Marj Delaney was waiting at the top of the steps with her hand on the rail.
Her house stood at the head of a street so steep that the pavement gave up for the last stretch and turned into wooden stairs, and she watched him come up them the whole way, or seemed to.
“Ingrid said you’d be big,” she said, before he was halfway. “She said it twice.”
She was seventy-seven, small and straight-backed, with short white hair and a cardigan buttoned to the throat and the hands of a woman who had gutted fish for a living and then played the organ for a living, both. When he reached the top her eyes went to a point beside his left ear and stayed there, and she tilted her head a little, the way you tilt a glass to see what is in the bottom.
“There’s halibut,” she said. “I don’t do anything fancy, but I don’t do anything badly either.”
The house was old and wooden, three storeys of it, painted a dark red that had faded on the south side to the colour of brick. The kitchen had a long table with eight chairs and a sampler on the wall that said DELANEY’S — ROOMS — 1974. The other seven chairs had nobody in them.
She served the halibut without hesitating once. He watched her do it, because he watched everybody do everything; it was a professional disease. She knew where every plate was, and every spoon, and she put his coffee down on the exact spot on the oilcloth where his right hand would find it. But when she poured the cream she hooked the first finger of her left hand over the rim of the jug, and felt the cream come up to it, and stopped.
He drank his coffee. She sat down opposite with her own cup and turned it round in her hands.
“Ingrid and I write,” she said. “Every week since September, two old women. She writes better English than I do.” The cup went round once more. “I told her not to send anybody. I told her it was a river and rivers do what they do. My husband Frank was forty-one years on the water. I know what water does.”
“She sent me anyway.”
“She did. She’s a stubborn old woman. I like her very much.”
Sindre’s room was on the second floor at the back, under a sloping ceiling, with a window that looked over the roofs and the harbour to the flats.
Marj stopped in the doorway with her hand on the frame and did not come in. “I aired it,” she said. “I changed the bed. I didn’t touch his things.”
An iron bed with a patchwork quilt, a chest of drawers, a chair. On the floor by the wardrobe, a blue duffel with its zip done up and a printed label on the handle: EIKSUND S. — KESTREL RIDGE. He had stayed here two weeks last May, she said, while the snow kept the camp shut, and done her gutters, and the neighbours’ gutters, and would have done every gutter on the hill. When he went up he had left the big bag, because they told him he would only need one. The police in Canada had sent his camp things to his father. His father had written her one line about this bag: keep it for now. So she had kept it for now.
Thorsen knelt and opened it.
On top of the clothes, folded once, lay a grey wool watch cap, a little felted, with a darn on the crown in a different grey.
“He wore that every day in May,” Marj said from the door. “In the house. At my table. I gave up telling him.”
He left it where it was. Under it there was not much: clothes folded with more care than most young men take, a pair of trainers, a Norwegian flag the size of a tea towel, a bag of liquorice with three pieces left, gone hard. At the bottom, wrapped in a T-shirt, a paperback with its cover held on by tape. Pelsjegerliv, by Helge Ingstad, an old edition with a drawing on the front of a log cabin and a man with a dog team. Inside the cover, in faded blue fountain pen, Per Eiksund, Ulsteinvik, 1962. Under it, in a boy’s careful capitals, SINDRE 2016.
Here and there in the book somebody had underlined a sentence in pencil, and here and there, in a newer hand, in biro, somebody else had underlined the same one.
There were two pictures on her refrigerator, under magnets shaped like halibut. One was of a big grey-haired man in a cap and rubber boots, holding up a king salmon nearly as long as his leg and laughing at somebody behind the camera, and Marj did not explain him and did not need to. The other was a small square instant print with a thick white border along the bottom. A black dog sitting on a gravel bar with a river behind him, looking straight into the lens. A white blaze on his chest like a bib. One brown eye, and the left one pale blue, nearly white.
