The Alaska Wildlife Troopers’ post at the head of the south harbour had a moose antler on the wall that somebody had hung a uniform cap on in 1994, and nobody had taken it down.
Pete Sandoval was eating a sandwich at his desk with a printout in his other hand. He was forty-five or so, compact, with a short black moustache and forearms crossed with old pale scars, the kind you get from hooks and wire and outboard motors. He nodded Thorsen into the other chair and finished his mouthful first.
“Seventeen days in a glacial river,” he said. “Face down in a log jam at the head of a bar. The sweater was on.” He put the sandwich down on its paper. “I’ve got a girl. She’s nine. I went home that night and looked at her too long. I’m not a detective. I look at bears and fishing licences and I pull people out of rivers. But I looked, because it was owed.”
Thorsen let that stand.
“So when Corporal Dhillon asked me in May to account for everybody from this side who was off that camp that weekend, I asked. Properly. RCMP paper and a piece of paper from the district attorney in Juneau.” He held out the printout. “One name. Airline took a month, because they’re an airline. Came in this morning.”
It was a single page. A name, a booking reference, two flights.
DOLAN, PAIGE. Saturday 15 August 2026, Nesvik to Juneau, 07:10. Monday 17 August 2026, Juneau to Nesvik, 18:45.
Thorsen read it twice. On the Saturday morning before Sindre went into the water, Paige Dolan had been in a seat over Frederick Sound with a cup of airline coffee. On the Monday night, while the RCMP were taking the camp’s statements, she had been coming home.
“She told me she was on the river that weekend,” he said. “Nowhere near the camp.”
“She told me the same thing in September. I didn’t ask her very hard. Nobody’d said anything was wrong, and the camp said the same: Paige went off Friday on Rainy’s plane, to go down the river with her cousins.” Sandoval wiped his fingers on a paper napkin, carefully, one at a time. “Rainy’s manifest says Rainy picked her up off Kestrel Lake on the Friday afternoon and put her down here. Not at the Landing. Here. Saturday she’s on the jet. So she’s not on the river, and she’s not on a creek in Canada with a pole in her hand, unless she’s got a twin.”
“She hasn’t.”
“I checked.” Sandoval leaned back. The chair complained. “So your yellow person on the drone isn’t Paige. You’re going to tell me who it is.”
“I don’t know who it is.”
“Good. Because it isn’t my case.” He said it without heat, as a man states the tide. “He died in Canada and came to me by water. I put the drive in a bag last night and wrote on it and it’s going to Amrit Dhillon on Rainy’s Saturday plane with a chain-of-custody form on it, because the Larkins gave it to me voluntarily and they got a receipt, and that’s the last thing I’m going to do about a boy who went in the river in British Columbia. Unless somebody in Alaska lied to me.” He picked up the sandwich again and looked at it. “Somebody in Alaska lied to me.”
“Paige.”
“Paige.” He bit the sandwich. “So we’ll go and talk to her. Nicely. Tomorrow, after her shift. Not in here. She’s not under arrest for anything. Lying to a fellow from Los Angeles isn’t a crime in this state.” He chewed. “Yet.”
Paige came out of the Narrows Seafoods side door at a quarter past four on Thursday with her hair still flattened by a hairnet and her lab coat over her arm, and saw the trooper’s truck at the kerb and Thorsen on the bench beside it, and stopped.
For a second he thought she would go back in. Then she came down the steps and across the gravel with her chin down, as though walking into something was the only way she knew to deal with it.
“What,” she said.
“Ten minutes,” said Sandoval. “Here, or in the truck, or on the dock. Your choice. You’re not in trouble with me.”
She looked at the truck. She looked at Thorsen. “The dock.”
They walked down to the end of the cannery float, past a man hosing fish scales off a deck, to where the Narrows ran past green and fast on the flood. Paige leaned on the rail with her back to them. Below her the kelp streamed out in long brown ropes, all one way.
Sandoval told her plainly: the Friday plane, the Saturday jet, the Monday night. Paige did not turn round.
“So you weren’t on the river,” Sandoval said. “And you told me you were, last September, and you told Mr. Thorsen you were, in May. I’d like to know why.”
The water went past.
“It’s got nothing to do with him,” she said. “With Sindre.”
“Then it won’t cost you anything to say.”
