The Tideflats King Claimed the Surveyor Who Trusts No One, and My Signature Was His Brother's Alibi novel · Chapter 21 of 24
Chapter 21: Every Hull
"Lena," my uncle said again, and his voice broke in the middle of it.
I did not answer him.
I turned the page.
"Second entry," I said.
"A tug out of Anacortes.
"Insured at one hundred and eighty thousand.
"Lost at the dock to fire in the engine room.
"Salvage to R and S Marine, six thousand.
"Surveyor of record, my uncle."
I read it the way I read a hull.
I gave each line its date and each hull its figure.
I did not raise my voice.
The room had gone so quiet that I could hear the candles.
At the back, a woman's chair scraped, and a man said her name in a whisper, and she hushed him.
"A Chinook charter boat out of Neah Bay," I said.
"Insured at two hundred and ninety thousand.
"Lost at the mooring to fire.
"Two men aboard.
"My mother has written beside it, dead, and underlined it twice."
A sound went through the hall.
It was low and hard, a sound I had heard once on a dock, from a crowd of people who had just been told which boat.
"That was my brother's boat," a man said, from the third table.
"The Neah Bay charter.
"They said it was the stove."
"I know," said an old woman beside him.
"Sit down."
"It was the stove," the man said.
"They said."
"Uncle Teuvo wrote it up as an accident," I said.
"Here, in his own hand, on the line below.
"Cause, galley stove.
"No accelerant detected."
I looked up.
"The surveyor of record is a man who quit the trade four years later.
"He drank himself to death in Aberdeen.
"His widow is in this hall tonight.
"She is at table six."
At table six a gray-haired woman in a black coat put her hand over her face.
I read on.
I read twenty-one boats.
I read the halibut schooner out of Ilwaco and the seiner out of Bellingham and the trawler that sank in Hood Canal in a flat calm.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of The Tideflats King Claimed the Surveyor Who Trusts No One, and My Signature Was His Brother's Alibi are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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