Wally rang on the Tuesday night. He had found the deputy who worked Leonard Lacourse’s drowning in August 1986: Gene Mahoney, retired from the Baptism County Sheriff’s Office more than thirty years ago, living now in a care home in Two Harbors. “Eighty-two,” Wally said. “Bad lungs, good memory. He kept notebooks. I’ll pick you up at eleven.”
“He’ll either talk your ear off or throw you out,” Wally said. “Some days both. Don’t call him sir.” He turned the grey Ford in off the highway at the top of Two Harbors, past a sign that said LAKEVIEW — A CARING COMMUNITY, and into a car park that had been ploughed that morning into neat white walls. “This is unofficial. I’m on my lunch hour. It’s a long lunch hour.” He switched off the radio, which had been giving yesterday’s county results all the way up the shore: Curt Hollister returned without opposition, and Megan Ostrowski by four hundred votes over a lawyer from Two Harbors. Wally had listened to both without comment.
The Lakeview was a low brick building that smelled of disinfectant and gravy. A nurse in purple scrubs knew Wally, and rolled her eyes at him with affection, and walked them to the last door on the east arm.
“Gene,” she said, knocking and opening at once. “Your policeman’s back. He’s brought a big one.”
Gene Mahoney sat in a vinyl armchair by the window with a Twins blanket over his knees and an oxygen line under his nose, which he took off as they came in and hung on the arm of the chair, as if it were a pair of reading glasses he did not need for this. He was eighty-two and very thin, with big knuckled hands and a face like a hatchet and very bright blue eyes. He looked at Thorsen and kept looking.
“So,” he said. “You’re the boy.”
Thorsen did not understand.
“In the back of the station wagon,” Mahoney said. “Asleep. I never saw you. A man told me about you.” He pointed at the bed with his chin. “Sit. You’ll break the other chair. Wally, you know where the coffee is.”
The room was small and very neat. Along the wall under the window, on three plain pine shelves, stood a row of notebooks, the kind that fit in a uniform shirt pocket, with a strip of white tape on each spine with two years written on it in marker. Thirty-one years of them. Thorsen looked at them, and Mahoney watched him look.
“The county kept the reports,” Mahoney said. “I kept what happened.”
Wally brought three paper cups of coffee from somewhere and gave them out, and sat down on the end of the bed with his overshoes on the linoleum.
“I told him what you’re asking,” he said. “I told him who you are.”
“I knew who he was.” Mahoney leaned forward, slowly, and ran one big knuckled finger along the shelf and stopped and pulled out a notebook. 1985–86. He did not open it. He held it on his knee under his hand. “Leonard Lacourse,” he said. “I’ve been waiting forty years for somebody to come in here and say that name. I thought it’d be his girl. She was ten. She told me it was calm. She was right.” He looked at Thorsen. “I was forty-two. I was the youngest man in the department. That tells you about the department.”
He did not need the notebook. He told it from memory, in a dry voice that stopped every so often to breathe, and Thorsen understood quite soon that he was hearing it the way it had been written down on the day.
“Fifteenth of August. Call at six fifty-five. Coast Guard out of Grand Marais, sixteen-foot Lund, upside down, off Gull Rock, a mile out from the Point. Only deputy on the shore, so I went. Righted her, towed her into Nordby, went over her on the ramp.” He touched the notebook without opening it. “Drain plug in. Tight. Ten-horse Evinrude, tilted down, clamps tight. Gear in neutral. Throttle turned right back to the stop. Not idle. Stop.” He looked at Thorsen. “You know boats?”
“A little.”
“Man thrown out at speed, his motor’s in gear. That motor had been shut off and put in neutral. The way you do when you’ve tied up to something. Or been tied up to.” He drank some coffee. “Life jacket still under the middle seat, his name on the collar. Oars gone. Anchor gone. Called the Weather Service in Duluth, had a man read me the log. Wind calm, or southwest at two knots, eight in the evening till six. Waves under a foot. Wrote it down.” He breathed. “A boat doesn’t capsize on glass, Mr. Thorsen. Somebody turns it over.”
“And the sheriff.”
“Dale Corcoran.” Mahoney said the name the way a man spits out a fish bone. “He’s dead now, God rest him and keep him there. He was Hale’s man. Old Bryce’s father’s man. Everybody knew that, it wasn’t even a scandal, it was just weather. He read my notes and said there must have been a squall I didn’t know about, and Lacourse must have been drinking, which he wasn’t, and the girl had fallen asleep, which she hadn’t. He closed it in four days. Accidental drowning. Then he put me on nights for a year.” He smiled very slightly. “I liked nights. Nobody bothered you.”
“You went to the Point,” Thorsen said.
“On the fifteenth. In the afternoon. Because the Lacourse woman told me her husband had gone up the shore the night before to see old Halvor Thorsen, and that was the last anybody saw of him.” Mahoney turned the notebook over on his knee. “So I drove up there.”
