Chapter 14: December First

On the first of December the line at the Trust window ran down the town pier and around the bait house.

Every family on the waterfront had come to watch the Pascoes lose.

I carried a canvas bag with fifty-two thousand, three hundred dollars in it, and I held it against my ribs.

My father walked beside me in his one good jacket, with his cap on straight.

Joslyn walked on my other side, chewing a toothpick.

Thirty-three thousand, three hundred of the money was the Ada P.'s season.

The other nineteen thousand had come under my door at the wharf the night before, in a brown envelope with nothing written on it.

I had asked Joslyn, and she had sworn on her mother she knew nothing.

I had decided it was the fleet, passing the hat.

Linwood stood behind the glass at the counter in his gold buttons, with the clerk at his elbow and a cup of tea steaming at his hand.

He had put a sign in the window.

Pascoe, W.: payoff due this day.

"Miss Pascoe," he said, warmly. "And Walter. Punctual."

"The sum, with sixteen days of penalty, is one million, one hundred and sixty-one thousand, four hundred dollars."

"I'll accept a bank draft."

I swung the canvas bag onto the counter and unzipped it.

Banded stacks slid out across the wood, green and soft.

"Here is fifty-two thousand," I said. "It's every dollar I have."

"Take it against the note and write me a receipt."

Linwood looked at the money.

"The Trust does not take installments from a debtor in acceleration."

He pushed the nearest stack back across the counter with one finger.

"Payment in full, or the wharf is in default at midnight."

Behind me, the line shifted.

A man in a yellow slicker, the same one who had stepped out of my way in November, spoke up.

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