Chapter 3 of 4We Have Our Own

By ten o'clock on Wednesday morning, Evelyn Sterling had ninety days on a probationary contract, a dead captain on the wall, and a diary in her tote bag that called him a drunk.

The plaque beneath the portrait in the main gallery of the Port Clement Maritime Museum was bronze, and somebody had polished it that week. It said Captain Alistair Shaw had gone down with the Whitefish Rose on November 28, 1924, standing at his post until the sea took him.

The fog had been in since Tuesday night, and the radio out of Marquette promised it would burn off by two. Through the tall windows the lake was the color of a nickel. The building had been a Coast Guard station once, and the gallery still kept the brass rail the watch standers had leaned on.

Evie read the plaque three times. Then she opened the diary across the flat of her hand and read the other version, the one written by a woman who had watched the whole night from the lighthouse three miles up the coast. The diary called the ship the Rose. The plaque called it the Whitefish Rose. She had spent an hour on Tuesday night deciding those were the same vessel, and no time at all deciding what that meant.

The entry for the twenty-eighth of November ran half a page.

Could not hold a course. Could not hold his tongue either. The captain was a sot and every man aboard knew it, and not one of them would say so to his face. Only Eino kept his head, and the sea took the rest of them.

Behind her, the portrait. Dark coat, one hand on a brass rail, jaw set, eyes on something past the frame. He had been a handsome man. The kind that gets painted.

Down the gallery, the front door opened and a family came in out of the fog.

"Morning," Evie said. "Admission's at the desk. Six for adults, three for kids."

"Do you take cards?" the father asked.

"We do now."

He paid, wiped his boots twice on the mat, and the two children went straight for the brass binnacle in the corner, spinning the dial until it clicked.

"Is there anything in here about the Whitefish Rose?" the father asked.

"Second case on the left. The ship's bell is the real one."

"Was that him?"

"That's him."

"Did he die?"

"He did."

"Cool."

They worked their way down the gallery, and Evie stood under the painting with her arms folded, listening to a boy in a Packers cap pronounce Keweenaw three ways, none of them right.

Maya arrived at ten thirty with her hair in a knot, a Mountain Dew in one hand and a paper bag under her arm.

"Okay, so," she said. "I brought pasties. My mom made too many, and you're not allowed to say no."

"I wasn't going to say no."

"Rutabaga-forward. Consider yourself warned."

The pasties were still warm through the foil. Evie ate hers standing up. Maya ate hers walking, which meant the two of them spent the meal facing opposite walls of the same room.

"So what's today?" Maya asked. "More thrilling catalog work?"

"Case three doesn't match the accession list. I want it sorted before the board notices."

"Love that for us. I'll get the scanner."

"Is that a diary?" Maya said, through a mouthful.

"Old accession notes."

"Out here?"

"Checking the labels against the catalog."

Maya took that answer the way she took most of them, at speed, and turned a slow circle with her hand out, taking in the room.

"Okay, but this gallery. It's a whole room about one guy on a boat."

"One captain on a ship."

"Right. And everything else in here is a brass thing in a case with a label my grandma could have typed." She waved the last of the pasty at the wall. "There's no story. You could put a QR code next to that plaque and people would actually read it."

"Read what?"

"Whatever's behind it."

Evie looked up at the plaque one more time. Along the bottom edge, in letters small enough that nobody standing on the floor would bother with them, it said: GIVEN BY THE SHAW FAMILY IN MEMORY OF THE CAPTAIN.

"I'll think about the QR code," she said.

"You won't."

"I might."

At noon she shut her office door and called Paula.

"Are you eating?" Paula asked.

"You open with that every time."

"Answer the question."

"I had half a pasty."

"Half a pasty. In Michigan."

"From a twenty-three-year-old who says rutabaga-forward."

Paula laughed, and Evie let her, and then said the thing she had been carrying since seven that morning.

"Paula. I found a diary."

"Whose diary?"

"The lighthouse keeper's. Nineteen twenty-four."

Evie turned her chair toward the window. The fog had lifted off the lake and left the water flat and pewter-colored.

"She wrote that the captain of the Whitefish Rose was drunk the night his ship went down."

The line went quiet long enough that Evie checked the screen.

"Say something," she said.

"Say whether you believe it."

"The paper is right for the period. The ink is iron gall, and it has browned the way iron gall browns. The hand is steady in the middle of a page and ragged at the ends of the entries, which is how a tired person writes." She stopped. "That's what I can tell you from a desk."

"That is not what I asked you."

"I know."

"Nobody in this town is going to thank you for this," Paula said.

"Probably not."

"You are two days into the job."

"Two."

"Do it anyway?"

"I'm going to catalog it," Evie said. "That is all I'm going to do."

She hung up and sat a minute with the tote bag on her knees. She had meant to lock the diary in the flat file that morning and had not. Then she went back out to the gallery to look at the plaque again, which is where she was standing, with the bag still on her shoulder, when the bell over the front door jingled at quarter past one.

The man who came in was tall and broad, with a full head of white hair and a soft gray sweater that cost more than Evie's first car. He stopped two feet inside the door and looked at the portrait.

"Can I help you?"

"Harrison Shaw." He did not turn around. "The captain there was my grandfather."

She waited. He turned, and his handshake was brief and complete.

"I'm president of the museum board," he said, "and we're here for an unscheduled inspection."

"Of what?"

"Everything."

"Your grandfather's exhibit is the best-attended thing in the building."

"We know," he said. "We paid for it."

"You might have called."

"We might have. Then you'd have tidied."

He said it pleasantly. Then he reached into the pocket of his chinos, brought out a ring of keys, and let them hang from one finger.

"We'll start with the archives. No need to fetch yours."

Evelyn Sterling said, "Right this way," and slid her hand down to the canvas bag on her shoulder.