tackle that didn't need oiling when the door scraped and Dutch filled the doorway, his big shoulders hunched against the rain.
He didn't say hello. He stepped inside, pulled the door nearly shut, and took off his cap. "You shouldn't be here, Dutch," Ellen said. "If Venn hears—"
"Venn hears everything. That's the trouble." The light through the crack fell across his face, and he looked older than sixty. "I been foreman eleven years. Eleven years I weighed fish honest and logged what the scale said. You know that."
"I know that."
"Then you know I didn't want any part of what's been going on." He stopped turning the cap and gripped it instead. "I'm not confessing to anything, Ellen. I want that clear. I didn't take a dime. But I saw things, and I didn't say anything, and that's been sitting on me like a wet net."
She set down the oil can. "What did you see?"
"The Monday barges." He said it like the name of a disease. "Every other Monday, near enough, through July and August, a barge'd come in after the day shift ended. Loaded for Seattle cold storage, the crew said. I was told — Venn told me himself, first time it happened — that those barges were handled out of the Seattle office and I wasn't to log them in the dock book. Not my concern, he said."
Ellen's heart was beating in her throat. "And you didn't log them."
"I did what I was told. Eleven years, Ellen, a man gets in the habit." He looked at the floor. "But I kept my own dates. In my head. Because a foreman knows what's crossed his dock, logged or not, the way a man knows his own teeth. There were six of them. Six Monday barges I wasn't supposed to see."
"Do you remember the dates?"
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded slip of paper, creased and soft from being carried. "Wrote them down last night, so I wouldn't get them wrong. July third. July seventeenth. July thirty-first. August fourteenth. August twenty-eighth. And September eleventh — that one's the worst, because the season was over, the plant was on half crew, and a barge still came in the dark and went out loaded."
Ellen took the paper with hands that shook. "Dutch, this is —"