Vendor 0417

Nell was in the lobby of Lathrop Wharf at eight minutes to eight. She had left Skerry Harbor in the dark at twenty to six with a thermos, the folder and the blank bronze plate in her coat pocket, where it knocked against her hip on the stairs.

The lobby had a slate floor and a wall of ship half-models, each with a brass date under it. She had thought about wearing a skirt for as long as it took to find her keys. She wore clean jeans, her good boots and the canvas coat that did not have a burn hole in the cuff.

At eight exactly the elevator opened and a woman in a green cardigan came out of it and looked straight at her.

“Ms. Thibodeau. I’m Aggie Pruitt. We’ve spoken four times.”

“I’m sorry about the fourth one.”

“No, you’re not.” She said it pleasantly. “Come up. He’s moved a call for you, and he doesn’t move calls, so you’ve got fifteen minutes that belonged to a bank in Boston.”

The office on the floor below the top was long and plain, with windows onto the harbor and a table running half the length of it. A man stood up from behind the desk at the far end.

She had pictured sixty, with jowls. He was in his thirties, tall and lean, with black hair cut short and wire-rimmed glasses. His eyes behind them were a very dark blue, and they stayed on her face while she crossed the room. He looked like a man who had never in his life lost his place on a page.

“Ms. Thibodeau. Winslow Lathrop. Please sit down.”

“I’ll stand. I’ve been sitting for two hours.”

She took the default notice out of the folder and laid it on his desk, turned so he could read it. She laid the printed email beside it.

“You signed both of those.”

He glanced down. “Yes.”

“Then I’m in the right office. I want to tell you what Vendor 0417 was, because I don’t think anyone has.” She kept her voice level. She had practised that on Route 1. “It was a boatyard my grandfather started in 1958. It’s my father and my brother and me and six other people. There are nine names on the payroll. Your buyer came to us with six wheelhouse modules, and when my father said we didn’t have the shed or the machine for it, your buyer said your finance company would make it easy. So he borrowed two million two from you to tool up for your job. Nine months later you cancelled it in four lines, and you didn’t even use our name.”

“Purchase order LS-2291,” he said. “Two million four hundred thousand.”

“That’s the one. You sent that on the thirteenth of June. My father spent the summer on the telephone trying to replace it. On the nineteenth of August I found him on the floor with half his face gone slack. He’s sixty-three. He used to be able to sell a man a boat over a cup of coffee, and now he gets out one word at a time.”

She stopped there. That was the part she had driven two hours to say.

He did not say he was sorry. She watched for it, and she watched him decide against it. He looked at the notice, and at her, and when he spoke it was in the tone of a man reading something off a wall behind her head.

“The note was written in September of 2024 for two million two hundred thousand. You made twenty-four payments of twenty-three thousand nine hundred dollars, from October of 2024 through September of 2026. None of them was late. Two were early. Fifteen of the twenty-four were made after the purchase order was cancelled, with no revenue from it. You missed October, November and December. The balance is one million eight hundred seventy-six thousand.”

Nell stared at him.

“You know all that. You’ve got that in your head.”

“Yes.”

“You knew we paid you for fifteen months with nothing coming in, and you signed that anyway.”

“The notice goes out at ninety days. It’s the same for every borrower on the book.”

“Did you know about my father?”

“No. That isn’t in the file.”

It was the worst thing he could have said, and he said it as if it were simply true. She supposed it was. She had thought she was coming to tell a careless man what he had overlooked. He had overlooked nothing that had a dollar sign on it. He had every payment she had ever scraped together lined up in order, and there was no place in the line for a man on a mould loft floor.

“Why did you cancel it?”

“The yard was losing money on the series those modules were built for. I stopped the series. Sixty people in South Portland lost their jobs the same afternoon.”

“How did you tell them?”

There was the smallest pause. “By email.”

“Of course you did.” She picked up the email and put it back in the folder. She left him the notice. “Keep that one. You’ve got it memorised anyway. I came to make sure you knew what you were foreclosing on, and now you do. You can go ahead and do it knowing.”

“Ms. Thibodeau, I can’t extend a cure date for one borrower out of—”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

She turned to go, and that took her down the length of the table.

