The Wrong Suspect

By ten o'clock, everyone at Pier Fourteen believed the forger was Amos Beale.

I watched it happen from a bench in the general hall. Dorian had fished my pass out of the bucket with a napkin and carried it, dripping, to Gwen's office, and a phone photo of Amos's voucher. "Same card stock, same ribbon, no seal," I heard him say through the open door. "Homemade. Two in one morning. Somebody is selling these."

Then he pointed across the hall at the old man on the bench, and Ellis Boone crossed the floor to stand beside Amos with the wrong look on his face.

"I am seventy-four years old, son," Amos said. He had taken off his cap and held it in front of him. "I kept a quartermaster's log for twenty-two years and never wrote a false line in it."

Nobody in the general line met his gaze. I did. It cost me something.

I had two choices, and I hated both. I could walk to the boarding desk, say who I was, and end it. But the drawer would be locked, the nine wristbands would vanish into the crowd, and Dorian would be a man who had been rude to the wrong woman instead of what he really was. Or I could keep waiting, and let an old man carry the word forger to his wife's last voyage.

At 10:08 a recycling cart rolled up to my bench. Gwen had dropped the sodden folder onto it after he left. Tomasz pushed the cart, and he was not looking at me.

"Ma'am," he said, to the air. "Your trash." He lifted my ruined pass out from under a stack of paper cups and held it up to the window.

The wet card had gone almost clear. Inside it, pale and exact, stood a ship's wheel with eight spokes.

"It only shows when it's soaked," Tomasz whispered. "Dry, it looks like nothing. He never knew. Nobody at that desk knows except the people who print them."

He laid the folder in my lap under a napkin and rolled on.

An old man was being called a liar forty feet from me, and I was holding the proof that he wasn't. If I stood up with it now, I would be handing Dorian everything he needed to run.

I stayed where I was, and it was the hardest thing I did that day.