At a quarter past six on Thursday evening there was one window still lit on the second floor of the old brick building on West Superior Street. Thorsen had rung from the van in the car park behind. Dennis Albrecht came down himself and let him in at the side door, past a cleaner’s cart with a radio on it playing polka.
He had lost weight since October. The fat Laurentian binder was no longer on the desk. In its place there was a hospital car-park ticket, and a cold cup of coffee with a skin on it.
Albrecht sat down behind the desk as if somebody had pushed him.
“Paul rang you at ten-fourteen the night he died,” Thorsen said. “For nine minutes.”
Albrecht did not ask how he knew. He looked at the dark window, where the harbour lights lay in the glass over his own reflection.
“Yes.”
“You rang me in October, at eleven at night, and told me about a memo in your drawer. You didn’t mention a phone call.”
“I told you what I could stand to hear myself say.” Albrecht took his glasses off and held them. “He was outside. I could hear a storm door, and a television through it. He was happy, Mr. Thorsen. That’s what I can’t get past. He said, Dennis, I’ve got it. The claim file, the burial register, the Thorsen letters. I’m going to the Band in the morning, and the Bureau. I’m not waiting till Friday.” He turned the glasses over. “I’d asked him to wait till Friday. Our counsel was coming up from the Cities on Friday. I begged him. A man of sixty, in his bedroom, begging a man he’d hired at twenty-seven. I told him he’d finish the firm. My father’s firm. Forty-one years. I told him that.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he was sorry.” Albrecht put the glasses down on the blotter, very precisely. “Those were the last words he said to me. I’m sorry, Dennis.”
The polka went past in the corridor and away.
“When he hung up I rang Laurentian’s counsel at home,” Albrecht said. “I told them he was going to the Band in the morning.” He looked at the glasses on the blotter. “I’ve asked myself every day since whether I killed him with that call.”
“Who did they ring?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. That’s the other thing I ask myself.”
“Where were you at midnight?”
“Linda was admitted at half past nine. Neutropenic fever; she’s on chemotherapy. I drove her in and came home for her things, and I was standing in our bedroom with the nightgown in my hand when Paul rang.” He looked at Thorsen for the first time. “Then I drove back. And I sat in a car park at the hospital, trying to make myself go in. From a quarter to twelve till nearly two. I couldn’t go up to her and hold her hand and say it was all right, with that on my face. There’s a camera on the gate. I’ve looked at it myself, to see what I looked like.”
“What did you look like?”
“A man in a car,” Albrecht said.
Thorsen drove home up the shore in the dark. Wally rang at nine, while he was still on the road.
“Hospital camera,” he said. “His Buick through the gate at eleven forty-seven. Out at one fifty-two. In between it sits in the third row with the engine running and nobody gets out. Night nurse on the oncology ward remembers him coming up at two with a plastic bag and a face like a sheet.” A pause. “He’s out of it.”
“He’s out of everything,” Thorsen said.
“He’ll be out of a job by Christmas, if there’s any justice. There might be, for once.”
The lawyer came at a quarter past nine on the Friday morning, while Thorsen was holding up one end of a plough blade.
It was a county blade off a highway truck that had met a bridge abutment, and Claire was running a bead down the crack with her whole body folded over the work like somebody reading small print.
It was a black Audi with a dealer’s frame from Edina round the plate. The man who got out of it was sixty or so, tall and spare, with silver hair and a good tan for November, a camel overcoat that had cost what Claire charged for a heater and an install, and black shoes that were finished after three steps across the yard.
“Ms. Lacourse? Gregory Ashworth. Pell, Carrow and Ashworth, in Minneapolis. I represent Hale Land and Timber.”
She let him in, in the end, because it was minus twelve and she was not going to heat the yard for a man from Edina. She did not offer him coffee. Ashworth laid a slim leather case on the end of the workbench, under the board of outlined tools, and took out a document fourteen pages long with a blue backing sheet.
“I’ll be brief. I know you’re a working woman,” he said, in a voice for boardrooms and funerals. “This is a quitclaim deed and release. For two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, you would convey to Hale Land and Timber any interest you may hold, as an heir of Joseph Lacourse, in what the old federal records call allotment two hundred and fourteen. The funds are in escrow in Duluth. My client doesn’t believe you hold any such interest. But litigation is slow and very unpleasant, and certainty has a value.” He smiled a little. “The offer is open until five o’clock this afternoon. My client’s board meets on Monday.”
