Chapter 7

Hollis Fairweather was seventy-nine years old and had not read a foundation document in his life.

He said so himself, at the bar, to a state auditor, with his daughter standing beside him and a hundred and ten people listening. Bitsy put a hand on his sleeve. He shook it off, not angrily, the way you shake off a fly.

"I sign what Bitsy puts in front of me," he said. "She's run it since her mother got sick. I never looked at the numbers. I wouldn't know what I was looking at."

"Then you signed the disbursements," Alma Reyes said. She turned a page in her folder so he could see it. "Six years of payments to Coyle Marine Services for storage and maintenance. Two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars out of the junior-sailing scholarship fund. Can you tell me which boats were stored?"

Hollis looked at the page for a long time. Then he looked at his daughter.

"Ward's yard doesn't store anything," he said. "Ward's yard hasn't stored anything since the fire."

Bitsy set her glass down on the tray, next to the upside-down cup, very carefully, as if it were full of something that could stain.

At 4:50, in the club office with the door closed, the commodore and two board members sat down with the auditor and the trustee. Nora laid out five documents. Ellis Vaughn, who had voted for her suspension that morning, read the first page and then stood up and walked to the window and stood there with his back to the room.

At 5:05, the board voted again, on a motion with no discussion. Bitsy Coyle was removed as chair of the Fairweather Sailing Foundation, effective immediately. The foundation's accounts were frozen pending the state's case. The suspension of Nora Belknap was rescinded and her boat key was returned to her by a board member who could not look at her while he did it.

Bitsy left through the service door by the kitchen. She did not take the cup. She did not take her mother's photograph, which was still sitting on the desk in the north cabinet room, and which Delphine would find there three days later and put in an envelope and mail to her without a note.

Ward Coyle was in the parking lot with his phone against his ear, arguing with a boatyard, and did not come inside.

Hollis Fairweather wrote a personal check that evening for two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars, and told the auditor he wanted the scholarships made whole by Monday, and Alma Reyes told him, kindly, that the case would proceed anyway, and that the 1890 cup - sold two years ago to a dealer in Boston for forty-six thousand dollars, a fact he learned at 5:20 in the afternoon at the age of seventy-nine - would be added to the list of assets to be recovered.

At 5:10, the christening party went ahead.

Nobody had a christening cup, so the kitchen sent up a plain silver cup, one of the club's, unengraved, dented at the rim from a hundred years of being dropped on the pantry floor. Delphine filled it at the tap. It weighed what it should have weighed.

Margo Coyle, who was twenty-nine and had spent the last four hours in a back room with a baby and a bottle and no idea what was happening in the ballroom, handed her son to the harbormaster because the baby had fallen asleep on the only person in the room who was completely calm.

Nora Belknap took him the way she took a line - one arm under, one hand behind his head, no fuss. The baby's fist closed around the rim of the plain cup and held on.

"He likes it," Margo said.

"It's real," Nora said.

The reception went on until seven. The roses were given away. The piano player, who had been hired for four hours and had played through all of it, finished with something slow and old. Delphine kept the etched replica on the bar under the pendant light with the carbon and the order confirmation beside it, and every twenty minutes somebody came up and asked to see it again.

Nora stood on the dock at 6:40 with the oilcloth log under her arm and watched the Petrel come in on the last run of the day, Petey Marsh at the wheel, slowing early, the way she had taught him. She took the bow line when he threw it. She dropped the loop over the cleat, took up the slack, and made it fast.

Behind her, the ballroom windows were yellow with light, and the harbor was going gray, and out past the breakwater the cormorants sat on the last rock with their wings half-open, drying.

She had waited two years and one month, ever since the October morning she walked into the north cabinet room as the foundation's new trustee, found the cup gone and a dust ring where it had been, and understood exactly what she was looking at and exactly what it would take to prove it: a purchase order, an auditor, and a room full of witnesses who would never believe her until they saw the bottom of the cup with their own eyes.

She had gotten all three in four hours. Then she went back to work.