It was covered in photographs, laid out in rows as neatly as a hand of solitaire. They were close-ups of welds, each with a steel rule in the corner and a smear of red dye. She saw the first one and slowed down. She saw the next three and stopped.

She should have kept walking. She knew it while her hand was already picking one up.

“Who’s welding this for you?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“These brackets. Whoever it is learned on steel.” She put the photograph down and tapped the bead with one finger. “That’s one long run. He started at one end and carried it all the way to the bracket without lifting. On steel that’s a nice piece of work. Aluminium carries heat about four times as fast as steel does, and it grows twice as much when it’s hot. If you run a seam end to end, you push all that heat ahead of you and pile it up in the last foot. Then it cools and shrinks, and it has to pull against something.”

She slid a second photograph next to the first.

“It’s pulling against this. Your bracket ends in a square corner and the weld is wrapped right around the point. That’s the stiffest spot on the whole frame, and somebody put the end of the weld on it. Nobody who had ever held a torch would draw it like that, because you can’t get a torch in there cleanly and you’d know what happens after. You taper the toe and you stop the weld short. So you’ve got heat with nowhere to go and a hard point for it to tear at. How many of these are there?”

“Thirty-one.”

“And the plate between those frames is wavy.”

“Fourteen millimetres. The limit is six.”

“There you go,” Nell said.

He had come around the desk while she talked. He stood on the other side of the table with his hands flat on it, and he looked at the two photographs and then at his watch.

“That took you about fifty seconds.”

“I talk fast when I’m angry.”

“I’ve had that report for three weeks. I have forty engineers who say it’s the welders and forty welders who say it’s the drawings.” He looked up. “Is it one mistake made thirty-one times, or thirty-one mistakes?”

“It’s two mistakes. One’s in your drawing office and one’s on your floor, and each of them got made thirty-one times.”

“So they’re both right.”

“They’re both wrong. That’s a different thing.”

Something happened in his face that was not a smile but was on the way to one. It was gone quickly.

“The boat is three miles from here,” he said. “Will you show me on the plate?”

“I came here about a foreclosure.”

“I know why you came. I’m asking anyway.”

She ought to have said no. But a photograph was only a photograph, and she had never in her life been able to walk away from a weld she had an opinion about. She also wanted, more than she liked, to be right in front of him on something he could not recite.

“Ten minutes,” she said. “Then you drive me back to my truck.”

He drove a grey Volvo wagon, not new, with nothing in it but an ice scraper. He took the bridge over the Fore River at exactly the speed limit and did not make conversation, which she was grateful for. Below them a tug with a green L on her stack was pushing through skim ice.

The assembly shed at Lathrop Shipbuilding could have held her whole yard, house included, with room left to turn a truck. A gantry crane spanned it from wall to wall. Under the crane, on steel cradles, stood the Petrel.

Nell stopped walking for a second. She couldn’t help it. The boat was a catamaran, eighty-five feet of bare aluminium the colour of a new nickel, with two knife-thin hulls and the wet deck bridging them eight feet off the floor. Whoever had drawn her lines had known their business. She was a lovely boat with a bad rash.

She also noticed that the shed went quiet when Win Lathrop walked into it. It was the quiet of forty people finding something to look at on their benches. Nobody said good morning to him.

A broad man with a red face and a white hard hat came across the floor.

“Mr. Lathrop.”

“Toby. This is Ms. Thibodeau. She’s a naval architect and a welder, and she has a view on the brackets. Ms. Thibodeau, Toby Keegan, our superintendent.”

Keegan looked her over, from the boots to the braid.

“We’ve had the class surveyor,” he said. “We’ve had engineering. We’ve had a fella from the wire company. Now we’ve got who?”

“Nell Thibodeau. I build aluminium boats in Skerry Harbor.”

“How big?”

“The one on my floor is thirty-eight feet.”

“This one’s eighty-five.”

“Then you had more room to make the same mistake.”

A welder behind him coughed into his glove. Keegan’s face went a shade darker.

“I don’t put strangers on my boat.”

“I don’t need to get on her. I need a hard hat, the list of where the cracks are and something to write with.” She looked past him at the men. “And I need whoever ran those frames to tell me which end they started from. Nobody’s in trouble. I just want to know.”