Marj came and stood by it. She lifted a hand and touched the edge of the print without looking at it.
“Bamse,” she said. “Sindre said I said it wrong. I said I’d say it how I liked in my own kitchen.” Her finger stayed on the border. “That’s his chest. I can see his chest.”
The dog had come from the Landing, she said, the village on the Canadian side, in June, the first time Sindre went down to the river for freight. Running loose at the dock and nobody’s. Sindre had given him half a sandwich, and the dog had got in the boat and would not get out.
She went into the front room and came back with a shoebox and put it on the table.
“Ingrid says you’re a detective,” she said. “Well. Detect.”
There were eleven letters in the box, in their envelopes, in order, written in black marker on lined paper in capitals a centimetre high, two or three pages each and not many words to a page.
“He worked it out the first week,” Marj said, “watching me read the paper. I never told him about my eyes. I don’t tell anybody about my eyes.” She was looking out of the window. “Read them to me. I can do it with the glass, but it takes me all morning.”
So he read them to her at the kitchen table while the light went long and gold across the harbour and then did not go any further, and hung there.
Most of them were camp and weather. The cook was from Quebec and made bread every day. The water line broke and he fixed it. He had seen a wolverine and nobody believed him. Then the second letter began DEAR MARJ. I HAVE A DOG, and Marj laughed out loud, a short bark like a gull’s, and after that the dog was in every one: eating a work glove, sleeping on the bunkhouse porch and then in the bunkhouse, riding down to the river on the back of the side-by-side like a man on a chariot, shaking a creek’s worth of silt over the cook.
Thorsen read them the way he had once read statements, slowly, all of it, hearing what was there and what was not. A boy who wrote every week to an old woman he had known for a fortnight, and never once wrote down the name of the man who ran the camp. A few lines he read twice.
HE IS NOT AFRAID OF THE HELICOPTER, NOT EVEN A LITTLE. HE LIES DOWN ON THE PAD WHEN IT COMES AND THE PILOT HAS TO SHOUT AT HIM.
ON MY DAY OFF I CARRY THE COOLERS FOR THE WATER PEOPLE. PAIGE IS FROM NESVIK, MAYBE YOU KNOW HER. SHE KNOWS EVERY BIRD.
“The Dolan girl,” Marj said. “Her mother’s in the choir.”
ONE OF THE DRILLERS THREW A ROCK AT HIM FOR NOSING ROUND THE RIG, AND NOW HE GROWLS AT THAT MAN AND WILL NOT GO PAST HIM, WHICH THE COOK SAYS IS ONLY FAIR.
The next was dated Sunday the twenty-sixth of July.
I HELPED WITH THE WATER AGAIN TODAY. IT IS COLD WORK, YOUR HANDS GO WHITE. BAMSE GOT A HOOK IN HIS LIP AT THE LANDING FROM SOMEBODY’S LINE AND WOULD NOT LET ANYBODY NEAR HIM. BOTH THE WATER LADIES WERE THERE. ONE OF THEM TRIED TO HELP AND HE NIPPED HER HAND. HE WAS SO SORRY AFTER. SHE WAS VERY NICE ABOUT IT. THEN TANNER SAT ON HIM AND I HELD HIS HEAD AND SHE GOT THE HOOK OUT WITH THE PLIERS FROM THE SIDE-BY-SIDE, AND THEN HE SAT ON MY FEET ALL EVENING.
The eleventh letter was dated the ninth of August, and it was short.
MY GRANDMOTHER IS SENDING ME A SWEATER. SHE HAS BEEN KNITTING IT SINCE CHRISTMAS AND WILL NOT TELL ME WHAT COLOUR. I AM GOING TO WEAR IT IN THE RIVER BOAT AND LOOK LIKE A NORWEGIAN ON A CHRISTMAS CARD. LOVE TO THE GUTTERS. SINDRE.
Thorsen put the last page down on the oilcloth.
