Chapter 12 of 13Steering a Drunken Course

The $2.4 million offer for the museum's land was still unsigned, the board could vote any week Harrison Shaw chose, and the only thing standing between the deed and a signature was proof. Evelyn Sterling had promised Leo Koskinen paper a court would accept, and Thursday morning she still had none. So she gave Maya Singh the ship's logs.

"A wall of them," Maya said. She stood in the back of the Port Clement Maritime Museum's storage room with her hands on her hips, looking at the banker's boxes that filled the shelving from the floor to the pipes, every one of them labeled in a different hand. "You're telling me nobody has ever gone through these."

"Nobody has ever had the hours." Evie set the flatbed scanner on the worktable and ran the cord to the laptop the museum kept for school groups. "The Heritage Fund wants a catalog as part of the application."

"Scanning the logs is the project," she added. "And the project is the rest of my probation."

Maya set down her coffee, in a Kwik Trip cup, and pulled the nearest box toward her. KEWEENAW TUGS, the label said, in pencil gone soft with age.

"Tell me again why I'm photographing another man's grocery lists," she said, working the lid off.

"Because the fund wants a catalog, and ship's logs are the most requested thing this museum does not have."

"Requested by who?"

"Historians. Genealogists. You would be surprised."

"I would be surprised." Maya looked up over the lid. "That is how I know you are stalling."

Evie pulled a second box to the end of the table. "There is one more thing."

"Here it comes."

"I want you to flag anything that mentions the Whitefish Rose."

Maya's hands stopped on the lid. "The diary ship."

"The ore freighter. November 1924."

"You said no diary on museum time. That was your rule, not mine."

"This is not the diary. This is the museum's own shelf, and nobody has read it." Evie drew out the first ledger and laid it on the scanner glass. "Anything that mentions her, before the storm or after. I want a scan and a page number."

Maya watched her for a moment. Rain came off the lake and found the gap under the west window, and the room smelled of wet wool and the pasties Maya had brought from the co-op and eaten standing up.

"What am I looking for?" she said at last.

"Another ship that saw her."

Maya worked through the afternoon. She photographed spines and title pages and whole stretches of weather, and by the time the light went gray she had built a spreadsheet with a column for every question Evie had and a file-naming system that Evie, who had catalogued manuscripts for a living, could not find one fault in.

The knock came a little after lunch. A woman stood under the porch light with her collar turned up against the rain and asked whether the lighthouse was open.

"Not this time of year. It's automated now," Evie said.

"That's a shame. My husband proposed to me out there."

"Then come back in May. We do a blessing of the fleet, and the light draws a crowd."

The woman looked past her into the gallery for a second, at the blueprints taped to the wall beside the plaque, and then went back out into the rain.

The phone on Evie's desk rang once while she was working on the Heritage Fund application, and she answered it with the pencil still in her hand and a page of budget categories half finished.

"Ms. Sterling. Have you made progress on the fund?" Harrison Shaw spoke as he always did, patient and certain of being heard out.

"I have."

"We like specifics."

"Then you will like the draft. It is due November 1, and you will have it before then."

"Good." Behind him she could hear wind against the tall windows of his house on the bluff. "And the other business."

"There is no other business."

"I hope that is true."

He rang off, and the scanner hummed on the table and the rain kept at the window, and she sat with her hand on the receiver for a moment before she went back to the application.

"Evie." Maya's voice carried down the hall from the back room. "You want to see this."

She had the book open on the worktable under the lamp, her laptop turned so the scan came up on the screen beside it. The book was a bound ledger with a water-stained cover and a spine somebody had stitched back together with sail twine.

"Ironwood," Maya said. "Steel freighter out of Duluth. She was on the lake that same night."

"Plenty of ships were on the lake that night."

"Not many wrote it down." Maya put her finger on the page. "Read that."

Evie bent over the table. The hand was small and square, the ink gone brown, and it was steady from the first line to the last.

"Sighted steamer Whitefish Rose off the starboard bow at dusk." Maya read it slowly, giving each word its own space. "She showed a masthead light and nothing else. She was steering a drunken course, twice falling off to leeward and coming up hard against her helm."

"Go on."

"We held off and let her cross ahead of us. No signal from her bridge." Maya turned the page and turned it back again. "Then it is the storm. Ice in the rigging, a crack in a hatch. He never mentions the Rose after that."

"Because the Ironwood came home."

"Right." Maya leaned back on the stool and folded her arms. "So does it say why? Does it say the captain was a drunk?"

"No."

"Does it mention the mate? The Koskinen one?"

"No. He is not in it."

Evie pulled the ledger around to her own side of the table and went through the passage from the beginning, at the pace she reserved for any document that mattered, her finger moving under the words. A man she had never heard of, master of a ship she had never heard of, had watched the Whitefish Rose cross open water on the last afternoon of her life, and he had set down what he saw in the plainest words he had. He did not know the captain, and he did not care whose family the captain came from. He wrote that the Rose would not hold her course on a night when holding a course was the whole of the job.

"Where has this book been?" Evie said.

Maya checked the tag pasted inside the front cover. "Bottom row, behind the tugs. It came in with a truckload of donations, and nobody ever opened it."

"So what does it prove?"

Evie closed the cover and kept her hand on it. "It proves that the Rose and the Ironwood met the same weather on the same night. One of them came home with ice in her rigging and a cracked hatch. The other one went to the bottom, and the town has always said the lake did it."

"That is what Mrs. Poole asked me for. Something a court cannot seal."

"It was never sealed," Maya said. "It has been in our own back room, in a box, the whole time."

"You think it is enough for her?"

Evelyn Sterling put her hand back on the cover, where a dead man from Duluth had written down a ship that would not hold her course, and looked at the index card from the town library still taped beside the blueprints on the gallery wall. "We have one more witness," she said. "I do not know yet whether Mrs. Poole will take his word over the Shaws'."