Chapter 6 of 7Sealed by Order

Evelyn Sterling needed the report from the 1924 inquiry, and the Port Clement library was the last place left to look for it. Everything hung on that. Harrison Shaw had tied her job, and the museum's future, to whether the diary in her tote bag could be proven, and a dead lighthouse keeper's notebook would not stand against a bronze plaque the Shaw family had paid for. The official record would.

She walked the half mile up from the museum into the wind off Lake Superior, past the dark pasty shop and the Kwik Trip, where a man in ore-dock coveralls filled a thermos at the coffee island. The library was low gray stone from the Carnegie years, and the reading room smelled of dust and radiator heat. A hand-lettered sign on the desk said LOCAL HISTORY — ASK.

A teenager in a hoodie was sorting returns onto a cart. Evie asked for whoever kept the town's records.

"That'd be Mrs. Poole. She's back in the history room." He slid a stack of paperbacks into place. "Retired, but she's in every day."

"Every day?"

"She says the books get lonely." He shrugged. "Go on back."

The history room had a tall window and a wall of bound newspapers, the Port Clement Gazette in brown volumes that went back past anyone's living memory. A small, sharp woman stood at the far shelf — quick eyes, glasses on a beaded chain, a lavender cardigan over a floral dress.

"Mrs. Poole?"

"It is Mrs. Poole." She did not turn around. "Widows keep the title."

"Evelyn Sterling. I'm the new director at the maritime museum."

That brought her around. She took in the linen shirt, the good trousers, the watch, and filed it away.

"I know who you are. Doreen's replacement." She squared a volume to the shelf edge. "An archivist, they tell me."

"That's right."

"Then you already know the Whitefish Rose."

"I know the town's version," Evie said.

"Mm." Mrs. Poole set another volume home and squared it, as she had every book since Evie walked in. "The town's version is that Captain Alistair Shaw held the Rose into a November gale, put every man he could into the boats, and went down with his ship rather than leave the rest. Your museum has a bronze plaque about it. I helped choose the wording."

"You helped choose it?"

"I was the town librarian. I chose the wording of a great many things."

"I'm not here for the story," Evie said. "I'm here for the official record."

Mrs. Poole slid the last book into place. "The hearing convened at the county courthouse that winter. The findings ran in the Gazette, and they have been reprinted every time this town wanted to feel good about itself. I can recite them standing up, which I would rather not do, on account of my knees."

"I'd like the primary record. The transcript, the testimony, the exhibits. Whatever survived."

"Well, actually." She stopped, caught herself, and began again. "The transcript survived, and when the findings came in, the file went to the county."

"To the courthouse in the county seat."

"To a room under the stairs." She unhooked her glasses and put them on. "Where nobody has read it in my lifetime."

"Can I request it?"

"You may request anything you like. You'll be refused."

"Why?"

"Because the file is sealed."

Evie set her tote bag down on the long table. "Sealed."

"By order of the court." Mrs. Poole had said the words to other people and had never cared for them.

"When was the order entered?"

Mrs. Poole breathed on her glasses and wiped them on her cardigan. "Well, now. That is a better question than the ones you have been asking."

Behind the shelves the radiator knocked and settled. "You've never seen the order yourself?"

"Nobody has seen the order. That is rather the point of one."

Mrs. Poole hooked the glasses back on their chain. "A judge signs an order, and a judge signs it on a petition, which means somebody asked."

"Somebody did."

"Who?"

Mrs. Poole walked to the long table under the window. "The clerk's index is public, and I have read that entry more times than I can count: the petition came from parties with an interest in the matter, and that is the whole of it."

"Parties with an interest." Evie thought it through. "The owners wanted their ship back. The insurers wanted their money. Everyone who could have had an interest in that wreck is on the bottom of the lake or in the ground."

"Now," Mrs. Poole said, "you are asking the right question."

Evie stepped out to the vestibule, where the wind worked at the storm door, and called the county clerk's office from the number pinned to the bulletin board. A woman answered with a single word: "Records."

"I'd like to request the transcript from the Rose hearing."

"That file is restricted."

"I understand it is sealed." Evie found a pen in her tote. "What is the process for viewing a sealed file?"

"Petition the court."

"With an attorney?"

"With standing, and a judge, and more patience than most people have."

Keys clicked at the other end of the call, and then nothing at all, as if the woman had turned back to her screen.

"Who decides I have standing?" Evie asked.

"The judge."

"Which judge?"

"The one who hears the petition."

Evie sat in her car with the heater going and called Paula.

"You're calling from a parking lot," Paula said.

"The records are sealed by court order. They won't let anyone read them."

"Sealed by whom?"

"That is the part nobody will say out loud."

The heater ticked over while she waited.

"Give me a second." Paula's keyboard rattled. "Whoever did it went to a judge. People pay lawyers for that."

"Somebody paid a lawyer a very long time ago, and nobody has looked at it since."

"Then somebody wanted it that way."

She found Mrs. Poole still in the history room, working a cart of returns.

"You came back," Mrs. Poole said.

"The clerk says I would need standing, a judge, and more patience than most people have."

"That is the usual answer."

She slid a book into place. Evie watched the shelf go straight.

"So a court sealed the record of how men died, and no one in this county can read it."

"Nor can they. That is what sealed means."

"May I see the index entry?"

Mrs. Poole opened a drawer in the long table and turned a card toward Evie. The typing was faint: In the Matter of the Records of the Inquiry into the Loss of the Whitefish Rose. Below it, in another hand, a single word, SEALED.

"No judge's name," Evie said.

"The index does not carry it."

"Then the record of how a man died sits in a room under a staircase, and I cannot see who asked for it, or who signed the order."

"Nor can I, and not for lack of wanting."

Mrs. Poole drew a key on a ribbon from her cardigan pocket and unlocked the workroom. "Copies are a dime. You may keep the card. I have the index by heart."

Evie slid it into her tote bag, next to the diary.

"One more thing." Mrs. Poole hung the key back around her neck. "Sealed stays sealed until somebody with standing goes back to a judge and argues it should not be, and in all my years in this building, nobody ever has."

"If nobody ever has," Evie said, "then somebody made very sure of it. Who?"

Mrs. Poole picked up her shelf list again, unhurried.

"Bring me something a court cannot seal," she said, "and we will ask that question together."