“Where?” Thorsen said. “Which way?”
“East, I think. Out.” Wally’s voice was moving now. Thorsen could hear his overshoes on the snow, and a car door. “It went for about a minute, and then I couldn’t hear it any more. Not because it stopped. Because something swallowed it.” He breathed. “I’m going down to the dock. Not the house. The house has a piece of paper with seven o’clock on it, and it can wait for seven o’clock. A man in an open boat at twenty-five below can’t. I’ve called the Coast Guard.”
“I’m coming.”
“Is she all right? Claire?”
“Her office is gone.”
There was a silence on the line, with the cold in it.
“I could have had Pruitt in a cell in November,” Wally said. “I wanted him scared first.” And he rang off.
He drove the van. Claire stayed, because the fire marshal was coming at six and somebody had to stand in the ice and tell him what had happened to her shop, and because she said she would come when she could, in a voice that meant it. She taped a sheet of clear plastic over the broken window in the back door, fast, in the floodlights, her fingers stiff and white, and put her palm against it when she had finished, the way he had once put his hand on the dent in the door.
“Go,” she said.
The heater roared under the passenger seat and the plastic snapped and boomed in the slipstream all the way up the Stone Bay road and along 61. The thermometer on the dash, which Claire had fitted along with the heater, said minus thirty-one.
Wally’s grey Ford stood in the lane below the gate with its engine off. Thorsen left the van behind it and went on down on foot with the small torch from Ray’s glovebox, in Wally’s tracks. The snow under his boots shrieked. The staples in his head had found the cold and settled into it.
The yard light was on. Arne’s old green Chevrolet stood in the yard with its plough mount and its rifle rack, furred white, frost thick on the windscreen. Nils’s trailer beyond it, dark, its blue tarp a sheet of ice. Arne’s fibreglass boat lay under its tarp beside the fish house, and the little outboard was gone off its transom. The house, dark. The fish house below it, long and low, and the dock.
And beyond the dock, where the lake began, the smoke.
Thorsen had heard of it. He had never seen it. The lake was perhaps two degrees above freezing, and the air above it was minus thirty-one, and the water was giving up its warmth into air that could not hold it. It came up off the black water in sheets and columns, white, twisting, in a wall that began at the end of the dock and went up two hundred feet into the dark and out across the whole of the lake. It never stopped moving. Columns of it turned slowly on themselves and leaned and broke apart and rose. In the yard light the face of it was grey, like a cliff of fog, and it made no sound at all.
Wally was standing at the end of the dock with his torch pointed at it, like a man trying to read a wall.
There had been snow in the night, the fine dry snow the lake made, an inch of it on the boards, and in it there were tracks. Rubber boots. A big man. They went down the dock and back, and down again, three times, four, carrying things. At the bottom of the slip, where the old ways went into the water, the skin of ice that had formed in the cove had been broken, and there was a channel through it, a dozen feet wide, black, going out into the smoke. It had already begun to freeze over again. The new ice was clear as glass and so thin that the water moved under it.
At the head of the slip the big lake doors of the fish house stood open, folded back against the wall. Wally put his torch through them from where he stood, and did not go in.
The cradle in the middle of the floor was empty, the shape of her still worn into the timbers. Two long dark marks went across the boards from the cradle to the doors, where the greased ways ran down through the slip into the water. The winch at the head of them had its cable paid out to the end, and its hook was empty.
Arne had winched a twenty-foot cedar skiff off her cradle and down the ways and into the lake, alone, in the dark, at minus thirty.
“Air Station’s grounded,” Wally said. He did not take his eyes off the smoke. “Traverse City. Zero visibility and icing. They won’t put a helicopter into this and I wouldn’t ask them to. Station Duluth’s got a boat that’ll break ice, and they’re getting her ready, and she’s three hours away if she’s an hour, and they won’t run her blind. The Sheriff’s Office hasn’t got a boat in the water. Nobody has. It’s December.”
Thorsen took out the phone. “Claire’s got a boat.”
“In the dark? In that?” Wally did not look round. “Her radar won’t see a wooden skiff, and I’d be fishing for three of you. I’ve asked her. She says first light.”
They stood there anyway, until Thorsen could not feel his feet and Wally’s eyebrows had gone white.
At five to seven, headlights came down the lane.
