Rainy’s Beaver came round the bend below the village at ten past eight on Saturday morning, low over the water, with the sun on her floats, and put down on the river as if she were setting a cup on a saucer.
She made fast, and walked up to the phone box on its post and made her CBSA call with her back to Thorsen, in a flat bored voice. Then she hung up and turned round and looked at him, standing at the top of the ramp with his bag and his stick and the dog.
“Upright,” she said. “Look at that.”
“Mostly.”
“Mostly.” She looked at the stick, and at the ankle, and at the place on his face where the bear spray had taken the skin off. Then she looked away at the river.
“I’m sorry about the fog,” she said. “On Sunday. I should have got down under it.”
“You found me,” Thorsen said.
She looked at him then.
“You radioed it. They knew where to look, and they knew which way I’d go. Ellie was at the mouth of the creek that evening because of you.” He held out his hand. “You found me.”
She looked at the hand as if it were a part she had not ordered. Then she took it, hard and brief, and let go.
“Get in,” she said. “And put that dog in the back, and if he’s sick in my airplane you’re cleaning it.”
The dog was not sick. He lay on the floor between the rear seats with his chin on Thorsen’s boot and his eyes shut and his ears going round like radar every time the engine changed its note.
They went down the river at three hundred metres, under a high thin overcast, with the whole valley laid out below them: the braided channels, the grey bars, the black spruce. The mouth of Mink Creek went by under the right float, very small, a brown tongue of water and a thread of white where the jam was, and Thorsen looked at it until it had gone behind the wing.
“Celia’s been at me all week,” Rainy said, over the intercom. “To get her up to her stations, with the camp shut. And the Mounties had Goat Creek taped off, and Otter Lake with it, and I’m not putting floats down on a police scene for anybody. They gave it back last night. So she’ll be at me again.” A pause. “She asked me three times on the phone exactly where I saw you. Below the lake, I said. On the west bank. I think she feels bad too.”
Thorsen looked at the back of her head.
“Everybody feels bad,” he said.
“Well, they should,” said Rainy. “You were up there two days.”
At the float in Nesvik the CBP officer scanned the dog’s chip with a wand, and looked at the paperwork, and the dog let her.
Marj was on her porch in a cardigan with her hand up against the light, looking at the road the wrong way, and when the dog came up the path ahead of him she knew him by the sound of his feet and put her hand down and said, “Well, there’s my boy,” and the dog went up the steps and put his whole head in her lap.
“And there’s the other one,” Marj said. She looked at a place a little to the left of Thorsen’s face. “You look like something the cat dragged in.”
“You can’t see me.”
“I can see enough. Pete Sandoval called me on Monday. The pastor called me Wednesday, and half the choir’s been round.” She found his arm without looking for it. “Get inside and sit down. Your lady comes at two-fifteen. I’m making a pie.”
“You don’t have to make a pie.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” said Marj. “I’m seventy-seven.”
Gordie drove him to the airport in the shop truck. The dog stayed on Marj’s porch, and watched the truck go with his chin flat on the boards.
Gordie said almost nothing on the way. At the turn by the cold storage he said, “She called me. Celia. Thursday. Wanted running up to her stations and waiting for. I told her I’m reporting at the Landing from now on and she’s not on my manifest.” He drove a while. “She laughed. Said since when do you report anything, Gordie. I said since you all found out I don’t.” And at the airport, in the car park, with the engine running, looking at the windsock, he said, “I told my wife. About the border runs. All of it.” He rubbed his face. “She said she knew. Twelve years she’s known. She was waiting for me to tell her.”
“What did she say then?”
“She said about time,” said Gordie. “I’m taking you back up the river tomorrow, if they want you. Sandoval says they might.” And he got out to wait by the fence.
The jet came in over the water from the south at a quarter past two, the only big thing that ever came to Nesvik on wheels, and people came down the stairs into the wind holding onto their hats. Claire was the eleventh. She had a duffel over one shoulder and a canvas tool bag in her other hand, which was so like her that he laughed out loud on the wrong side of the fence, and she heard him, and looked across the apron, and found him.
She did not run. Claire did not run. She walked across the apron at her own pace, and came through the little gate, and put the duffel down, and the tool bag, and looked at him from about a metre away: the stick, the ankle, the face.
“Bear spray,” she said.
“Mine. The wind came back.”
“I can see it did.” She put her hand up and touched the raw place on his cheekbone, very lightly, with two fingers. Then she put her arms round him, there by the fence, with Gordie pretending to look at the windsock, and held on, hard, the way she had held onto his coat on the ramp of the Nokomis.
