Rainy flew her Beaver the way some women drive a truck they have owned for thirty years: with one hand, talking, and without once appearing to look at anything, and with the absolute attention of a mechanic listening to an engine.
“Don’t touch that,” she said, as Thorsen’s knee came near a lever. “Don’t touch that either. Dog’s fine. Dogs are always fine. It’s the men who throw up.”
They went off the south harbour at eight on Saturday morning in a long white roar of spray and climbed out over the flats. Bamse lay on the floor behind the seats on top of the mail sacks, with his chin on a sealed brown evidence bag that Pete Sandoval had signed across the flap, and slept. Ed Harker sat behind Thorsen with his knees up and a duffel on them, because Ellie Bourque had asked the fleet to send somebody to the council’s meeting on Goat Creek, and the fleet had sent the man who had shouted loudest.
“Hot week coming,” Rainy said, over the engine. “You can see it on the glacier. Look.” Where the river came out from under the great white tongue of ice above the border, the water was the colour of milk. “Every warm day, the creeks come up. They come up all afternoon, they peak about supper, they go down overnight. By August you can’t cross anything after lunch. You can hear the boulders going down Mink Creek like a bowling alley.” She glanced at Thorsen. “Not that you’ll be crossing anything.”
“No.”
“You city boys always say no. And then I’m out looking for you.”
“Last August was worse,” Ed said from the back. He had not spoken since Nesvik. “The lake let go up top. You remember, Rainy.”
“I remember.”
“I was at the Landing that weekend. I go up most Augusts, to help Albert Kane put up his fish, and that week we had his net in the eddy off Caldera’s bar at the mouth of Mink Creek. Everybody on that river knew it. Albert pulled it on the Saturday, when the flood warning came down, so there was nobody at the mouth on the Sunday.” Ed looked down at the river going by under the floats, grey and enormous. “The Sunday, it was up a foot by noon and coming. And Celia raised me on the VHF. About ten to three, Canada time; I put my watch on Canada time when I go up, or Albert gives me hell. I know because I’d just looked at it to see how fast the river was rising. She was up at the top station, she said, on Mink Creek, and she’d heard about the lake, and what was the river doing at the mouth? So I told her. And I said, you get off that creek, girl.” He was quiet for a moment. “She laughed at me. She said she was a long way up, and she’d be out by five.” He rubbed his face. “And the boy was down there. On the bar. While I was telling her.”
Nobody said anything. Rainy flew. After a while Ed said, to the window, “She cried for a week. People forget that.”
Rainy put the Beaver down inside the buoys at Dalgleish Landing at a quarter past ten, Canada time, and drifted her up to the float, and Thorsen stepped off with the line and made it fast on the cleat, and did it right, which he saw her notice.
At the grey box on its post Rainy read off passport numbers with one hand on her hip. “Two passengers, US citizens. Pilot, US citizen. Mail. Freight for Kestrel Ridge. One dog. Canadian. Going home.” She held the receiver out. “The officer wants to talk to you about the dog.”
He read the officer the rabies certificate number and the microchip number, standing on a float in the middle of British Columbia with the river going past, and she gave him a reporting number, and he wrote it down.
Ellie was at the bottom of the ramp. She shook Ed’s hand and took him off up the road towards the band office, Ed with his duffel over his shoulder, talking. Corporal Dhillon stayed by his truck in his RCMP ballcap.
He took the evidence bag and signed for it on the bonnet, slowly, reading Sandoval’s form line by line. “Drone and GoPro originals,” Thorsen said. “The girl who edits them says the files are on Alaska time. Add an hour. And there’s someone at MC-1 at two forty-seven in yellow, with something long in their hands, too small to see.”
“I’ll get our tech people on it.” Dhillon put the bag in the truck. “And the tracker in Batt’s helicopter. I’ve got five people who lied in a sudden-death file and a pilot who admits he falsified a log. Crown wanted more than a drill on a hill before I put that in front of a judge. Now they’ve got it. The application’s in. Ten days, maybe, for the operator to hand over every place that machine put down that morning.”
