The phone rang at twenty past seven, while he was standing on the stones at Flood Bay watching the sun come up out of the lake.
He had left the turnout in the corn at three, because he was not sleeping, and stopped here because he wanted to stand next to the lake for a while before he went back and ate Arne’s fish.
“You’re up,” Heikkinen said.
“I’m on the shore. Heikkinen —”
“Call me Wally. Everybody does except Hollister, and he says Agent like it’s something you catch.” Paper rustled. “I’ve got your gas station. Holiday on London Road. They keep thirty days, so I got there with eight to spare. Nine-ten p.m. and forty seconds, Wednesday the thirtieth. Black F-250, plough mount. Man in a black canvas jacket and a goatee buys a twelve of Grain Belt, pays cash, and looks up at the camera on his way out like he’s daring it.” A pause. “It’s him.”
“Nine-ten. He could still be back up the shore by eleven.”
“If he drove like a fool he could just about do it. So I went and saw the girlfriend. Shawna Kuznia. She does nails at the Miller Hill Mall and she doesn’t like me. She says he was asleep on her couch with the hockey on by eleven and still there at six when she got up for work.” The water drew back off the stones with a long rattle, and came in again. “I wouldn’t hang a dog on a girlfriend.”
“So it’s Hale’s story or Arne’s.”
“It’s an hour and fifty minutes of nobody knowing where Jarrett Pruitt was. That’s all it is. And Hale’s on a hotel video in St. Paul till eleven with the governor’s hand on his shoulder. So it isn’t Bryce Hale with a rock.” An engine started. “Your uncle saw a truck at suppertime, and then he lay awake a few nights with his boy in jail, and maybe the truck moved. I’ve seen a nun do it. Where are you going?”
“The courthouse. Book fourteen.”
“You’ll want the book itself, so you can say you held it.” A pause. “Hollister has a cousin in the treasurer’s office across the hall. Everybody in that building has a cousin.”
The Baptism County Courthouse stood at the top of Main Street, red sandstone with a copper dome gone green. The Register of Deeds was in the basement, down terrazzo stairs worn into shallow dishes by a century of people coming to find out what they owned.
The clerk was a round, cheerful woman of sixty-five with a loon on her sweatshirt. Her name plate said BEV KOWALSKI. She knew who he was before he opened his mouth, and it seemed to please her.
“Book fourteen. You’re the second one this fall.” She came back from the steel shelves hugging it to her chest, red leather gone brown at the corners. “The other one was that poor Mr. Strand. Two whole afternoons in September. He brought me a coffee the second day without being asked.” She touched the cover. “I cried when I read it in the paper.”
She turned the heavy pages with the flat of her hand and found the place without looking it up. “Three forty-one. He had a sticky note on it. I took it off after. It didn’t seem right to leave it.”
In 1924 the county had not kept deeds; it had copied them. A clerk with a steel nib had written every deed out word for word into the ledger, so the page in front of him was a copy, in a careful sloping hand. It said what it said. Lots 3, 4 and 5, and the South Half of the Northeast Quarter, Section 11, the same words he had read in Kansas City. To the Hale Land & Timber Company, the forest. To Anders Thorsen, the shore. For one dollar and other good and valuable consideration.
And at the foot, small and careful in the middle of the line, where the clerk had drawn it as faithfully as he had copied everything else:
Joseph his X mark Lacourse
In presence of: A. Thorsen. E. W. Pike.
Then the acknowledgement. On this 12th day of March, 1924, before me, a Notary Public within and for said County, personally appeared Joseph Lacourse, to me known to be the person described in and who executed the foregoing instrument. E. W. Pike, Notary Public.
Personally appeared. Four months after the lake took him.
“Elmer Pike,” Bev said happily at his elbow. “The office man at the Hale mill. His grandson’s the district judge now. Small county.”
He photographed it with the 7-Eleven phone, slowly, the way Wally would have, with the spine and the page number in the frame.
He was on the acknowledgement for the second time when the light from the stairwell changed.
“Well, now,” Hollister said. “Doing some genealogy?”
He was standing at the foot of the stairs out of uniform, holding a paper cup of coffee: a man who had been passing and dropped in. It was his courthouse. He was always passing.
“Morning, Bev.” He looked at the page over Thorsen’s shoulder without any appearance of interest. “I heard you’ve been away a few days. That’s a lot of miles in an old van.”
Thorsen did not ask who somebody was.
“You want to be careful on these roads, a man from LA,” Hollister said kindly. “Specially at night, on the cliffs. We’ve had two go over the rail above the Gooseberry in five years. The lake kept one of them.” He shook his head. “It’s a beautiful drive. It’s not a forgiving one.”
