The three Ladnier sisters had not been in the same room for twenty years, and the first thing the youngest one said when she walked into their dead mother's kitchen was, "Which one of you took the money?"
Bernice Ladnier, who was seventy-two and the oldest, set down her coffee cup.
"Hello to you too, Carol Ann," she said.
"Don't." Carol Ann was sixty-six and had driven nine hours from Atlanta. She stood in the kitchen doorway in her good wool coat with her car keys still in her fist. "Don't hello me. We're here to sell the dock. Let's sell it and go home."
At the table, the middle sister, Faye, sixty-nine, did not look up from her hands.
The dock was the Ladnier dock, on the bayou behind the house in Pelican Bayou, Alabama, twenty miles down the coast from Mobile. Their grandfather had built it in 1938 from cypress pilings he cut himself. Their father had run shrimp boats off it for fifty years. Their mother, Lorena, had kept the books, the ice house, and the family running until the day she died in October, at ninety-four, in the front bedroom, with the window open to the water.
She had left the dock, the ice house, the old house, and the last family boat, the Miss Lorena, to her three daughters equally.
A man from a condo developer in Orange Beach had offered $1.1 million for the whole waterfront. The offer was good until December 23.
None of them wanted to run a shrimp dock. All of them were sure one of the others had stolen from their father.
It had happened in 2006.
Their father, Captain Emile Ladnier, had died that spring of a heart attack on the deck of the Miss Lorena. In the weeks after the funeral, their mother had gone through his accounts. There should have been a little more than thirty thousand dollars in his savings at the Pelican Bayou bank. Money he had put away for forty years. Money he had told all three girls, separately, at one time or another, was for them.
The account was empty. It had been emptied in four withdrawals over the winter before he died. Their father had made the withdrawals himself, in person, at the bank. But he had been sick that winter. Confused, some days.
Someone had driven him there.
Bernice had lived in Mobile then and driven down every Sunday. Faye had lived right there in Pelican Bayou, married to a shrimper named Russell Thibault. Carol Ann had come home from Atlanta at Christmas and stayed three weeks.
All three of them had driven him places that winter.
Each of them had been certain it was one of the others.
The fight at the funeral lunch had been the worst day of Bernice's life. She did not remember most of what was said. She remembered Carol Ann throwing a glass of sweet tea. She remembered Faye leaving without her purse. She remembered their mother sitting at the end of the table with her hands folded, saying nothing at all.
She had not spoken to either sister since. Not at Christmas. Not at the birth of grandchildren. Not when Faye's husband, Russell, died last year. Bernice had sent a card. Faye had not answered it.
"I didn't take it," Bernice said now, in their mother's kitchen. "I've been saying that for twenty years."
"So have I," Carol Ann said.
Faye still did not say anything. She sat at the end of the table, in their mother's old chair, with her hands folded.
Bernice looked at her. And for the first time in twenty years, something about the way her sister sat bothered her.
It was exactly the way their mother had sat at the funeral lunch.
They did the work they had come to do.
They walked through the house with a woman from an estate company in Mobile. They walked the dock with the condo man, a pleasant young fellow in a fleece vest who called it a "unique waterfront opportunity." They stood on the deck of the Miss Lorena, tied up at the end of the dock with her nets hung and her paint peeling, and did not look at each other.
The boat had been their father's. He had named it for their mother in 1971. Bernice had learned to cull shrimp on that deck when she was nine, sorting the brown from the white on the picking table while her father sang Hank Williams off-key in the wheelhouse.
She stood at the picking table now, running her hand along the old wood.
"Daddy kept a box," she said suddenly. "Under the wheelhouse floor. Do y'all remember?"
Carol Ann frowned. "What box?"
"His luck box. A tackle box. He kept his papers in it, and his good knife, and that silver dollar from Grandpa. He said if the boat ever sank, the box would float." Bernice looked at the wheelhouse door. "Mama said she never found it. After he died. She looked."
"Bernice, that was a story. He told us a hundred stories."
"Maybe," Bernice said.
That night, after Carol Ann went to her motel and Faye went home to her empty house up the bayou road, Bernice went out to the Miss Lorena alone with a flashlight.
The wheelhouse smelled of diesel and salt and old coffee. She got down on her knees on the worn plywood floor. Her knees were seventy-two and told her so.
She remembered where it was. Under the captain's chair, a square of plywood with two brass screws, a little lighter than the rest of the floor, because her father had replaced it in 1980 after a leak.
The screws were rusted. She went back to the house for a screwdriver and a can of oil.
It took her half an hour. Then the square of plywood came up in her hands, and under it, wedged between two floor beams, wrapped in a black plastic garbage bag and taped shut, was a green metal tackle box.
Bernice sat down on the wheelhouse floor and pulled the tape off with shaking fingers.
There was no knife. There was no silver dollar.
There was a bank envelope, thick with deposit slips. There was a stack of letters, rubber-banded, in their mother's handwriting.
And on top, folded once, was a single sheet of their mother's blue stationery, with a note in her small, upright hand.
If you are reading this, you found Emile's box. I knew one of you would. I hope it's Bernice. Please don't show your sisters until you have read every word.