The world was fifty feet across.
Fifty feet of black water, flat and slow and shining like oil, sliding past the bow, and on every side a white wall that rose and turned and came apart and rose again. Once the sun showed through it, low in the south-east, a flat disc the colour of a copper penny. Then the smoke closed and it did not show again.
He stood at the bow with the searchlight held against his chest, because Claire had put it in his hands at the dock and it was something to hold, and watched the fifty feet.
On the water the cold did not have a number. It came in through the half-zipped float coat and the wool under it and settled in the long bones of his legs and stayed there. When he blinked, his eyelashes stuck together and came apart with a small tearing feeling. Everything on the Nokomis that was not moving had grown a white fur, even the hood of Claire’s parka where her breath went over it.
Behind him, in the open back of the cuddy, the radar turned its slow green arm round and round. Claire stood at the wheel with one glove off and her bare hand on the throttles, and the twin outboards burbled at idle.
“Half a mile,” she said. She did not raise her voice. Out here there was no need.
The radio on his chest clicked. The cold had got into it, so that the voice that came out was thin and far off.
“Thorsen. Where are you?”
“Half a mile south-west of Gull Rock,” Claire said, without turning round, and he pressed the key with a thumb he could not feel and said it into the radio.
A pause. “He’s got that shotgun,” Wally said.
“I know.”
“I’m just saying it so it’s said.”
They went on. Time went slack out there, like a line with nothing on the end of it. They had been out forty minutes by the clock on the radar. It might have been ten. He thought, with great clarity, that he could not feel his face, and that this was information, and he could not think what to do with it.
Claire pulled both throttles back to nothing and the motors died.
The silence came down on them like a lid.
Water touching the hull. A tick, somewhere aft, of ice forming. Claire stood at the wheel with her head turned a little to one side, the way Gus turned his when he heard a car on the road that nobody else had heard.
Then he heard it too.
A small outboard, ticking over at the lowest it would go, like a sewing machine in another room. It came from the left. It came from the right. It came out of the water itself, because that was what the smoke did with sound: it took it and gave it back from everywhere at once.
Claire listened. Then she put out her bare hand and pointed, very precisely, a little to starboard of the bow, and put her glove back on, and touched the throttles, and the Nokomis went forward into the white at a walking pace.
Gull Rock came first.
A darkness in the smoke, low down, that thickened and took a shape: a long hump of bare rock, white with a century of gulls and new frost on top of that. On the far side, in the lee, the water lay flat and black and the smoke stood up off it thicker than anywhere.
And in the lee, the Solveig.
She was drifting, turning very slowly on the flat water with her bow to the rock. White hull, green sheer strake, all of it furred with frost so that she looked like a boat carved out of salt. A small outboard was clamped to a bracket on her transom, ticking over, holding her more or less where she was.
Arne was sitting in the stern.
He sat with one hand on the tiller and the other on his knee, in his long wool coat and his cap with the flaps down, the way Thorsen had seen him sit in that boat a hundred times, the summers Thorsen was a boy, with his eyes half closed in the sun. There was ice in his beard, and on his eyebrows, and through the left one the old seam of the scar showed white against the grey skin.
Across his knees lay a double-barrelled shotgun.
He looked up as they came out of the smoke. He looked at the Nokomis for a moment as though he could not think whose boat it was. Then he took his hand off his knee and raised it, slowly, palm out, the way a man raises a hand from a porch to a neighbour going by on the road.
Claire brought them round, gently, and held them. The motors went to neutral and then to a touch astern and then to neutral again.
“Thirty feet,” she said, very low, behind him. “That’s what he gets.”
“Danny,” Arne said.
His voice came across the water slowly, one word at a time, as though each one had to be lifted.
“Arne.”
Arne nodded. He turned his head, carefully, and looked past Thorsen into the cuddy.
“Claire Lacourse,” he said. “That’s a good boat. I heard you went out in it in the blow. In November. For the Canadian fellow and the boy.” He nodded again. “Everybody on the shore heard about that.”