Claire put her reading glasses on the end of her nose and read it, all of it, slowly, while Gus smelled Ashworth’s shoes at length.
“Paragraph eleven,” she said, without looking up. “I don’t talk about it. Ever. The deed. My father’s claim. And if I do, I pay it all back, with interest, and your fees. And this one, where I promise never to bring a claim, or help anybody else bring one. Not the Band. Not my son.”
“Standard provisions.”
“If it’s still trust land,” Thorsen said, “she can’t sell you anything. Not without the Secretary of the Interior.”
Ashworth looked at him with mild pleasure, as though a dog had done something unexpected.
“Which is why it’s drafted as a release and a covenant as well. Belt and suspenders, Mr. Thorsen.” He turned back to Claire. “You do a good deal of work for the county, I understand.” He did not look at the blade on the trestles. “A matter like this, left open, has a way of costing people things they never expected it to cost.”
Claire took the glasses off and let them fall on their cord, and squared the pages, and held them out to him.
“My father wrote better than this,” she said. “He wrote letters. Forty of them. I’ve read them now. He said what he meant, and he didn’t need fourteen pages, and he didn’t put in a paragraph to make me keep my mouth shut. No.”
He put the deed back in his case. He laid his card on the bench under the outline of a ball-peen hammer, where she would see it every time she reached for one.
“Five o’clock,” he said pleasantly, and went out across the yard picking his way like a heron.
They worked all day and did not talk about it. At five o’clock Claire was under a boat trailer on a creeper, with only her boots showing, and the red second hand of the beer clock above the door went past the twelve, and nothing happened, and it went on round.
Claire rolled out and lay looking up at the roof with the grinder on her chest.
“Quarter of a million dollars,” Thorsen said.
“I made thirty-one thousand last year. After the truck payment.” She lay there a moment longer. “My dad would have laughed at him. You could hear him laugh across the bay.”
“Paul Strand rang this shop on the twenty-ninth of September,” Thorsen said. “The day before he died. Two minutes.”
She did not move. The grinder lay on her chest and rose and fell with her breathing.
Then she got up off the creeper, and put the grinder on the bench, and went into the shop office and stood in front of the answering machine on the filing cabinet: an old grey one with a cassette behind a smoked window, and a red button.
“There was a second message,” she said, with her back to him. “I didn’t tell you. He said he’d found my father’s letters. In Kansas City. All of them. And he said he was going to see a man on Wednesday night who might know what happened to my father. He said, I’ll call you after.” She put one finger on the red button, not pressing it. “And I wiped it. I stood right here and pressed the button.”
“Did he say who?”
“No. A man.” She took her finger away. “He never called after.”
“Where were you that night? The Wednesday.”
“Here,” Claire said. “With Tyler.”
She came out of the office past him without looking at him and pushed herself back under the trailer, and the grinder screamed.
He let it sit. Tyler was a linesman in Fargo, two hundred and fifty miles off. But a half-truth left alone will sometimes finish itself, and a woman who has just told you she wiped a dead man’s voice off a machine has told you the hard half.
Bryce Hale rang him at eight that evening, in the van, with a piano somewhere behind him and the crack of a fire. Ms. Lacourse had declined; he was sorry; feelings were running very high on this shore. “I can’t control everybody who works for me.”
“Pruitt tried to put me over the rail above the Gooseberry,” Thorsen said. “With his truck.”
A second’s quiet on the line: a man learning something, and finding nowhere to put it. “I don’t know anything about that,” Hale said, and rang off. A warning or an apology; with Hale, probably both.
On Saturday night he parked the van at the top of her drive, between the road and the house, nose out, where anybody coming in would have to come past it.
“You’re going to sleep out there,” Claire said. “Like a dog.”
“Like Gus.”
“Gus sleeps on the bed.” She stood in the doorway of the house in her socks with the light behind her. “Suit yourself. The heater’s mine. If you freeze in it, it’s my reputation.”
