The rest of October went the way the leaves went, all at once and then gone.
He helped Arne haul the fibreglass boat out and lash a tarp over it. Nils’s lawyer asked for bail, and Pike, the notary’s grandson, set it at a million dollars, which came to the same thing. Gary Erickson’s cabins went into the paper as a sheriff’s sale. Thorsen did not tell Arne what Walt had said: that Paul Strand had sat in the Ericksons’ kitchen that night, and that Walt had sent him on to the Point. Arne had told him over fish soup that nobody came. Asked again, he would only tell it better. Thorsen wanted proof in his hand first, something his uncle could not talk his way round.
Claire did the last of the work on the van. She talked to him about the work and nothing else. Once, in the shop doorway, he said her name, meaning to say more, and she said, “Not yet, Thorsen,” without turning round.
The wind went into the north-east and stayed there. He moved the van down beside the fish house, tucked in against the grey wall on the landward side where the wind could not get at it. From there the house could not see him. He found he liked that.
On the first night of November the snow came.
It came without wind, heavy and wet and straight down, so that when he went out at eleven the Point had gone silent under it and the snow was falling past the yard light like something being poured. Then he went back to the bunk and set the heater to nineteen and slept.
He was underwater, and something was screaming.
He knew it was a dream. He knew it the way you know you are dreaming of falling, and he could not get out of it, and the screaming went on, high and electronic and rhythmic, whoop whoop whoop, and his head was split down the middle from the crown to the bridge of his nose as though somebody had put a hatchet in it and left it there.
He opened his eyes. It was dark. The screaming was real.
He lay and looked at it. A small white box above his face, with a red light now where the green one should have been, flashing in time with the noise. He understood that it meant something. He could not think what. His thoughts were coming slowly, each one by itself, from a long way off, like men walking across a field.
I hear it, I —
He rolled over and was sick on the plywood floor.
That helped. It cleared something. He was on his hands and knees in the dark with the stink of it and the scream going through his skull like a drill, and the van was tilting, though the van was not moving, and he thought quite clearly, in Claire’s voice: Out. Not to see what it is. Out.
He could not find the door.
He knew where it was. The sliding door, on the right side, by the passenger seat. He crawled to it and put his hands on the cold wool and could not find the handle. His hands went over the wall like a blind man’s over a face. They were not working right, they were big and stupid and far away at the ends of his arms, and he thought, with a calm that frightened him more than anything, This is how it happens. You can’t find the handle. They find you in the morning with your hands on the wall.
His fingers closed on something. A lever. He pulled it, and nothing happened, and he pulled it the other way and threw his shoulder at the door, and it rolled back on its track with a bang, and the cold came in.
He fell out of the van into the snow.
He lay on his face in it. It was eight inches deep and wet and it went into his mouth and down his collar, and it was the best thing he had ever felt. He rolled onto his back and breathed, great ragged gulps of air so cold it hurt his teeth, with the alarm still screaming behind him, and looked up at the falling snow and thought, absurdly, of Ray.
A light came bobbing down the path from the house.
“Danny!” A great hoarse voice. “Danny!”
Arne came round the end of the fish house at a lumbering run, in rubber boots and long johns and an open coat, with a torch swinging in his fist. He saw Thorsen in the snow and stopped dead, and the torch beam shook. Then he was on his knees beside him.
“Jesus. Danny. Danny, look at me.”
“Heater,” Thorsen said. His tongue was thick. “Gas.”
Arne did not ask anything else. He got his arms under Thorsen’s and hauled him up, and Thorsen was two hundred and twenty pounds of dead weight and Arne was seventy-six, and he did it anyway, with a sound in his chest like a man lifting an engine block, and got Thorsen’s arm over his shoulders and walked him up the path through the snow towards the house, half carrying him, talking to him the whole way in a low steady voice, the way you talk to a frightened animal. That’s it. That’s it, Danny. One more. I’ve got you. I heard it from the house, I thought it was a fox screaming. That’s it.
