He was halfway through the meatloaf when the old man sat down beside him.
The Slack Tide was a long low room on the main street with steamed-up windows and a counter down one side, and at noon on Monday it was full. The woman who had poured his coffee wore a man’s watch too big for her, pushed up her forearm out of the way of the pot, and had told him the meatloaf was good because it was Monday.
The old man was seventy-eight and moved like it: big and rawboned and stooped, in a wool shirt and braces, with a white crewcut. He put his mug on the counter with hands that did not quite open all the way.
“Ed Harker. I fish the flats.” His voice was a low rasp. “I’m sorry for your family. I want you to hear that before anybody else gets to you. That boy came in here with Marj every morning for two weeks last spring and asked me every question you can ask about a gillnet, and wrote it all down in a little book.”
He turned the mug a quarter turn.
“He died for the camp’s freight run. That’s what I think. They sent a kid down to that bar on a flood day to fetch their groceries. I know that river. I go up to the Landing every August and help an old friend put up his fish, and I’ve done it forty years, and you don’t send a kid down to the water on a day like that.” He turned the mug again. “They’ll tell you it’s magnets. Wind turbines. It’s a hole the size of this town and a tailings dam with thorium in it, on top of a sockeye river. And the day the province signs, an outfit called Pallas buys the lot, and everybody up there gets rich.”
“Ed,” said the woman at the coffee machine, without turning round. “Not at my counter.”
Ed lifted one hand off the counter and put it down again, which seemed to count as an apology.
“You want to know what’s in that river,” he said, “ask my daughter. Celia. She does their water. She’ll tell you straight. She’s told them things they didn’t want to hear.” He laid a five-dollar bill by his mug and got up with a hand on the counter. “Harker Environmental, on the dock road, by the old net loft. Tell her I sent you. She’ll pretend she’s annoyed.”
He stood a moment longer, looking down.
“Gordie Marsh found that boy,” he said. “Gordie hasn’t been in here since September.”
He went back to the window table, and the fishermen closed round him like water.
The woman took Thorsen’s plate. “That’s true, about Gordie,” she said. “Twenty years, eggs over easy and rye toast, at that end of the counter. Then nothing.” She wiped the place where the plate had been. “He’s at the shop. He’s always at the shop.”
Dalgleish River Jets was a long steel building at the north end of town, where the road ran out into gravel and alders, with a roll-up door open at one end and a hand-painted sign above it of a boat going up a river very fast.
The boat sat inside on a trailer: eight and a half metres of welded aluminium painted bright orange, with a cabin of big windows and the engine hatch open at the stern. A man was lying on his front across the engine bay with only his legs out, and a radio on the bench was playing country music very quietly, as if it were embarrassed.
“Shop’s closed,” said the legs.
Thorsen waited. After a while the legs came backwards out of the engine bay and a man sat up on the edge of the hull and looked at him.
Gordie Marsh was sixty-three, lean and grey and stringy, with a long jaw and a thin mouth and very pale eyes in a face burned dark by thirty summers of glare off water. He had grease to the elbows. He wiped his hands on a rag, one finger at a time, looking at Thorsen the whole while, and did not get up.
“I know who you are,” he said. “I read the papers. You want the bar.”
“If you’ll tell me.”
“Nothing to tell. Second of September, I was running a tour. I saw something on the bar that shouldn’t be there. I went and looked, and then I wished I hadn’t.” He said it on one breath, in a voice as dry and flat as a board, like a man reading out a list he had written a long time ago and read many times since. “I called the troopers. The trooper came. That’s all.”
The radio sang about a truck.
“I never went past the hot springs that day,” Gordie said.
Thorsen let it lie there between them on the concrete. Nobody had asked Gordie Marsh where he had been that day. He had said it anyway, flat and quick, the way a man tries a door he has already locked.
“Which day?”
Something happened at the corner of the thin mouth, and stopped.
“The sixteenth. August. The day he went in.” Gordie stood up then, and picked up the rag again, and wiped hands that were already clean. “Everybody asks. The trooper asked. The Mountie asked. I had a tour that day. Hot springs and back. The river was coming up and I turned round. Never got near the border.” He threw the rag on the bench. “So now you’ve asked.”
