Tuan worked for Coastwise Marina Management, LLC, which ran Halyard Point under a contract with the Halyard Point Marina Association, whose board of directors had five members and whose president, for the last three years, had been Lawson Tillery. For the last eight months, because he was the only person on staff who could type faster than he could talk, he had also been sitting in the back of the dockmaster's office on rainy afternoons scanning the old ledgers into the management company's new software, one page at a time, on a flatbed scanner that took forty seconds a page.
There were nineteen ledgers. They went back to 1953. The first eleven were in the handwriting of a white man named Ransom Sumrall, who had owned the fish house, and then his widow, and then, from 1964, in the slanting blue fountain-pen hand of a Black man named Delmas Whitsett Senior, who had kept the fish house books for the widow and then for the next owner and then, somehow, stayed on through the sale to the developers and kept the marina books until 1998, when his son took over. Delmas Whitsett Junior was the dockmaster still. He was sixty-eight years old. He had evacuated on Friday morning to his daughter's house in Meridian, Mississippi, and before he left he had stood in the office doorway in his rain jacket and said to Tuan, You're in charge of nothing. Lock it up at four and go inland. Don't be a hero. And then, after a moment, looking past Tuan toward the window and the end of C dock: Keep an eye on slot 1.
Tuan had laughed and said, Slot?
That's what it is, Delmas had said. Read the books.
Tuan had read the books. That was the problem. He had read them all spring, the way some people read old letters, because it turned out the ledgers were not just a list of who paid what. They were a history of the river. Delmas Senior had written down everything. In August 1969, after Camille, a single line across a whole page: Ozella P. rode it out. Z.P. on board all night. Fool. In a different ink, underneath: Brave fool. And on a page from April 1987, in the middle of a column of sales to strangers with addresses in Birmingham and Atlanta and Houston, the developers carving up the old fish house dock into units: Slot 1. Z. Pettaway. Deeded. Perpetual. With landing right. Not for sale at any price. Underlined twice.
He had read the Declaration of Condominium too, all ninety-four pages of it, because it had been in a box in the same closet, and he had found that the lawyers who drafted it in 1987 had used the word slot throughout instead of slip, Boat Slot Unit, Slot Owner, Slot Assessment, because Delmas Whitsett Senior had typed the first draft from his ledgers and nobody had bothered to change it. The amendment in 1988, the one with Z. Pettaway's signature and the signature of a young-ish association board member named O. Tillery as the second vote. Tuan had scanned it all and saved it in three places.
And then, on Thursday night, Claudine Pettaway had walked into the office at eight o'clock with Captain Tillery beside her in a hospital gown under a windbreaker, and the Captain had put a two-page document on the counter and said, Son, I understand you're a notary.
Tuan had read that document too. He'd read it twice. It was a Revocation of Durable Power of Attorney, typed, with the Captain's name and the date and a paragraph that said in plain words that he, Ozro Tillery, being of sound mind, revoked any and all powers of attorney previously granted by him, including but not limited to that certain Durable Power of Attorney naming his son, Lawson Tillery, as agent, executed on the fourteenth of March, three years ago. Below that, a second page: a letter, also typed, giving Claudine Pettaway permission to board, operate, and maintain the vessel Clementine, Official Number 637214, on his behalf, and to keep her in Boat Slot Unit 1.
He had known exactly what it was. He had known exactly whose name was in it. He'd asked the Captain the questions they told you to ask in the online course: Do you know what this document is? Do you know what day it is? Is anyone forcing you to sign this? And the Captain had looked at him across the counter and said, It's Thursday the eighth, it is a quarter past eight in the evening, the President is a fool, the Saints are three and one, and nobody has forced me to do anything since 1964, son, and I'll be glad to tell you about 1964 another time.
Tuan had stamped it. Then he had gone back to his boat, a 1979 Catalina 27 named Fiddler that he had bought off a dying man for two thousand dollars and lived aboard in a transient slip on D dock under a work-exchange arrangement that saved him eight hundred dollars a month and existed, as far as he could tell, entirely at the pleasure of the Coastwise regional manager, who played golf on Wednesdays with Lawson Tillery. And he had lain awake in his V-berth listening to the halyards slap and wondered what exactly he had done.
This morning he'd found out.
He had come into the office at seven to lock down the storm shutters and found a document sitting in the tray of the shared printer, which was the shared printer for the management company and the association both, because the association was too cheap to buy its own. Three pages, on Halyard Point Marina Association letterhead, unsigned, DRAFT watermarked in light gray diagonal letters behind the text.