Chapter 23 of 24Finch's Own Hand

The lock had given way, but Nora Vance hadn't lifted the lid. Ben Carter stood across the workbench with his coffee going cold, and neither of them spoke. Monday morning's salvage hearing would decide whether the Salt-Spray Cottage, out on Tern Island, stayed hers, and the one thing that could settle it sat inside that iron box, or it wasn't anywhere.

"Go on, then," Ben said.

Nora wiped her palms on her jeans and took the lid in both hands. It came up with a long scrape of iron on iron. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth gone the color of a dry leaf, was a small book, no longer than her hand, bound in brown calf cured hard as a shingle.

"That's a ledger," she said.

"Reckon so."

"Hand me the lamp."

He slid the lamp over and she tilted the wick to the first page. A name ran across the top in a dense, slanted hand — Alistair Josiah Finch, his book — and under the name, a place and a year. The pages after were ruled in columns with a straightedge, and the ink had not faded.

Ben pulled the second stool over and sat. "Can you make it out?"

"Standing up, I can." She turned a page, then another. "Cargo, consignee, value."

"A chandlery book."

"It pretends to be one." She ran a knuckle down the left margin, where a second set of marks ran small and upright, grouped like the entries above them. "Same hand all the way through. Not the same books."

"Are those words?"

"Those aren't words." She tapped the cargo column, then the money column. "Counting. Strokes and a cross, strokes and a cross."

Ben leaned in. He smelled of diesel and cedar and the cold water he had crossed to get to her. "How far apart are they?"

"They aren't apart. They're deliberate." She turned pages fast with her thumb, then slower. "Every run that fall is in here. Crates off the Gannet."

"Crates off a Blackwood trawler," Ben said.

"Sloop to cove, cove to wagon, wagon to the chandlery." Nora read the entry out and gave it no more weight than a structural report. "All of it written up as dry goods and salt cod, with payouts no chandlery in this state ever saw."

"Bootleg," Ben said.

"Bootleg, in his own columns, in his own hand." She opened the book wide at the middle and flattened the spine against the bench. "That's why the draft marks never matched the manifests. The town's ledgers weren't wrong. They had the wrong half of the story."

Ben stood, walked to the window, looked out at the last of the fog coming apart over Sedge Head, and came back to the bench. The southwest wind had come up while they read, and the cove had gone from gray to blue. "Is there more?"

"There's a page where he stops keeping columns." She found it, and the writing ran across the ruled lines with no straightedge, the slant the same, the pressure heavier, the ink feathered at the ends of every letter. "He writes plain here."

"Read it."

"He says the partnership is finished." Nora read it out with no more weight than a structural report. "He's drawn the account out in full, every dollar of it, and turned it into coin, because coin carries no name on it and no bank book can follow where it goes."

"Go on."

"He means to settle his affairs, sell what can be sold, and be gone from Port Blossom before the season turns."

"Again," Ben said. "The middle part."

"He drew it out in full. All of it. His own partner's money, and he wrote down that he meant to keep it." She looked up from the page.

"His own partner's money."

"That's everything the Blackwoods had. Finch took it and left them holding the debt and the talk."

Ben sat back down and wrapped both hands around his mug. Out past the float, a lobster boat's engine knocked across the bay.

"There's one more page," Nora said.

"Of course there is."

"He's put the whole of it into coin and stowed it in one place." She read the last line slowly, a word at a time. "The stone cellar under the north cove landing, north corner, beneath the flat rock he laid himself the summer they cut the cove road."

Ben set the mug down. "That's a confession."

"It's proof." She closed the cover and held the book in both hands, and the leather had gone warm from her palms. "Signed in his own hand. Dated. And it names the coin and where he put it."

"You know what it does."

"I do." Nora laid the ledger on the bench and squared it to the edge. "It gives Jedediah Blackwood his name back."

"And it takes Alistair Finch off the Historical Society's wall."

Ben considered that for a while. "Judith won't take it sitting down."

"Judith will take it however she takes it."

Her phone buzzed against the windowsill. Liam.

"Hey, just checking in." Traffic moved behind his voice. "You ready for Monday?"

"Getting there." Nora tucked the phone against her shoulder and steadied the book with one hand.

"I'm driving up tomorrow after lunch. Want me to bring anything?"

"A phone charger and a real pillow. The inn's pillows are from a previous century."

"Noted." Then, quieter: "You sound like you've been on your feet since before dawn."

"I have been. Liam — the box is open."

A truck's brakes sighed behind his voice. "What's in it?"

"A ledger. Finch's own bookkeeping, all of it, and a page about the money."

"Should I be worried?"

"Bring the pillow." She said it gently. "And drive carefully."

"Love you, Ma."

"Love you too."

She put the phone face down on the sill. The Hannaford bag still held the week's groceries, with Ben's whoopie pies from the bakery on Main sitting on top of them.

A knock came at the kitchen door, and Grace Carter let herself in with mud to her knees and a canvas tote over one shoulder.

"Your float line's chafing through," Grace said. "Put a sleeve on it before it parts and you'll be swimming for your dinghy."

"Thanks. Coffee?"

"I'm good." Grace stopped at the bench and looked down at the open book without touching it.

"That's what came out of the chimney."

"It is." Nora put both hands on the bench.

"Does it say what I think it says?"

"It says more than that."

From the window end of the room, Ben said, "It says the gold is real, and it says where."

Grace looked at the ledger a long moment. "Monday's hearing isn't about gold."

"No. It's about whether Silas Blackwood gets my upland."

"Then walk in there holding that." She shifted the tote on her shoulder. "My father has been telling me about Silas since I was a kid. That man has waited his whole life for one piece of paper."

"I know."

Grace let herself back out, and the screen door banged twice.

Ben finished his coffee, rinsed the mug, and set it upside down on the drainboard. "You didn't tell her where."

"Not my place to." Nora went to the drawer under the chart table and took out the oilcloth. "Tomorrow morning I'm taking it to the shop. Silas hears it first, from me, with the book in my hands."

Ben pulled his cap off the nail by the door. "He'll slam the door in your face."

"Then I'll stand on the sidewalk and read it through the glass."

He settled the cap on his head. "We'll see. I'll run you over at eight."

"Eight is fine."

She watched him go down the path to the float until the engine caught and the boat swung wide around the point.

Nora wrapped the ledger in its oilcloth, slid it into her canvas bag, and set the bag at the foot of the stairs where she would have to walk past it to leave. Tomorrow she would put a dead man's handwriting into his victim's grandson's hands, and nothing in Port Blossom would sit square again.