He turned his back and leaned into the engine bay and did something with a wrench that did not need doing.
By the door, on the floor between the bench and the wall, stood a sack of dog food. A big one, twenty kilos, with a husky in snow on the front, the top rolled down and closed with a bulldog clip. Beside it were two stainless steel bowls, nested one inside the other, clean.
There was no dog in the shop. No bed, no lead on a hook, no hair on the floor. Only the sack, and the bowls nested the way a man nests bowls he takes somewhere and brings home.
“You have a dog, Mr. Marsh?”
The wrench stopped.
“No,” said Gordie Marsh, inside the engine bay, after a while. “I don’t have a dog.”
Thorsen went out into the grey afternoon and up the gravel road towards town, and before he reached the first house he heard the radio in the shop turned up loud.
On Tuesday morning the Revell Island Herald had the week’s front page taped up inside its window, the way shops once put up notice of a death. Most of it was festival: three small children in horned helmets, each holding a herring, looking appalled. In the top right corner, in a black-bordered box, in a typeface bigger than anything else on the page, the paper was counting down to the ruling of the province’s Environmental Assessment Office, the EAO:
EAO DECISION ON KESTREL RIDGE: FRIDAY 16 JULY. 66 DAYS.
Behind the glass, at a desk under a wall of bound back issues, a young man with a pencil behind his ear was eating a slice of cold pizza. He saw Thorsen reading, and raised the slice to him like a glass, and went back to his screen.
He walked down to the dock road by the long way, along the harbour. Men were stringing flags between the light poles on Main Street from the bucket of a borrowed truck, and the cannery was running halibut, its steam going straight up in the still air and then leaning over towards the hill.
Harker Environmental had the ground floor of the old net loft on the dock road, a long shingled building on pilings with the tide sucking at the weed underneath, and it smelled of coffee and wet neoprene and something sharp under it all, like a swimming pool.
The woman at the front desk was in her fifties, with permed brown hair and reading glasses and a brooch on her cardigan in the shape of a salmon. She looked at him with the polite wariness of somebody who answered the door for a living, took his name, and half turned in her chair.
“Celia? It’s the man Ed sent.”
“Tell him I’m annoyed,” said a voice from the back.
The back of the loft had been made into a laboratory by somebody who knew exactly what a laboratory needed and had about a third of the money for it. A long steel bench under the windows. Shelves of plastic sample bottles in a dozen sizes, new and still in their bags. Blue and white coolers stacked three high against the wall, each with a strip of tape across the lid and a station code in marker. A whiteboard of numbers half rubbed out with the side of a hand. And at a deep steel sink at the end of the bench, a woman in a fleece with the sleeves shoved above her elbows, rinsing bottles under the cold tap and standing them upside down on a rack, one after another, quickly, like somebody dealing cards.
She finished the row before she turned round.
Celia Harker was forty-six, of middle height and strong through the shoulders, with short dark hair going grey in a way she had plainly decided not to do anything about, and freckles, and reading glasses on a cord round her neck. She had her father’s long jaw and none of his weather. Her forearms were red to the elbow from the cold water. She shook his hand with a hand that was cold and still wet, said she was sorry about his cousin, and went back to the sink.
“You’ll have to talk to my back. These go up on Friday’s plane.”
On the wall behind him was a big topographic sheet with a blue line wriggling down it from the top right, and a smaller one coming in from the east with red dots along it. She pointed at it with a wet bottle without looking round.
“The Dalgleish. Mink Creek. Kestrel Ridge is up at the head of it. Rare earths. Neodymium, for magnets: wind turbines, electric cars. The port director’ll tell you it’s the energy transition, and he’s not wrong, which is what makes my father so angry. The red dots are my stations.”
“And you measure what’s in the creek.”
“Before anybody touches it. That’s a baseline.” She stood a bottle on the rack. “A photograph of a river before the mine. Two years, minimum. If they build, and the zinc or the uranium ever goes above what the creek was doing on its own, the mine’s on the hook.” Another bottle. “You rinse three times, you filter on the bank, two drops of nitric so the metals stay put till the lab gets them, and you write down the weather and the colour of the water and what you had for breakfast. And I’m not the only one. It’s a border river. Everybody’s got a bottle in the Dalgleish.”
