Chapter 3: Deputy Clerk M. Ferris
The judge gave us fourteen days.
“Fourteen days, Ms. Okafor,” she said, peering over her reading glasses, “to produce something more than your client’s recollection. Otherwise this court will recognize Ms. Hale as the surviving spouse.”
In the hallway afterward, Vanessa walked past me close enough that her shoulder brushed mine. Eleanor followed her without a glance. Colin went the other way, toward the stairs, fast, like a man leaving a fire.
That night I checked into a motel off Route 1 because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Our house was hers now. My apartment in Woods Hole had been sublet for the research season. I sat on a bedspread printed with cartoon lighthouses, still in my green rain jacket, and stared at the copy of Vanessa’s certificate that Dana had gotten from the court file.
I’d been staring at it for an hour when I finally saw it.
At the bottom, under the county seal, was the deputy clerk’s signature. A neat, round hand. M. Ferris.
I knew every name on our real certificate. I’d framed a photocopy and hung it in my cabin on the ship. Judge Harold Price. Witness: Colin Reyes. Deputy clerk: Arlene T. Watts. I remembered because Arlene had a cardigan with cats on it and told me I had “a lucky smile.”
I called Dana at eleven at night. She picked up on the first ring.
“Who’s M. Ferris?” I said.
By ten the next morning, she had the answer. Melissa Ferris had started as a deputy clerk in Cumberland County in January. Seven months after the date on Vanessa’s certificate.
“She couldn’t have signed it,” Dana said. I could hear her grinning through the phone. “Not unless she time-traveled. Somebody printed that certificate this year and backdated it. And I’d bet my car somebody paid Melissa Ferris to fix the register too.”
“That’s enough, isn’t it?”
“It’s a crack. It’s not enough. Their lawyer will say it’s a clerical error. We need your certificate. A real one, with a real chain of custody that Colin couldn’t touch.”
I lay back on the lighthouse bedspread and closed my eyes, and I thought about the weeks after the wedding. Adrian making me pancakes. The two of us arguing about whether I should change my name at all. I’d wanted to keep Brooks for my research. He didn’t care either way. In the end, I’d compromised: Brooks at work, Sterling on paper.
On paper.
I sat straight up.
“Dana,” I said. “My passport.”
“What about it?”
“I renewed it a month after the wedding. I changed my name to Sterling. I had to mail them a certified copy of the marriage certificate. The real one.” My heart was pounding. “The State Department keeps that, doesn’t it? With the application?”
There was a long silence on the line.
“Natalie,” Dana said slowly. “You’re a genius. That’s a federal file. Colin can’t bribe his way into the State Department.” I heard her start typing. “I’m filing for an emergency records request today. It’ll be tight. But it’s real.”
For the first time in five weeks, I laughed. It came out strange and wet, half a sob.
I spent the next nine days doing everything Dana told me. I found Arlene Watts, retired now, living with her sister in Biddeford; she remembered the bow tie with the anchors and agreed to sign an affidavit. I tracked down the photographer who’d taken one picture of us on the courthouse steps for twenty dollars. I didn’t sleep much.
And I didn’t let myself think about the ocean. About Adrian’s sailboat, the Halcyon Days, and the coast guard saying the weather that afternoon had been perfectly calm. About how a man who’d sailed since he was six could just vanish on a calm day.
On the tenth night, at 2:14 a.m., my phone rang.
The number was a Canadian area code. I almost didn’t answer. I thought it was spam, or a reporter, or Vanessa’s people trying something new.
“Hello?”
Silence. Breathing. Then a voice so weak and rough I barely recognized it.
“Nat.”
I stopped breathing.
“Nat. It’s me. Don’t trust Colin.”