“Somebody already tried,” Thorsen said.
Hollister’s face did nothing. That was what Thorsen turned over afterwards: not a flicker, not a frown, not the small automatic question that comes into the face of a man who does not know what you are talking about. A pink, pleasant, attentive face, like a plate.
“Deer, probably,” Hollister said. “We’ve had a lot of deer this year.” He raised the cup an inch to Bev, the way a man touches his hat, and went up the terrazzo stairs, unhurried.
Bev looked at the book, and at Thorsen, and reached across and closed it.
Claire was under a pontoon boat in bay one with a welding torch, and she did not stop for him until she had finished the bead she was on.
He held up the folder. A hundred and four pages. He had read them twice, in a rest area in Iowa, and not again, because they were not his.
She looked at it. She did not come and take it.
“There’s something else,” he said. “You told me your great-grandfather signed the church register when he married. If they kept a marriage book at Stone Bay, they kept the other one.”
“What other one?”
“Burials.”
She pulled her gloves off one finger at a time. “There’s no grave. There was nothing to bury.”
“They’d still have written it down.”
She looked at him a moment longer. Then she went to the phone on the bench and dialled from memory, with her back to him.
“Father. It’s Claire. No, nobody’s dead. I want to look at the old books.” A pause. “Now, if it’s all right.” Something in her shoulders loosened very slightly. “No, I haven’t. I know it has. Twenty minutes.” She hung up. “He says I haven’t been inside since my confirmation and he’s going to make me light a candle.” She took her truck keys off a nail. “We’ll take mine. Gus.”
St. Francis Xavier stood on a rise above the little harbour at Stone Bay, a white frame church with a square tower. Behind it a graveyard ran down through bare birches towards the water, wooden markers gone silver and here and there a little grave house over a mound, the old way.
Father Michael Benoit was waiting on the step in a cardigan over his clerical shirt: seventies, small and wide, brown-faced, with hands that had plainly put the new shingles on the tower themselves. He kissed Claire on both cheeks, which she endured, and looked up at Thorsen with frank curiosity.
“Thorsen,” he said. “From the Point.” He said it like a man making a note.
The registers lived in a steel cabinet in the sacristy. He brought one out and laid it on the table under the window, tall and narrow in black cloth, the spine mended with tape. Liber Defunctorum, 1889–1931. It opened by itself at a strip of paper.
“A man from Duluth sat where you’re sitting, in September,” Father Benoit said. “He copied this page in pencil and thanked me twice.”
Latin, in a priest’s crabbed hand. Most of the entries on the page were burials, a name and an age and in coemeterio huius missionis. One was shorter, and had no place in it.
Die 25 Novembris 1923. Missa celebrata pro anima Josephi Lacourse, die 19 Novembris in lacu deperditi. Corpus non inventum.
“On the twenty-fifth of November, 1923,” Father Benoit read quietly, “Mass was said for the soul of Joseph Lacourse, lost in the lake on the nineteenth of November. The body was not found.” He touched the initials in the margin. “Father Rousseau. Thirty years here.”
Claire put out one finger and did not quite touch it. Thorsen photographed the entry, and the priest watched him without asking why.
The nineteenth of November. In the little boat that has your name. And on the twelfth of March, before E. W. Pike, Notary Public, Joseph Lacourse had personally appeared.
“There’s nothing for my father,” Claire said, to the book. “Is there.”
“No. Father Dufresne had the parish then. I came five years after.” He closed the register and left his hand on it. “Your mother wouldn’t have a Mass said over an empty lake.” He looked at her. “I’d say one tomorrow, Claire. You only have to ask.”
She did not answer. After a moment he nodded as if she had, and took the book away, and they were alone in the cold church.
He gave her the folder in the front pew.
She put her reading glasses on the end of her nose and read the letters one by one, laying each face down beside her. He sat at the other end of the pew and looked at the painted Christ above the altar, whom somebody local had given a broad brown face. Their breath showed.
The last letter she read twice. I will write to you again after with what he tells me.
“He was going to write again after,” she said. She laid it on top of the others, square. “Grandpa’s teacher at Pipestone used to hit his hand with a ruler if the loops weren’t right. He taught Dad his loops the same way. Dad told me that like it was funny.” Then, without looking at him: “What else.”
He had thought, in the van, of not telling her today. He had thought it for about a mile.
He took Professor Brekke’s translation out of his coat, typed on a manual typewriter, with Wally’s copy stamp in the corner, and read the April letter aloud in the cold, all of it, in an even voice, the way he would have read a statement to a family.
