The careful check of Pier Six continued through the damp, gray hours of the afternoon.
Tomas Reed knelt on the narrow limestone bench that projected from the southern face of the pier, his boots sunk in three inches of bitter-salt water that had pooled in the hollows of the rock. The seventy-pound pack frame sat twenty feet away on the dry scree. But his leather satchel lay open beside him on an oilcloth tarp, its compartments bristling with the specialized tools of a town load-bearing clerk. Steel feeler gauges, tuned depth probes, a spirit level ground from leaded glass, and three bound books of approved thick parchment survey forms.
Beside him, Nessa Vale was systematically sounding the upright joints of the third stonework course. Her sound horn was pressed firmly against the dressed granite face. Her knuckles tapped the stone with a six-ounce brass testing hammer.
Clink. Clink. Thump.
Nessa stopped. She tapped the stone again, six inches to the left: Thump.
She pulled the sound horn away, her eyes meeting Tomas’s with grim, skilled certainty. “Delamination. The outer facing stone has snapped away from the rubble core. The facing block is four feet long and two feet thick, but it’s carrying no load. It’s standing like a loose tooth in a rotten jaw.”