Claire said nothing at all.
“Put the gun down in the boat, Arne,” Thorsen said.
Arne looked down at the shotgun across his knees as though he had forgotten it was there.
“It’s not for you,” he said. “It’s Dad’s. I brought it for me.” He looked at his hand on the wood. “I’ve sat out here since the middle of the night with it. Couldn’t feel the triggers. Couldn’t have done it anyhow.” He said it without any shame, as a plain fact, like his age. “So that’s that.”
The Solveig turned a little on the black water. The outboard ticked.
“Karl called me,” Arne said. “Did you know?”
“I was in the next room.”
Something moved in the ice of his beard that might have been a smile. “Arne, it’s Karl. Like he’d been down to the store.” He breathed, and the breath smoked. “He asked me was it me. The Duluth fellow. It’s not a thing you say to your brother on a telephone.” He looked at Thorsen. “I put a cup out for you, at your place. I thought you’d come down the lane before the rest of them, the way you did the first day, and I’d tell you at the table. You didn’t come. And I thought, they’ll all stand round the kitchen in their boots, and I’ll have to tell it to the stove.” He looked out at the white. “I wanted to tell you. Out here. This is where it is.”
Thorsen waited. He was holding the bow rail with both hands.
“I’ve told you the rest at the table,” Arne said. He looked at the water beside the boat. “I looked up at the loft, coming in. At the window. There was nothing there. I’ve always thought there was nothing there.”
“I was there,” Thorsen said.
Arne closed his eyes.
He sat like that, and the Solveig turned slowly on the black water.
“Karl came down at two,” he said, with his eyes still closed. “He sewed me up at the bench. He didn’t say one word the whole time, Danny. Not one. His hands didn’t shake. Mine did.” He opened his eyes. “And at half past three he put you all in the car and he went. He took you away from me. Karl did. You were my boy, those summers. You were my boy.”
Thorsen could not say anything. His jaw was shaking. He did not know if it was the cold.
“Paul Strand,” he said, when he could.
“He’d have taken the Point,” Arne said. “All of it. Everything Grandfather paid for.”
“Grandfather paid for it with somebody else.”
“Yes.” Arne nodded slowly. “Yes. He did. And so did I.” He let a breath go, and watched it smoke. “And so did you, Danny. Every summer you ate my fish. Every night you slept in that loft. That’s what the Point is. That’s all it ever was.”
The outboard ticked. Behind Thorsen, in the cuddy, he heard Claire’s glove creak on the wheel.
“Walt Erickson sent him,” Arne said. “Walt told him to ask me, so he asked me. Did Leonard Lacourse come to the Point that night in ’86. Polite. Like a man asking the way.” He looked at the rock. “All those years, and a man asks you that at your own kitchen wall. He telephoned. Late. And I said, come up now, and I’ll show you where. And he came. Right then. He left his keys in his car at the gate. He thought he’d be ten minutes.”
His voice did not change. It had not changed for Leonard and it did not change now.
“I met him in the lane with the lantern and walked him out to the end and showed him the rock.” He put his hand inside his coat, slowly, and brought it out, and held it up so that Thorsen could see what was in it: the short dark club with the lead let into its head, black and smooth with a hundred years of hands. “And I hit him with this.”
Thorsen looked at it. The lead was a dull grey coin in the end of the wood, flush, with its little rim. Something rounded, with an edge.
“It was on its nail over the knives all this time, Danny,” Arne said. “You walked past it every day. I took it down the night Karl rang.” He laid it on the thwart beside him, carefully, as though it might wake. “I meant the lake to have him. It didn’t want him. It put him on the rocks. I went down after him. Took the skin off my hands on the boulders.” He turned his right hand over on his knee in its frozen glove, as if the marks were still there to be shown. “And he wouldn’t go.”
Thorsen thought of that hand in his in the yard on the first day, dry and hard as wood, and the two scabbed knuckles, yellow and blue. Net reel. Stupid. Seventy-six and I still put my hand where I shouldn’t.