When he had finished she did not move. The only thing that changed in her face was that she took her reading glasses off, slowly, and let them fall on their cord, and they swung against her coat and were still.
Then she stood, and put the folder under her arm, and walked out of the church, and he followed her.
She drove him back without a word.
In her yard she stopped beside the van and turned the engine off and sat. The boat on the pole stood up black against a white sky. Down at her dock lay a square grey welded workboat with two big outboards tilted up.
“It was a hundred years ago,” Claire said. “It’s not yours.”
“I’ve been living on it.”
She turned her head.
“Every summer till I was eleven,” he said. “I learned to swim off that dock. My name’s on the mailbox. Everything I ever thought about myself that came from somewhere came from there.” He looked at the pole. “And I didn’t know.”
“So have I,” she said, after a while. “Different side.”
She got out and took the folder off the dashboard and held it against her chest with both arms, the way a child carries a book to school, and walked across the yard to the house behind the shop. Gus went after her, and the door closed.
Wally was in the car park of the gas station in Nordby, eating a ham sandwich out of waxed paper.
“I called a woman at the university in Minneapolis who teaches Indian law,” he said, by way of good afternoon. “A conveyance in the trust period without the Secretary’s say-so, she read me this part twice, shall be absolutely null and void. Not voidable. Absolutely. And in 1934 Congress extended the trust, and nobody’s ended it since.” He looked at the lake. “Hale’s lawyers might win in court. Doesn’t matter. Nobody will insure a title like that, and nobody lends a billion dollars on a title nobody will insure. Laurentian walks.”
“And everybody whose land came off that deed.”
“Everybody.” He put the waxed paper in his pocket. “Somebody went through Paul Strand’s apartment that first weekend and took his work and left his television. In Duluth. Where Pruitt spends his nights. I’m not saying it. I’m saying I’ve written it down.”
“Walt Erickson carried the message in 1986,” Thorsen said. “He’s ninety-one. You said he’d keep.”
Wally looked at him.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Nine. I’ll pick you up at the mailbox, so your uncle doesn’t have to give me breakfast.” He put the car in gear, which was how Wally told people to get out. “Megan says if you get yourself killed on her shore she’ll never forgive you. She said it nicer than that.”
Arne had made fish soup, and lit the lamp over the table though it was not yet dark, and when Thorsen came in he looked up from the pot and his whole face opened.
“There he is. I thought the lake had you.”
His boots were on the mat by the door, and he was in the sheepskin slippers Marit had sewn him, the wool gone grey at the heels. They ate. Lake trout and potato and dill and cream, and the brown bread from Nordby, and Arne talked about Nils, whom he had seen that morning through the glass. Nils had asked for a book. Arne could not remember the last time Nils had asked for a book.
Thorsen let him talk. Then he put his spoon down.
“Arne. The summer we left. There was a man from Stone Bay called Leonard Lacourse who drowned off Gull Rock in August.” He kept his voice easy. “Did he come to the Point? The night he drowned?”
Arne put down his spoon. He did it carefully, and laid it straight beside his bowl, and looked at it.
“The ironworker,” he said. “Him with the claim. That was a terrible thing. His girl was ten. She sat on the porch all night.” He shook his head slowly. “Not that I ever heard. Not to me.” He looked up, and his eyes were sad and kind. “Dad might have known. Everybody came to Dad. But he never said anything about it to me.” He picked the spoon up again and did not use it. “Why do you ask that, Danny?”
“Paul Strand was asking about him.”
“Was he.” Arne nodded slowly, working it through. “Well. That’ll be the claim. I told you that fellow was looking for something wrong.”
They ate. The lamp hissed.
“Where’ve you been, Danny?” Arne said gently, not looking up. “Three days. Your van gone in the morning and not back at night. I didn’t know whether to call somebody.”
“Kansas City. The archives.”
Arne nodded, slowly, three or four times. He did not ask what was in the archives. He tore a piece of bread in half and wiped his bowl with it.
“That’s a long way to go,” he said, “to read about dead people.”
At a quarter past nine on Friday morning Walt Erickson received them in a brown recliner in a front room that smelled of coffee and liniment, with the television on and the sound off and the Korean War cap on his head, indoors, as if he might be called out at any moment. The window behind him looked up the road to where, four hundred yards on, the Thorsen lane went off into the trees.
“Karl’s boy,” he said, before Wally had finished saying who they were. “Look at the size of you. Sit. Sit, the both of you. Gary! Coffee.” Nobody answered from the back of the house. “He’ll bring it. He’s sulking.”
