Brooks came at nine, in the green Subaru with the child seat in the back, carrying a camera the size of a paperback, a folding tripod, a box of evidence envelopes and a face that said she had not slept either.
His mother met her at the door and said, “You’re the detective,” and Brooks said, “You’re the doctor,” and his mother said, “Have you eaten?” and Brooks, who had spent eleven years refusing food from the families of the dead, said, “No, ma’am,” and was sat down in front of a plate of sarma before she had put the tripod down.
They did it at the kitchen table, because his father said that was where it belonged.
Brooks set the camera up at the end of the table, put her phone on the oilcloth with the speaker on, and dialled.
“Heikkinen.”
“Detective Imani Brooks, Los Angeles Police Department, Northeast Division. I’m at the home of Dr. Karl Thorsen in San Pedro. Present are Dr. Thorsen, Dr. Ana Thorsen, and Daniel Thorsen. You’re on speaker, Agent Heikkinen, and you’re being recorded.”
“Good morning, everybody. It’s snowing here. I’m told it’s seventy where you are. I’m trying not to think about it.”
Brooks did it by the book, because she did everything by the book. The date and the time. That Dr. Thorsen was not under arrest, and was free to stop whenever he liked, and was entitled to have a lawyer present.
“I don’t want a lawyer,” his father said. “I’ve waited long enough. I’m not waiting for a lawyer.”
“Dr. Thorsen.” Wally’s voice, flat and level through the speaker. “I want to say one thing before you start, so you’re not sitting there worrying about it. Whatever you did that night, stitching a man’s face and driving away, the clock ran out on it a very long time ago. I looked it up last night. Twice. I’m not interested in you. I’m interested in your brother.”
His father looked at the phone for a moment.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’d tell you anyway.”
He told it again, in the same order and nearly the same words as the day before, so that Thorsen understood he had told it to himself every night since, and it had worn smooth, like a step.
Brooks asked her questions in the gaps, quietly. What time exactly. What colour was the water. Which eye. Wally asked three, at the end, and they were the right three: had Arne ever, by letter or telephone or through anybody else, said anything to him about that night; had Halvor; and where was the fish priest kept.
“No. No. On a nail by the bench,” his father said. “Above the knives. It always was. It was my grandfather’s. It’s ironwood. You could drive nails with it.”
His mother sat through all of it with her hands folded in front of her. She did not take his hand this time. She looked at him, steadily, as if she were memorising a man she had been married to for fifty-four years.
Then Brooks put on gloves and photographed the Bible and the envelope and the two pencilled sheets, and sealed them, and had his father sign across the seals. She scanned the letter with her phone and sent it to Duluth while they waited. Thirty seconds later they heard, through the speaker, a printer start up in the BCA regional office and grind out two pages, and stop.
They waited.
“That’ll do it,” Wally said.
Megan Ostrowski came on ten minutes later, from her office in Nordby. She had read it three times. She would be in front of the district judge in Duluth tomorrow afternoon for two warrants. One was to search the Point: the house, the fish house, the smokehouse firebox and the boat. The other was for the arrest of Arne Thorsen for the murder of Leonard Lacourse. There was no limitation period on murder in Minnesota. There never had been. Not Pike, she said. Not anybody who would tell Curt Hollister before the ink was dry.
Afterwards, on the step, with the camera folded back into its case, Brooks looked at Thorsen.
“You opened it,” she said.
“With gloves. I photographed every stage.”
“I saw.” She put her sunglasses on. “I’d have done exactly the same. If you ever tell anybody I said that, I’ll deny it under oath.” She went down the steps to the car and did not look back.
His mother was angry with his father, and she would be for a long time. At one o’clock she made him a cheese sandwich and cut it into triangles, the way he liked it, and put it in front of him without a word, and went out into the garden and pulled up weeds that had not done anything to her.
Thorsen went out after a while and helped.
“Who’s Claire?” his mother said, to a dandelion.
He stopped with his hand on a weed.
“You said her name twice yesterday. Once when you were talking about the van, and once in your sleep on that bed with your boots on, which I saw.” She yanked the dandelion out, root and all, and looked at it. “Is she a nice woman?”
He thought about it.
“No,” he said. “Not nice. She’s good.”
His mother looked at him sideways with her black eyes. Then she threw the dandelion on the pile.
“Good,” she said. “Nice I can’t stand.”
He was packing in the evening, in his old room, with the striped spread covered in shirts. The flight was at a quarter past six in the morning. His mother was in the kitchen on the telephone to Denise, and he could hear her voice going up and down through the wall like weather.
His father had gone into the bedroom at seven and shut the door. Thorsen had thought nothing of it. He was eighty, and he had told the worst thing in his life twice in two days.
