Chapter 24 of 24The Best of Us

Nora Vance had one morning left before the salvage hearing, and the ledger in her hands could save the cottage or cost her every board of it. Monday, Silas Blackwood's amended claim would come up again, and it still named her upland parcel, the ground the house stood on. She could not out-lawyer him. She could out-document him.

She had meant to take the ledger up Main Street and lay it on the glass counter of his shop. By the time the kettle boiled she had changed her mind, because one man alone in a shop would settle nothing, and three people in one room with the book between them might settle everything.

She called the shop first. Silas picked up with the marine forecast going behind him, a voice reading wind speeds out past the islands.

"It's Nora Vance."

"I know who it is."

"Can you come out to the cottage this morning?"

"The fact of the matter is, I've a shop to run."

"Run it Monday. I have something of your grandfather's to show you, and I would rather you saw it before the hearing than after."

Something slid across a counter.

"Whose handwriting?" he said.

He had guessed the shape of it already.

"Come at ten. Ben Carter will bring you."

Judith Finch answered without a greeting.

"Ms. Vance. One simply does not telephone on a Sunday morning."

"I am asking anyway."

"Am I to understand you have taken up my great-granduncle as a hobby?"

"I have taken up the truth as a hobby."

A drawer rolled shut on her end of the call.

"Ten o'clock, at the cottage on Tern Island. Ben will meet you at the Port Blossom town dock."

"And if I decline?"

"Then you will hear the short version from Silas Blackwood in front of a room full of people, and you will not care for his delivery."

"I shall wear a coat," Judith said. "That island is always cold."

Ben brought them across at ten, along with a cardboard carrier of coffee from the Dunkin' on Main and a box of wild blueberries from a farm stand out on Route 1. The fog had burned off, and a southwest wind came up the cove and carried the smell of rockweed through the open windows.

Silas came up the path in a wool cardigan despite the heat. Judith came behind him in a linen coat, stepping around the mud as though it might be contagious, and neither of them looked at the other.

Nora had cleared the workbench and laid out what had cost her a summer: the almanac with the hand-drawn map folded inside, the rusted tin, the silver dollar, the water-damaged photograph, the shipping docket off the roof, and Agnes Miller's small oilcloth diary.

"Everything on this bench came off this property," she said.

Silas leaned over it. "The tin."

"That one is yours. In a minute."

"The tin is—"

"Sit down, Mr. Blackwood."

He sat.

She took them through it as she would a structural report. Cora Jean had put a name to the signet ring in the photograph. The mark on the almanac map matched the carving under the hearthstone. The initials on the docket matched the signature on the old partnership papers. And Agnes Miller, in a private book she never meant anyone to read, had written down the crates coming ashore at night with no lanterns showing.

"This is the same diary you brought me," Judith said from the porch chair.

"Then you have invited me here to repeat yourself."

"Not quite."

Silas had both hands braced on the bench. "Get to the part about my grandfather."

Nora did not reach for the box yet. She wanted the floor framed before she put weight on it.

"The harbor ledgers show the Gannet riding low with almost nothing in her hold," she said. "The docket shows crates coming off her at the north cove. The diary says the men who carried them argued in this room. Three documents from three sources, and they cannot all be wrong in the same direction."

"A common clerical error," Judith said.

"Every one of them?"

Judith's mouth closed.

Nora lifted the iron box onto the bench. The ledger came out in both hands, its cover dark and soft as a worn glove, and she set it where the two of them could see the spine.

Silas made a sound that was not a word.

She read the marked page aloud, slowly, and let each sentence finish before she started the next one.

"Set it down plain. Jedediah Blackwood put his own money and his father's into the Gannet's refit and the cutting of the cove road, and he stands in this business as a partner, not as a hired man. If she goes on the rocks, the loss is mine to carry. He was never a fool. He was the best of us."

Nobody moved. Out on the cove a gull complained about something and quit.

Silas put his fingertips on the blank margin beside the words.

"That is Finch's own hand," he said.

"It is."

"He wrote it down himself, where anyone could read it."

"Where you could read it," Nora said.

Judith had come in from the porch and stood at the end of the bench, reading the page upside down.

"Where is the rest of it?"

"The rest of it names a place."

"And the coin."

"And the coin."

Silas straightened. "So it is real."

Ben spoke from the doorway with his coffee in his hand. "That docket came off the roof in a gale. I was on the ladder."

Nora turned the ledger to face them.

"Here is what I want. We take it out of the cove together, in daylight, with Ben on the boat and a bank officer on the beach if you like."

"And then?" Silas said.

"Then it is divided. The first share goes to you, to put your family's name back where it was. A notice in the paper. A gift to the library or the church, whatever you decide. Public, in daylight, your grandfather named as an investor."

"That is the only part of it I have ever wanted."

"I know."

Silas's hand closed over the edge of the bench.

"And the rest?"

"The rest goes to the Historical Society, anonymously. Not a plaque. Not a press release. A gift from a private donor, written in their accession book and nowhere else."

Judith's hands had gone still at her sides. "Anonymously."

"You keep your great-granduncle. The town keeps the story it has always told."

"You are offering me silence."

Judith took a step back from the bench.

"I am offering you a choice."

"The Society does not accept hush money."

"Then call it a bequest."

Silas turned his head toward her for the first time. "It is more than she deserves."

"It is what will work," Nora said.

"There will be people who will not believe a word of it."

"There will be a ledger with Finch's handwriting in it. Anyone who wants to argue can go and read."

Judith was the first to the path. She stopped where the boards ran out into grass.

"The Society's accounts are in my name, Ms. Vance. Every dollar that comes to us passes through my hands."

"I know."

"You would hand me a purse and trust me not to open it."

"I would hand you a purse and ask you not to spend it on yourself."

Judith looked at her a moment longer, then went down to the float. Silas followed without saying goodbye.

From the porch she watched them cross the cove, Judith in the stern and Silas in the bow, neither speaking to the other.

Ben came back for the coffee cups and asked the question she had been avoiding all day.

"You think they will take it?"

"Silas will," Nora said. "Judith is still working out what it costs her."

She put the ledger back in the iron box, and the box in her canvas bag, and set the bag by the door where she would walk past it Monday morning.