“Here,” Edwin said, sliding a ledger toward her. His finger pointed to a line written in a cramped, shaky hand that didn’t look like his own. “That’s Miller’s hand. He ran the skid-road tally back in November before he went down with the lung-rot. Look at the numbers for the number four raft.”
Clara leaned over the table, her shoulder nearly brushing his sleeve. The close, clean smell of mutton soap and laundry starch cut through the resinous odor of his coat. “Four hundred and twelve logs,” she read aloud, tracing the line with her pencil. “But the delivery manifest at the mill slip says three hundred and ninety.”
“Twenty-two logs short,” Edwin said. “Now look at the date. November fourteenth. That was the night the boom-chain snapped off Sandy Point. Murphy’s men towed the stray logs into their own pocket-boom before my crew could get a tug out. They didn’t log them as salvage; they logged them as new-cut timber from their own claim up-river.”
Clara looked up from the page, her brows drawing together. “If that’s true, then Murphy didn’t just miscalculate the tax—he’s been double-dipping on the territorial bounty for salvaged drift.”
“He has,” Edwin said quietly. “And if you take that inquest of yours to the registrar without those twenty-two logs accounted for, Murphy will produce a clean bill of sale signed by Miller before he died. Miller was coughing blood half the winter; he’d have signed his own name to a death warrant if someone put a bottle of whiskey in front of him.”
Clara sat back, her pencil rolling across the oilcloth. The realization didn’t make her angry in the way she usually got when confronted with male stubbornness; it made her feel cold. The town was small, the mill was the only thing standing between her sister’s boardinghouse and the poor-farm, and Registrar Murphy had three cousins on the county commissioner’s board.
“You knew about this before today,” she said, her voice dropping into that flat, dangerous quiet.
Edwin didn’t look away. His gray eyes met hers with an uncomfortably level weight. “I knew Murphy was crooked. I didn’t have the paper proof. You have the paper proof because you went through three years of old dock-master receipts that nobody else bothered to look at because they thought women only care about butter prices and linen counts.”
“That is a remarkably stupid assumption for a man who claims to understand timber,” Clara said, though there was no real heat in it.
“It’s an assumption I’m trying very hard to unlearn,” Edwin said. He shifted his weight, his large frame making the old pine bench creak. For a moment, neither of them spoke. The rain hissed against the tin stovepipe outside, and from the front room came the faint, rhythmic ticking of the grandmother clock that had survived the trip around the Horn in seventy-six.
Edwin reached down beside his chair and picked up a small, smooth piece of cedar he had been turning in his palm—a wedge he had planed down until it was as thin as a visiting card. Without looking at her, he laid it beside her inkwell.
“What’s this for?” she asked.
“To wedge under that left leg of the table,” he said. “It’s been rocking every time you bear down on the ‘seven’ columns. Drives me crazy.”
Clara looked at the little wooden wedge. It was precisely tapered, clean-grained, and smelled of fresh-cut heartwood. It was the kind of small, uselessly thoughtful thing her father used to do before he lost his shop in the panic of seventy-three—not a grand rescue, not a speech about justice, just a bit of dry wood put where it would stop the rattling.
Her hand, when she reached out to test the table’s balance, brushed his knuckles. He didn’t pull back, but his skin was hot—not with the fever of illness, but with the steady, heavy heat of a man who worked ten hours a day beside an iron boiler.
“Edwin,” she said softly, using his Christian name for the first time without the formal prefix she usually deployed like a picket fence.
“Yeah?”
“If we take these November tallies to the district meeting on Tuesday, Murphy isn’t going to just pay the back taxes. He’s going to make sure you lose your millwright’s ticket.”
“Let him,” Edwin said, his jaw tightening. “The saw’s been screaming too loud anyway. I’ve been thinking about taking a crew up into the foothills—building a small water-powered frame near the Skagit. Where a man can cut timber without having to grease the registrar’s palm every time a log floats downstream.”
Clara stared at him, her heart giving a strange, uncomfortable lurch that had nothing to do with ledgers or taxes. “The Skagit is fifty miles of vertical rock and black water,” she said. “There’s no boardinghouse. There’s no church. There’s just mud and hemlock.”
“There’s room to breathe,” he said. And then, with a clumsy, halting honesty that made him look suddenly younger than his thirty-eight years, he added: “And I shouldn’t think the arithmetic would be nearly so crowded either.”
He didn’t touch her again. He stood up, picked up his oilskin-wrapped books, and looked down at her with a look that wasn’t a demand and wasn’t a plea—it was simply an open door, left unlatched against the rain.
“I’ll be at the mill by five,” he said. “If you decide to bring those tallies to the commissioner’s office on Monday, leave them with the cookhouse girl. I’ll come get them.”
He walked out into the wet evening, leaving the little cedar wedge beside her inkwell. Clara sat alone in the quiet kitchen for a long time, listening to the child breathing evenly behind the flour bin and the steady, endless drum of the Washington rain upon the cedar shakes.
The Monday morning mist off the Sound was thick enough to taste of salt and creosote. By eight o’clock, the mud in front of the territorial land office was the consistency of warm porridge, and Clara Bennett’s left boot had already lost its second lace to the suction of a sunken hemlock root.
She did not care. She carried the November tally-books wrapped in an oiled flour sack tucked tight against her ribs, and her shawl was pinned so hard across her chest that she could barely draw a full breath—which suited her temperament well enough, since she had no intention of sounding winded when she informed Registrar Murphy that his arithmetic was a public nuisance.
Edwin was already standing by the hitching post outside the office, holding the halter of a bay mare that looked as though it had spent the night standing in a swamp. He wore his heavy wool coat with the buttons done up to the throat, and his breath plumed white in the cold air.
“You’re late,” he said, not unkindly, as she reached the bottom step.
“I had to settle with the baker before he gave the bread away to the dogs,” Clara retorted, planting her boot firmly on the dry cedar planking of the porch. “And unlike some people, I prefer my ledgers not to smell of stale chewing tobacco.”
Edwin gave a short, dry bark of laughter—not the professional roar he used to cow the mill hands, but a real one that crinkled the corners of his gray eyes. “Tobacco keeps the damp out of the pockets. If you spent ten hours beside the carriage-saw, you’d understand the need for a preservative.”
Before Clara could suggest that a mustard plaster would serve him better, the door of the land office swung open. Registrar Murphy stood in the aperture, flanked by two of his cousins from the county road crew. Murphy was a stout, red-faced man whose waistcoat buttons strained against a belly fed on government flour and timber-scow bribes; he smelled strongly of bay rum and cheap whiskey, even at nine in the morning.
“Miss Bennett,” Murphy said, his voice dropping into that greasy register he used for widows and new settlers. “If this is about the wharfage assessment on your sister’s property, you’ll need to bring six witnesses and fifty dollars in hard silver to cover the re-survey. The district doesn’t run a soup kitchen for strays.”