Chapter 21
Yuri couldn’t stop himself from whistling as he let himself in the back door of the temporary library building.
Not only had McCreedy dropped off lumber for shelves first thing this morning, but the sun was shining today.
Actually shining. In the middle of winter.
It was a rare day indeed, and he planned to spend as much of it as possible outside.
If he worked quickly, he might be able to mount shelves on two walls before lunch. He reached for the toolbox in the storeroom, but a series of thuds echoed from the front.
Had McCreedy returned, thinking he would help? Hopefully so. The work would go twice as fast with an extra set of hands.
He headed through the storeroom, with its adjoining office at the back of the building, then entered the storefront.
But Angus McCreedy wasn’t the one making noise.
Rosalind stood by the shelves against the wall.
Sunlight caught the golden tones in her hair, and the light green shade of her dress made her look like spring itself had walked in early.
She moved briskly between the boxes and shelves, putting away books with a speed that bordered on careless.
A spine caught against the edge of the shelf, and she shoved it in anyway.
Another book slipped from her hands and landed on the floor.
She muttered something under her breath, crouched to pick it up, then stood and smoothed her skirt in one long, distracted motion before resuming her work.
“Good morning.”
At the sound of his voice, she jumped, then whirled toward him, a hand pressed to her chest. “Yuri, you scared me.”
He nodded toward the toolbox in his hand. “I didn’t mean to. I’m here to build shelves, which it appears we’re going to need before lunch at the rate you’re working.”
Her cheeks turned a faint shade of pink. “Am I working too fast?”
“I doubt there’s such a thing as working too fast. The sooner the books are ready, the sooner we can open. But don’t feel as though you need to spend every waking hour here. I’m certainly planning to enjoy the sunshine later.”
“The sunshine. Right.” She gave a sharp nod, then turned to start shelving the books again.
Yuri set the toolbox down and came closer. “Is something wrong? You seem . . .” He wasn’t sure quite what word to use. Nervous maybe? Flustered?
She put another book on one of the shelves. “I’ve decided to take you up on your offer.”
“My offer?”
“To help me leave Sitka.”
“You have?” He should have been happy to hear such a thing, but something in him ached at the way she said it. Her voice was flat and her eyes dull. It didn’t seem like she was asking for help so much as surrendering. “What happened to change your mind?”
Her hand moved to the pendant lying against the base of her throat.
It was large and dark and blue, a lovely necklace that matched her engagement ring, even though both items looked a bit too big and gaudy with the simple dress she was wearing.
“I can’t marry Leeland, which means I need to get away.
But I still need time to see if I can find proof of my father bribing Marshal Hibbs. ”
He took a step closer. He should probably care more about the bribes, but at the moment, he just wanted to keep her safe. “How soon can you go?”
She pressed her lips together. “A week from today? Does that work? I . . . I think I should do as you said and try to figure out the money part after I’m somewhere safe.”
He was glad to hear it, though a week felt like an unreasonably long time.
Each day she lingered increased the likelihood her father would find out what she was up to, but he’d make it work.
“I’ll make the arrangements. We’ll go to Seattle and from there take a train to Washington, DC.
” He didn’t care how badly he needed to strong-arm Alexei.
He’d make sure they had a ship available to leave that night, which would get them away from Sitka hours before anyone realized she was missing.
“Thank you,” she whispered, turning back to the books, her hand still clutching the pendant in a way that made him frown.
Had something happened last night? What wasn’t she telling him?
And what if she was in more danger now than she had been before?
She still hadn’t found anything.
Rosalind wandered into the library of her father’s mansion, her neck aching from spending the past two hours searching his study.
Normally she wouldn’t be able to search it in the evening, but both her father and Leeland, along with her uncle, had been invited to a meeting at the hotel with the owner of a shipping company from San Francisco.
Snow had started falling shortly after they’d left, and she didn’t know whether that would keep them away longer or cause them to head home earlier, or if it wouldn’t affect things one way or the other.
She still hadn’t found any record of her father bribing the Marshal—or anyone else—over the years. She knew he had a ledger of transactions somewhere, but she’d told Yuri that she would leave Sitka a week from today.
What if she didn’t find the evidence before then? Was she supposed to leave without any proof of her father’s criminal activity? How many more people would her father hurt if she couldn’t find evidence that would land him in prison?
She let the library door fall shut behind her, then leaned her weight against it and tilted her head toward the ceiling. Dear God, please help me find evidence before I leave.
But no answer seemed to come. The only thing that greeted her was the ticking of the mantle clock and the low crackle of the fire. She sighed and crossed to the table near the window where she’d left her knitting, then sat down and stared at the yarn.
There had to be proof of the bribes somewhere. It wasn’t as though her father was an honest man. If he was going to forge numbers and bribe officials and steal land from native communities, there had to be a record of it somewhere.
Dear Father, what am I missing?
She fingered the scarf she’d been working on but didn’t pick up her knitting needles.
Maybe she’d be better off sorting books for the town library. Father had said they could donate some of the older books they no longer used, but if she didn’t get things donated before she left, the books would probably never make it to the library.
At the very least, it would give her something to think about besides how big of a failure she was.
