Chapter 14 of 20Find the Judge

Evelyn Sterling had a page of paper that no court had sealed, and it was the only thing she could put in front of the woman who had asked her for exactly that. If Agnes Poole refused it, the Port Clement Maritime Museum's land would go to a developer for $2.4 million, and Evie's probationary contract would go with the deed.

She stood on the porch of the last tidy bungalow on Ridge Street with a folder under her arm, and inside were a photocopy of a page from the log of the S.S. Ironwood, dated November 28, 1924, and a signed statement from Mateo Flores about the lighthouse keeper's family. Nobody in Port Clement would take a boatyard man's word over a Shaw's, and both women knew it.

The storm door opened wide enough for a face.

"You're early," Agnes said. She wore a gray cardigan with wooden buttons, her glasses hung on a chain, and she looked at the folder before she looked at Evie.

Evie held it up. "I didn't want to give you time to change your mind."

"I don't change my mind." Agnes held the door with her hip and glanced past her at the street. "Well. You brought paper."

"I brought paper."

"Then come in before the lake comes down on us."

Inside, the house smelled of coffee and wool. Boxes sat on the shelves above, labeled in Agnes's square hand. She cleared a stack of plat maps off the kitchen table, set out two mugs, and poured from a percolator that had been on the counter since breakfast.

Evie set a foil packet beside the mug. "Pasties. From the Super One out on the highway. They put rutabaga in them."

Agnes lifted the foil and looked underneath. "They do."

"Now," she said, sitting. "Show me."

Evie laid the photocopy on the table. It was a printed form ruled into columns for wind and bearing and a wide column for remarks, and in that column, in the Ironwood's hand, was a line: Whitefish Rose steering a drunken course.

Agnes read it without touching it, her glasses pulled down on the chain, her mouth moving over the final words before she set the page back on the table.

"When did this come in?"

"In a box nobody had time to catalog. My intern found it while she was digitizing the logs."

"Your intern." Agnes sat back. "And the original page?"

"In the map case with the rest of them. I photographed it. I didn't carry it out of the building."

Agnes tapped the paper with her knuckle. "That's a description of how a ship steers. It is not a description of a captain."

"I know that."

"Good. Then say the useful thing. What does it prove?"

"It proves she was under way and out of control before the gale came on, and it matches the diary, where the captain turned her into the trough. This is a stranger on another ship, on the same night, describing the same thing."

"Or a stranger who was crowding her in a snow squall and wanted a reason written down."

Evie had not thought of that, and she said so.

"Look at it the other way," Agnes said. "If the man was lying, he picked an odd lie. He put his own ship within sight of a drowning one and signed his name under it."

Evie drew out Mateo's statement. Agnes read it slowly, all the way down to the signature.

"Who wrote this out?"

"I did. He talked, I wrote, he signed it. His grandmother worked in the fish house. She told him the Petersons were run out of town after the inquiry, and he'll say that out loud in front of anybody."

"Will he say it in front of a judge?"

"When the time comes, he'll say it standing up."

Agnes sat with that, then pushed her mug aside.

Evie laid the index card beside the log page. It said SEALED and nothing else.

Agnes looked at both pieces of paper for a while.

"You kept it."

"You told me to come back with something a court couldn't seal."

"So I did." Agnes folded her hands on the table. "There's a thing about that file I never told you, because it was no use to anybody. The petition was filed before the transcript was typed."

Evie waited.

"Somebody knew what the testimony would say before it was written down. That card has sat in my desk a long while, and I have never been able to make it mean anything." Agnes looked up. "You did."

She pushed back from the table. "All right. I'll say it once, and then we'll be practical about it, because I am seventy-eight years old and sentiment doesn't write letters. An injustice was done in this town, and it was done to a man named Eino Koskinen."

"Once is enough."

"No, it isn't. But it's a start."

"Now. Practical." She pulled her chair in again. "I don't want the petition. A petition is a piece of paper with a lawyer's name on it. Every order of the circuit court goes into an order book, and at the bottom of every order is the signature of the judge who made it. That name cannot be argued with."

"Where is the order book?"

"In the old vault under the courthouse, and they'll bring it up if you ask in writing and pay for the copies. A dollar a page, the last time I asked."

"Then that's where we start."

"The judge," Agnes said. "That's the soft spot, and in all these years it has never been pressed."

Evie called Leo, with Agnes listening and pretending not to.

"Mr. Koskinen. This is Evelyn Sterling."

"Mm."

"I have paper."

She heard him breathe on the other end, a long pull of air, and then nothing.

"What kind."

"A ship's log. Another vessel saw the Rose the night she went down and wrote down what she was doing."

"Read it to me."

Agnes had stopped pretending and stood at the counter with her arms folded, watching Evie's face and not the paper.

Evie read the line off the photocopy. "Whitefish Rose steering a drunken course."

"That's about the ship," he said.

"It is."

"Doesn't say why."

Agnes's hand moved on the edge of the counter, one knuckle, then still.

"No," Evie said. "It doesn't say why."

"His palms," Leo said. "You remember what I told you about his palms."

"I remember."

Evie looked at the index card where it lay beside the log page, at the one word on it, and at the ring the mug had left on the table.

"Keep going. Bring it out here when you can put it in front of somebody that counts."

"Soon."

She hung up. Agnes looked at her over the top of her glasses. "He'll do."

At the door Agnes handed her a folder from the hall closet, thick and tied with string.

"That's everything I have on the sealing. Every note I made while they still let me into the courthouse. It never came to anything, but it's in order, and I don't throw things away."

"Find the judge," Agnes said. "Everything else follows from that. Order book first, then the newspaper, then the state archives in Lansing."

"And if the judge comes back clean?" Evie said, and the folder shifted under her arm.

"Then somebody told a clean judge to seal it, and that's the more interesting question."

Evie stepped onto the porch. Snow was coming off the lake in small hard flakes that wouldn't stick to the porch rail, and the folder under her arm was heavier than it looked.

"Miss Sterling."

She turned.

"Nobody in this town has ever asked who told him to seal it." Agnes stood in the doorway with her cardigan gathered at her throat. "I intend to find out."