“Harker Environmental had two samplers last summer,” Thorsen said.
Dhillon waited.
“One of them was in Juneau. Sandoval’s got the airline record. The other one is Dr. Harker, and the only thing that says where she was that afternoon is Batt’s ticket. MC-3, up past the camp. Batt rewrote that ticket.” He said it plainly. He had been carrying the name for three days, since Sandoval’s printout, and it sat badly beside a woman on Marj’s top step with her field book open on his knee, and he said it anyway. “I’d like to test it.”
“Celia Harker.” Dhillon looked at him with no expression at all. “Both sides of that town trust her. She wrote to me on Thursday, through a lawyer, with a copy to the EAO. She wants her own coolers looked at. She thinks somebody in that camp’s been into them.”
“I know. She told me first.”
“Then you know she’s the only one up there asking me to look at anything.” He opened the truck door. “So test it properly. Batt’s journey log, not the ticket. They’re two different documents and he’d have to have fixed both. And what did her father just say to you, on the plane? I watched him get off. He looked like a man who’d been talking.”
Thorsen told him. The VHF, ten to three, the top station, the river rising. You get off that creek, girl.
Dhillon was quiet.
“I’ve known Ed Harker two summers,” he said. “He told me once to my face that I’d ruled wrong on a fishing violation, and then he brought me the tide table that proved it, and he was right. I’d take Ed’s word on the time of day over the clock in my office.” He got into the truck. “And he wasn’t giving you an alibi for his daughter. He was telling you about a flood.”
Kestrel Ridge had changed in four weeks.
Rennick had stopped the permitted drill above camp himself while the inspector wrote her report, and without its noise the valley had a different sound, wind and water, and the generator going in the dry like somebody’s heart.
Doug Rennick met them on the dock with the eyes of a man who had not slept well since the Herald, and that evening in the dry, with a half-carved heron on the bench between them, he did not pretend about anything.
On the sixteenth of August, he said, he had been on the camp sat phone in the cook tent, on the cord, from five past two until twenty past three, telling the CEO’s office in Vancouver that the financing was safe. Bernie had made him move twice to get at the oven. The bill had gone to Vancouver.
“And Mitch,” he said. “He carried for Celia some days in July, when she asked me for hands. What nobody knew was that he went down twice more. After the sump went over I sent him down the creek on his own with a bottle on a pole and camp rain gear, to find out before the consultant did whether there was drill mud in Mink Creek.” He took a camp manager’s diary out of his shirt pocket and turned the pages with a thumb. “Twenty-ninth of July. Seventh of August. A lab in Prince George, on my own card. They came back fine, more or less. I didn’t send him on the sixteenth. And I told him to say he’d never been down that creek with anything but a rod, to anybody who asked.” He put the diary away. “The core shack key’s on my ring, and I’ve never opened a cooler of hers in my life. I lied about the morning. I’d like you to know I’m not lying about the rest.”
Dhillon would get the phone records when the warrant came. Until then it was a man with a knife saying so.
Imogen Oakes saw him at the long table by the core boxes on Sunday afternoon, and her mouth went flat.
“If you want my alibi,” she said, “you could have just asked.”
She took a small grey field camera out of her fleece and put it in his hands without letting go of the strap. The sump on her own permitted pad, up near the head of Mink Creek, had gone over in the rain that weekend, worse than Mitch’s in July, grey water down a gully into the creek the whole baseline was measured on, and she had gone up alone and stopped it with a pump and a tarp and her own two hands, and never told anybody. Sixty-one photographs, each with a time and a position: the first at one thirty-one, the last at eight minutes to four, of a red-and-white helicopter coming up the valley towards her.
“Clocks can be set. I know. Corey’s machine has a tracker in it. Ask Amrit to ask for it.” She took the camera back. “One spill is a careless driller. Two in a month, in the middle of a financing, is the end of the financing. That’s my career, Mr. Thorsen. Not the hole. That.”
