He studied the document for a few minutes. “We have three million bushels of soybeans in Peoria and we want to move them to Buffalo. Hansel Baltic is buying the shipment there and that’s where our responsibility ends. So Phillips’s sales reps start scurrying around trying to find someone to carry the load. GLSL. They start there—Great Lakes Shipping Line. They’re charging four dollars and thirty-two cents a ton to carry it from Chicago to Buffalo and they need five vessels. With that big a load you’d normally bid it out among several carriers—I guess the rep was just being a little lazy on this one. Phillips has to bring it from Peoria by rail by the twenty-fourth of July and they’ll get it to Buffalo on the thirty-first or earlier.

“Now, in our business, contracts are set up and canceled routinely. That’s what makes it so confusing—and why the difference of a few cents is so important. See, here, later on the seventeenth, we offer to carry the load for four twenty-nine a ton. That was before we had the Lucella—we can go way under our old prices now because these thousand-footers are so much cheaper to operate.

“Anyway, then Grafalk came in on the eighteenth at $4.30 a ton but a promise to get it there by the twenty-ninth. Cutting it pretty close, really—wonder if they made it.”

“So there’s nothing out of the ordinary about this?”

Bledsoe studied it intently. “Not as far as I can tell. What made you think there would be?”

The chief engineer came in at that point. “Oh, hi there. What do you have?”

“Hi, Sheridan. Miss Warshawski’s been going over Eudora’s shipping orders. She thought something might be wrong with them.”

“No, not that. I just needed help understanding them. I’ve been trying to figure out what my cousin might have known that he wanted to tell Captain Bemis. So I went through his papers yesterday over at Eudora Grain, and I learned he’d been particularly interested in these documents right before he died. I wondered if the fact that all these Pole Star contracts ended up with Grafalk was important.”

Bledsoe looked at the documents again. “Not especially. Either they underbid us or they were promising an earlier delivery date.”

“The other question I had was why Boom Boom was interested in certain dates this spring.”

“What dates this spring?” Bledsoe asked.

“One was the twenty-third of April. I don’t remember the others offhand.” I had the diary in my canvas bag but I didn’t want to show it to them.

Bledsoe and Sheridan looked at each other thoughtfully. Finally Bledsoe said, “The twenty-third was the date we were supposed to load up the Lucella.”

“You mean the day you found water in the holds?”

Sheridan nodded.