The last thing Sindre Eiksund wrote to his grandmother, at twenty to one on the afternoon he died, he wrote in Norwegian, as he wrote everything to her. She read it to Thorsen in English, down a telephone line from the other side of the world.
Grandma, I have seen something today that I cannot keep quiet about. Two things, actually. I’ll ring tonight.
“His tonight was my small hours,” Ingrid said. “So I made coffee and sat by the window with the telephone.”
He did not ring.
That was on Sunday the eighteenth of April, in Claire’s kitchen at Stone Bay. The ice had gone out of the bay three days before, in the night, with a long grinding sigh he had heard before he knew what he was hearing, and in the morning there had been black water to the horizon and Gus running up and down the shore barking at it as though he had done it himself. When the phone rang on the table with a number that began with forty-seven, Thorsen had stood up to answer it without knowing why, and Claire had turned round from the stove with the spatula in her hand and stayed turned.
The voice was old and clear, and it laid its consonants out in a row like cutlery. Ingrid Thorsen Eiksund, from Ulsteinvik, on the west coast of Norway. The professor who had written to him in the winter about the family had given her his number. She was his father’s cousin, a little. She had met his father once, in 1968, when Karl was twenty-two and had eaten all her mother’s waffles and been very polite about it. She had taught English at the school in Ulsteinvik for thirty-eight years, so he was not to worry about her English.
“I am going to tell you something,” she said, “and then I am going to ask you something.”
She told it in order, like a woman who had marked a great many essays and knew what a beginning was for.
Her grandson was twenty-two, her son’s only boy, a student of marine biology at Ålesund. Last May he had gone to Canada on a working holiday, to a summer job at a mineral exploration camp in the mountains of British Columbia, above a river called the Dalgleish. He had gone in by way of a fishing town on the Alaska side called Nesvik, because that was where the river came out into the sea. He was a camp helper: firewood, water lines, garbage, the freight. He had wanted the north since he was a boy reading his grandfather’s books about trappers until the covers came off.
On Sunday the sixteenth of August, the camp said, he had his day off, and went down to the river to fish and to collect the freight off a boat. A lake behind a glacier upstream had burst in the night, and the river was in flood. He did not come back for supper. The police searched for four days. Seventeen days after he went missing, a tour boat found him on a gravel bar thirty kilometres inside Alaska. Anchorage said he had drowned. The coroner in British Columbia, at the end of March, said accident, in eleven pages.
That night in August, she said, she had sat in that chair by the window and watched it get light over the harbour, and sat on until the first shift went down to the shipyard, with the telephone in her lap.
“I waited for them, Daniel. All winter. I thought, they have his messages, they will see what he meant, they only need time.” Paper moved at her end. “The eleven pages do not mention the messages at all. So I stopped waiting.”
The first message had come at a quarter past seven on the morning of the sixteenth, his time. She read it in Norwegian, slowly, as she must once have read poems to children, and then gave it to him in English.
I have to work today on my day off. Flying out to a drill rig. Extra money!
“The camp says he had the day off and went fishing. Sindre says he was flying to a drill to work. The police say nothing. The coroner says the river.” A clock ticked behind her. “And when they found him, he was wearing a sweater I knitted for him. Red and white. I knitted it all winter and posted it to him in July. He had it on.”
Thorsen sat down again.
There was one more thing, and she gave it to him as carefully as the rest. On the twenty-second of July her grandson had sent her a photograph with the words Helping the water lady today and a smiling face. It was somebody’s back beside a creek, in yellow rain clothes, and a little brown bottle on a stone. She did not know who the water lady was. She did not know whether it mattered. She would send him everything she had.
“What would you like me to do, Ingrid?”
Something moved in the voice, once, and was put back.
“I would like somebody to go and look. Somebody who is not polite. The professor says that is you.” The clock again. “I am eighty, Daniel. I do not have time to be polite for another year.”