“It’ll cost my mom.” She turned round then. Her face was white under the freckles and perfectly steady. “I was interviewing. In Juneau. For Tidewater. They’re the other environmental outfit, they do the cruise-ship stuff and the hydro. I’d been on the hill all summer for Celia and I wanted something with benefits, and Tidewater wanted to see me on the Saturday and do a field day on the Sunday, and I couldn’t ask for the weekend. Not that weekend. Celia had me on standby, in case the river came up and she wanted an extra pair of hands.” She swallowed. “So I told camp I was going down the river with my cousins, and I got Rainy to take me straight through to town instead. And my mom covered. My mom’s her office manager. She’s been her office manager for nine years. When Celia called for me, Mom said I was on the river with the cousins and there’s no signal down there, which there isn’t. She brought Celia her coffee on Monday morning and said I’d be back up Tuesday.”
“And then Sindre,” Thorsen said.
“And then Sindre.” She looked at him. “And everybody’s asking where everybody was, and if I say Juneau, the first thing anyone asks is why didn’t Celia know. And then Celia knows my mom lied to her face. For me. So I said the river. It’s what camp thought. It’s what Celia thought. I said it to Pete, and nobody checked, because why would they. And then I said it to you, because I’d already said it.” Her voice did not crack. It went flat instead, like a tool being put down. “I didn’t think it mattered. I wasn’t there. I didn’t see anything. I wasn’t anywhere near him.”
“I know,” Sandoval said. “I’ve got the flights.”
She let out a breath, short, through her nose, and looked away up the Narrows.
“Did you get the job?” said Thorsen.
“Yeah.” She laughed, once, without any pleasure in it. “I got the job. I quit Celia in September and then I didn’t take it. It was standing in creeks with bottles, same as before, and I couldn’t. Not after him. So I’m in the QC lab checking seams on salmon cans. Nine bucks over minimum.”
“Why did you quit Celia?”
The kelp streamed. Out in the Narrows a gillnetter went by low in the water, coming in, with gulls behind it in a long untidy line.
“I just did,” Paige said.
Thorsen waited. Sandoval, to his credit, waited too. A minute of it. The man on the tender turned off his hose and the quiet came down on them.
He took out his phone and showed her the picture again, the one he had laid on her bench in May. Helping the water lady today. A yellow back, a creek, an amber bottle on a rock in the foreground, a little out of focus. In May she had said it could be anyone.
“Is that you?”
She looked at it. Long enough that he thought she might answer.
“That’s MC-1,” she said. She did not say whether it was her. “Doug does the rota. Some days I had the lower ones, some days it was whoever Doug sent. Imogen signs the custody sheets.” She gave him back the phone. “I saw Mitch go down the creek with a pole more than once. Imogen once. Sindre on his days off, carrying for somebody. So those bottles went through half the camp’s hands before they ever got to a cooler. And something smelled wrong. Don’t ask me what. I’m a tech. I see coolers. They sat in Imogen’s core shack overnight before Rainy took them out, with Caldera people in and out all evening. And my name’s on the sampler line of every custody form, because I was the tech and the tech signs.” She held on to the rail. “So if there’s something wrong in those coolers, it’s not anybody else’s signature. It’s mine.”
“That’s why you asked me who else had seen the picture.”
“I knew the rock. I didn’t want it going round camp with my name next to it.” She breathed. “And I asked Marj about his phone. Because he took pictures of everything, and if there was something on it about the samples, I wanted it to go to Pete. Before somebody decided it was me.”
“You could have told me that in May.”
“In May you were some guy from TV.” She picked up her lab coat off the rail. “I’m not saying anything else about work. Okay? Celia was good to me. She taught me everything I know. She paid my course fees. And my mom’s still there. I’m not losing my mother’s job too.”
“Too,” said Thorsen.
“I’d already lost him,” Paige said. “I’m not losing Mom’s job on top.”
She looked at him with a kind of tired contempt, the contempt of the young for people who notice things.
“Are we done, Pete?”
“We’re done,” Sandoval said. “Thank you, Paige. Tell your mom hi.”
She went back up the float with the coat over her shoulder, and in.
Sandoval drove him back up the hill to Marj’s without saying anything, which Thorsen already valued in him. At the gate he left the engine running and looked at the windscreen.
“Coolers in a core shack,” he said.
“Yes.”
“With the company in and out.” He thought about it. “That’s not a kid making something up to cover a job interview. That’s a kid who’s been scared for ten months.”
“Yes.”
Sandoval nodded slowly. “Not my case,” he said, the way a man touches wood. “Go and eat something, Thorsen. Marj says you don’t.”
Jim Kehoe was leaning on a white Caldera pickup across the road from Marj’s gate when the trooper’s truck had gone, and he straightened up and came over with his hands where Thorsen could see them, which is something salesmen and policemen learn.
“Two minutes,” he said. “Then I’ll let you eat.”
He looked like a man whose smile had been taken off and put back on slightly crooked.