In the kitchen Arne propped the door wide open to the snow, and sat him in the chair beside it with a blanket round him, and put coffee on, and then, while Thorsen was still telling him not to, picked up the telephone on the wall and called 911.
“I’m fine,” Thorsen said.
“You’re green,” Arne said, and gave the dispatcher the address, slowly and clearly, the way people do who have had to do it before.
The ambulance came from Nordby in twenty-five minutes. The older EMT was a calm, heavy Ojibwe man in his forties with a name tape that said BELLANGER, who came in stamping the snow off his boots and looked at Thorsen and said, “You’re the big one,” and clipped a probe to his finger, fatter than the hospital kind. “This one reads the carbon monoxide,” he said. “The ordinary kind would tell you you’re fine.”
“What’s it say?” Arne said.
“Twenty-six.” Bellanger fitted a plastic mask over Thorsen’s face and turned a valve on a green cylinder, and the mask filled with a cold hiss. “Carbon monoxide in his blood. Twenty-six percent. A smoker’s about five. You start dying somewhere past forty, depending.” He looked at Thorsen over the mask, without any drama at all. “What time did it go off?”
Thorsen moved the mask. “Ten past three.”
“Then you’d have been dead by five. Probably sooner. Keep that on.” He put the mask back. “Lacey, go and shut his heater off, and leave the doors open, and don’t you sit in it.”
They wanted to take him to Duluth. He said no. Bellanger had him sign a form that said he had been told and was refusing, and made him sit with the mask on for an hour anyway, while the coffee went cold and Arne sat across the table with his big hands folded together so tightly that the knuckles were white.
At the end of the hour the box on his finger said fourteen.
“Better,” Bellanger said. He packed up. At the door he stopped. “Those little diesel heaters. I’ve been to three of these. Every one of them, somebody did something stupid with the exhaust.” He looked at Thorsen. “You didn’t strike me as stupid.”
Hollister came himself at a quarter past seven, in the black Tahoe, with the light just coming grey over the lake and the snow stopped. Deputy Novak came behind him in a cruiser.
He stood in the yard in a sheepskin-collared coat and looked round at the white Point, and at the van with its side door still open, and shook his head slowly.
“Well, now,” he said. “Arne. Mr. Thorsen. That was a close one, I hear.”
He walked round the van once, slowly, and then got down on one knee in the snow by the right-hand sill with the long black four-cell torch every deputy on the shore carried, and shone it underneath.
“Well, there you go,” he said. “Look at that.”
Thorsen crouched beside him with a blanket round his shoulders and the hatchet still in his head, and looked along the beam.
The exhaust ran out sideways in a short steel pipe with Claire’s stainless clamp on it and ended a foot clear of the sill. The end of it was gone. There was a fist of grey, packed snow and ice where the opening should have been, pushed up into the mouth of the pipe and frozen there, glazed by the heat that had been trying to get out through it, like a cork in a bottle.
“Snow drift,” Hollister said. “Wet snow like last night, it gets in anywhere. Packs right up. Then your heater’s breathing its own exhaust.” He sat back on his heel. “Who put this in for you?”
“Claire Lacourse.”
“Claire Lacourse.” He let it sit a moment. “Well. She’s a fine welder, I’ll give her that. But that’s a bad installation. That’s how people die up here, Mr. Thorsen. Every winter. Ice-fishing houses, deer stands, cabins. Somebody does a job a little bit quick.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “I’ll have to write it up. There’s a state licence involved, I believe. I’d hate to see her get in any trouble.”
Behind them Novak had come down from the cruiser. She knelt in the snow on the other side of the sheriff with her phone out and took a photograph under the van, with the flash. Then another, closer.
“What are you doing, Kayla?”
“Pictures for the report, Sheriff.”
“Well, get on with it. I’m going to clear that before somebody starts the thing.” She took a third, and Thorsen saw her stop with the phone held out, and look at the screen, and at the pipe, for a second longer than she needed to. Then she stood up and put the phone away and looked at nothing.