Keegan did not move. Win did not order him to, either, and she noted that. He only waited, and after a long moment the superintendent jerked his chin at a foreman, who brought a hat and a clipboard. A boy of about twenty handed her a stick of soapstone out of his chest pocket before anyone could tell him not to.

She walked in under the wet deck, between the hulls. The frame numbers were written on the plate in black marker, and each frame showed through the skin as a faint ripple where it had been welded from the other side. She had to stretch to reach, and at frame 9 she gave up and dragged a rolling step over.

“Frame nine, port. Where’s the crack?”

“Bracket end,” the foreman read. “Where the deck turns down into the hull.”

She chalked an X at the corner. “Who welded it?”

A grey-haired man lifted two fingers.

“Where’d you start?”

“Centreline. Run her outboard to the bracket.”

“One pass?”

“One pass. Why would I stop?”

“On steel you wouldn’t.” She drew an arrow along the frame from the centreline to the X. “Frame nine, starboard.”

It took a quarter of an hour. She moved the step eleven times. By frame 13 the welders had drifted in under the boat to watch, and they were calling out their starts before she asked. By frame 19 there were thirty-one white crosses along the two corners of the wet deck and thirty-one white arrows, and every arrow ended in a cross.

Nell got down and stood back so they could see it.

“That’s your heat,” she said. “Every one of you started in the middle and chased it out to the side. It got to the corner and it couldn’t go any further, because the corner’s the stiffest thing on the boat. So it sat there and cooked, and when it cooled it tore the end off the weld. The plate in between got pulled like a bedsheet. That’s your fourteen millimetres.”

Nobody spoke. Win was looking up at the chalk with his head tipped back, reading it line by line.

“That’s sequence,” Keegan said at last. His voice was tight. “My men have tickets.”

“They’ve got steel tickets, and I’d hire any one of them tomorrow to build me a barge. This isn’t a barge.” She pointed the soapstone at the corner over her head. “And I’ll tell you the other half, because it’s just as bad. Your drawing office gave them a bracket with a square toe and a weld called out all the way round it. That bracket would crack if a saint welded it. You fix the sequence and leave the bracket, you’ll get fifteen cracks next time. You fix the bracket and leave the sequence, you’ll get the other sixteen.”

“So I was right about the drawings.”

“You were half right. So were they.”

Keegan opened his mouth and shut it again. She handed the boy his soapstone, which was down to a stub.

Win had not said a word the whole time. He said one now.

“Ms. Thibodeau, I’d like to retain you. Five thousand dollars a day, starting today, for as long as it takes to write that up and see it done.”

He said it in front of forty people, in the same voice he had used for her payment history.

She did the sum before she could stop herself. She was her father’s daughter. Fifteen days would cure the note.

Then she thought about a purchase order that could be cancelled for the convenience of the buyer under Section 14, effective immediately.

“You can’t afford me,” she said.

“I assure you I can.”

“I don’t mean the money. I worked for you once already. I was a number on a list, and you crossed it off on a Friday.” She took off the hard hat and gave it to the foreman. “You’ve known the number for a year and a half. Go and learn the name. It’s Thibodeau.”

She walked out from under his boat. Behind her she heard a man reach up toward the chalk, and Toby Keegan say, low and hard, “Leave that.”

Win drove her back across the bridge. He did not argue or raise the offer, and she had braced for both. In the wharf lot he got out when she did and stood by the car with the wind pulling at his coat.

“Thank you for the ten minutes,” he said.

“It was closer to forty.”

“Yes. It was.”

She got in her truck.

She was home by half past twelve. Rémy met her in the shed door, and her father was in the office with a hand of solitaire laid out on Cy’s desk.

“Well?” Rémy said. “Did he throw you out?”

“He offered me a job.”

“He what?”

“His boat’s cracking. I told him why, and he offered me five thousand a day to fix it. I said no.”

Rémy laughed, a short surprised bark. “You told him why for free?”

“I know. I heard it too.” She dropped the folder on the desk and set the bronze plate back on the windowsill. “It doesn’t matter. That’s the last we’ll hear from him until the thirty-first.”

Leon turned over a card. He looked up at her, and his jaw worked a moment.

“Listened?” he asked.

She thought about a man standing under his own boat with his head back, reading her chalk marks and not interrupting once.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “The whole time.”

Her father nodded and went back to his cards, as if that settled something. She did not like that at all.
***