"Don't thank me. There's more, and it's worse, because it's about you." He put his cap back on, pulling it low. "The ink corrections. On the fish tickets. I saw him do it. Twice, in the office, after hours. He saw me the second time. He didn't stop. He just said the settlements had to reflect the pack, and the pack was what he said it was. Then he put your name on the complaint." Dutch's voice cracked. "I should have said something then. I'm saying it now. That's all I get to say."
He was gone before she could answer, the door scraping shut, his boots fading on the wet planks. Ellen stood in the dim shed with the slip of paper in her hand and Tom's oilskins hanging beside her like a witness. Six dates. Six barges that had crossed Dutch's dock and never entered any book she had seen. She folded the paper small and put it in her boot, because it felt like the kind of thing a person could lose, and then she walked home through the rain with her head down and her mind racing.
That night she added a new page to the ledger. At the top she wrote MONDAY BARGES, and under it the six dates, and she stared at them until they told her what she already knew: the cannery had packed far more salmon than it had ever reported, and the extra fish had gone out on barges in the dark, and Venn had been skimming the difference between the true pack and the reported pack and covering the gap by short-paying the fishermen and blaming the scale house.
She still couldn't prove the second half of it. She had the shape of the fraud now — she could feel it the way you feel a fish on the line before you see it — but she couldn't prove where the barges had gone after they left Kestrel Bay, or who had taken the money at the other end. Seattle was seven hundred miles of water away, and she was a suspended clerk with a kitchen table full of notebooks and no authority to ask a single question of anyone who mattered.
She lay awake a long time, listening to the rain, and the fear came then, cold and plain: at the hearing it would be Venn's sworn word against hers. He was the manager of eleven years' standing, a man who wore a tie to the fishermen's meetings and shook hands with the state inspector every spring. She was the widow who kept pencils. And she understood, with a clarity that made her sit up in the dark, that her notebooks were all she had, and that they had better be enough, because there was nothing else coming.
The harbormaster's office was a one-room building at the head of the dock with a coal stove and a wall of clipboards, and Harlan Bixby had run it for twenty years and talked for most of them. Ellen went in on a Tuesday morning with a basket of smoked salmon — the last of Tom's brother's catch, put up the previous fall — and set it on the counter.
"Harlan," she said, "I'm trying to settle something in my mind about the season. The barge traffic. Do you keep the sailing records?"
Harlan took a piece of salmon and chewed thoughtfully. "I keep what I'm given, Ellen. Barges file a sailing notice when they take on or discharge here. Most do. Some don't, and I don't chase them — I'm one man and the stove needs feeding."
"Do you remember any barges loading late in the day? Evenings? Through the summer?"
He chewed some more. "There was one outfit ran evenings. Didn't like the daytime dock fees, I expect, or didn't like company. Came in quiet, went out quiet. I remember because my wife complained about the engine noise on a Monday night in August — woke the baby. I told her it was commerce and to go back to sleep." He grinned, then the grin faded as he looked at her face. "Why?"
"Just settling my mind," Ellen said. She asked to see the sailing notices for July and August, and Harlan shrugged and handed her the clipboard, and she copied down what was there — precious little, as he had warned her: most of the evening barges had filed nothing at all. But two had. Two sailing notices, for July 31 and August 28, listed a barge named the Northern Venture, master listed as J. Okafor, cargo listed as "canned goods," destination Seattle. The dates matched two of Dutch's dates exactly.
Her hands were steady when she copied them. They shook later, on the walk home.
The dockworker was easier. His name was Ray Pruitt, twenty-three, and he loaded barges for the summer money and talked the way young men talk when a woman asks them about their work and actually listens. Ellen found him mending a net on the dock in the thin afternoon sun and asked him about the evening barges.
"Oh, those," Ray said. "Yeah, I worked two of them. Good pay — time and a half, cash, foreman's orders." He glanced around, though there was no one to overhear. "Weird ones, though. Sealed cans, pallets of them, shrink-wrapped. And the mate stood over the manifest the whole time and took it with him when we cast off. I never saw a copy go to the office."
"Do you remember when?"
"Late July once, and then near the end of August. Mondays, I think. Mondays, yeah, because I missed my bowling league." He laughed. "You want to know something funny? The cans weren't even labeled Northlight. They were plain. No cannery mark at all."
Ellen felt the dock move slightly under her feet, though it didn't. Plain cans. Cans that could have come from anywhere, going to Seattle on a barge whose manifest never reached any office in Kestrel Bay.
Bea Callahan was harder, because Bea still worked in the scale house and Bea was frightened. Ellen waited until Saturday, when Bea came to the house with a jar of jam and an excuse about borrowing a pie pan, and they sat at the kitchen table with the notebooks pushed aside and talked about everything except the reason for the visit until Peter went out to play. Then Bea put her hands in her lap and said, very quietly, "I have something for you. But you didn't get it from me."
From her coat pocket she took a folded fish ticket, the carbon thin and smudged. "I found it stuck behind the drawer in the scale house desk. Last week. I think it fell back there in August and nobody missed it."
Ellen unfolded it. F/V Sea Wren, August 2. Her own handwriting: 5,905 pounds, initialed by her and Bea, signed by Mikkelson. And beside it, in Venn's round ink, the correction: 5,200. The ticket they had settled on. The ticket Anna had been short-paid on.
"This is the original?" Ellen whispered.
"It's the fisherman's copy. The one that was supposed to go to Anna." Bea's eyes were bright. "The office copy — the one in the files — it only has his number. Somebody took a fresh ticket and wrote it over. If you hadn't kept your carbons, Ellen, there'd be nothing left with your number on it at all."
Ellen held the ticket as carefully as she would hold something alive. "Bea, why are you giving me this?"