Marchetti and Okonkwo, who had seen Pruitt off down the shore with the trooper and come straight up it the other way. Novak behind them in her Honda, in her own parka with her badge on its chain, who had not been asked.
At seven o’clock by Wally’s watch they went up to the house.
“You’re a witness,” Wally told Thorsen at the porch steps. “Witnesses stand where I tell them and don’t touch anything. You’re here because you know the house. If you go in front of me, I’ll have Novak arrest you.”
“Understood.”
Wally looked at him. “I’ve heard that before.”
The house was not locked. It never had been. Wally knocked, and called out, Arne Thorsen, it’s the BCA, we have a search warrant, in a flat carrying voice, twice, and waited, and opened the door.
The kitchen was warm. Not hot; the warmth of a room where a stove has burned all night and been let go down in the last few hours. The black woodstove ticked as it cooled. On the back of it, the blue enamel coffee pot.
On the long scrubbed table, under the lamp, two cups.
One was Arne’s: the big white mug with a faded ore boat on it and a chip out of the rim, with a skin on the last of the coffee in the bottom. It stood at his place, at the end of the bench nearest the stove.
The other stood across from it, at the place where Thorsen had sat for every meal since the day he came. It was one of the good cups, the blue ones with the white rim that were kept on the top shelf, clean and empty, set out on its saucer with a spoon beside it. As though somebody had been expected for coffee, and had not come.
“Don’t touch it,” Wally said quietly, behind him.
“I’m not.”
Over the door the rack of wooden pegs where Halvor’s shotgun had always hung was empty. Under it, on the boards, a little scatter of rust flakes, where something had been taken down that had not been taken down in years.
The van from St. Paul came down the lane at a quarter past, and its two technicians followed them down the path in white suits over their parkas.
The smokehouse was through the low door at the landward end of the fish house. Okonkwo went in first, with Marchetti’s camera, and Thorsen stood in the doorway because Wally told him to. The racks were empty. The stone firebox at the end was black, and as cold as the lake.
And nobody had touched it.
The bed of old ash lay as Thorsen had left it on Thanksgiving afternoon, with a skin of frost over it and, under the frost, the furrows where his own fingers had gone in. At the back, against Halvor’s iron grate, was the lump of grey metal fused to the bars, and the curl of green board, and the scorched corner of a binder spine. Nobody had raked it. Nobody had so much as put a lid on the firebox.
Okonkwo photographed it from the doorway, and closer, with a scale, and then held Thorsen’s Thanksgiving pictures up beside the camera and took them again, one for one.
“It’s the same,” he said. He sounded almost disappointed. “It’s exactly the same.”
Wally stood looking at the firebox with his hands in his coat pockets.
“He left it for us,” he said.
They came back through the low door into the fish house, and Thorsen turned the torch along the wall to the bench.
The knives were in their row above the bench where the fish were dressed, bright with use, in order. And above the knives, a nail.
Nothing was on it.
He kept the light on it. After a moment Wally came and stood beside him and looked at it too, at the bare nail, and at the faint pale shape on the wall behind it where something had hung for a hundred years and kept the light off the wood.
“Your father said that’s where it lived,” Wally said.
“He took the priest.”
Wally did not answer at once. He took out his notebook, slowly, with his gloves on, and wrote something in it, and put it away.
“He left us the ash,” he said. “And he took the one thing we could test.”
Thorsen did not ask him what he meant. He thought he knew.
They went back out onto the dock.
The light was coming. Inside the wall there was a faint grey now, and you could see a few yards into it, and then nothing.
“He’s been out there three hours,” Wally said. “In an open boat. In this.”
“Thirty-five degrees in the water,” Okonkwo said. “Every bit of spray that comes aboard freezes where it lands. He’ll be making ice the whole time.” He stopped, because he had seen Thorsen’s face.
Thorsen was looking out into the white, to the east and a little north.
He knew where his uncle was. He had known since the empty nail.
“Gull Rock,” he said.
Wally turned his head.
“A mile out. Off the mouth of the Kettle. Where the nets were set, in 1923. Where Anders took Joseph Lacourse, in that boat, and hit him with that priest, and put him over the side.” His voice was very steady. He listened to it being steady. “Where Leonard Lacourse’s boat was found upside down on the fifteenth of August, 1986.”
“Why would he go there?”
Thorsen looked at the smoke going up into the morning, and the empty slip, and the tracks in the snow.
“Because that’s where this family takes people,” he said.