“I sat out there with him a long time,” Arne said. “Near one, it was, before I went up to his car.”
“And his laptop. His papers.”
“In the smoker.” Arne nodded. “You found it. I thought you would, the day you went down for air with a pie.”
“Yes.”
“If Nils saw a light that night, that was me. He’s a good boy. He doesn’t know what he sees.” He looked down at his own hands, the enormous hands, lying in his lap in their frozen wool gloves. “The computer wouldn’t burn. It went soft on Dad’s grate and stuck there. I’ve left it the way it is, for the Finn. So he’ll know I’m telling it right.” He was quiet. “His telephone went off the end of the dock, after. His little book went in the fire with the rest.”
The cold had got in behind his eyes, and everything Arne said went into it and lay down flat, one thing on top of another, like fish in a box.
“Why did you call me?” Thorsen said. “In October. Why did you call me at all?”
Arne took his time.
“I didn’t know about the Legion, Danny,” he said. “Nils never told me. That he’d said that, about the man, in front of all of them. Hollister told me, the morning he put the cuffs on him in the yard.” He looked at the shotgun. “I’d done it to my own boy, and I didn’t know it. So I called you. I thought you’d find it was Hale. Hale’s men. That Pruitt, with his truck. I thought you’d find that, because it’s what there was to find, and they’d let Nils come home.” He looked at Thorsen for a long moment, across thirty feet of black water. “I wanted it to be them. I wanted it so much I saw his truck at the gate. I thought you were a Thorsen.”
“I am,” Thorsen said. “That’s the trouble.”
Arne put his hand inside his coat again and brought out an envelope.
It was inside a plastic bread bag from the bakery in Nordby, with the end twisted shut and knotted.
“This is for Nils,” he said. “It’s all in it. Lacourse. The Strand fellow. All of it. I wrote it down the night Karl called, and I signed it.” He looked at it in his hand. “I don’t write good. But it’s all in it. So they’ll let him out.” He looked past Thorsen again, into the cuddy. “Will you bring your boat in, Claire? Close enough for Danny to take it?”
For a long moment nothing happened.
Then the motors changed their note behind Thorsen, very slightly, and the Nokomis moved forward across the black water, slowly, and slower, until the ice-furred lip of the bow ramp was a yard from the Solveig‘s side. Claire held her there. Thorsen did not look round at her. He went down on his knees on the ramp and reached out across the gap.
Arne leaned forward and put the bread bag in his hand.
And then he did not let go. His other hand came up, slowly, and closed round Thorsen’s, round the glove and the bag and all, the whole of it, enormous, and held it. Thorsen could not feel it through the glove. He could feel the weight of it. He was six years old, and he was standing on the dock in the early morning with this hand on the top of his head, and the hand was turning his head, gently, the way you would turn a cup, towards the shallows by the rocks, where a heron was standing on one leg in the mist, looking at the water. Look, Danny. Look there. Don’t move.
Arne let go.
He sat back on the thwart. He picked up the shotgun with both hands, and looked at it once, and leaned out over the far side of the boat and let it go. It went into the black water without a sound. There was a ring where it had been, and then there was not.
Then he picked up the priest.
He held it up, the way he had before, so that Thorsen could see it. Then he opened his hand over the side, and it dropped, and it did not float, because it had been made not to. It went straight down, end first, as though somebody below had been waiting for it.
Claire spoke.
It was the only time she spoke to him. Her voice came from the cuddy behind Thorsen, quiet and level, the voice she used for reading out a job sheet to a customer: what was broken, and what it would cost.
“My father whistled,” she said. “Did you know that? He could do any bird.”
Arne turned his head and looked at her.
He looked at her for so long that Thorsen thought he was not going to answer. The Solveig had drifted a few feet off the ramp, and the smoke went up between the two boats in a long slow twist and came apart.
“I know,” Arne said. “He whistled on the dock. While he waited.”