They sat on a sofa with an afghan over the back. Wally took out his notebook and did not open it.
“Mr. Erickson,” Thorsen said, “in 1986 Leonard Lacourse wrote to the Bureau of Indian Affairs that you’d brought him word from my grandfather.”
Walt’s eyes, which were wet and very sharp, went to him and stayed.
“Who showed you that?”
“It’s in the archives in Kansas City.”
“Kansas City.” The old man thought about it. “Well. Leonard wrote everything down.” He looked at the silent television, where a man was selling knives. “Halvor wanted to tell it. I took the word. That’s all. I was the one could go between, because I’d fished with Halvor since I was a boy and Leonard’s dad and me were in Korea together. So I took the word. And then Leonard drowned, and Halvor came and stood on my porch, right out there, and couldn’t say anything, and went home. And I never asked him. I’ve never asked anybody since.” His hands moved on the arms of the chair. “There’s a lot of men on this shore never asked anybody anything.”
“Mr. Erickson —”
“And that Duluth fella sat right there.” He lifted one finger off the arm of the recliner and pointed it at Wally, or at the kitchen chair just inside the doorway behind Wally, a vinyl one with chrome legs. “Right in that chair. One night. Asking. Same as you. About Halvor and Leonard and the old business. He had a little notebook. Polite as anything. I told him what I’m telling you. And I said, you want the rest of it, ask Arne. He was there.”
The man on the television cut a tomato in half.
“When was that, Mr. Erickson?” Wally said.
“That was the middle of the month, Dad.”
Gary was in the doorway from the kitchen with two mugs, one in each fist. He came in and put the mugs down on the table in front of the sofa, hard enough that the coffee jumped.
“You don’t know what night,” he said. “He came by in September asking for you, the middle of the month, and you talked his ear off and I put him out at nine. You get them mixed up.” He looked at Wally. “He gets them mixed up.”
Walt looked up at his son with his wet sharp eyes, the way a man might look at a boat he had built himself and found, in a bad sea, to be leaking. Gary looked back at him and then at the television.
“He’s tired,” Gary said. “He’s ninety-one. He gets tired about now.”
Walt took off the Korean War cap and put it in his lap and turned it round by the brim, once, and put it back on.
“I’m tired,” he agreed.
Gary showed them out. He walked them all the way to Wally’s car and stood in the drive with his hands in his pockets while they got in. The burn barrel stood by the corner of the house, cold. Gary did not look at it, and went in.
Wally pulled out onto 61 towards the lane and stopped at the mailbox.
“The barmaid at the Legion,” he said. “She says he asked the way to this house on the thirtieth.”
“Yes.”
“And Gary went out two minutes behind him.”
“Yes.”
Wally sat with the engine running and looked down the lane into the spruce.
“Huh,” he said.
At ten past eleven on Friday night the 7-Eleven phone rang on the shelf beside the bunk.
He had not been asleep. He had been lying under the green light thinking about an old man turning his cap round by the brim. The number was not one he knew. Hardly any of them were.
“Thorsen.”
“It’s Dennis Albrecht.”
The voice was careful and too slow, the voice of a man who has had two drinks and is holding himself very straight in a chair so as not to sound like it. Thorsen had left the number on Albrecht’s desk in Duluth ten days ago. He had not expected it to be used.
“Mr. Albrecht.”
“I wasn’t straight with you.” A breath. Somewhere behind him a refrigerator hummed in an empty kitchen. “Paul’s memo was in my drawer when I signed that commitment. The deed. The X. Everything he’d found by then. It was in my drawer, and I signed it anyway, in August, because Laurentian’s our biggest client in thirty years and I told myself commitments carry exceptions and somebody downstream would catch it. Nobody downstream was going to catch it. I was downstream.” The refrigerator stopped. “And in September I rang Laurentian’s lawyers, off the record, to say there might be a problem with the old deed. To cover myself. That’s how they knew. That’s how Hale knew.”
Thorsen sat up on the bunk.
“If Paul had gone public,” Albrecht said, “I’d have lost everything my father built. Forty-one years. The firm, the house, the insurance. Linda’s —” He stopped. “I want you to know that I know what that sounds like.”
“Mr. Albrecht, where —”
The line went dead.
He rang the number back. It rang eight times and went to a recorded voice that said the person he was calling was not available. He did not leave a message.
He lay back down. The wind had gone round into the north and was working at the roof vent with its low note. He lay awake a long time after that, listening to the lake on the rocks, with the names going round, and did not try to put them in order.