He lay on the bunk with a paperback he was not reading. Nothing had come along the Stone Bay road since ten.
At twenty to midnight something did.
An engine, not a truck, something lighter, coming from the highway end. It slowed short of the drive, on the road under the boat on the pole, and sat there idling.
He was sitting up with his boots in his hand when the first shot came.
It was a flat, enormous crack, and at the same instant, from the shop, the high bright sound of a big pane of glass going all at once. Gus began to bark inside the house. Thorsen was out of the side door into the snow with one boot on before the second shot, and he heard that one hit: a hollow wooden knock somewhere above him. Then the engine roared and tyres spun whining on packed snow and caught, and the car went away towards the inland bend.
He ran to the end of the drive in his long johns and one boot. Red taillights, low, swinging away into the trees; no plate he could read; then nothing. The air smelled of burnt powder and exhaust. It was minus twenty. He could not feel his bare foot.
When he turned round Claire was standing in the lit doorway of the house in a parka over her nightdress and unlaced boots, with a rifle at her shoulder.
It was an old lever-action, and she held it the way people do who learned young, the muzzle on the empty road behind him, her finger outside the guard. When she had seen that there was nothing on the road she brought it down and worked the lever once, and caught the cartridge as it came out, and put it in her pocket.
“You hit?”
“No.”
“Gus. Quiet.” The dog stopped. The big front window of the shop office was a black square with a few teeth of glass hanging in the frame. “Put your other boot on, Thorsen. You’ll lose toes. I’ll call it in.”
The dispatcher in Nordby said the on-duty unit was at the north end of the county on a domestic and would be there when it could. Thorsen called Wally, who said, “Don’t touch anything,” and was already moving.
The first car was not the sheriff’s. It was Novak’s old blue Honda with the ski rack, at half past twelve, and she got out of it in jeans and a blaze-orange hat, with a torch.
“I heard it on the scanner,” she said, not looking at Thorsen. “I was driving by.”
“At half past twelve,” Claire said. “On the Stone Bay road.”
“I like the drive.”
Wally came at five past one, in a time he said was a personal best and against several laws. He crouched over the marks where the car had spun away. “Car tyres,” he said. “Not a truck.” Then he dug the first round out of a stud behind the office panelling with a pocket knife, standing on a chair while Novak held the light.
“Three-oh-eight,” he said. “There’s one in every deer camp in this county. I’ve got one myself.”
The second had gone through the old tug on her pole, just under her sheer strake: a small neat hole going in, and a bigger one coming out with splinters standing round it like a burst seed head. Claire stood under it with her arms folded and her chin up.
“That’s been on that pole since I was three,” she said.
“Sheriff?” Wally said to Novak quietly.
“Dispatch called him at home. He said the on-duty unit would handle it. The on-duty unit is Travis Kline.” Novak’s jaw moved. “His domestic is a man and his brother-in-law arguing about a snowmobile.”
She stood a moment longer with her hands in the pockets of her jacket. Then she took one of them out with a thick brown envelope in it, and held it out, not to Wally, but to Thorsen.
“I wasn’t here,” she said. “I didn’t give the BCA anything. I gave a man I booked for trespass a blanket, and this.”
They went into the shop under the hanging lights, the four of them, and Thorsen laid it out on the bench under the board of outlined tools.
There were photographs, printed at home on ordinary paper. A close-up of the mouth of a stainless pipe, washed white by the flash, and frozen into the grey plug of ice a short dark curl of something, knotted round itself. 11/02 07:24.
“Before he knocked it out,” Novak said. “He put his flashlight on it and said snow drift. I’d already taken those. I don’t know why. I just did.”
Under them were photocopied campaign finance reports, three election cycles, gone through with a yellow highlighter. Hale, Bryce. Hale, Catherine. And in the employer column, over and over, Hale Land & Timber Co., beside foremen and secretaries and one man listed as security: Pruitt, Jarrett.
“Thirty-eight thousand dollars,” Novak said. “For a sheriff’s race in a county of nine thousand people. They’re public. Nobody ever goes and asks.”
Under that, a page from a pocket notebook, in a neat round hand that pressed hard.
