Arne carved the way he cleaned fish: without looking, in long strokes, the knife doing exactly what it was told.
He stood over the turkey in a clean wool shirt and his thin brown knitted tie and laid slices onto the platter, each the same thickness as the last. The kitchen was hot and the windows had steamed. Outside, snow was coming in off the lake in small hard handfuls.
Thorsen sat halfway down the bench and watched the hands.
“White or dark, Walt?”
“Dark. I’m ninety-one. I don’t have to eat what’s good for me.”
There were seven of them, counting Arne and Thorsen. Walt Erickson in his Korean War cap, which he did not take off indoors, at Arne’s right hand. At the far end of the bench, as far from Arne as the table allowed, his son. Gary’s daughter Becky, who usually drove Walt, was at her in-laws’ in Two Harbors, and Walt had said that if nobody drove him he would walk, so Gary Erickson had driven him, and now sat with his big grey head down and his elbows on the cloth and ate as though the food had been put there to test him. Irene Pavlich, a small brisk widow who had brought a green bean hotdish and an opinion about it. And two men from the Hjalmar Lindgren who had come because Nils could not: Dewey Martineau, long and quiet, from Grand Portage, and Kenny Zupan, a round red Iron Range man with a laugh that went off like a dropped tray.
There was wild rice, and cranberries from a can, still showing the ridges, and lefse under a damp tea towel, which Arne had made at five that morning with his mother’s turned stick.
He sat, and bowed his head.
“Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, and let these gifts to us be blessed.” The others said it with him, the grace every Lutheran child on the shore learned before they could read, and Thorsen found that his mouth knew it too. “Amen. And Lord, keep Nils —”
He stopped.
The stove ticked. Snow hissed against the window. Arne sat with his head bowed and his enormous hands folded on the cloth, and his shoulders moved once, and his mouth worked, and nothing came out of it.
“Amen,” said Walt Erickson loudly, as if it had been finished. “Pass the lefse, Irene, before Kenny gets it all.”
Gary and Arne exchanged eleven words all afternoon. Thorsen counted them, because it gave the part of his mind that would not sit still something to do. Two at the door, Arne and Gary, like men signing for a delivery. Three over the turkey, when Gary said “Pass the salt” down the length of the table and Arne passed it without looking at him. The two men had stood on either side of Marit’s grave eleven years ago, and it had not brought them any nearer.
Arne told stories, pointing with his fork. He told them about Karl at eight, the summer of 1954, when Walt’s dog Tippy had come home off the shore with her side laid open on a broken net float, and Halvor was out on the lake and their mother was in Two Harbors, and Karl had boiled her darning needle and a spool of white thread in a saucepan because he had read that you should, and sat on the porch with the dog’s head in Walt’s lap and sewn her up.
“Eleven stitches,” Arne said. “I was four. I held the flashlight. I kept moving it, and Karl said, Arne, hold the light where I’m looking.” He laughed. His eyes were wet. “Hold the light where I’m looking. I’ve said that to men on boats my whole life and not one of them knew where I got it.”
“He knew he’d be a doctor from that day. A fisherman’s boy. Everybody laughed.” Arne looked down the table at Thorsen. “And he was.”
He told them about Halvor in his last years, with his heart, on the porch with the pills in his shirt pocket and a blanket over his knees, watching the lake as if he were waiting for somebody.
“He’d give Danny a peppermint,” Arne said. “Every morning. Out of a paper bag. You remember, Danny?”
“I remember.”
Thorsen ate, and said it was good, and it was. He watched Arne’s hands, and Arne’s face, and could not make them agree with each other.
It was Kenny who brought up the shooting, the way young men do, as news. “You hear somebody put a round through Claire Lacourse’s window Saturday?”
“I heard.” Arne put his fork down and looked at Thorsen. “You were there, Danny.”
“I was there.”
“Hale,” Arne said quietly. “That’s Hale. Or that animal of his. Shooting at a woman’s house in the night.” His big hand closed on the tablecloth. “Leonard used to fish off this dock with me when we were boys.” It was not what he had said in October. “If I knew who it was I’d —” He stopped. “Well. I’m an old man. I’d do nothing. But I’d want to.”
Irene patted his wrist. Dewey Martineau looked at his plate. At the end of the bench Gary Erickson had stopped eating and was looking at Arne.