He had found old Halvor on the porch. In a wooden chair, with a blanket, in August, in the sun. Grey. Not grey-haired; grey in the face, the colour of a man with a bad heart who has not slept. He had a little brown bottle of pills on the arm of the chair, nitroglycerine, and every so often he put one under his tongue.
“I asked him did Leonard Lacourse come to see him the night before,” Mahoney said. “He looked at me a long time. Very pale eyes. Like yours. And he said, He never came. I waited. I asked him what for. That’s between me and him, and he never came. Then he looked at the lake and that was all. I wrote down I waited. Underlined it.”
His grandfather on the porch, with a blanket over his knees and a paper bag of peppermints. Gutten.
“Then the son came up from the fish house,” Mahoney said. “Arne. Your uncle. Thirty-six. Red beard, big as a door. Pleasant. Very pleasant. He shook my hand. He had a black eye coming up purple, and a cut through his left eyebrow, here,” he drew a line with his fingertip through his own white eyebrow, slantwise, “about an inch long. And it was stitched. Five stitches, black thread, little square knots, all in a row, the ends trimmed short, the edges lined up so neat you’d have to look twice to see the cut.” He held up one big hand with the finger and thumb a hair apart. “Stitches like a hospital’s.”
Wally, on the end of the bed, did not move at all.
“I asked him what happened. He said he caught it on a net reel the day before, working in the fish house. A handle came round on him. Happens. I asked him where he’d got it stitched, because the nearest emergency room was Two Harbors and I’d have heard. He said he did it himself. In the mirror. With a needle and thread from the kitchen drawer.” Mahoney picked up his coffee and looked into it. “I’ve stitched myself, Mr. Thorsen. In the army, and once in a deer camp. It looks like a boot lace. Nobody stitches his own eyebrow that neat in a mirror. Nobody on God’s earth.”
The radiator ticked.
“And your father’s car was gone,” Mahoney said.
Thorsen looked at him.
“There’d been a station wagon in the yard all summer. Big brown Ford with California plates. Everybody on the shore knew it, Dr. Karl’s car, home for the summer from San Pedro with the wife and the boy. It was gone. I asked Arne. He said Karl had to get back to his practice. Something urgent. They’d left early.” He set the cup down. “I wrote that down too. Left early. I didn’t know what I was writing down.”
“How did you know about Duluth?”
“I didn’t. Not then. A month later I was in Duluth on a transport, and I stopped for gas at a little station on London Road, and the owner was a fellow called Stan Wojcik who I knew from the Legion, and he was talking, the way Stan did, about the summer people. And he said a funny thing happened in August. The middle of August. He’d just come in to open up, five o’clock in the morning, just getting light over the lake, and there was a station wagon at the pump already, waiting. California plates. A big man with a woman beside him asleep against the window and a boy asleep in the back with his head on a pillow. And the man got out and went to fill up himself, and his hands were shaking so bad he dropped the nozzle on the ground and gas went everywhere. And Stan went out to help him and the man said thank you and I’m sorry, very polite, and Stan said, You all right, mister? and the man said, I’m a doctor, as if that was an answer.” Mahoney looked at Thorsen. “Stan thought it was funny. He said he’d never heard a man say I’m a doctor like he was saying I’m sorry again.”
Thorsen sat on the edge of the bed with the paper cup in his hands.
He could see it. He had been able to see it all his life without ever looking straight at it: the light coming grey over the lake in Duluth, and his father at the pump outside the window. He had not seen the nozzle fall. He had been eleven, and asleep, and then not asleep, and he had kept his eyes shut, he understood now, sitting on a stranger’s bed in Two Harbors. He had kept them shut on purpose.
“Thank you,” he said.
Mahoney looked at him with his bright eyes.
“I never wrote to Corcoran about Stan,” he said. “There wasn’t any point by then. But I wrote it in here.” He held up the notebook. “I wrote down five a.m. Duluth, doctor, hands shaking. And I wrote down stitches like a hospital’s. And I put them on the same page.” He put the notebook back on the shelf, in its place, in line with the others. “I’ve waited for somebody to read them on the same page. I’m glad it’s you. I’m sorry it’s you.”
Wally drove back up the shore and for eight miles said nothing at all. It was snowing a little, fine and dry.
Thorsen looked at the road.
Five stitches. Black thread. Little square knots, all in a row.
He had watched his father do it. Not that night, other nights: a dockworker’s boy with his chin split on a bollard at the kitchen table in San Pedro. His father’s big fingers, very slow and very sure, the square knots one after another, the ends trimmed short. There. You’ll hardly see it. His father’s bag, which had gone every summer to the Point in the back of the brown station wagon, under the cooler of sandwiches, because a doctor did not go anywhere without it.
“Your dad was a doctor,” Wally said, at last, to the windscreen.
“Is.”
Wally drove for a mile before he nodded.
