The inquiry took four months.
It was not Eli who initiated it. He had contacted the city archivist's office the morning after the man in the coat had appeared, and the city archivist had contacted the national archives authority, and from there the process had moved in the deliberate, institutional manner of processes that involve professional bodies and historical records and questions of accountability.
Eli gave a deposition. He produced the document box, the key, the locket, the telegram, and the account book. He presented his photographic record of every page. He was asked numerous questions about the condition of the materials when found, the circumstances of discovery, and his interpretation of the provenance chain.
The Harbor Mist Historical Society, when approached, confirmed the existence of the original 1888 coastal history project but disputed the characterization of the record as having been altered. This dispute was addressed when the national archives authority compared Emmeline Vane's annotated original with the Society's published version and found thirty-seven specific substantive differences.
The Society's legal standing was examined. Three senior members resigned during the inquiry process.
The seven names from page 212 were added to the Harbor Mist coastal memorial register, which had been established in the 1970s and had been accepting additions from documentary evidence ever since. The addition was noted in the local newspaper's historical correspondence column.
Eli attended the brief ceremony at which the names were formally entered in the register. It was held in the Harbor Mist public library — a different building from St. Jude's, smaller, closer to the harbor. The harbor was visible from the library's front window.
He had brought Marrow in a soft-sided carrier. The cat sat quietly throughout the ceremony and made no noise except for a brief period when the names were read aloud, during which he produced a low, steady vibration that the librarian standing beside Eli turned to look at with polite curiosity.
"He does that sometimes," Eli said.
Afterward, he stood at the harbor and looked out at the reef, which was visible at low tide as a dark line below the water's surface.
The record had been made freely. Now it was free.
The Harbor Mist Historical Society's legal representative sent a letter in December, three months into the inquiry, acknowledging that the original record had been produced under the Society's auspices, and that the differential between the original and the published version was the result of "editorial decisions made in the context of period sensitivities." The letter did not use the word falsification.
The national archives authority's response to this characterization was measured but thorough. They produced a comparative analysis running to forty-seven pages that described each of the thirty-seven substantive differences between the documents, the nature of each omission, and its probable effect on the historical record.
They did not use the word falsification in their analysis either, but by the time the reader reached page thirty-eight, the nature of what had been done was not in question.
The Society's three resigning members had all been affiliated with families whose business interests in 1888 and 1889 had involved maritime salvage operations along the Harbor Mist coastline. This observation appeared in the inquiry's preliminary findings as a note rather than a conclusion, but the note was present.
The addition of the seven names to the memorial register was a separate process from the inquiry — handled by the Harbor Mist memorial trust, which operated under different jurisdiction and different procedures. It was faster. The names were added within six weeks of Eli's initial contact with the trust, following a review of the documentary evidence by two independent historians who confirmed the testimonial chain.
The trust's director telephoned Eli on the morning the addition was confirmed, to let him know before the formal notification arrived by post. She said: "They're on the register. Seven names. All properly attributed."
Eli thanked her and put the receiver down.
He sat at his worktable in Room 404 for several minutes without doing anything.
Then he stood up, put on his coat, and walked up the stairs through the quiet library to the street above, where the November morning was cold and clear, and stood for a while in the thin winter sunlight before returning to the archive.
Marrow, when he came back downstairs, was sitting in the center of the room looking at the archival drawer where the pocket watch was stored, in the way he sometimes looked at objects that had completed whatever he considered their purpose.