“Is it clean?”
“It drains a carbonatite. There’s uranium in it, and zinc and fluoride, more than a fisherman wants to hear, and it’s been there since the ice went back.” She turned the tap off. “My father hates me saying so.”
He asked about Sindre then, and she told him with her hands back in the sink. The boy had carried coolers on his days off, for twenty dollars and a chocolate bar, and would have done it for the chocolate bar. He sang. He asked why you filter. Most of the kids up there wanted to get through the summer and go home with the money.
“He worked mostly with your tech,” Thorsen said.
“Paige Dolan. Her mother’s out front.” She said it more quietly, with a glance towards the front desk. “Best I’ve had. She can fix a pump with a hair clip. She quit in September. I’d have her back tomorrow.”
“Why did she quit?”
“You’d have to ask her.”
“His dog’s alive,” Thorsen said. “At the Landing. A woman up there wrote to Marj.”
She turned round from the sink with a bottle in her hand, and for the first time that morning she looked at him properly.
“Is he? Oh, I am glad.” She laughed, surprised into it. “All winter? Poor old thing. Somebody up there must have been feeding him.” She stood the bottle on the rack and shook the water off her fingers, still smiling, and then the front door went and she leaned back to see round it. “Is that Juneau? Did they ring back about the filters? If they haven’t, I’m going to have to drive out to the airport and shout at somebody.”
She turned back to him. “Sorry. Friday’s plane. If you want the science, I’ll give you all you can eat. The camp, the rest of it, you want the RCMP. I take water out of a creek and write down what’s in it.”
The quality control laboratory at Narrows Seafoods was at the top of an outside steel staircase at the end of the cannery, a white room with a window looking straight down onto the processing floor. Below the glass a line of people in white aprons and hairnets and yellow gloves stood along a steel table under hard light, cutting halibut. The noise came up through the floor, muffled: band saws, a conveyor, a radio, somebody shouting a number.
A young woman in a white coat and safety glasses was at the bench with her back to the door, writing in a log in fast small capitals.
“Paige Dolan?”
“Who’s asking.” She did not turn round.
“Daniel Thorsen. Sindre Eiksund was my cousin.”
The pen stopped. Then it went on and finished the line, and she capped it and laid it square to the edge of the binder, and turned.
She was twenty-five, short and solid, with a round face that would have been friendly on anybody else and was not friendly on her, and forearms that had carried things. She took the glasses off and looked at him: a stranger who knew her name.
“He carried coolers,” she said, before he asked. “Everybody carried coolers. He was a nice kid. He talked too much. He was nice to me. That’s what I’ve got.”
Below them a band saw screamed into something and stopped.
“Were you up there when it happened?”
“I was on the river that weekend. Nowhere near the camp. Ask anyone.”
She said it quickly and flatly, looking straight at him without blinking, like somebody who had decided beforehand exactly where to look.
Thorsen took the envelope out of his jacket. He laid the printed picture of the water lady on the bench beside her binder, the right way up for her: the grey-brown creek, the yellow back bent over it, the hood, the amber bottle on the stone.
“He sent this to his grandmother. The twenty-second of July. He said he was helping the water lady.”
Paige looked down at it. She did not pick it up. She did not move at all. The hand that held the pen had gone white across the knuckles.
“Could be anyone,” she said. “Everybody up there wears yellow. Caldera hands it out like candy. Half the drillers wear it. Celia wears it. I wore it.” She pushed the picture back across the bench with the end of the pen, without touching it with her hand. “That’s a creek and a raincoat. That’s not anybody. I’ve got eleven hundred pounds of halibut to sign off before three.”
She put her glasses back on and turned to the binder.
He was at the bottom of the steel stairs when the door banged above him and her boots came down the treads, fast.
She stopped on the last step with one hand on the rail and her glasses pushed up on her hairnet and her face still white. Behind her the noise of the cannery came out of the open door and went over their heads and away across the harbour.
“Who else have you shown that to?”
“Nobody.”
She looked at him, breathing hard.
“Keep it that way,” Paige Dolan said, and went back up the stairs.