Then, through the wall, very low, he heard his father’s voice say, “Arne.”
Thorsen stood up.
“Arne. It’s Karl.”
He went out into the hall and stood outside the bedroom door with a shirt in his hand, and for the first time in his life he did not want to hear what was on the other side.
There was a long silence. Thorsen could hear the clock in the kitchen, and his mother’s voice on the phone, laughing at something Denise had said.
“Yes,” his father said. “Yes, it’s me.”
Silence.
“I’ve told them. … Yesterday. And this morning. … No. … No, Arne. Because it’s time. Because a man’s dead who didn’t need to be, and your boy’s in a cell.” His father’s voice did not rise. It went very low, so that Thorsen had to hold his breath to hear it. “I know. … I know you did. I know that. I stitched it, Arne. I was there.”
A long silence. Longer.
“Arne. Arne, listen to me —”
And that was the nearest Thorsen had ever heard his father’s voice come to rising, in fifty-one years. It came up, on the second Arne, like a man reaching for something going over the side.
Then nothing.
Thorsen opened the door.
His father was sitting on the edge of the bed, on his side of it, under the reading lamp, with the cordless phone in his lap in both hands. The bedside table was bare where the Bible had been. He did not look up.
“He hung up,” he said.
Thorsen sat down beside him. The old bed creaked.
“He asked about my heart,” his father said. “First thing. Before anything. Whether I’d got Dad’s heart. He asked after your mother.” He looked down at the phone. “He said he didn’t blame me. He said he’d always known I’d tell it one day, and he was glad I’d waited till Dad was dead.”
He turned the phone over in his hands, and over again.
“I asked him, Danny,” he said. “If it was him. The man from Duluth.” He said it as if he were reporting a symptom he was ashamed of having missed. “I’ve never asked my brother anything in my life. Not that night. Not since. I asked him that.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, You never asked me anything in your life, Karl. Don’t start now.” His father’s mouth moved. “And then he said to tell you he’ll make it right for Nils. Tell Danny I’ll make it right for Nils. That was the last thing. Then he put it down.”
Thorsen sat on the bed and looked at the carpet.
In November, at the kitchen table, Arne had said Before God, no, and sworn it on Marit. Tonight his brother had asked him the same question. He had not said no.
His mother was in the doorway. Thorsen did not know how long she had been there. She had the kitchen phone still in her hand, and Denise’s voice was coming out of it, small, saying Ana? Ana, honey?
“Make it right,” his mother said. “What does that mean, make it right?”
Nobody answered her.
She put the phone to her ear and said, “Denise, I’ll call you back,” and hung up, and came across the room and sat down on the other side of her husband, and put her arms round him, and held on, and looked at her son over his bent white head.
Thorsen took out the 7-Eleven phone and went out into the hall and called Wally.
Wally listened without a word until he had finished. Then he said, “So he knows we’re coming.”
“Yes.”
“Make it right.” There was a television somewhere behind him, turned low. “I’ve heard that twice in my life. Once a man meant he’d hire a lawyer. The other one had a deer rifle in his closet in Hibbing.”
“Can you go in?”
“Not on a phone call from California, with the paper coming tomorrow. The crime-scene people are coming up from St. Paul, and they won’t be on the shore before nine at night. Minnesota doesn’t let me knock on a man’s door with a warrant after eight at night or before seven in the morning unless the judge says so, and this one won’t say so. Ostrowski asked. So it’s seven o’clock Saturday.”
“That’s a day and a half.”
“I know what it is.” A drawer opened, at the other end, and shut. “I’ll have both papers Friday at four. I’m not going through an old man’s door at midnight at twenty below with his father’s shotgun on the wall and three of us. Seven o’clock, daylight, twelve people. That’s my call, and if it’s wrong it’s mine.” A pause. “I texted Novak while you were talking. She’s on nights this week. I asked her was there any news on Duke.” He read it out in the same flat voice. “Shift cancelled. Hollister. Sorry. He called her at home an hour ago and told her he was short on overtime.”
“Curt doesn’t cancel deputies,” Wally said. “Curt hasn’t the imagination to save money. I’d like to know who told him to.” A car door shut, and an engine started. “So I’m driving up myself. I’ll sit in the lane below the gate, where I can see his kitchen. I’ll be there by two. If he comes up it in his truck, I follow him. That’s all.”
“He won’t come up the lane. He’s seventy-six. Where would he go?”
“People surprise you. That’s the job. It’s going to be twenty below.”
“Will you be all right?”
“I’m from Virginia, Minnesota,” Wally said. “This is spring. Go to bed, Thorsen. You’ve got a plane.”
