The crowd on Wally’s television roared and settled, and roared again, and Wally said nothing through any of it.
“Did you touch it?” he said at last.
“With two fingers. I photographed it and put the ash back over it.”
“Put the ash back.” He breathed out through his nose. “Then listen to me. You send me those pictures tonight, every one. You don’t go back in that smokehouse, not even to see if it’s still there. You don’t tell anybody.”
“Gary Erickson’s sending you some film. From his porch. You’ll want to look at the times.”
“Gary Erickson. All right. Leave it. Saturday. Two Harbors. The café on Seventh Avenue, eight o’clock. I’ll bring Ostrowski. Until then you’re a man who had his Thanksgiving dinner and went to see his girl.” A pause. “In your uncle’s smoker,” he said, more quietly, as though he were reading it back. “I’m going back to my ham now. I’m going to sit there and not taste it.”
He rang off. Thorsen sent the photographs, one by one, and drove down the shore to Stone Bay with the turkey on the seat beside him under its foil.
Tyler Lacourse was six foot three, with his mother’s broad face and none of her expression. He shook Thorsen’s hand in the doorway, briefly, hard, and looked past him at the plywood over the shop window, and said, “So you’re the cop.”
“Ex.”
“Huh,” said Tyler, in his mother’s voice exactly, and went to help her with the turkey.
They ate at seven. Tyler talked to his mother about Fargo and a foreman called Rudy who was an idiot, and when Thorsen said something, Tyler looked at his plate.
“The window,” Tyler said finally, to his mother. “And the boat. Mom. Somebody shot at the house. With you in it.”
“Tyler,” Claire said.
“That’s true,” Thorsen said.
Tyler looked at him then, surprised, and opened his mouth to say something else, and the lights went out.
They went all at once, the kitchen and the yard light and the hum of the refrigerator, and in the black window over the sink a flash lit the trees up the road towards the highway: blue-white, then green, stuttering, like a welding arc seen through a slot.
Tyler was on his feet before it had finished. “That’s not the storm. That’s a line on the ground.”
A quarter of a mile up the road, at the bend, Claire’s headlights came round through the snow onto an old brown Buick with its back end down in the ditch and its engine running. Beyond it a power pole leaned out over the road, snapped at the base, and one wire lay across the road in a long slack curve, its end in the drift a few feet behind the Buick’s bumper.
“Stop,” Tyler said. “Mom. Right here.”
She stopped forty feet short. “Lorraine Gauthier,” she said. “She’s eighty-four. She was coming to us for pie.”
Thorsen was looking at the Buick. It was minus fifteen, and an old woman was keeping warm. “Her tailpipe’s in the snow,” he said. “It’s coming up into the car.”
Through the side window, in the glow of the dash, a small white head was leaning against the glass, not moving.
“Co-op says that line’s dead. Assume it isn’t.” Tyler was unzipping his jacket. “If it’s live, the ground round it’s live, worse the closer you get. You come in from the road side. Shuffle. Feet together, don’t lift them, like you’re on ice. I’ll go.”
“No,” Thorsen said. “It’s your job to know what to do if it goes wrong. I can’t do that. You can. And I can carry her.”
Tyler looked at him for one second, with his mother’s eyes.
“Shuffle,” he said. “Go.”
It was thirty feet. He went round in a wide arc on the road side, sliding his boots along the packed snow an inch at a time, with Tyler’s voice behind him saying small, small, and the back of his neck waited the whole way for something that did not come.
The passenger door opened on the stink of exhaust, and under it the thing that had no smell at all. Lorraine Gauthier was in a good wool coat and a church hat, with a pie beside her in a cardboard box. She looked at him without surprise.
“I’ve got such a headache,” she said.
He leaned across her and turned the key, and the engine died. Then he got his arms under her and lifted her out, coat and hat and all, and she weighed nothing, and he shuffled back the way he had come with her hand holding onto his collar.
At the truck Claire took her from him and put her in the cab with the doors open to the cold, and talked to her steadily, the way Thorsen had heard her talk to Gus. Tyler stood in the road with his hands in his armpits.