Hollister reached under the van and knocked the plug out of the pipe with the heavy end of the torch. It came away in two pieces, and fell, and broke in the slush.
“There,” he said, getting up with a grunt and brushing the snow off his knee. “Good as new. You want to get Claire to come and look at that, Mr. Thorsen, before you run it again. Or somebody.” He smiled. “Glad you’re with us.”
Novak was already walking back to her cruiser. As she opened the door she looked across the roof of it at Thorsen, once, for no longer than it took to blink. Then she got in.
When they had gone, and Arne had gone back up to the house to fry eggs that Thorsen did not think he could eat, he lay down on his back in the snow by the van and pulled himself underneath it with his heels.
There was no point looking for footprints. Arne’s run, the EMTs, Hollister and Novak had trodden the yard to porridge.
Under the van the ground was almost bare. There was an inch of snow at most where the sill had sheltered it, and outside the line of the sill the snow stood eight inches deep, clean-edged, like a cake cut with a knife. The flakes had come straight down all night. There had been no wind. And the van was tucked against the fish-house wall, where no wind could have reached it even if there had been one.
Snow does not drift up into a pipe a foot under a van in still air. It does not climb.
Somebody had packed it in. By hand. A fistful of wet snow, pushed up into the pipe while it was hot enough to melt the outside of it, so that it glazed and froze and sealed.
He turned his head and looked at the slush under the end of the pipe where Hollister’s plug had fallen and broken.
There was something in it. A short dark curl, an inch and a half long, half sunk in the grey. He slid out and fetched a freezer bag from Ray’s bins, because Ray had believed in freezer bags, and photographed the thing where it lay, and then turned the bag inside out over his hand and picked it up.
A twist of twine. Brown, hard, sticky with tar, frayed at both ends where it had been cut. Somebody had knotted it once round itself in an overhand, to make a plug of it, a bung, something to push up into the mouth of the pipe first so that the snow behind it would hold.
Tarred net twine. The kind that was wound on every net reel on the shore.
He lay in the snow with it in the bag on his chest, and thought of a man in a black canvas jacket in a school gym, leaning close. They go walking out on the rocks. Things happen. And of a pair of lights coming up in his mirror on the cliffs above the Gooseberry.
Wally came at half past ten and lay down under the van in his corduroy coat without being asked, which took some doing. When he came out he had snow in his eyebrows and did not brush it off. He held the freezer bag up to the light and turned it.
“Snow doesn’t tie itself in knots,” he said. He put it in an evidence envelope and wrote on it. “There’s tarred twine in every fish house on this shore. Bert sells it by the spool next to the minnows. Who knew you parked here?”
“Arne. Claire. Anybody who drove down the lane and looked.”
Wally looked at the fish-house wall, and up the slope towards the house, which you could not see from here for the spruce. “Hollister knocked the plug out.”
“Before I could say anything.”
Wally did not say anything else about it. He went and sat in his car with the door open, writing, and then drove away.
Claire’s truck came down the lane at eleven going too fast for the snow. She got out before it had quite stopped rocking.
Her face was white, with two hard spots of red high on her cheekbones. She walked straight past him to the van and got down in the snow on her back and went under it.
“Hollister phoned me at eight,” she said from underneath. Her voice was perfectly flat. “To tell me my bad installation nearly killed a man. To tell me he’s writing it up. To tell me he hopes I’ve got good insurance.” Something clinked against steel. “He was enjoying it.”
Thorsen crouched by the sill.
“Clamp’s where I put it. Paint dot’s still lined up.” He heard her fingers on the pipe. “Nothing’s bent. Nothing came loose. Nothing drifted.” A silence. “Somebody got down here in the dark and stuffed it.”
She came out. She stood up and looked at him, and he told her about the twine, and the bare ground, and Wally, and he watched the red spots on her cheekbones go darker.
“Somebody stuffed my pipe,” she said, “to kill you in your sleep, and make it look like I did it.”
“Yes.”
“Hollister knocked the plug out.”
“Yes.”