He did not go to bed. He sat on the striped spread among his shirts and listened to the house. His parents’ voices, low, through the wall. His mother crying, and then not. His father saying something, and his mother saying I know, dušo, I know. Then the light going out under their door.
His parents were both at the door at five in the morning, in their dressing gowns, in the dark, with the porch light on and Brooks’s Subaru idling at the kerb.
His mother held his face and kissed it, both cheeks, hard, and told him to wear a hat, and to call her when he landed, and on Christmas Eve he was to pick them up at four o’clock because Denise had told her what to bring and it was going to take two of them to carry it.
His father did not say anything. He looked at Thorsen in the porch light, with his white hair standing up at the back where he had slept on it, and then he put out his hand and laid it on the back of Thorsen’s neck, the way he had when Thorsen had a fever, and in the back of a station wagon in Nebraska, when he was eleven. And left it there.
“Bring Nils home,” he said.
At Terminal Five Brooks put the car in park and looked at him.
“Christmas Eve. Six o’clock. Denise’s. I wrote it down.” She leaned across him and opened his door, and was pulling away from the kerb before he had the bag on his shoulder.
At Minneapolis the plane to Duluth sat on the apron for an hour while two men in a cherry-picker sprayed it with something orange and steaming. It was six o’clock and dark when they came down into Duluth. His phone woke in his pocket on the jet bridge: Signed. 7 a.m. tmrw. Still here. W.
Then the automatic doors opened onto the kerb, and the air came in.
It was like walking into broken glass. Minus twenty-eight. He breathed in once, through his nose, and felt the hairs inside it freeze with a small crackle he could hear inside his own head. The sodium lights over the car park stood up into the still air in pillars, as if they were holding up the sky.
Her truck was at the kerb with the engine running and Gus in the back seat, thumping his tail against the door.
Claire got out. She was in a parka with the hood up and a scarf over her mouth, and all he could see of her face was her eyes, with frost on the lashes. She came round the front of the truck and stood in front of him on the kerb and looked up at him.
“You came back,” she said, through the scarf.
“I said I would.”
“People say things.” She looked at him a moment longer. Then she took his bag out of his hand and threw it in the back, beside Gus, and got in. “Get in. You’ll lose your ears.”
She drove up the hill out of Duluth and onto 61 with the lake black on their right, invisible. The heater roared and did nothing.
He told her that his father had seen Arne at two in the morning, the night of the fourteenth of August, 1986, washing her father’s blood out of the Solveig, and had stitched his face. And that there was a letter from his grandfather, written that day, addressed to her father, which nobody had read since.
She drove. Her hands on the wheel were very still.
“He wrote to my dad,” she said at last.
“Yes.”
“What did he say? At the end?”
“He said he was sorry. He said he should have said it when your grandfather was alive. He said the land should go back.”
She nodded, slowly, at the road. Her eyes above the scarf were wet, and she did not wipe them.
“Huh,” she said.
At the Stone Bay turn she slowed, and did not look at him.
“Will they charge him for Strand too?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” she said, and made the turn.
The van was standing in the yard beside the shop, furred thick with frost, with a heavy orange cord running from its grille across the snow to an outlet on the shop wall. The front window of the shop was still boarded with plywood where the rifle round had come through. Behind it was her office, and in a box file on the desk, her father’s letters.
Claire took a key out of her parka pocket and held it out to him. Worn smooth. A strip of masking tape round the head, gone grey, and the capital R.
“Every day,” she said. “Like you said. Twenty minutes every morning. I put a pad under the battery as well, on the same cord. Your friend never wintered it at twenty below. Nobody tells you the battery goes before the engine.”
He took the key. It was so cold it burnt his fingers.
He got in. The seat was like sitting on a stone. He put the key in the ignition and turned it.
The old engine turned over once, slowly, like a man getting out of a deep chair. And caught. And ran.
Ray had seen to it for twenty years in Los Angeles. He had not seen to this. Claire had.
They went to bed at half past ten in the small house behind the shop, with the woodstove banked and the van ticking and cooling in the yard, plugged in, and Gus on his blanket by the bedroom door.
She lay with her back to him for an hour, awake; he could tell by her breathing. Then she turned over without a word and put her head on his shoulder, the way a person puts down something heavy she means to pick up again in the morning, and slept.
Thorsen lay in the dark and listened to the cold. The house creaked as its timbers shrank. Out in the woods a tree split, once, loud in the still air.
He was nearly asleep when Gus growled.
It was very low, from the bottom of the dog’s chest, and it did not stop. Thorsen opened his eyes. In the faint light from the yard he could see Gus on his feet by the door, stiff-legged, with his head down and his hackles up along the whole length of his back, staring at the wall, at the yard beyond it, at the shop.