“Sheriff never even came out, I heard,” Kenny said.
“Curt Hollister,” said Walt, “couldn’t find his own backside with a map and a dog.”
Kenny’s laugh went off again, and the table moved on. Gary got up without a word and went out through the back porch, and a minute later Thorsen heard a hatchet start up behind the house, steady as a clock.
Walt wanted his coffee on the porch. He said he was ninety-one and could sit where he liked. Thorsen took him out a cup and a kitchen chair, and put a blanket over the old man’s knees without asking, and Walt let him.
The snow had stopped. The lake lay grey and flat under a low sky. Out past the end of the Point, a mile off, Gull Rock was a dark lump on the water with a ruff of white round it.
“You’ve been asking about Halvor,” Walt said. “And the Lacourse boy.”
Thorsen sat down on the top step. “Who told you?”
“Nobody. I got eyes.” Walt looked at the lake. “You stood at the back of that gym, and I thought, that’s Karl’s boy. He’s come to find out.” He drank. “Halvor come to see me. July. Drove himself, which he shouldn’t, with the heart. Sat in my kitchen grey as ash, didn’t touch his coffee. Walt, I want you to go see the Lacourse boy for me. I said what for. He said, Tell him I’ll put it all on paper. My father’s sin. All of it. Tell him come the fourteenth, late, by water, when the house is asleep.”
Walt turned the cup in his hands. “So I told Leonard, and he shook my hand, and two weeks after he was drowned and Karl was gone in the night, and Halvor never said one word to me about it after. Eight years. We fished together, eight years. Not a word, and I never asked him.” He looked down into the coffee. “Nobody asked me either. Man drowned on the lake. What’s to tell.”
The hatchet went on behind the house. Walt listened to it for a while.
“And that Duluth fella sat in my kitchen the night he died,” he said. “Not the middle of the month. That night. Gary knows. He went out on the step twice to use his telephone, and he came in and said Arne told him come at twelve. He had another cup of coffee. I told Curt Hollister. Curt wrote down I was confused.”
Thorsen looked at the lake, because it was easier than looking at the old man.
It’s eleven o’clock at night, son. Come in the morning, Arne had said, at the woodpile, nine days ago. And then, when that would not hold: I rang him to say don’t come at all.
“Why didn’t you tell me in October?” he said. “In your kitchen.”
“I did tell you. You heard my boy tell you different.” Walt’s voice was quite steady. “He’s my boy. He’s in trouble with the bank and he’s frightened. I been frightened for him since the first of October. I’m ninety-one. I’m done being frightened.” He jerked his chin at the sound of the hatchet. “Go and talk to him. He’s been wanting to tell somebody since that morning, and he’s too proud, and I’m too old to wait on him.”
The woodshed stood behind the house at the edge of the spruce, an open-fronted lean-to stacked to the rafters. Gary Erickson was at the block under the eave in his shirtsleeves, splitting kindling, and the pile at his feet would have lit the stove till March.
He did not look up.
“Your dad sent me.”
“My dad’s ninety-one.” The hatchet came down. “He sends people all over.”
“He says Paul Strand sat in your kitchen the night he died. He says you know.”
The hatchet stopped in the wood. Gary left it there and straightened up, slowly. His face had the grey, pouched look of a man who has not slept properly since the bank started writing to him.
“You’re going to give me to Hollister.”
“To Wally Heikkinen. He’s BCA. He’s not Hollister.”
Gary looked past him at the house, at the steamed windows with the shapes moving in them. Then he took his phone out of his shirt pocket, a big cheap one in a cracked case, and thumbed at it with a thick forefinger, and held it out.
“Camera on the porch post. Motion. Becky put it up after somebody had the gas out of my truck. It saves to the phone.” His mouth moved. “I kept them. They’re the only thing in the world that says I was home by a quarter to one.”
The clips were short and grey and grainy, with the time in white in the corner. At nine fifty-two, headlights swung into the Erickson drive behind the tan GMC, and a slight man in a fleece got out with a bag over his shoulder and went up the step. At ten-fourteen the same man was on the step in the porch light with a phone to his ear, walking two paces and back. At ten thirty-nine he was there again, standing quite still this time, with his free hand on top of his head. At eleven fifty-eight the Subaru reversed out, and its lights swung away towards the lane. At twelve-twelve Gary himself, in a coat and a cap, came down off the step and walked out of the frame towards the road. At twelve forty-four he walked back into it with his head down.