10/04. 0112. Hwy 61 SB MP 41. Blk Ford F-250 plow mount lt bar. Radar 84/55. Driver J. Pruitt (recog.). Lit up. He waved. Called in — Sheriff: “Let it go, Kayla, he’s on Hale business.” Let it go.
“The weekend somebody went through Mr. Strand’s apartment,” Novak said. “One in the morning, southbound, towards Duluth. He went past me like I was a mailbox.”
And last, by itself, a single line photocopied off a computer printout and cut out with scissors, so that it lay on the bench like a strip of tape.
09/30 2341 Sheriff 10-8 … 10/01 0106 Sheriff 10-7. No incident.
“That’s the dispatch log,” Novak said. “Nobody ever pulled it for that night. Not him, not anybody. So I did.” She did not touch it. “Ten-eight is in service. He put himself on the air at eleven forty-one and took himself off at one-oh-six. There’s no call against it. No traffic stop, no backup, nothing on the radio. He never goes out at night. He doesn’t even go out to the Legion.”
The boiler stove ticked. Gus, who had come in with them, lay down on Thorsen’s feet.
Thorsen looked at the strip of paper. Eleven forty-one to one-oh-six. Ten minutes after Curt Hollister had rung Paul Strand’s cell from his own and got no answer, he had put himself on the air. In the middle of it, at twelve-thirteen, a phone had stopped answering at the end of the Point, three miles from the LEC. He thought of a laceration with one margin straight as a ruler, and a long black torch knocking against a man’s thigh as he crossed the snow with the cuffs.
Wally had picked up the strip by its edges and was reading it as if it might say something else the second time.
“Where’d he go, Kayla?”
“I don’t know. Nobody knows. That’s the point.”
“Has anybody asked him?”
“I’m asking you not to.” For the first time she sounded young. “Not yet. Not while I’m the one who pulled it.”
“Nobody’s asking him anything,” Wally said. “Not till I can afford the answer.” He laid the strip back down on the bench beside the photograph of a curl of twine in a plug of ice, and looked at it, and then across the bench at Thorsen.
“Why now?” Thorsen said to Novak.
She looked at the black square of the office window.
“Because I took an oath,” she said. “Not to him.” She zipped her jacket. “I’ll testify to every word. And if you need me you can text me and say it’s about a dog. Duke. On the bulletin board in the lobby. Everybody at the LEC texts each other about Duke. Nobody ever looks twice.”
By three, Thorsen and Claire had nailed plywood over the office window, and Wally stood by his car with the envelope inside his coat.
“I could pick Pruitt up tomorrow for the cliff road,” he said, before Thorsen asked. “I told you why I’m not.” He looked at the plywood. “I’m starting to wonder if that was clever or just old.” He looked past Thorsen at Novak by her Honda. “Go home, Deputy. And thank you,” he said, and drove away.
When the Honda’s lights had gone, Claire stood in the doorway of the house with the light behind her, and the rifle back on its pegs inside, and looked at the van at the top of the drive.
“You’re not sleeping in that van tonight,” she said.
“It’s got a good heater.”
“I know. I put it in.” She did not look at him. “You’re not sleeping in it tonight, Thorsen.”
He did not sleep in it. He did not sleep much at all. Towards five, with Gus a dead weight across both their feet and the stove gone down to a red line round the door, she said into his shoulder, “That tug’s been on that pole since I was three,” as if it were the only thing that had happened, and he said, “I know,” and she slept.
On Sunday morning Claire was in the shop office with a push broom, sweeping up the glass they had missed in the dark.
The calendar on the far wall had a hole through November. On the shelf beside the welding rod, Arne’s jar sat where she had put it, with its square of cloth tied over the lid.
“My dad got a dead dog on the porch,” Claire said, without looking up. “I get a bullet.” She knocked the broom against the edge of the box. “That’s progress.”
She swept. The glass hissed on the concrete.
“They’re scared, Thorsen. A quarter of a million dollars on Friday and a rifle on Saturday. That’s not a man who thinks he’s got nothing to worry about.” She chased a piece out from under the desk with the bristles. “Of what? Of me?”
“Of what you could do,” he said.
The broom went on for a stroke, and another, slower. Then she leaned it against the desk, and went to find the number for Rose Defoe at the Band office.