“That came on the twenty-first,” Marj said. “The Friday. He’d been in the river five days by then.” She put the lid on the box and kept her hand on it. “Every week. The dog in every one. Not a word about the camp, or what they were digging, or what anybody up there thought about it. I asked him once, at this table, what he thought about the mine. All of Nesvik’s got an opinion about the mine. He smiled and said he was a guest.” Her hand stayed flat on the lid. “He was a guest everywhere. That’s how he was brought up. I think that’s what got him killed.”
Thorsen looked at her.
“I don’t mean anybody did anything.” She had heard it herself. “I mean he was polite. The river was up, and somebody said go and get the freight, and he went where they sent him. That’s all I mean.”
On the counter by the bread bin was a cardboard box he had not noticed until she reached past it for the kettle. It was full of hymn sheets, enlarged on a photocopier until each verse took a page, the notes as big as peas.
“The pastor had them done,” Marj said. She did not look at the box. “I don’t need them big. I’ve played that organ since 1971.”
He slept badly, in the room next to Sindre’s, with the light coming round the edges of the blind at four, and at six he gave up and went outside to find something to do with his hands.
The woodshed was a lean-to of grey boards behind the house, with the logs inside stacked as neatly as library shelves. The basket by the stove had been half empty last night. He took it out to fill it.
At the back of the shed, behind a stack of crab pots and an old outboard, a sign on a post leaned against the wall with its face to the boards.
He would not have looked at it, except that it was new. Everything else in the shed was old: the axe, the splitting maul with its handle bound in friction tape, a pair of Frank Delaney’s rubber boots with the tops folded down. The sign was clean white board on a new cedar post, the kind a realtor drives in by a gate, and its edges had not yet gone grey. He tipped it forward a few centimetres with one finger.
FOR SALE. A telephone number, and the name of a realtor in Wrangell.
He put it back exactly as it had been, face to the boards, and filled the basket, and carried it in.
Marj was at the stove in her dressing gown, frying eggs by sound.
“You found the woodshed,” she said.
“I did.”
She broke another egg one-handed into the pan and listened to it, and did not turn round. “Good,” she said. “That’s what it’s for.”
At nine she came back up the wooden steps from the post office with her mail, and stood at the counter holding the envelopes close to her face, one after another, sorting them by the colour of the paper.
“Bill. Bill. The man from Fish and Game, to tell me he’s coming in June. Church.” She stopped at the last one and held it out to him. “That one came Thursday. It’s in pencil. I’ve been carrying it round.”
It was a postcard. On the front, a river in a canyon with snow on the rims, and in white letters across the corner, DALGLEISH LANDING, B.C. A Canadian stamp. It was addressed in an old woman’s upright hand to Mrs. Delaney (Sindre’s landlady), Nesvik, Alaska, USA, and in a town of two thousand nine hundred that had been enough.
He turned it over and read it aloud.
Mrs. Delaney. Sindre told me about you and your house. I am writing to tell you about his dog. He came back to the village in August, after, and he has been at the dump all winter. I fed him because somebody had to. He will not let anybody touch him. When the boats start he will go back down to the camp landing, I think. That is where the food came from. Somebody should know. Ruth.
Marj stood very still in the middle of her kitchen with the bills in her hand.
“He’s alive,” she said.
“It seems so.”
She put the bills down on the table, carefully, one on top of the other, by feel, and sat. “All winter. Up there, at a dump. Thirty below.” Her hands lay flat on the oilcloth. “And she thinks he’ll go back to the landing.”
Thorsen looked at the picture on the card: the canyon, the snow, the river going away round a bend into the mountains, where it had come from with a boy in it.
“I’m going up there,” he said.
“I know you are.” She reached across the table with her hand open, and he put the postcard in it, and she held it out at arm’s length and a little to one side, where she could see best, and looked at the river for a long time.
“When you do,” Marj said, “you bring me back word of that dog.”