The Tideflats King Claimed the Surveyor Who Trusts No One, and My Signature Was His Brother's Alibi novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Where You Did Not Look

Lena takes her uncle's warm call and returns to the burned boat at dawn, where a stair tread of new oak does not belong.

I told him in two plain sentences.

"I swab the likeliest pour points with a field kit, and I run a sniffer across the char at low and high.

"If both come up clean in the places a pour would go, I write that no accelerant was detected."

He listened without moving.

"Where is a pour point?" he said.

"Where a man would stand."

"Where did you not look?" he said.

Nobody had ever asked me that.

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

My uncle had taught me to look, and he had taught me where, and for eight years I had looked exactly where he showed me and written down what I found.

I had never asked what was left over.

"That's a question about my method," I said finally, "and I'll answer it at the boat."

"Then go to the boat," he said.

"Tomorrow at first light.

"My man will be at the gate.

"He will not come aboard, and he will not stand behind you."

I picked up the case.

It was heavier than I remembered.

I did not know why I noticed.

My phone rang in the elevator.

I knew the ring.

I had a special one for him, a little brass bell, since I was twenty-one.

"Uncle Teuvo," I said.

Niko, by the buttons, did not look at me.

It was the kind of looking away you do on purpose.

"Lena, sweetheart," my uncle said.

His voice was warm and a little hoarse and he sounded like every Sunday dinner of my life.

"I heard from the yard.

"Somebody told me a Matkovic man was on the Sea Marija."

"He bought the note," I said.

"He wants a fresh survey."

"Ah."

There was a pause.

I heard him breathe.

"Did he say anything about the old notes, Lena?"

"What old notes?"

"The file.

"From before."

"He has the report I signed."

"Right.

"That's right."

He laughed, a short soft laugh.

"Has he seen the old notes, Lena?"

It was the second time he had asked, in the same words, and I noticed it the way I notice a seam in a hull.

"I don't know what notes you mean," I said.

"It's nothing.

"A man worries.

"You take his fee, honey.

"You do it by the book.

"Keep it professional."

He said it kindly, and the kindness did not match the words.

I stood in the steel elevator, going down through the cold, with my uncle's voice in my ear and my back flat to the wall.

"You never showed me the Westport report," I said.

I had not meant to say it.

The line went quiet.

"What's that?" he said.

"The fire report on Mama's boat.

"The Coast Guard one."

"Oh, Lena.

"We've been over it.

"It burned in the same fire."

"All of it?"

"All of it, honey," he said gently.

"The report, the file.

"The house in Aberdeen too.

"Let it lie."

"All right," I said.

"I'll call you tomorrow."

I hung up.

Niko had not moved.

The elevator opened on the loading floor, and the cold came in around our ankles, and he held the door with his shoulder and let me go out first.

I went to the dry dock at first light the next day.

It was grey and raining, and the boatyard smelled of creosote and wet cedar.

A man in a dark jacket stood at the gate with a thermos and did not come near me.

I nodded to him.

He nodded back.

The Sea Marija stood in her cradle on blocks, tall and black and ruined.

I climbed the ladder with my flashlight and walked the deck, and the wheelhouse, and then the forward companionway where the fire had started or had been said to start.

I had written it up in a motel, from my uncle's photographs.

I had never climbed down here at all.

I swabbed the stair rail and ran my sniffer over the char.

Clean.

I did it again.

Clean.

The fire had burned from the stern forward, a hot, ugly burn, the whole length of the engine room.

The forward stair should have been the last thing to go.

I put my flashlight on the lower treads.

They were blackened, but the rest was sharp.

I knelt and put my thumb against the bottom tread, and then I took my knife out of my sleeve and shaved a curl off the edge.

Under the soot the wood was pale and tight and square-cut.

New oak.

On a boat built in 1974.

I held the curl up to the light.

My hands were not steady.

I had written that this stair was original.

I had written it from a photograph.

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