“She left the pie,” Thorsen said.
Tyler laughed, once, a short surprised sound like something knocked loose, and turned away and wiped his face.
The ambulance took Lorraine Gauthier to Two Harbors with a meter clipped to her finger. They drove back with the pie on Tyler’s knees. Tyler had gone loose and talkative, the way men do afterwards.
“That’s nothing,” he said. “Worst week of my year, the end of September. Four days up poles in Moorhead after that storm. Slept in the truck.”
Thorsen looked at the wipers going across and back. Here, Claire had said, in the shop, a week ago. With Tyler.
Claire said, to the windscreen, “Your great-great-grandfather’s name was Joseph.”
Tyler looked at her.
“I know, Mom,” he said. “Grandma told me when I was twelve.”
Claire drove for a while. The wipers went across and back.
“Your grandma,” she said. “Of course she did.”
Tyler went to bed on the couch at eleven with his boots by the stove. Claire washed the plates and Thorsen dried them, and the power came back on with a thump of the refrigerator.
“You told me you were with Tyler,” he said.
She went on washing a plate that was already clean.
“I was. For forty minutes. On the phone. From the shop.” She put the plate in the rack. “After I wiped that man’s voice off the machine I needed to hear somebody who had my father’s name.” She pulled the plug and watched the water go. “That’s what I didn’t want to tell you. That I rang my son up a pole because a man’s voice on a tape frightened me.”
He hung the towel on the rail of the stove.
“He wasn’t dead yet,” he said.
“No,” Claire said. “That’s the other thing.”
“A lump in an ash pit,” Megan Ostrowski said, “photographed with a seven-dollar phone by the defendant’s cousin.”
She said it without any malice, looking at the screen of Wally’s laptop. They were in a booth at the back of the café in Two Harbors, because it was not in Baptism County.
She went through the photographs again, one by one, down to the priest on its nail with Ray’s key laid against it.
“Jenny Strand says he had a silver laptop,” Wally said. “A MacBook. A laptop’s hinge has a steel pin.”
“So do a lot of things. And the day I write an affidavit on photographs taken by the defendant’s family, every judge in this district asks himself whether the family put it there.” She closed the laptop gently. “I’m not saying they did. I’m saying I’d ask.”
“I’d ask too,” Thorsen said.
She looked at him then, for the first time, a long, level look.
“Then let me tell you who it isn’t,” Wally said. He tore a caramel roll in half. “Claire Lacourse’s shop line, the thirtieth: outgoing, eleven-fifty at night to a Fargo cell, forty minutes. The cell’s her boy’s. It was pinging a tower in Moorhead, which is where his time sheet says he was, up a pole.” He ate half the roll. “Gary Erickson’s porch camera I can’t give you yet. I’ve sent the files to St. Paul to see if anybody’s touched them. A phone’s clock is a phone’s clock.” He wiped his fingers. “And Curt Hollister went ten-eight at eleven forty-one that night and ten-seven at one-oh-six, and wrote no incident. I pulled the dispatch log through the front door, so nobody asks where I got the idea. Then I asked Curt where he went. He said, I don’t answer to you, Heikkinen. He’s right, as it happens. He answers to the voters of Baptism County, and on the third they told him he was doing fine.” He looked at what was left on his plate. “Which leaves me a family on a point, and a sheriff who went for a drive.”
Ostrowski turned her coffee cup round.
“And that club,” she said. “If it’s what killed Paul Strand, it’s the best thing in that fish house, and the first thing anybody touches tips him. Paper first. And here’s the thing you won’t like. The laptop was burned at the Point. Two men live at the Point, and one of them is my defendant. That lump convicts Nils as easily as Arne. I need to know who before I move on anybody.”
“Nils saw a light in the smokehouse at one that night,” Thorsen said. “He told me in the cell.”
Wally put the half of his caramel roll down and looked at him.
“So Arne says come in the morning, and then rang back at twelve thirty-one to say don’t come at all,” Ostrowski said. “Walt Erickson says come at twelve. And Nils, who was drunk and half asleep, saw a light.” She looked at Thorsen. “The judge in Duluth will hear me. She’ll want more than this, and she’ll be right to. I need somebody who can tell me who. Somebody who was there.”
