Chapter 6

The christening was at four, in the little stone chapel at the point, with the doors open and the harbor behind the altar.

Nora stood in the back row in her foul-weather jacket, because nobody had told her not to come to a christening, and because Bitsy could not throw a suspended employee out of a church in front of a state auditor without explaining why. The baby was four months old and his name was Hollis Fairweather Coyle, and he slept through the water and woke up when the congregation said amen.

The reception began at a quarter past four in the ballroom. Mahogany, brass, white linen, roses on every table, the harbor in the tall windows. Delphine stood behind the bar with the tray in front of her: thirty flutes of champagne, and in the middle, on a white napkin, the silver cup.

Alma Reyes stood near the ballroom doors with her folder under her arm and her glasses on. She had not been invited to the toast. She had been invited to stay for it, which is different.

At 4:35, Bitsy raised her glass.

"To honesty," she said. "To family. And to the foundation that carries my mother's name - and will carry it the way she did."

Applause. Somebody laughed at the far end of the bar.

"Petey." Bitsy beckoned, and Petey Marsh came up red-faced in his new polo shirt, and she put the harbor keys into his hand in front of a hundred and ten people, and the room applauded again, harder, because everyone likes a promotion.

Delphine's voice cut through it.

"The cup says 2019."

The applause thinned unevenly, like water going out of a basin. Bitsy's smile held.

Delphine lifted the cup off the napkin and turned it upside down, and tilted the base into the light of the pendant over the mahogany.

The room leaned in. The machine etching was not small and it was not faint. It had been cut by a laser into a surface flat as glass, and it read, in a hard clean line: FOUNDATION REPLICA - 2019. Below it, a modern maker's mark, three letters and a shape. Below that, a serial number.

"FW-19-0114," Delphine said. "It's right here. It says FW-19-0114."

Nobody drank. Bitsy's glass stayed exactly where it was, at the top of her raised arm, and her eyes went to the cup and stayed there.

Nora came off the wall by the windows and set a folded paper on the bar beside the upside-down cup, serial facing the room.

"Purchase order 2019-114," she said. "Fairweather Sailing Foundation. One christening cup, silver plate over pewter. One hundred and forty dollars. Shipped to a post office box on Thames Street."

The room was very quiet. Alma Reyes walked forward and set her folder on the mahogany and looked at the paper, then at the base of the cup, then at Bitsy.

"Mrs. Coyle," she said. "I'll need the foundation's 2019 purchase ledger."

Bitsy laughed. It was a small, bright, terrible sound. "She's staff," she said. "She's the deckhand who couldn't read a ledger. Ask anyone in this room."

"I read ledgers for eleven years before I took this job," Nora said. "Ask the state."

She reached into her canvas bag and put the oilcloth log on the bar, and opened it to a page she had kept for two years. The heading, in her own pencil, said TRUSTEE EXHIBITS.

"I've been the trustee of Mrs. Fairweather's foundation since October, under paragraph seven of her trust," she said. "The foundation's records are mine to produce, and I've been producing them since July, to the state, quietly. The cup was ordered on a foundation card and shipped to a box that isn't the foundation's. The rental ledger shows where the boats went and who paid, and it doesn't match the disbursements. I have the instrument, the certificate, and the order confirmation."

She laid the printed confirmation next to the carbon. The serials sat side by side, identical.

"I've been waiting two years for an auditor and a purchase order and that cup to be in the same room," she said. "You gave me the room at nine o'clock this morning. Thank you."

"It's all here," she added, to Alma Reyes, and turned the log around so the auditor could read it.

Alma Reyes opened her folder, uncapped a pen, and asked her first question.

"Mrs. Coyle - who signed the foundation's 2019 purchase orders?"

At the end of the bar, a heavy man in a linen jacket, holding a plate of shrimp he had forgotten about, cleared his throat.

"I did," said Hollis Fairweather.