Thorsen heard a sound behind him in the cuddy. It was not a word. It was the sound a person makes when they have been hit in the body and have not yet fallen down. He did not turn round. He could not.
Arne looked out at the lake. At the white wall, and the black water going into it.
“It doesn’t give anything back,” he said. “Karl used to tell you that.”
And he put his hand on the gunwale and stood up in the boat.
The Solveig rocked under him. He stood quite steadily, with his knees bent a little, the way a man stands who has stood in small boats all his life, and he did not look at them again. He stepped over the far side. He did it the way you would step from a dock down into a boat that you knew. There was hardly a splash.
Thorsen was moving before he knew it.
He heard Claire scream his name, Thorsen, high and raw, a sound he had not known her voice could make, and he was off the ramp and across the gap and into the Solveig, and she lurched and went down on her side under his weight and threw him across her thwarts, and he went over her far gunwale head first, after Arne, into the lake.
It was not like the cold. It was not like anything that had a name.
It hit him the way a car hits a man. All of him at once, and his chest locked and then heaved, a huge gasp that he had not chosen, and he took the lake in through his mouth and his nose, black and burning, and came up choking into the smoke with his heart going like a fist on a door. The float coat held him up like a hand under the chest. That was the only thing that did.
Arne was there.
A dark shape, a yard away, just under the surface, going down slowly with his arms out a little from his sides. The wool coat had held some air for a moment and was letting it go in a silver stream. Thorsen lunged and got a hand into the collar of it, into the thick wet wool at the back of the neck, and closed his fist, and held.
Arne was as heavy as a stone. He hung under the water on the end of Thorsen’s arm, with his boots full and his coat full, and pulled Thorsen’s arm straight down after him, and Thorsen’s face went into the water and he did not let go. He could not feel his hand. He could see it, in the black, white and far away, knotted in the wool. He told it to hold. It held.
Then Arne’s hand came up through the water and closed round his wrist.
It was not a struggle. There was no struggle in it at all. The big fingers closed round his wrist, quite gently, the way they had closed round it on the knife at the bench in the fish house when he was nine, to show him the angle, and they held it, and then they worked it, deliberately, patiently, one finger at a time, out of the collar. Thorsen felt his own hand open. He could not have stopped it if he had wanted to. It had already stopped being his.
Arne let go of his wrist.
The shape went down into the black, slowly, without hurry, and was gone.
He was on his back. He did not know how he had got there.
The float coat held him with his face to the smoke. He had stopped gasping. His breath came slow now, and shallow, and it did not seem to matter much. The cold was not cold any more. It was a weight, a great soft weight on his chest and his belly, pressing him down into a place that was quiet, and comfortable, and he thought, very clearly, this is the easy way, and did not mind.
Somewhere a motor was roaring, and then not roaring: dropping to a mutter, close by. Somewhere a woman was shouting, the same word over and over.
Something hard came up under him.
It came under his shoulders and his back and his legs all at once, flat and ribbed and grinding, and the water slid off his chest. He was lying on it. Steel, with ice on the steel. He could feel the engines through it, very slow, pushing. She had not left the wheel. She had put the ramp down into the lake and brought the Nokomis in under him at a crawl, the way you slide a shovel under something you are afraid of breaking, and she was holding the boat there on the throttles, saying his name and swearing in a steady breathless stream, the way she swore at an engine.
Then the winch whined, and the ramp came up out of the lake with him on it, and the water poured off him in sheets, and he was rising, out of it, into the air, and the steel tilted and he slid down it towards her.
He turned his head. It was the last thing he did.
Out on the flat black water, in the lee of Gull Rock, the Solveig lay empty, turning slowly, slowly round, with her little motor ticking over and nobody at her tiller. As she came round her transom came into the light, and he saw her name, gold under the frost, the old-fashioned letters with their black shadows, the way they had looked to him when he was ten years old and she was the most beautiful thing in the world.
Then the smoke came down between them, and closed.