“He came in the Legion asking for Dad’s house,” Gary said. “I was sat right there. I went home behind him because I wanted to see what he’d do. Dad let him in. Dad lets everybody in.” He looked at the hatchet in the block. “I went in my room. I was mad. I could hear them through the wall. Dad telling him about Halvor, and Leonard, and the message, all of it. Then the fella went out and came back and said Arne’d told him come at midnight. I heard him say midnight through the wall. I thought, Arne’s going to give it all away, the Point, my twelve acres, the lot, to a man in a fleece jacket. I went down to tell him he had no right.”
“On foot.”
“I’d had a few at the Legion. I’m not Nils.” He said it without any satisfaction. “The car was at the gate. Door not shut, the little light on inside. A bag and a black binder on the seat. Keys in it. Nobody. So I walked on down.” He was quiet for a moment. “The kitchen light was on. Arne was at the table under the lamp. Hands flat on it. Not moving. Like a man who’s finished something. A cup by his hand and another across from him. Nils’s TV going blue in the trailer. And I stood there and I couldn’t. I went home.”
“Strand?”
“I never saw him. I could see Arne. You can’t see the whole room through that door.” Gary rubbed his face with one big hand. “I didn’t think about him. I was thinking about me. Me and Arne haven’t said a straight word to each other since we buried my sister, and I’d walked half a mile in the dark with a lot of them saved up, and I got to the edge of his yard and I couldn’t say one.”
“Why did you lie to me?”
“Because I was there. Because I’d been at the Legion. Because I’ve got a bank that wants me dead, and you think Hollister wouldn’t have liked me better than Nils?” He looked at Thorsen then, straight, for the first time. “You’d have liked me better. Go on. Say you wouldn’t.”
“You let your sister’s boy sit in there.”
“I didn’t know anything. I saw an old man at a table.” His voice cracked on it and he waited until it had stopped. “I’ve thought about that table every night since. I thought, he’s waiting. And then I thought, no. He’s done.”
Thorsen did the arithmetic standing there. Eight hundred and forty yards from the Erickson step to the gate, and four hundred and forty more, which put Gary at the edge of the yard by twenty-five or so past twelve. And the same back: a mile and a half, near enough, for a heavy man of sixty-six in the dark on a gravel lane, in thirty-two minutes. It left him two or three minutes to stand at the edge of a yard and lose his nerve. It did not leave him the seven hundred yards out to the end of the Point and back, and a man to put over the edge, and a climb. And Paul Strand’s phone had stopped talking to anybody at twelve-thirteen, when Gary Erickson was a minute out of his own front door. If the clock in the corner of a cheap camera was telling the truth.
He gave Gary the number of the 7-Eleven phone and told him to send every clip to it, and the same to a number he wrote on a bit of kindling with a carpenter’s pencil from the shelf.
“That’s Heikkinen?”
“Yes.”
“And then what?”
“Then you take your dad home. He’s cold.”
Gary sent them, one by one, with his thick finger. Then he took the hatchet out of the block and hung it on its nail on the post, and went round the house to the porch.
Arne was at the door with Walt’s coat already over his arm. He had seen them come round the corner of the house together. Thorsen saw him see it.
“Walt’s tired,” Gary said.
“I’ll get his coat,” said Arne, who had it, and held it out, and Gary took it.
That made eleven.
Thorsen told Arne he was going down to the fish house for some air. Arne, with his arms in the sink, said, “Take a pie with you,” and Irene laughed, and nobody looked up.
The fish house was cold and dim and smelled of tar and the lake. The Solveig on her cradle, her name in gold. The net reels, the ladder to the loft. The long bench under the window, and above it the knives in their rack, and above the knives, on its nail, the priest.
He stopped.
A short dark club of ironwood, no longer than his forearm, polished by a century of hands, with a disc of lead let into the end of its head. Anders’s. It had hung there all his childhood and he had never once thought about it. On its nail, Arne had said, at his kitchen table, with the tears in his beard. Over the knives. Where it’s always been. I see it every morning.