“Somebody was at MC-1 that afternoon. In yellow.”
“Then ask Doug who he sent down after the sump.” The colour had come up in her face. “I sign Celia’s coolers in and out. I don’t open them. Ask Celia, she’s the one who’s decided it’s us.”
She looked at the core tray, and when she spoke again it was slower.
“It wasn’t the sump he came to me about, at lunch, whatever I told Amrit. You know that. He said KR-31, and the green on Ellie’s map. I said tomorrow because tomorrow the financing closed.” She put the hand lens down. “I’ve had ten months of tomorrow.”
Mitch Doyle, on Monday evening behind the shop, with a cigarette he was not supposed to have, did not bother to deny the bottles. Doug had told him to keep his name off the water, and he had a kid and a driller’s ticket to keep. On the sixteenth, he said, he had been in the dry with a bottle of rye and his helper. The helper remembered the rye and not the clock, except that at some point he had woken on the bench and Mitch and his boots were gone. Mitch said he had gone for a piss, and looked at the boarded window while he said it.
Corey Batt was the easiest man in camp to talk to, and Thorsen had been a policeman long enough to be wary of that.
He had flown Thorsen twice that week, up to the lake intake at the head of the valley and to look at the upper bench, and both times he had put him down where he said, and come back when he said, and told stories against himself all the way.
He did not lie about the morning any more. On Wednesday evening, on the step of the helicopter on the fuel pad, with the dog lying well off on the gravel, he said it plainly. He had flown the drill to KR-31. He had flown the boy up with the water lines. He had rewritten the ticket and the log that night because Rennick asked him to.
“Last lift home was about twelve,” he said. “Cloud was down on the Goat side, so I brought her the long way round, out over the river and up the creek from the mouth. The kid had his face on the window the whole way. Over the canyon he grabs my arm and points down and says, who’s on MC-1? I said nobody, Paige was off. He said somebody was. Somebody in yellow with a pole, on the gravel.” Batt shrugged. “I said a fisherman. Somebody’s cousin. He didn’t like it. He went quiet.” He looked at Thorsen sideways. “Mitch was down there a lot, that summer. With a pole. Ask Doug what for.”
“Did you look?”
“I was flying a helicopter down a canyon.” He looked at the lake. “No.”
“And that night you wrote him out of the ticket.”
“Stupid. Twenty-five years flying. Never put a wrong line in a log in my life before that. Coastal Ridge’ll have my licence. Transport’ll have the rest of me. Fair enough.”
“The afternoon,” Thorsen said. “Harker.”
“MC-3.” Batt reached into the door pocket and handed him a folded photocopy. “Transport’s got the book. They let me keep the page.” It was in Batt’s square capitals. 16 August. 1405, drop Harker Environmental, MC-3. 1640, pick up, MC-3. “The afternoon was dead easy. Imogen up to her pad and back, Celia to her top station and back. In between I was on the fuel pad.”
“Not MC-1.”
“MC-1?” Batt laughed. “I’ve never put down at MC-1 in my life. It’s a canyon. You’d lose the rotor on the walls.” He took the page back. “Why?”
“There was somebody at MC-1 that afternoon. On the drone.”
“Told you. Doug sent Mitch down, didn’t he? After the sump.” Batt shrugged. “Or one of the Guardians. Or somebody’s cousin from the village after a fish. It’s a creek. People stand by it.” He folded the page and put it back in the door pocket. “You still want to see KR-31, by the way? I’m slinging gear up there for the inspector’s lot on Saturday. There’s room going up.”
That night, on his bunk, Thorsen wrote it down as a list. Harker: top station, Batt’s log, Ed’s VHF about 1450. Rennick: sat phone, bill to come. Oakes: KR-27, camera, tracker to come. Doyle: rye, “a piss”.