She stood and crossed to the tall bookshelf nearest the door.
Most of the titles were older. There was a smattering of everything—travelogues, religious commentaries, and even a few well-worn novels from when her mother had been her age.
She started pulling books from the top shelf, careful to check the condition before stacking a few into a pile on the floor.
She worked her way down the shelf, selecting books that might be of interest to others, but that she hadn’t read in several years and her father didn’t use for business. When she reached the lowest shelf, she crouched down, the spines of the books all but invisible in the shadows.
She pulled out a dusty copy of The Marble Faun, then flipped it open before closing it and setting it back on the shelf. Her father wouldn’t want her to give away a Hawthorne novel.
When she went to slide the book back into its slot, it wouldn’t go all the way in, almost as though something stopped it. She never would have noticed how the spine stuck out had she not been holding the book, but now that she knew how deep the shelf was, its position on the shelf seemed odd.
The book beside it seemed to stick out a bit more than necessary too, and the one beside that. Had something gotten caught behind them?
She pulled the trio of books out and felt behind them. A warped section of wall met her hand, or maybe it was careless patching from years ago.
Wait. It didn’t seem like the wall was warped at all.
It was every bit as smooth as the shelves themselves.
It was almost as though a wooden panel had been deliberately placed at the back.
She pulled on the board, wriggling it backward and forward until it gave way.
Two small leather-bound books rested flush against the wall behind it.
She pulled them out, her pulse quickening and blood rushing in her ears. The books looked similar to the ledgers in her father’s study. Had she just found what she’d been looking for?
Please, Father, help these be what I need.
She undid the clasp on the first ledger and flipped it open.
Her blood turned cold.
These were the seal-harvest totals from last summer.
The date was written clearly on the top of the page.
The trouble was, the brief summary of seals harvested didn’t match the US government quota.
Everyone knew the Alaska Commercial Company had the ability to kill two hundred thousand seals per year, a number scientists had said wouldn’t damage the population.
The number was hardly a secret. But the summary on the first page of the ledger made it look like the ACC had killed over three hundred thousand seals.
She flipped to the next page, where the number of seals killed was meticulously tallied and broken down by date, location, and kill crew.
She turned the page, and the pattern repeated.
The ledger had week after week of detailed counts, locations, and notations, often with little side marks like an asterisk beside unusually high yields, a small p to indicate pelts shipped, and in some cases, a check mark next to tallies that had clearly been adjusted downward in the public-facing reports.
There was no mistaking what she was looking at.
This wasn’t a rough estimate. It was an internal account of every seal harvested, including the ones never declared to the government.
And it meant the ACC had never paid the government bounties on over one hundred thousand seals.
How could they, when they were allowed to kill only two hundred thousand?
She flipped forward several pages, her chest tight. At the end of the ledger, a neat table compared three columns—Total Harvested, Reported Harvest, and Government Bounty Paid.
Her pulse quickened as she studied the numbers. The totals didn’t add up. The difference between what had been harvested and what had been reported was staggering. She traced the columns with her finger, doing the math in her head line by line.
The unreported kills amounted to about one hundred thousand seals.
If each pelt carried the usual bounty, then the government was owed more than two hundred thousand dollars.
And her father’s company had kept nearly that much in profits—almost one hundred and eighty thousand—by lying on their reports.
She blew out a breath. God had answered her prayers after all. This wasn’t the bribery list she’d been looking for. It was much more.
The northern fur seal was going extinct, and poaching at sea was rampant.
Yuri’s older brother Sacha had commissioned a report about how the quota for harvesting two hundred thousand seals was far too large given how quickly the population was dwindling, and newspapers had printed the report in every paper along the Pacific Coast after it had been released, sparking a debate about just how many seals should be harvested.
Her father and uncle had naturally insisted that taking two hundred thousand seals a year wasn’t harming the population, but even she had noticed a decline in the number of seals in Sitka Sound, and she’d only been here four years.
People like Freya who had lived in Sitka their whole lives couldn’t stop talking about how they never saw seals anymore.
She opened the next ledger, then swallowed as she stared down at the tally of names, dates, and monetary amounts.
Some names she recognized, like the foreman who managed the Saint George Island seal camp and the accountant who oversaw shipments out of Dutch Harbor, but most she didn’t.
Still, the pattern was clear. These were bribes labeled as either “special allowances” or “discretionary bonuses.” She opened the first ledger again and quickly saw that the payment tallies coincided with harvest spikes and false reporting periods noted in the first ledger.
Every payout was tied to someone who had the power to overlook a discrepancy, such as a local inspector, a ship captain, or a government clerk.
She flipped through page after page, watching the sums rise. Some payouts were as small as fifty dollars, but a few crept into the thousands.
Once again, she tallied the numbers in her head and calculated that the ACC had made a profit of nearly two hundred and twenty thousand dollars after all the bribery payments.
She sat back on her heels, the two ledgers heavy in her lap.
If she turned this information over to the authorities, it just might be enough to ruin the Alaska Commercial Company’s standing with the US government. It would certainly be enough evidence to land her father and uncle and anyone else who’d had a hand in running the company in prison permanently.
And she knew exactly what she needed to do with it.