She looked up the lane, the way the Tahoe had gone. Then she went to her truck and came back with a toolbox and a length of stainless pipe and a roll of mesh, and lay down under the van again.
She worked for an hour and a half. She ran the exhaust out past the sill where anybody could see it from ten feet away, and riveted a cap of stainless mesh over the end, and screwed a second alarm to the wall above the bunk. At the end of it she was lying under the sill tightening the last clamp, and he saw that her hands were shaking. Not much. The spanner kept slipping off the nut, and she put it back on, and it slipped again.
She stopped. She lay there with the spanner in her hand and her eyes on the underside of the van.
“I heard it on the scanner,” she said, not looking at him. “Three-thirty. Ambulance to Thorsen Point, CO exposure, adult male. I sat in my kitchen in the dark with my coat on and the keys in my hand until they said you were talking.” The spanner went back on the nut, and held. “I thought —”
She did not finish it. She turned the spanner a quarter turn, and another, and gave it a last small hard tug, and lay there.
“There,” she said. “Now let them try.”
Arne made him eat at one. Soup again, at the long table, with the woodstove going. He had been quiet all morning, standing at the window while Claire worked, with his hands in his pockets. He had not gone down. He had watched.
“It was them,” he said, when Thorsen had told him about the twine. He said it to the window, low. “Hale’s people. That fellow with the truck. They came down my lane in the dark and into my yard and did that to you a stone’s throw from my bed.” His hand on the table closed. “They did it to the boy from Duluth, and now they’ve come for you.” He turned from the window. “Come sleep in the house, Danny. Please. Karl’s room. It’s made up. It’s been made up since you came.”
“I’m all right in the van.”
“You’re not all right. You were nearly dead in it.” Arne’s voice broke, very slightly, and he looked down at his bowl. “I’ve lost enough people off this Point. I don’t want to lose you in my yard.”
“I’ll be all right. Claire’s fixed it.”
Arne looked at him across the table, the way he had looked at him the first night, when Thorsen had said he would sleep in the van. Then he nodded slowly, giving way.
“Then park it up by the house,” he said. “Up in the yard, by the porch. Where I can see it from the window.” He reached across and put one enormous hand on Thorsen’s wrist and held it. “Where I can keep an eye on you.”
Thorsen looked at the hand on his wrist, and then at his uncle’s face.
A heavy sleeper. You could drive a train through this house. He had heard a little white box through foam and wool and a fish-house wall, and been beside him with a torch before he’d stopped being sick.
Thorsen filed it, and finished his soup.
Wally called at nine that night. Thorsen was in the van in the yard, by the porch, with the heater ticking and both green lights on.
“Two things,” Wally said. “The paint off your door is Ford factory black, F-series, 2017 on. A third of the trucks in this county. So that’s nothing.” Paper. “Here’s the other thing. A friend in Cloquet who used to work insurance fraud knows every body shop between here and the Cities. There’s a man runs a place out on Highway 33 who replaced the right front wing on a black F-250 on October the fourteenth. The Wednesday. The morning after somebody leaned on you above the Gooseberry. He did it in a day and sprayed it in primer because the customer couldn’t wait for paint. The customer paid cash and didn’t want a receipt.” A pause. “He says the customer had a goatee.”
Thorsen sat in the dark and looked at the alarm’s green light.
“Pruitt,” he said.
“Maybe. I’ve got a man in Cloquet who’ll pick him out of a photo line-up if I ask him nice.” The flat voice did not change. “And I’m not going to ask him. Not yet. I pick Pruitt up for the cliff road, he does eighteen months and never says Hale’s name. I want him scared first.”
“While he’s walking about.”
“While he’s walking about. That’s the cliff road, anyway. That’s not your heater. I’ve got no twine on Jarrett Pruitt.” Wally was quiet a moment. “Lock your doors, Thorsen. Both of them. I mean it.”
He hung up.
Thorsen locked both doors. He lay back under the two green lights and thought about a fistful of snow pushed into a hot pipe by somebody who knew what a diesel heater was, and where he slept, and that he would be asleep.
Pruitt, he thought.