Claire printed all of it on the shop printer that afternoon and read every page twice with her glasses down her nose. Then she squared the pages on the bench the way she squared a sheet of steel before she cut it.
“You told me in December you come when you’re asked,” she said. “She asked. Take the ferry. You’ll want the van.”
Sindre had made the same trip a year before, in the same week, and had written to his grandmother that the ferry was a hotel with tents on the roof.
Thorsen saw what he meant at ten past six on Friday evening, the seventh of May, when the deckhands closed the car deck and sent everybody up the stairs. There were eleven tents on the solarium deck at the stern, small domes in orange and green and blue, pitched in rows behind the heated lounge chairs and taped to the steel. A roll of silver duct tape the size of a dinner plate went down the rows from hand to hand like bread.
The twelfth tent was not taped down yet. Its owner was kneeling on the windward side with the tape in his teeth when the ferry came out from behind the breakwater and the wind found it.
It went up like a kite. The boy went with it as far as his knees and lost it, and it bounced once on the deck, and Thorsen, who had been standing at the rail doing nothing, stopped it with a foot against a stanchion and fell on it with both arms. It fought him like a large dog that wanted very much to be somewhere else.
“Oh, man. Hold that corner. That’s perfect. Hold it right there.”
He was twenty-three or so, long and loose, in a hoodie and steel-toed boots with the laces undone, with a fine pale fuzz along his jaw that he was hoping would turn into a beard. He taped from each corner to the deck in long crossing strips, like strapping an ankle, and talked the whole time: about the heaters, which cooked you at four in the morning so you woke up wet; about last year, when he and his buddy had pitched a three-man right here, same spot, by the wall. He bit the tape off and sat back on his heels and said his name was Tanner, and put out his hand. His palm was as hard as an axe handle.
On the deck behind him lay a blue duffel with a printed tag on the handle: a bird with folded wings, and CALDERA NORTH — KESTREL RIDGE — KOVAC T.
“I work at a camp,” Tanner said, when he saw Thorsen read it. He said it as young men say I work offshore, proud and not wanting to look it. “Up the river out of Nesvik. I owe you a beer. It’s a dry boat, but in principle.”
He went off down the row of tents. The face had bothered Thorsen from the moment the boy knelt, like a name he nearly had, and he stood at the rail with the lights of Bellingham going small behind them and let it bother him.
He had read Ingrid’s pages enough times now to have them without the paper. Two messages, five hours and twenty-five minutes apart. At a quarter past seven a boy on his day off was pleased about some extra money. At twenty to one the same boy had seen two things he could not keep quiet about, and had decided to say so to his grandmother before he said so to anybody else. Whatever had happened to him had happened in between, or because of it, or after; and in eleven pages nobody had asked what the two things were. Thorsen had worked homicide for a long time in a city where people were killed for less than a sentence, and he knew how little a sentence weighed in a file. He also knew it was the only kind of thing that ever got anybody started.
At one in the morning, with the engines going under him like a pulse, he lay on a lounge chair in the sleeping bag Claire had put in the van without mentioning it, and took Ingrid’s envelope out of his jacket.
The water lady was grainy on the shop paper. A creek going over stones, grey-brown and fast. A figure crouched at its edge with its back to the camera, yellow jacket, yellow trousers, hood up: the shape of a person and nothing more. On a flat rock in the foreground, close to the lens and soft, stood a small amber bottle with a white cap.
Behind it Ingrid had put one last thing, so that he would know the face. Sindre had sent it to her from this ferry the May before. A tall fair boy with big ears and a grin that took up the bottom half of his head, holding the phone out at arm’s length, on this deck, by this wall. Behind him, a green and white tent taped down in long crossing strips. And at the edge of the frame, half cut off, holding up a can of Coke in salute, another boy, long and loose, with a fine pale fuzz along his jaw.
Thorsen looked down the row to the green and white tent, taped in its crossing strips, and zipped shut.
