Chapter 2 of 4The Captain Was a Sot

The false bottom of the trunk lifted with a dry crack, and in the gap, wrapped in oilcloth, lay a book. Evelyn Sterling had ninety days to prove that the Port Clement Maritime Museum deserved to keep its doors open. She was spending the first evening of those ninety days on her knees in a storage room.

The building had been a Coast Guard station once. Cream brick, low ceilings, a brass bell by the front door that nobody had rung in years. The town of Port Clement, Michigan, had inherited the place, filled it with glass cases and mannequin sailors, and never quite decided what to do with the result.

She should have waited for morning. She had walked home to the apartment above the closed yarn shop on Main, eaten a pasty standing at the kitchen sink with the foil still warm in her fingers, and unpacked exactly one box. Then she put her jacket back on and walked the shore road to the museum with the keys cold in her pocket.

The oilcloth was stiff and clean, and it had done its job. Inside lay a book, black cloth over board, ruled in faint blue lines, the spine mended long ago with tape gone the color of amber.

No title page. Only the inside of the cover, and on it, in a small upright hand:

Elara Peterson Port Clement Light 1924

Beneath that, one line pressed deeper into the paper, as though the pen had rested there a moment too long. *If I am to keep anything, let it be this.*

She pulled on the cotton gloves.

The early entries were weather and work, and Evelyn, who had spent a career reading other people's weather and work, felt her pace slow to match the handwriting.

"March 3. Snow all night out of the northeast. I carried the oil up and trimmed the wick and sat with my back to the glass until the sky went gray. The lake talks in March. I have stopped answering."

"May 14. Wednesday. Went in for flour and salt and the mail. Mrs. Lindquist says the town is growing. The town has said that every year since I came, and it is not true yet."

"September 2. Four ore boats out tonight, their lights strung across the water like beads on a wire. I know the sound of every one of them. I can tell when a man is steering badly by the way his wake bends."

The phone rang. She answered it with the glove still on her left hand.

"Evie. Finally."

"Paula."

"I have been staring at my phone like a teenager. Tell me about the town."

"It has one traffic light and an ice cream shop."

"That is heaven. You are describing heaven."

"It has a decent harbor."

There was a pause on the line, the kind that had a question inside it.

"Evie. What are you not telling me?"

"I found a diary."

"A diary."

"In the false bottom of an old seaman's trunk. It belonged to the lighthouse keeper here. Elara Peterson, 1924."

"Nineteen twenty-four. That is not a diary, that is evidence. Are you wearing gloves?"

"I'm wearing gloves."

"Of course you are."

Evelyn turned another page while she listened. Her friend's voice came down the line from a city with an orchestra and two hospitals, and for a minute it made the storage room feel less like a storage room.

"Are you all right up there?"

"I'm fine."

"Say something that isn't fine."

"I ate a pasty standing at the sink and I regret nothing."

"That is the saddest thing I have ever heard."

"It had rutabaga in it. It was correct."

Paula laughed, then went quiet in the way that meant she had decided something.

"Somebody took a sander to that trunk," she said. "There is a person inside that book, and somebody went to real trouble to hand her down quietly."

Evelyn looked at the name on the cover. Elara Peterson, in ink, unashamed.

"Or they wanted to keep her," she said.

"Don't stay there all night."

"I won't."

"You will. Call me tomorrow."

"I will. Good night, Paula."

Her phone buzzed again at ten past nine, and the screen said Maya Singh.

"Ms. Sterling? Hi. It's Maya. I'm the intern. Doreen gave me your number, which I'm choosing to find encouraging."

"Hello, Maya."

"So, two questions. Thursday at nine, right? And do I park in the lot or on the street?"

"Thursday at nine. The lot."

"Great. Also, fair warning, my friends all say the museum is boring, and I want you to know I argued with them about it."

"I appreciate that."

"Are you there right now? It's nine o'clock."

"Something like that."

"Okay. Wow. See you Thursday."

"Good night, Maya."

At half past nine she locked the door and walked the shore road back to the square. Lake Superior lay flat and gray under a sky the color of a nickel. The fog that had sat over the harbor all afternoon had thinned to almost nothing.

The Superior Scoop was still lit. Brenda stood behind the counter in her apron, working a rag along the glass.

"Evie Sterling. Two nights in a row."

"One scoop of vanilla, please."

"One scoop. You look like a two-scoop decision."

"One."

"Three fifty."

Evelyn paid, and Brenda did not hand over the cup right away.

"So how's the big house treating you?"

"We're still getting acquainted."

"My mother used to walk us down for the Blessing of the Fleet every May. Free cocoa for the kids."

"I'll bring the cocoa back."

"Don't make promises in this town. They keep." Brenda wiped the same spot twice. "You met the board yet?"

"Not yet."

"Harrison Shaw runs it. President." She set the cup on the counter, then thought better of it and set it down again. "He's a Shaw. In Port Clement that's two separate pieces of information."

"What's the second one?"

"Ask anybody on the square and you'll get a different answer. That's how you know it's the real one."

Evelyn took the cup outside and ate it walking, and dropped the paper in the bin by the museum door.

Back at the desk, with the lamp on and the old building ticking around her, she turned forward through the book. October was short. The glass falling. The boats running late. Two more loads down from the ore docks and then the season done.

She turned the page, and there it was in the same steady hand, dated November 28.

"The glass has been falling since Tuesday, faster than I have ever seen it. Wind northeast all day and no let-up at dark. At four I lit the lamp. At half past four I picked up the Rose's running lights coming down the coast, low and close, heavy with ore.

By five the snow took the water. I could not see the lake at all. I could see her lights, and they were swinging where no boat swings.

At half past six she turned where the chart has no turning. I had the glass on her. She went broadside to the trough like a sled going down a hill, and the sea came over her rail and kept coming.

I stayed at the glass until my hands went numb. The light turned over her and turned over her. She was there, and then there was nothing where she had been, and the light went on turning over nothing, because that is what a light does.

I have set down the hour in the log. I will not set down the rest. The captain was a sot, and Eino the only sober man aboard."