“The sale to Pallas closes in twenty-nine days,” he said. “If the certificate comes. Half a billion dollars and two hundred jobs and the school roof. KR-31 is a problem with a price on it, and Caldera will pay it.” He put his hands in his pockets. “The boy is a tragedy. Caldera would like to endow a scholarship in his name, at the university in Ålesund. I’d like you to tell the family.”
“Tell them yourself. Write to his grandmother. She reads letters properly.”
“I will.” Kehoe looked down the hill at the harbour. “Gordie’s freight lease on the port float comes up in August. I sign it. Everybody on that project gets paid when it’s certified: the consultants get their completion fees, the camp contractors get their next three years, the town gets its dock. I’m not threatening anybody, Mr. Thorsen. I’m telling you how many people in this town are standing on the same float.”
He went back across the road to the pickup. At the door he stopped.
“I believed that package,” he said. “When I sent it up to the camp for you. I want you to know that. I read every line of it first.” He got in and drove away.
Trinity Lutheran sat on the rise above the south harbour, white clapboard with a square tower and a weathervane in the shape of a Viking ship. On Thursday nights the choir practised. Marj had asked him, at supper, in the voice of somebody mentioning the weather, whether he would walk her up, because the steps were bad in the half-light. They were not bad. He walked her up.
He left the dog tied to the rail of the porch with a bowl of water and sat in the back pew, in the smell of floor polish and old hymnbooks and the oil heater, and listened.
There were eleven of them in the choir, working on something for Sunday that had a difficult middle. One of the altos was Paige’s mother, with her eyes fixed on her music. The pastor, who had had Marj’s hymns enlarged, stood at the front with her reading glasses on top of her head, conducting with a pencil and saying, Altos. Altos. I love you, but that’s a B flat.
Marj sat at the organ under the window with her back very straight.
The organ was a small pipe organ, older than the church it was in, with a brass plate on it that he had read on the way in: given in memory of men lost at sea, and a list of names, most of them Norwegian, the last of them 1968. The music stood on the rack in front of her. The pastor stood at her shoulder, between conducting, and when the page came to its end the pastor reached over and turned it, neatly, as a page-turner does at a concert, and went back to her pencil.
It took him three pages to see it.
Marj was not looking at the music. Her eyes were on a point above the rack, on the plaster of the wall, on nothing, and her hands moved on the keys and her feet moved on the pedals as surely as if she were walking down her own hall in the dark. When the pastor stopped the altos, Marj stopped. When the pastor said from the top of the second page, Marj went back without looking, and found it, and played it. Once, in the difficult middle, her hands faltered, and she stopped, and sat with her head a little on one side, listening for something in the next room. Then she found it, and went on.
The page the pastor turned for her was the wrong page. He was close enough to see. It did not matter at all.
Afterwards, while Marj was putting on her coat with the help of one of the old men, who was making a long and courteous business of it, the pastor came down the aisle and sat on the end of his pew with her pencil behind her ear.
“You saw,” she said.
“Yes.”
“She played it at her husband’s funeral. And at his father’s. She hasn’t been able to read a note since Easter. She plays everything from memory. She learned the whole book when she was a girl, so she’d never have to look down.” She smiled a little. “She doesn’t know I know. Or she does, and she’s decided I don’t.”
“Then why turn the pages?”
“Because if I stopped,” the pastor said, “she’d know I’d noticed. And then she’d stop coming. And then she’d sell that house and go to her daughter in Bellingham, and she’d sit in an apartment looking at a parking lot.” She stood up and put her glasses down on her nose. “Walk her home. Slowly. She’ll tell you it’s for your sake.”
They went down the steps in the long blue dusk with Marj’s hand through his arm and the dog going ahead of them on his rope, stopping at every post.
“They were flat in the middle,” Marj said. “The altos.”
“I heard.”
“You didn’t. You’ve got no ear. I can tell from the way you hum.” She walked on. Her hand on his arm was light and quite sure. “That was Sindre’s favourite. That hymn. He came up every Thursday in those two weeks, he said it was like his grandmother’s church at home, and he sat where you sat and he went to sleep.”
“I didn’t go to sleep.”
“No,” Marj said. “You were watching me.” She did not turn her head. “Don’t, Daniel. I know what I’m doing. I’ve known that organ longer than you’ve been alive.”
At the gate she let go of his arm and stood looking out over the harbour, at the boats going in under the last of the light, the way she looked at everything, a little to the left.
“Are you going back up there?” she said.
“Saturday. Rainy’s taking me.”
“Then you’d better take the dog. He’ll only sit on the porch and look at the road.”
She went in. He stood at the gate with the rope in his hand, and Bamse sat down on his boot and looked up the road.