Chapter 8 #2
The Rusty Anchor, May nineteenth. A man who bought two rounds and knew the name of Pop's sister's town in Florida.
Thirty-one thousand dollars in two payments.
An external drive handed over in the parking lot of a Winn-Dixie on June fourth, and four hundred and eleven dollars of diesel on a fuel card the same day, because they'd told him to fill the boat so it'd look like a work day.
And a name. He had a name.
He'd written it on the back of a fuel receipt, because that's where important things live in my family, and he'd kept it in a coffee can on his boat for five months because some part of a seventy-year-old man had known from the start that he was going to have to hand it to somebody eventually.
Judge Ferrer read the receipt.
Then she read it again.
"Mr. Halloway," she said. "Is this individual an employee of your client?"
Halloway said, "Your Honor, I'd like a recess."
"I bet you would," said Judge Ferrer.
During the recess I went out into the corridor and stood by a water fountain and shook for about ninety seconds, which is my whole quota of drama for the year.
Torren came out and stood next to me and didn't say anything, which by that point I'd learned to read as a full conversation.
"He said my name," I said.
"Who?"
"Pop. On the stand. He said 'the only person who'd have cared what people thought of me is sitting right there.'" I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. "He's been on that bucket since I was four."
"I know."
"He's going to die and I'm going to spend the rest of my life not knowing which thing he was."
"He was both," Torren said.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one there is." He handed me a paper cup of water I hadn't seen him get. "Silas was funny and he was reckless. He was both. Your father gave away money that wasn't his to give and he was the best man on this island. Both."
"That's exhausting."
"It's the whole job," he said.
Junho came out then with his collar undone, looking like a man who'd been through something.
"Is it over?"
"It's a recess."
"How long's a recess?"
"As long as it takes Peter Halloway to call somebody in a car," I said.
It took nineteen minutes. He came back with a different face on and asked for a continuance, and Judge Ferrer gave him one, and then asked, in a tone I will be thinking about on my deathbed, whether counsel intended to make any amendment to their filings before the court reconvened.
It took eleven more days for the ruling, so I'm compressing.
Meridian Deep's claim was dismissed with prejudice.
The court found their filing was predicated on misappropriated survey product and materially misdescribed the character of the site.
Kwon Salvage was confirmed as sole salvor-in-possession, with the Iron Compass's Compass Salvage & Recovery as co-claimant of record.
The padrón secreto — one hundred and forty-one charts and a copper case containing eleven documents — went to a joint academic consortium: two universities, one Spanish archive, one Philippine institute, on a conservation and publication agreement that took four months to write and that I do not understand a word of past page nine.
The salvage award was set against the archive's assessed historical value, paid out of a consortium fund, and it was not forty million dollars.
It was six hundred and twelve thousand.
Which cleared forty-one thousand of debt, paid a hospice, refitted a hull, replaced a compressor that predated me, and left enough to buy a second boat that Torren Vale still had not named.
And my name is on the find. Kwon, N., first author, on the site report, ahead of four professors.
Pop asked me to read that page out loud to him twice.
The second time he made me stop at the author line and read just that part again, and then he sat back on the bucket with his eyes shut and said, "Say it like it's on a sign."
"Pop."
"Say it like it's on a sign, girl."
"Kwon, N."
"Again."
"Kwon, N."
"Your daddy," he said, "couldn't have got that on a sign in nine lifetimes," and then he didn't say anything else for about ten minutes, and neither did I, and Junho very quietly went and got three beers and put them down without a word, which is the single most adult thing my cousin has ever done.
The other line item nobody warned me about: a six-hundred-thousand-dollar award arrives as a wire from a consortium fund with a reference number and no ceremony whatsoever. I found out we were solvent from a banking app while standing in line at a Winn-Dixie.
I bought a lime.
I want that on the record. I bought one lime, deliberately, at eleven in the morning, and stood in the parking lot and looked at it.
The other thing that happened, which mattered more than any of it, happened in the parking lot after the hearing.
I came out into that white eight o'clock heat with my father's shoes in my hand because I couldn't take another minute of them, and Danny Wexler was standing by a rental car with his tie off, looking like a man who'd just set his own house on fire and was watching it go.
Torren walked over. I followed at a distance because I am nosy and unrepentant.
"You're fired," Torren said.
"Yeah."
"Blacklisted, probably. Every commercial outfit on this coast."
"Probably." Wexler laughed with no sound in it. "That was a real career I had this morning."
"Uh huh."
"Any advice?"
Torren looked at him.
"Where'd you get the survey data," he said.
"I didn't. It came down to me in a project folder. It's always a project folder." Wexler rubbed his face. "That's the thing nobody gets. I never met anybody sinister. I got a folder and a schedule and a budget and a guy in the back of a room who left at lunch."
"You know what's in the other folders?"
Wexler went very still.
"Some of them," he said.
And Torren pulled out his phone, and called a number in Arizona, and said seven words into it:
"Cade. It's me. Put Ines back on."
Six weeks later, a nervous archivist named Danny Wexler had a lawyer, immunity paperwork, and an office job at a salvage company in Cerro Vista, Arizona, cataloguing every project folder he'd ever touched.
Junho's summary, delivered on the dock with a beer: "So the bad guy works for us now."
"He wasn't a bad guy. He was a guy with a folder."
"That's how they get you," Junho said darkly. "Folders."
"Junho, you've never opened a folder in your life."
"And look how I turned out."
He was, at that time, dating a woman named Priya who did aerial silks and had described his boat as "quaint," which is the single most violent thing anyone has ever said about the Halcyon, and which I have not let him forget for one day since.