“Your father,” Wally said.
Thorsen looked at the table.
“You haven’t called him,” Wally said. It was not a question.
“No.”
“What if Arne rakes it out?” Thorsen said. “Before we’ve got anything.”
“Then we’ve got your pictures, with the dates in them, and a raked firebox in a smoker nobody’s lit since Labor Day.” Wally folded his napkin. “But I’d rather he didn’t. So you keep going up there for your supper, like you have been, and you eat what he gives you, and you say it’s good.”
“And meanwhile,” Ostrowski said, “your cousin sits in Hollister’s jail on my charge.”
She said it to herself, not to them. Then she put a ten-dollar bill on the table and went out into the cold, walking fast.
“She’ll lose her job,” Wally said, watching her go. “Or she’ll be governor.” He looked at Thorsen. “Call him.”
Claire went to the Band office on the Tuesday with her father’s letters in a box file on her knees: the copies from Kansas City, the photographs of the burial register, and Professor Brekke’s translation of the April 1924 letter. She took Thorsen. “You’re a Thorsen,” she had said. “I want her to see one sitting there.”
Rose Defoe was in her sixties, broad and short, with iron-grey hair cut close. “You’re the Thorsen,” she said. “Sit there. By the door.”
She read everything, and at the April 1924 letter she sat for a full minute with her eyes closed. Then she pulled a form towards her: a petition to the Bureau, in Claire’s name, as an heir of Joseph Lacourse, to find the conveyance void and the land still held in trust. “Copies to Washington, and to Laurentian and Hale. Then they’ll fight us. For years.”
“They shot my boat,” Claire said.
Rose looked at her for a moment. Then she laughed, a big short bark of a laugh that filled the office. “Well, then. They’ve started.”
Claire wrote her name on it slowly, in a square, upright hand. In the car park she did not start the truck. She sat with her hands on the wheel, looking at the bay, where the ice was coming in from the edges in grey plates.
“I signed my name,” she said. “His was better.” Then she put her hand on the back of his neck for a moment, without looking at him, and took it away again, and drove home.
On the Wednesday the radio in the shop said that shares in Laurentian Copper had fallen eleven per cent in Toronto on reports of a federal challenge to title. Claire stopped grinding to listen, and then started again.
He kept going to the Point for his supper, as Wally had said. On the Thursday Arne made pork chops. At nine Arne yawned until his jaw cracked and said he was an old man and was going up.
“I’ll sit in the fish house a while,” Thorsen said. “Like when I was a kid.”
“It’s twenty below in there, Danny.”
“I’ve got a coat.”
Arne smiled. “Nils’s old flashlight’s on the nail by the ladder. If it works.” And he went up, slowly, one hand on the rail, and Thorsen heard his door close.
The torch worked. It was a long black steel one, heavy, with a yellow light, and his hand had gone to the nail in the dark before he thought about it.
He had his boot on the bottom rung when the door opened behind him.
A beam of light came in across the floor and found the Solveig on her cradle, and swung, and found him.
“Danny?”
Arne was in the doorway in his trousers and an undershirt, with his braces hanging and his boots unlaced. No coat, in a fish house colder than the lake. He had the big square torch from the kitchen in his left hand, pointed at the floor now. His right hand was in his trouser pocket.
“Saw the light from the house,” he said. His voice was slow and warm and a little hoarse with sleep. “Thought I’d see you’d found it.”
He came in two steps and stopped. He did not come to the ladder. He stood a yard back from it, where a man stands when he wants both hands free, and over his shoulder, on its nail above the knives, hung the priest.
Thorsen took his boot off the rung. They stood there under the floats, two big men in the yellow light of two torches, three feet apart. He could hear Arne breathing.
Arne took his right hand out of his pocket.
It came out holding his snuff tin. He looked at the tin as though he did not know how it had got there, and put it back, and the hand came up empty and lay on Thorsen’s shoulder, heavy, and stayed.