Then he turned back to the front of the notebook, to the two messages copied out in Ingrid’s careful English. I have seen something today. A drill in the green in the morning. And at noon, from a helicopter window, somebody in yellow on the gravel at the lowest station with a pole. Two things, and he had told Oakes about one of them. Not till he’d talked to the person, Tanner had said.
On Friday he rang Dhillon from the cook tent, on the cord.
“It’s not my scene,” Dhillon said. “It’s the inspector’s, and she’s walked it and photographed it, and once her report’s in, the order seals it and nobody goes up there till a court says so. If you want to stand where that boy stood, Saturday’s the last chance anybody gets.” A pause on the line. “Photographs. Touch nothing. Tell someone down here when you go and when you’re back.”
So he rang Ruth, in the village, in her kitchen above the float.
“Batt’s taking me to KR-31 at two tomorrow,” he said. “Back at three. If I haven’t rung you by four, ring Dhillon.”
“Say it again,” Ruth said. “I’m writing it on the calendar.” He heard the pencil. “Two. KR-31. Corey Batt. Back three. Four, Amrit.” Then, “Take something to eat.”
He wanted to see where the boy had spent the last morning of his life, and in a week the only people who would ever stand there again would be lawyers.
On Saturday, because Ruth had said so, he put a cook-tent sandwich in his jacket pocket, and went out to the pad.
Bamse went up into the back of the helicopter in one jump after Thorsen, flat-eared, pressed against his legs, hating the noise and coming anyway, the way he had gone into Rainy’s Beaver and Gordie’s boat, into every machine that might take him somewhere he had been before. The turbine wound up through its long rising whine, and the camp tipped and fell away.
They went up the valley and over the shoulder of the ridge into the Goat Creek basin, and the land opened under them.
It was a hanging valley, a great green scoop in the mountain with a creek coming down the middle of it white over rock, and long pale avalanche stripes down its bush. At the bottom, far below, a small grey lake lay in the trees like a dropped coin. Otter Lake. Beyond it, beyond a dark gash in the forest that was Mink Creek in its gorge, he could see the bench where the camp stood, and the white dot of the cook tent. It looked close enough to walk to.
“Can’t,” said Batt in the headset, as though Thorsen had spoken. “Mink Creek’s between. You can’t cross that thing in summer. You’d go in at the top and come out in Wrangell.”
The pad was a shelf of raw earth on the slope at eleven hundred metres, dug out of the mountain and shored with timber cribbing, with tracks of crushed bush running from it. The drill was long gone. There was a capped steel casing in the middle of the shelf, a heap of split core bags, two blue plastic drums, a sump under a green tarp held down by rocks, a red jerrycan on its side, and the inspector’s stakes with pink flagging strung between them, flapping in the wind.
Batt put the skids down on the edge of the shelf, light, the rotor still turning over their heads.
“Here.” He reached behind his seat for an orange pouch with CAMP EMERGENCY stencilled on it, took out a small device in a yellow rubber case and dropped it in Thorsen’s lap. “inReach. SOS is the big button under the cap. Anything happens, you hold it down. They’ll have a chopper on you in an hour.” He grinned. “Which’ll be me.”
Thorsen put it in his jacket pocket with the sandwich.
“Need to sling a load for the inspector’s lot,” Batt said. “Back in an hour. Have a look round. Don’t fall in the sump.”
Thorsen took off the headset and climbed out into the wind with his head low, and the dog came after him and stood against his legs. He walked them clear of the rotor disc and turned and lifted a hand.
Batt lifted a hand back. The helicopter lifted off the shelf, turned its nose down the valley, dipped once, and went away from him over the green, an insect and then a dot and then a sound, and then it went over the ridge and the sound went too.
It was two o’clock in the afternoon.
The wind came across the pad and lifted the edge of the tarp on the sump and dropped it again. Bamse sat down on Thorsen’s boot and looked at the ridge where the noise had gone, with his ears up, and waited, the way he had waited at the landing all spring.