Claire came at twenty past seven.
They heard her truck before they saw it, coming too fast down the lane, and its lights swung into the yard and stopped beside Arne’s Chevrolet. She got out in her parka, still glazed down the front with ice from the hose, with her eyes red from the smoke, and came down the path to the dock and looked at the empty slip, and the wall.
She did not ask what had happened. He told her in four sentences, and she nodded at each one.
“Gull Rock,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Coast Guard?”
“Three hours. Blind.”
Her breath went up in a plume and froze on the rim of her hood.
“The Nokomis is in the water,” she said. “At my dock. I keep a bubbler going under her all winter, it keeps a hole open round the hull. She’s got radar. She’s got a searchlight.” She looked out at the smoke, and back at Thorsen, and her face did not change. “I’m going. You can come or not.”
Marchetti looked at Wally. Okonkwo looked at the boards. Novak was very still, with her hands in her pockets.
Wally looked at Claire, and then at the white wall, and then at his overshoes.
“I didn’t hear that,” he said.
Claire turned to go.
“Claire.” She stopped. Wally did not look up from his overshoes. “Take a radio.”
Novak already had hers off her belt. She held it out to Thorsen. It was warm from her body.
“Channel two,” she said. “That’s the county car-to-car. I’ll be on it. Wally’ll be on it.” She held onto it for a moment after he had taken it. “Bring yourself back.”
Stone Bay was frozen.
The inner bay had gone over in the night, grey ice from shore to shore, smooth as a floor, smoking faintly at the edges where it met the open water beyond the point. But at the end of Claire’s dock there was a black pool thirty feet across where the bubbler had been churning the warmer water up from the bottom all night, and in the middle of it, white with frost from bow to stern, the Nokomis.
He had last been aboard her in the gale. He did not think about that. He thought about it all the time.
The mooring lines were frozen to the cleats. He broke them free with the back of a hatchet she handed him, and chipped the ice off the ramp hinges while she went aft.
“The legs have been in the water all night,” she said, crouched at the engines. “That’s the only reason they’ll start.” The starboard engine caught, rough, blowing blue smoke that lay on the ice. The port took four tries, and Claire swearing at it under her breath.
She switched on the radar, and the screen lit green, and the sweep went round, and the shore came up on it in a bright line, and beyond it a scatter of returns that was the smoke, and then, far out, a single hard spot.
“That’s the rock,” she said.
She took two float coats out of the cuddy and held one out for him. It was meant for a man six inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter. She got the zip halfway up his chest for him, and no further, and left it.
“Searchlight’s on the bow rail,” she said. “You’re on the bow. You watch. If you see ice on the water you tell me before we hit it.” Her eyes in the slit of the balaclava were very steady and very dark. “And Thorsen. You don’t go in. Whatever happens. You hear me? You don’t go in.”
He did not answer. She looked at him a moment longer, and then went to the wheel.
Gus stood on the dock at the edge of the black water and whined, high and thin, and Claire said Stay, and he stayed.
She took them out through the ice.
The Nokomis nosed out of the black pool into the grey ice of the bay, and the ice broke under her bow with a sound like a building full of windows coming down, and the aluminium boomed and rang. Thorsen stood at the bow with the searchlight and called the ice, and she steered. Behind them the channel they had made lay black and steaming across the bay, and Gus, very small at the end of it, did not move.
Then the ice thinned, and went to slush, and to nothing, and they were in open water at the mouth of the bay, and in front of them was the smoke.
The sun was coming up somewhere behind it, and the tops of the columns far out were lit from underneath, pink and gold. Below the light the wall was grey, and at its foot, where it came off the water, it was dark.
Claire did not slow down. She did not speed up. She put the bow at the place on the screen where the hard spot was, and held it there.
The first of the smoke came over the bow like a breath. Then they were in it.
The light went white. The end of the ramp, twelve feet in front of him, was a shape, and the water beyond it was nothing at all. He tried the searchlight, and the beam went out ten feet and stopped, a solid bar, as if it had hit a wall, and he switched it off again. Frost grew on the rail under his glove, and on his sleeve, and on his lashes, and the spray off the bow froze on the ramp in a clear skin that thickened while he watched.
Behind him he could hear the engines, and then, as they went further in, less. The smoke took the sound and folded it away, the way it had taken his uncle’s outboard four hours before, until the two big motors were only a kind of trembling in the deck under his boots.