They drove on into Nordby with the snow coming down, and what Gene Mahoney had written on the same page rode with them the whole way, like a third man in the back seat.
Wally dropped him at the Legion, where Thorsen had left the van that morning, and drove off without stopping, and that was why Thorsen was alone in the car park when he saw them.
There were four of them round an old blue Honda with a ski rack at the far end, by the dumpsters. The woman was Novak, out of uniform, with a takeaway carrier bag in each hand, standing very still beside the driver’s door. Two of the men were young and thick-necked and wore their off-duty clothes like uniforms. The third was Pruitt.
The Honda was down on its rims. All four tyres. Somebody had let them down and taken the valve caps, and the car sat on the grey slush like a dog that had been told to lie down. And spread across the windscreen, head to tail, its tail flopped over the wiper, there was a dead lake trout, three feet long, gutted, the cavity gaping, with snow on its eye.
They were laughing. Not loud. The way men laugh at a joke they have told before.
”— talk to the state, Kayla, you want to talk, you talk to the fish —”
“Rats belong at the dump. Isn’t that right, Jarrett?”
“That’s what I heard,” Pruitt said. “Fish stinks, though. Real bad. You’ll want to get that off before it freezes on.”
Novak’s face was very white and set, her jaw locked, and she was looking at a point in the air somewhere past Pruitt’s ear, and holding the carrier bags so tight that one of them had begun to tear.
Thorsen walked over.
He walked at the pace of a man crossing a car park to ask the time, and did not look at anybody. He walked round the end of the Honda, between the two young deputies, who moved without meaning to, and stopped at the windscreen, and picked up the trout.
It was heavy and cold and slick, and it had begun to freeze to the glass, and it came away with a sound like tape. He held it in both hands. Then he turned round and held it out to Pruitt.
Pruitt looked at it.
He did not take it. Then he saw that Thorsen was not going to put it down, and that the two young deputies were looking at him to see what he would do; and Thorsen watched him understand that whatever he did now, they would remember it. The fish hung between them, dripping on the slush.
Pruitt took it.
He stood with three feet of gutted trout in his arms in the Legion car park, and his face went the dark mottled red that Thorsen had seen once before, at the overlook above the lake, and his eyes went very wide.
“Big fella,” he said. “Heard you had a bad night Sunday.”
Thorsen did not answer. He stood. He did not move and he did not speak and he did not look away, and after a while the silence was the only thing in the car park, and the snow coming down in it, and the fish.
One of the young deputies said, “Come on, Jarrett,” in a voice that had gone uncertain. The other one was already walking away.
Pruitt looked at Thorsen a moment longer. Then he turned and walked across the car park to his black truck with the fish in his arms, and threw it into the bed, where it hit with a thump, and got in, and the big diesel started, and the truck went out onto Main Street and away. The two deputies got into a pickup without looking at each other and followed it.
“I didn’t need help,” Novak said.
She had not moved. She was still holding the carrier bags. She said it to the windscreen, to the smear of slime and scales the trout had left on it.
“I know,” Thorsen said.
She looked at him then. She was so angry her lip was shaking, and furious with him for seeing it, and he stood there and let her be.
“It’s my grandmother’s fish fry,” she said, holding up the bags, as if that explained something. “Wednesdays. I pick it up for her.” She put the bags on the roof of the car. Her hands were shaking too. “They think I gave the state Strand’s inventory. Bauer and Kline. They think I went behind the sheriff to the BCA. Half the department does. Somebody put a rat in my locker last week. A real one. Dead.” She laughed, once, without any humour. “This is a better class of fish, at least.”
“Did you?”
“Give it to him?” She looked at him straight. “Wally asked. I answered. That’s the job.”
Thorsen nodded. He found he had nothing to add to it.
He got out the little compressor Claire had put in the back of the van and crouched by the Honda’s front wheel. Novak watched him with her arms folded. After the second tyre she found the gauge in Ray’s bins without being told where, and crouched beside him at the third, and said, “Thirty-two,” and he moved on.
When the fourth tyre was up she stood and looked at him.
“Monday,” she said. “At the Point. Under your van.” She stopped, and looked at the Honda’s roof, a decision being taken and then put off. “Never mind.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll call Wally,” she said. “Not you. Wally.”
“Okay.”
She got in the car with her grandmother’s fish fry on the seat beside her and ran the wipers once over the slime on the glass, which made it worse, and drove away.
At nine o’clock he sat in the van at the top of Arne’s yard, where Arne could see it from the window, and called his father. It was seven in San Pedro, and his father always picked up on the second ring. It rang four times, and then there was a click and a hiss of old tape, and his mother’s voice, brisk and twenty years younger, from the machine by the bread bin: You’ve reached Karl and Ana Thorsen. We’re out, or we’re with a patient, or we’re asleep. He listened to the tape turning on the counter in San Pedro, the faint wash of it, like the lake on the rocks, and did not leave a message.
Stitches like a hospital’s.