Saturday went by in Queen Charlotte Sound, with the ship rolling long and easy on a swell from the open Pacific. In the night the clocks went back an hour, to Alaska time, and in the morning half the solarium stood about in sleeping bags asking each other what time it really was.
They came into Ketchikan at six, under a mountain that went straight up out of the water into cloud, in rain so fine it hung in the air instead of falling. The town lay along the foot of the mountain on pilings, a long thin strip of roofs and floats and cannery sheds with the forest standing straight up behind it, and a seaplane went out over the harbour low and slow and turned towards somewhere with no road to it. Thorsen sat on the deck with his back to the bulkhead and the ferry photograph on his knee, and did not hear the boy come up behind him.
“That’s Sindre.”
Tanner stood over him with a box of dry cereal in one hand. He looked at the picture, and then at Thorsen, and Thorsen watched him put it together: the big stranger bound for Nesvik, and a name nobody on this boat had said out loud.
“His grandmother sent it,” Thorsen said. “She’s my father’s cousin.”
Tanner sat down on the deck, not close, and held out his hand, and took the photograph by its edges in big cracked fingers.
“That’s my Coke. He made me hold it up like a toast.” He nearly smiled. “He was such a dork, man. He asked everybody on this boat where they were from. We were bunkies all summer.” He gave it back and looked along the row of tents. “I took the same spot. I didn’t think about it till I’d taped it down.”
“What happened to him?”
The boy’s face closed, carefully, the way a door closes in a house where somebody is asleep.
“I can’t really talk about camp stuff. They make you sign things.” He picked at the corner of the cereal box. “He went down to the river and the river came up. We looked for four days. I looked.” His voice stayed level. “I go back up Tuesday. I need the job. My mom’s got — I need the job.”
He stood up. He stood there a moment longer, looking at the envelope on Thorsen’s knee as though there might be something else in it he would be shown. Then he said he was going to get a coffee.
He did not come back. When the ferry pulled out of Ketchikan an hour later the cereal box was still on the deck beside the green tent.
Below Wrangell, in the middle of the afternoon, Thorsen stood at the forward rail and watched the sea change colour.
It happened along a line as straight as the edge of a rule. On the near side the water was green-black and moving in the ordinary way of water. Beyond the line it was a pale, opaque grey, like milk with something stirred into it, and it lay flat and dull right across to the white mountains in the east. Somewhere under those mountains a river was coming out of the land and laying itself on the sea, and it had laid itself so far out that the coast it came from was still only a line of haze. Nobody told him what it was. He watched it for an hour and was sure.
Nesvik came round a point at half past seven, in the long gold evening.
A white steeple. A cannery on pilings with NARROWS SEAFOODS across its roof in letters three metres high, and steam coming off its vents. Two harbours of masts and trolling poles as thick as reeds. Wooden houses up the hill in yellow and red and blue, and on half of them, painted round the windows and under the eaves, swirls of flowers in red and green like the houses in Ingrid’s photographs of Ulsteinvik. Small Norwegian flags along the railings of the dock. It was the second week of May, and the town was dressing itself for its festival.
On the bank above the terminal two hand-lettered signs stood on the same patch of grass, SALMON FOREVER — NO KESTREL MINE and, a metre in front of it, OUR KIDS NEED JOBS, and somebody had mown carefully round both.
He sat in the van on the car deck with the engine running and the window down while the cars ahead of him went off up the ramp one by one.
Tanner walked past last, with his duffel on his back, towards a white van at the head of the ramp with NESVIK AIR on the door and a woman pilot in a ball cap leaning on it with a thermos. Thorsen heard her greet the boy, and saw her tip her head back down the ramp towards Thorsen’s old blue Ford van, and say something with a question in it. The car deck gave it back to him in pieces, the way a cave gives back a voice.
”— the cousin? The Norwegian kid’s —”
Tanner did not look round.
“Never met him,” he said, and threw his duffel in the back of the van, and got in.