The Greyhaven liaison office turned out to be two rooms above a bank, and the man who met me there introduced himself as Tolliver, a records coordinator for the Coastal Inquiry Bureau, with the mild, overworked manner of someone who had done this exact meeting too many times already that month.
He laid three things on the table between us: the draft closure summary, a photostat of my October 1964 carbon, and a manila envelope he opened last, sliding out photographs of the recovered belongings I had once seen under a canvas cloth in a cold room on Cinder Island.
Take your time, he said. I'm required to let you review and annotate anything you believe is inaccurate, so long as you sign what you change. I understood from his tone that this courtesy was procedural, not personal, and that he expected me to find nothing worth the trouble.
I read the closure summary first, the same paragraph that had sat on my kitchen table for two days before I'd opened the envelope. It still said that I had declined to accompany the three fugitives and had elected to remain in custody, a sentence so smooth it barely sounded like it was describing a person.
Then I read my own carbon beside it, line by line, the way Dowd had typed it seventeen years before. I didn't elect anything, it said. I tried to get through the opening in my cell and couldn't. It had given before, but that night it held fast. I remembered making him read those words back before I would sign.
I pointed at the two pages side by side. These don't agree, I said. Mine says I tried and failed. The summary says I chose to stay. Somebody wrote one and read the other and still wrote what they wanted.
Tolliver leaned over, read both passages twice, and sat back with the particular stillness of a man realizing a mistake is actually going to require work. The summary language likely came from secondary sources, he said. Press accounts, prior staff recollection. It wasn't meant to override your statement. It happened to anyway, I said.
He turned to the photographs next, asking me to confirm what I could about three items: a canvas bag strap, a hairbrush with a chipped handle, a scrap of oilcloth. I could say the strap resembled one Evelyn carried. I could not say it was hers, only that it looked like it, the same careful distance I'd kept in 1964.
Then near the bottom of the draft, in a section labeled Current Status, I found a sentence that stopped me outright. It said investigators considered it probable the three women had perished at sea shortly after departure, given the season and known conditions.
Probable based on what, I asked. Tolliver checked his own copy and admitted there was no cited source for that line, no weather log, no official determination, nothing but seventeen years of nobody disagreeing with it hard enough to make someone take it out.
I want that struck, I said, and I want my statement corrected to say what it actually says, that I attempted to leave and could not, not that I chose to remain. He nodded slowly. Striking the fatality language is simple enough. But Mrs. Mercer, correcting the other part means the file will show you tried to escape. That's a different woman than the one in every account on record since 1964.
I understood exactly what he meant, and for a moment I let myself imagine leaving it as it was, the comfortable error standing undisturbed one more winter. I'd carried the other version so long it had its own weight, its own furniture, a whole life built on its foundation. I want it corrected anyway, I said. Write it down. I'll sign whatever you need me to sign.