“What are you going up there for?”
“The lake.”
“Nothing to see at night.” Arne looked up at the square of dark above them, and then at Thorsen’s face. His own face was creased and kind and tired. He took his hand away. “Mind the third rung. And don’t fall asleep up there and freeze. I’m too old to carry you.”
He went out. Thorsen stood at the foot of the ladder and listened to the unlaced boots go up the path, and the kitchen door, and then nothing but the lake moving under the floor.
He climbed the ladder and turned the torch off and waited for his eyes, and went to the gable window and scraped a square of frost off the glass with his thumbnail. Below him the dock ran out pale under a skin of snow, and beyond it the cove was black.
He did not try to remember. You took a witness to before the thing, and let them come to it on their own feet.
August. The heat under the tin, even at night, and the smell of tar coming up through the boards. Nils on the other cot, asleep on his back with his mouth open. Arne walking the boys down with a torch and saying good night at the foot of the ladder.
Something had woken him.
A motor, small, far out, coming in slow across the flat water, and then cutting off. A bump on the dock. And then, for a long time, a bird. He had lain there and listened to it, half asleep, a bird whistling down on the dock in the dark, clear and sweet, which birds did not do at night. Then it stopped, and there was a voice.
He had gone to the window barefoot and put his hands on the sill. A lantern on the post at the end of the dock, and in its light a small aluminium boat with an outboard on its stern. Two men on the dock, talking. One voice low and slow, the other quicker, eager. The quick one laughed once.
And then the Solveig going out: the white skiff sliding out from the end of the dock into the dark beyond the lantern, with a man at the oars, his back bending and straightening, and another man sitting in the stern facing him. And behind her, on a line, the little aluminium boat. Empty. Towing along behind like a dog. He had wondered why they were rowing, when she had an engine.
And then, a long while after, the Solveig coming back. One man in her, rowing hard now, not quietly. Nobody in the stern, and nothing on the line behind.
A big man. The boat sat down at the stern under him. He came into the lantern light and shipped the oars and stood up in the boat, and stood there with his back to the fish house, breathing, his head down and his hands hanging at his sides, half curled, as though they were still holding something.
There was no face. He did not need one. He knew the shoulders. He had watched them bend over a chopping block all autumn, and ten minutes ago they had stood at the foot of this ladder in an undershirt.
His heart was going very fast, the way it had gone at eleven, at this window, on these boards. He made himself breathe.
When he came down, the fish house was empty. He went out with Nils’s torch and walked up the dark path with the beam on the snow in front of his boots, past the kitchen, where the light was still on, and at the van he dropped the torch into the pocket of the driver’s door and started the engine.
He did not drive to Stone Bay. He pulled off onto the shoulder of 61 half a mile on, under the black spruce, and sat in the dark until his hands stopped shaking.
A bird whistling on the dock.
He could whistle like any bird you named, Claire had said in October, with her back to the stove, about her father.
And in the kitchen, Arne had said, his grandfather had been at the cribbage board with his father. Halvor had sent for that man. If Halvor had been awake he would have gone down that path on his hands and knees. Somebody in that kitchen had been awake and heard a man whistling for him, and had not gone.
It was a quarter to ten. A quarter to eight in San Pedro. He rang the house.
It rang twice.
“Danny.” The stove door opening. “Your mother’s at the church doing the flowers. She’ll be sorry she missed you. Are you all right?”
“I’m all right.” He looked out at the dark. “Dad. I’m coming to LA. For the hearing, on the eighth. I’m flying out on Sunday. I’ll come to you after.”
“That’s good. That’s very good. Your mother will —”
“Dad,” Thorsen said. “Was Granddad asleep at midnight?”
The line was quiet.
He could hear the kitchen clock with the painted saint on its face, and his father breathing, a long slow breath in and out, the breath of a man who has sat up at bedsides all his life and knows how to wait for the thing that is coming.
“Yes,” Karl Thorsen said.
Thorsen shut his eyes.
“I know, Danny,” his father said. “I’ve known since Flagstaff. Come home.”