Simone Counted The Seals While Janet Waited For My Signature

“That isn't my signature,” I said.

Janet tapped the paper with a clean red nail.

“It's the copy Vaughn sent me.”

Simone laid her notebook beside it.

“Then please leave the copy.”

“Who are you?”

Simone showed her badge. Janet's hand moved away from the page.

“I just dispatch trucks.”

“Today you delivered a document. We're being very specific.”

Janet left without her clipboard. Through the window, I watched her call someone before she reached her car.

“She could say I signed another version,” I said.

“She could say the moon signed it. We collect things we can check.”

Simone photographed the form where Janet had left it. She noted the time and asked me to describe my normal release process. I showed her the bound release book. Every real form had a number matched to a line inside.

This one had no number.

“Useful,” she said. “Not the whole answer.”

She never said the words I wanted most: We've got him.

Instead, she called a prosecutor. Then she called the archive's board chair, Ruth Vale, with me beside her.

Ruth ran a small surveying office. She sounded tired until Simone read the words emergency disposal.

“We held no vote,” Ruth said.

By evening, the board had sent a written hold on all water samples and related papers. Ruth came in person to sign the inventory. Vaughn did not answer her calls.

Simone brought an evidence technician the next morning. I stayed at the cabinet while they checked bottle numbers, seals, temperatures, and the field crew's original custody sheets.

One seal had a folded edge.

My throat tightened.

The technician compared it with the intake photo from nine months before.

Same fold. Same small bubble beneath the tape.

“That's why we take dull pictures,” Simone said.

Under the board's written consent, they packed the reserve bottles into locked coolers. Each transfer had a time, a name, and a signature. A temperature logger rode with them.

I kept certified copies of the transfer sheets. The originals went with the evidence.

The cabinet felt much larger when it was empty.

“Did I just give away my only protection?” I asked.

“You gave it a second lock.”

We walked outside. Wind dragged loose snow across the yard in long white lines.

“Now what?”

“Now we find out what the bottles can honestly tell us.”

The lab could test the water for the batch tags listed in the certificates. It could also look for chemicals linked to those tags. Simone warned that a match would not put Vaughn behind a steering wheel.

“A bottle can't tell us who opened a valve.”

“Neither can a rock sorter.”

“You keep bringing that man into this conversation.”

That made me laugh for the first time in two days.

The next week, Ruth barred liquid loads from the bay. Vaughn called the order an insult and sent a bill for $6,800 in “yard interference.”

Ruth sent it back with a copy of the lease.

The tankers stopped entering. They still passed our road.

With Ruth's permission, I helped Simone identify trucks from inside the archive office. Her team handled the road work. We had the gate book open, a plate list beside it, and two cups of coffee that grew cold too fast.

At eleven, a truck rolled past with one amber lamp out.

“Fleet number forty-one,” I said.

“How sure?”

“I'm not. Put down possible forty-one.”

She wrote possible.

I liked her more for that than I wanted to admit.

At midnight, she handed me a paper bag.

“Supper.”

“Is that an order?”

“A sandwich. Much harder to appeal.”

We ate by the window. She told me her father kept every appliance manual, even after the appliance died.

“A man of faith,” I said.

“A man with three broken fans.”

I told her about my mother teaching piano outside Grand Forks, and how I had learned storage rows before I learned to enjoy playing.

“Do you still play?”

“Badly, where nobody can hear.”

“That sounds carefully arranged.”

Just before one, she found a name in my gate book that appeared on six night loads: Eli Rusk.

“He quit,” I said. “Janet said he stole fuel.”

Simone checked a dispatch sheet obtained from the county study file. Eli's name appeared beside truck forty-one and a pit delivery Vaughn had billed at $4,200.

The cargo line said washed gravel.

The vehicle line said tanker.

Simone drew a square around the entry.

Then my phone rang from a blocked number.

“You still keep everything?” a man asked. “Even the things Sutter tells you to throw out?”