The Merman Who Wouldn't Sing, The Tears He Saved For Me novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: Dead Stock

"Stole," I said.

I said it loud enough for the back row of tables to hear.

Two hundred heads turned.

Garrick put a hand on his chest.

"Marnie, honey, I'm not saying you meant to. You came to my yard, I was busy, the lot numbers got crossed. Thirty-one was reserved for a buyer. You took him on a mix-up and now you won't give him back, even when I offered you eight hundred, and then a thousand. I'm trying to help you."

"You offered me a thousand dollars to give back what I paid four hundred for."

"A kindness."

"At midnight, and again at six in the morning. At my gate."

Somebody laughed in the crowd, and then somebody shushed them.

The deputy stepped up beside me with his clipboard and his bad conscience.

"Marnie, it's an unlicensed-stock complaint. If you'll just show me the permit."

"There isn't one."

"Then I'll have to write you up."

"Deputy." I pulled my fleece open and took out a folded sheet of paper. "I keep every receipt. Ask anyone. Read the top of this out loud."

I held it out.

He took it.

He didn't want to read it, and I watched him not want to.

"Bill of sale," he said. "Moss Tide Yard. Lot thirty-one."

"Keep going."

"Sold as is. No returns." He stopped. "Dead stock."

"Louder."

"Dead stock."

The crowd murmured.

"What does that mean, Aggie?" I said, and turned, because she had come up the dock behind me with her braid undone and her chin out.

"It means the yard wrote him off as dead," Aggie said, in her carrying shop voice. "Under the Tidewater Act, dead stock is not stock. It's salvage. A seller who signs a bill of sale for dead stock gives up every claim to it. He can't take it back, he can't say it was stolen, and nobody needs a license to keep it, because on paper it isn't alive."

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