He did not touch it.
Something rounded, with an edge. The lead let into the head of it, flush as a coin, a rim of grey round the wood. A man who had used it once on this shore, and seen it on its nail every morning since, could take it down in the dark and put it back before light, and go on seeing it.
He went on to the landward end, to the low door of the smokehouse.
He had to stoop to go through. Inside it was close and dark and smelled of a hundred years of fish and alder. The racks stood empty. At the far end, built into the stone of the gable, was the firebox: a squat black mouth of fieldstone with an iron door hanging open on one hinge, an iron grate on bars, and under the grate, the ash.
I haven’t lit the smoker since Labor Day.
He turned on the light of the 7-Eleven phone and crouched and looked.
The ash lay in a grey bed four or five inches deep, fine as flour, with a crust on top where the damp had got at it. He put his fingers into it, gently, at the back, the way you feel in water for something you have dropped.
Under the crust it was soft and cold. Near the bottom, against the bars of the grate, his fingers met something that was not ash and not wood.
He brushed the ash back from it with two fingers, a little at a time.
It was a lump of metal the size of his fist, dull grey, with the puddled look of something that had melted and set again, fused to the bars of the grate. Sticking out of one end of it was a short steel pin, perfectly straight, the kind of pin a hinge turns on. Beside it, half buried, was a curl of something green and stiff, with a pattern of fine copper lines on it like the streets of a town seen from very high up.
He brushed a little further. A strip of black plastic, scorched and bent into a U, with a row of hollows where the rings of a binder had been, and at one end a steel spring clip. Under the clip, held flat by the steel, a scrap of paper no bigger than a stamp, browned to the colour of toast, with printing on it.
SUPERIOR TITLE & AB—
He took his fingers out of the ash.
A bag and a black binder on the seat, Gary had said, twenty minutes ago, by the woodpile. Keys in it. Nobody. At twenty past twelve they had been on the passenger seat of a car at the gate. Now they were here, under the grate, fifty yards from his uncle’s kitchen.
He knelt there with the cold of the stone coming up through his knees. Very faintly, up the slope, Kenny Zupan was laughing in the kitchen.
He did not touch it again. Anything he touched, a lawyer would say he had brought. He took Ray’s key out of his pocket, with its strip of masking tape, and laid it on the ash beside the lump for scale, and photographed the lump and the board and the binder spine and the scrap of paper, from above and from the side and close, until his hands were not steady enough to hold the phone. Then he picked up the key, and with the side of his hand drew the ash back over all of it, slowly, until it looked as it had looked.
On the way out he stopped at the bench and photographed the priest where it hung, with the key held flat against the head of it for scale, twice, so that it would be there on the phone beside the ash. He left it on its nail.
He went out behind the fish house, where nobody could see him from the house, and scrubbed the grey off his hands with snow until they were red and aching and clean. He was breathing as if he had been running.
That’s Dad at the smoker, Nils had said, through the wall of a cell. So I didn’t think anything.
He stood there until he could feel his hands again. Then he walked back up the path to the house.
Arne was cutting the pie. He looked up as Thorsen came in, with the knife in his hand, and the steam off the coffee pot between them.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Danny.”
“Too much turkey.”
Arne laughed, and put a second piece of pie on a plate, and gave it to him.
Thorsen ate it.
He left at half past three, with a foil-covered plate of turkey on the passenger seat for Claire, because Arne would not hear of him going to a woman’s house empty-handed on Thanksgiving. Arne stood on the porch in his tie and waved him up the lane.
At the top, by the gate, he stopped.
It was where Paul Strand had left his car, on the last night of September, with the keys in it and the little light on inside. Thorsen turned the engine off and sat with the phone in his hand.
Wally answered on the second ring. He did not sound as if he had been asleep. Behind him a television was showing football, a crowd very far away.
“It’s Thorsen.”
“Happy Thanksgiving. My wife’s made a ham. I’m not supposed to be on the phone.”
“I found Paul Strand’s laptop,” Thorsen said.
The crowd on the television roared at something and went quiet.
“Where?”
Thorsen looked in the mirror, back down the lane into the spruce, where the smoke from the kitchen chimney went up above the trees into the dusk, straight, because there was no wind.
“In my uncle’s smoker,” he said.