The Officer Took My Skiff While Our Volunteers Held Wet Ropes

Harlan Keene waited until twelve volunteers could hear him before he called me a cheat.

"Nobody touch another basket," he said. "This whole operation is outside its permit."

I stood ankle deep at our landing in Apalachicola, holding a rope that smelled of bay mud. Behind me, our little skiff knocked against a tire hung from the dock.

I was Corinne Voss, a forty-year-old white woman with pale freckles, broad shoulders, and brown hair cut blunt at my chin.

My job was oyster-restoration field coordinator for the Bay Lantern Cooperative. I counted shell, trained volunteers, checked water, and spent more time cleaning tools than using them.

Keene looked past me toward the clean shirts.

Harlan Keene was a fifty-seven-year-old white man with a square red face, close gray hair, and a stiff back that made his tan uniform look pressed onto him.

"Who is responsible here?"

"I am."

His eyes went down to my boots.

We had placed eighteen small test baskets inside Plot C that morning. Each held clean oyster shell for young oysters to settle on. Nothing had gone into the protected channel beside it. Our permit allowed those baskets, those stations, and that week.

"I can show you the station sheets," I said.

"My location report shows where you were."

He lifted a clipboard as though it settled the tide.

I put my free hand in my pocket. My thumb found the smooth empty shell I carried before hard meetings. My mother had picked it from this landing years ago. Its edge had worn soft enough to press without cutting.

"Please record that I offered the sheets."

"Please step away from the vessel."

He said vessel like I had stolen a ship.

The skiff had cost me $18,400, bought used with money left after my mother's house sale. The cooperative paid fuel and repairs. I kept the title in a blue box with our waterfront deed and the county tax bill for $1,846.

People called this the cooperative landing. I let them. The name on the deed rarely helped anyone carry a basket.

Bennett Salazar came down the dock with the last cooler. He was a thirty-four-year-old Cuban American man and our volunteer cartographer. He usually asked odd, cheerful questions, like whether pelicans thought docks were built for them.

"Are we getting a parking ticket for a boat?" he asked.

Nobody laughed.

Keene handed me a notice. Unauthorized placement in a protected channel. Proposed penalty: $12,600. Evidence seizure: one skiff, motor, survey unit, and attached equipment.

"The survey unit stays switched off," I said. "Its files need to be preserved."

"Don't instruct me in evidence."

Two men from his contracted tow yard stepped aboard. One dragged our wet rope across the bench where we had written basket numbers in pencil.

June Bell, a retired school secretary who volunteered with us, held up her clipboard.

"I witnessed every station," she said. "I signed."

"Ma'am, volunteers aren't licensed surveyors."

"I'm licensed to know what I signed."

I almost smiled. Then the tow man lifted my spare fuel tank.

"Inventory that too," I said.

Keene blew air through his nose.

"If you cooperate, this may go easier. Contesting a location finding can cost more than a boat is worth."

Across the river, sunlight flashed on metal roofs. A shrimp boat eased past with gulls riding its wake. Our volunteers stood still in life jackets, watching my working life leave on a tow rope.

I took the duplicate notice. Under my signature I wrote: Received only. Facts disputed. Records offered and refused.

Keene stared at the words.

"You think writing on a form changes what happened?"

"I think it records what happened."

He turned away.

After the trucks left, one volunteer asked whether she might lose her teaching job. Another asked if the bay water had been harmed.

"We followed our permit," I told them. "Keep your notes. Don't fill in anything from memory. Date anything you add."

June put the station sheets in a clean zipper bag. Our sample custody forms were already separate. She had watched each sample get sealed, signed every transfer, and driven the cooler to an independent lab herself.

Keene had taken the boat. He had not taken those records.

Bennett stayed while the others left. I opened the permit copy on the bait table and laid Keene's exhibit beside it.

His playful face went still.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

He put one finger on the map's north arrow and another on a creek mouth.

"Maybe the print scale," he said. "Let me check before I say more."

My phone buzzed with a message from the tow yard. Storage would run $85 a day, beginning immediately.

Under that was a second message, an image of a notice already taped to my skiff.

It listed a proposed auction date: May 24.