When they got back to the house the dog was under the porch.
He was right at the back, in the dark, flat on his belly, and he would not come out for Thorsen. He thumped his tail once and stayed where he was.
Marj was in the kitchen doorway with her hands in a tea towel.
“He went under there when the truck went,” she said. “Like a thing poured out of a bucket. He’s been waiting at landings for a year, that dog, for people who drive off. He doesn’t believe anybody comes back yet.” She twisted the tea towel. “And Celia came.”
Thorsen stood very still on the path.
“About an hour after you went. With a rhubarb pie, if you please, and me with a pie in the oven. To see how you were. To see if you needed anything. She was so sorry. Everybody’s so sorry.” Her face was turned towards the road. “She asked how you were. If you’d been in the hospital. If you’d brought your things down from the river, or if they were still up there. I said I didn’t know, you only had the one bag. She asked could she see you, and I said you were out, and she said she’d come again. And she stood on my porch and talked.” She was quiet. “I can’t see faces any more, Daniel. You know that. I can hear them. And Celia talked too much. Celia’s never talked too much in her life. Not even as a little girl. She was the one who sat and listened.”
Claire put her bags down and got down on her stomach on the path, in her good travelling jeans, with her face to the gap in the lattice, and said nothing to the dog for two minutes. Then she said, quietly, “Well, look at you,” and put her hand in through the gap, palm down, and left it there.
Five minutes later the dog came out on his belly like a seal up a beach, put his nose in her hand, and rolled over and showed her the white of his chest.
“He’s a good dog,” Claire said, from the ground.
“He is,” said Marj. “Who are you?”
“Claire.”
“I know you’re Claire. He’s been talking about you since May. I mean who are you.” Marj came down the step, feeling for it with her foot. “You got him out. Nobody’s got him out from under there but me. Come inside. Leave that pie, it’s hers. Mine’s better. Can you fix a water heater?”
“Probably.”
“Frank always fixed the water heater,” said Marj. “Then Frank died, and now it bangs.” She took Claire’s arm, the way she had taken Thorsen’s. “Come and listen to it bang.”
Hazel came at five on her bicycle, which she laid down on the grass with great care, as if it might break, and came up the path and stood at the bottom of the porch steps with her hands in the pocket of a hoodie three sizes too big for her.
“She asked me,” she said. “Dr. Harker. At the harbour. This morning.”
Thorsen was in the porch chair with his foot up on a crate. Claire was inside, under Marj’s water heater, with Marj sitting on a kitchen chair beside her handing her things.
“Asked you what?”
“She asked Mom first. At the fuel dock. About old footage from the river trip.” Hazel did the quote marks with two fingers each, inside the hoodie pocket, so that the hoodie did it. “Like if Dad still had stuff from last August. From the drone. For her stations. She said it might be useful for her flow records. Mom said ask Hazel, Hazel does the files. So she came and found me on the breakwater.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her we delete everything after ninety days. For space.” Hazel looked at the dog, who had come to the top of the steps and was looking at her. “Which is a lie. I don’t delete anything. I’ve got everything since I was seven.”
“Did she believe you?”
“I don’t know. She said oh, what a shame.” Hazel considered it. “She said it twice. And she kept pulling her sleeve down. The left one. Like this.” She took one hand out of the hoodie and pulled at her own left cuff with the fingers of her right, down over her wrist, twice, three times. “The whole time. It wasn’t cold.”
“You told your mom?”
“No.” Hazel put her hand back. “I told you. Mom tells everybody everything. That’s the whole problem with Mom. I know what was in the frame. I gave the drive to Sergeant Sandoval.” She went back down the steps and picked up her bicycle with the same care. “I just wanted you to know she asked.”
She rode away down the road, very upright, very straight, and did not look back.
Ollie’s story had gone up on the Herald‘s website on Friday night, and by Saturday supper the whole of Bev’s café had read it on their phones, and those who had not had had it read to them. In Bev’s window the Herald‘s black box said 13 DAYS.
It was not a long story, and Ollie had written it carefully. B.C. orders inspection of Kestrel Ridge water data. Split-sampling at two baseline stations on Mink Creek on Thursday; a discrepancy raised by the Guardians in March; Harker Environmental named, once. Dr. Celia Harker had said in a statement that variations of this kind were well documented in glacial river systems, that she had full confidence in her data, and that she welcomed the inspection.
“Welcomes it,” Ed Harker said, at the big table by the window. He said it loudly. He said everything loudly. “You hear that? She welcomes it. That’s my girl. You want to inspect her, inspect her. She’ll show you every bottle.”
