"Good. I'd like you to come over to the office before the hearing. Some matters have come to our attention since your statement, regarding the condition of the vessel. I want to be straight with you, Mr. Whitfield. I think you know a good deal more than you told me. I understand why a man might not want to say it. But the Board is going to ask you, in front of the family, under oath. It would be better for everybody if we talked first."
Duncan looked at the wall. Someone had written a phone number on the paint in grease pencil years ago, and someone else had tried to scrub it off, and it was still there, faint, a seven and a four and a two.
"I'll think about it," he said.
"I'd do more than think about it. Monday? Ten o'clock?"
"I work Monday."
"Then Tuesday. Or I can come to you." A pause. "Your father testified before a Marine Board in this district, I'm told. The Corvallis Trader. I read the transcript when I came out here. They use it in training at New London. I'm not raising it to pressure you. I'm only saying you're not the first Whitfield to sit in that chair."
Duncan hung up. He didn't say goodbye. He just put the receiver back on the hook and stood with his hand on it and felt the room behind him go quiet.
When he turned around Sig Aasen was looking at him.
He had put down his spoon. He was sitting very straight on the window stool, straighter than Duncan had ever seen him sit, with both his big ruined hands flat on the counter on either side of the soup bowl, and his face had gone a color Duncan had not seen on it before, the red gone out of it, gray underneath, like a deck after the paint has been sanded off.
"Whitfield," Sig said.
Duncan didn't say anything.