The Harker table rumbled agreement: seven men over sixty in rubber boots and wool shirts, who had sat at that table against the mine for three years and against the cannery for twenty before that.
Thorsen and Claire were at the counter with soup. Bev Marchand, who had fed him meatloaf at her counter on his first Monday, put bread down in front of them, and looked at Thorsen’s face, and said, “The bear?” and he said, “The spray,” and she said, “I’d have bet on the bear,” and went away.
Ollie Grant was at the end of the counter with his laptop. He looked across at the Harker table, and Thorsen saw him decide to say something, and decide against it, and decide again.
“If the baseline’s high, Ed,” Ollie said, “it’s high for good. That’s the line the mine gets to run at.”
“I know what a baseline is, son,” said Ed. “I was fighting about baselines when you were in diapers.”
“I know. I’m just saying what the—”
“Celia’s numbers,” Ed said, “are the only honest thing in that whole outfit.”
And he stopped.
He did not stop the way a man stops who has finished. He stopped the way a man stops halfway across a room, when he has heard something behind him. He sat at the big table by the window with his coffee cup in his hand, and the table waited for the rest of it, and the rest of it did not come. He put the cup down. He looked at it.
“Ed?” somebody said.
“I’m all right,” said Ed. He looked out of the window at the harbour, where his boat was, at her slip, with the new engine on her. “I’m all right. Leave me be a minute.”
The table went back to its pie, carefully. Ollie looked at his laptop.
Ed got up five minutes later and came past the counter on his way out, and stopped, and put a big hand on the counter beside Thorsen’s bowl.
“You were up there,” he said. Not loudly. “You were up at that camp a month. You saw her work. You tell them. Her numbers are good.”
Thorsen looked at the hand on the counter: the swollen knuckles, the white scars across the backs of the fingers where fifty years of gillnet had cut them.
“I don’t know anything about numbers, Ed,” he said.
Ed looked at him a moment longer. Then he nodded, as if that were an answer, and went out, and the bell over the door rang behind him.
Claire ate her soup. Under the counter, where nobody could see, she put her foot against his, and left it there.
Fraser called at a quarter to ten, when they were on Marj’s porch in the long light, and Marj had gone to bed, and the dog was asleep across the top step.
Thorsen took it at the end of the garden by the shed.
“She called Batt,” Fraser said. “At six-forty this evening. He’s in Terrace on medical leave. He agreed on Wednesday to let us listen, and a judge agreed yesterday, and we listened.” A pause. “I’m not going to tell you what she said.”
“All right.”
“I’m going to tell you one thing she said, because it’s about you, and you’re sitting in her home town.” Another pause. “She asked whether you went near the Otter Lake hut.
“And Batt said what we’d asked him to say, which was no idea, he came out on the west bank, that’s all I heard. And she said right, and good, and asked after his chest, and hung up. I don’t think she’s going to do anything to you, Mr. Thorsen. I think she wants you on a ferry. But you’ll stay with people tomorrow. Your friend, the old lady, the parade. People. You won’t be anywhere on your own.”
“I won’t.”
“Good,” said Fraser, and rang off.
When he came back up the garden Claire was not on the porch. The shed door was open.
He found them both in the shed, Claire and Marj, in the yellow light from the doorway; Marj in her dressing gown and boots, who had not gone to bed at all, standing with one hand on the workbench, and Claire with her back to him, pulling something out from behind a stack of crab pots and an old outboard. It was a sign on a post. It had been there some time. The post had cobwebs on it.
FOR SALE, it said, and a phone number, and a realtor’s name in Wrangell.
“Don’t help,” said Marj, to both of them. “I can do it myself.”
“I know you can,” said Claire, and carried it out.
They put it up at the end of the front path, by the gate, in the last of the light. Marj chose the place by walking along the fence with her hand on it and stopping. Claire found a mallet in the shed and drove the post in with eight blows, square, the way she did everything, and stood back and looked at it to see that it was straight, and it was.
Marj stood at the gate with her hand on the post. She could not have read it. She did not need to.
“There,” she said. “Now everybody knows.”
“Everybody knew,” said Claire.
“I know they did,” said Marj. “Now I do too.” She took her hand off the post. “Frank built that fence. I’m going to bed. Don’t stay up all night, the pair of you, it’s not good for you, whatever the sky says.”
She went up the path in her dressing gown, feeling the edges of it with her boots, and the dog lifted his head as she passed and put it down again, and the screen door banged.
Claire came and stood beside him at the gate.
“You’re going to tell me,” she said, “when you can.”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” said Claire, and took his arm, and they went in.