The phone went at twenty to seven, on the floor beside Claire’s bed, and he had it before the second ring.
“His truck’s not at the Point.” Novak’s voice, low and quick, with a car heater roaring behind it. “I came down the lane at six. Trailer’s cold, fish house is cold. There’s a boat up on the ways with half the paint off her and a scraper on the bench. No truck.” A breath. “Wally wanted a car on the lane all night. There was one car for the whole county after midnight and a jackknifed rig across 61 at Silver Bay, and that was where it went. So I went and banged on Kenny Zupan’s door. He didn’t want to tell me. Then he did. The mate off the Hjalmar Lindgren rang Kenny at midnight to ask was Nils fit to sign on, and was he out on bail or what, because Nils had rung him at eleven asking for a berth. She’s at the ore dock in Two Harbors taking the last cargo of the season. Pellets for Indiana Harbor. Kenny says she finishes loading at seven and lets go at first light.”
Thorsen was sitting up. Claire was sitting up beside him, already reaching for her jeans.
“Megan signed a complaint at eleven last night,” Novak said. “The judge in Duluth signed the warrant at a quarter to twelve. I’ve got it in my coat.” She was quiet a moment. “If that boat clears the breakwater, he’s in Indiana on Tuesday and we’re asking a judge in Lake County, Indiana for him. And he’s had four days on a deck with a rail round it to think about his dad.”
“Don’t go up there with lights, Kayla.”
“I’m not going up anywhere. I’m going to be behind you.” The heater roared. “No siren. I’m leaving now.”
Claire drove.
She drove the way she did everything that mattered, without talking and a little too fast, the plough-scarred truck sitting down hard on its springs on the frozen ruts of 61 with Gus left whining in the porch behind them. It was minus twenty-four by the gauge on the mirror. In the headlights the road was white and empty and the snowbanks went by like walls. Behind them, a quarter of a mile back, a set of red and blue lights turned and turned without a sound.
On the left, where the lake should have been, there was nothing at all. Then the road came down close to the shore at Silver Creek and he saw it: the whole lake smoking in the dark, a grey wall standing up off the open water and leaning in towards the land, the way breath goes up off a horse.
He rang Wally.
“I’m on the expressway,” Wally said. “Forty minutes, on this. Kayla rang me.” The wipers went. “Eight o’clock, I said. I didn’t say where.”
Claire had both hands on the wheel. She did not look at him.
“If he goes over,” she said, “you don’t go in after him. Not this time. Not off a boat that size.”
“No.”
“Say it like you mean it.”
He looked at the smoke. “I don’t know if I mean it,” he said.
She drove.
The ore docks at Two Harbors stood out into Agate Bay like something left behind by a bigger race of men: long black trestles of steel and concrete, higher than the houses of the town, with a row of chutes hanging off each side like the teeth of a comb. There was a string of work lights along the top, and under them, where the smoke had not reached, the dark length of a ship.
She lay along the face of the dock from one end almost to the other, so long that the far end of her was only a guess. A red hull with the ice frozen in grey sheets along her waterline, and the deck a long flat plain with the hatch covers down, and at the after end, a long way off, the white block of her stern house with lights in its windows. HJALMAR LINDGREN, in white letters as tall as a man, on her bow. The chutes had been raised. Somewhere down in her a diesel was running, a deep slow sound that came up through the soles of his boots.
There was a gate in a chain-link fence and a man in a booth. Novak’s lights came up behind Claire’s truck and stopped, and the man looked at them, and came out, and Novak got out of the cruiser and talked to him with her hands in her pockets. Then he raised the bar.
They walked out along the dock apron at the foot of the trestle, Thorsen and Novak, on concrete glazed with ice and gritted with spilled pellets that rolled under the boots like shot. Claire stayed by the truck. The ship’s side went up beside them, a red steel wall, and between the wall and the dock was a black strip of water two yards wide with the smoke boiling up out of it.
Up on the deck men in orange float coats were working the mooring lines. A deck winch whined. One of the heavy lines came slack off a bollard on the apron and a deckhand hauled it in, and the wire went up the ship’s side dripping and smoking, and was gone.
“Singling up,” Novak said. “They’re taking in everything but one line at each end.”
“How long?”
“Don’t ask me.” She looked along the hull. “Not long.”
Halfway down the apron, an aluminium ladder went up the ship’s side from the dock to a gap in the rail, steep and narrow, with a safety net slung under it over the black water. At the top of it a short, thick man in a parka with a radio on his chest stood with his hand on the rail and watched them come.
“You’re a cop,” he said, before Thorsen had his foot on the bottom rung.
“I was. I’m his cousin. I need five minutes.”
“He told me nobody’d come.” The mate looked at Novak, at the patch on her shoulder, and back. “He’s signed on. He’s crew. I’ve known him since he was nineteen. He’s the best deckhand I’ve had on this boat and he never once came aboard drunk.” He looked at his watch. “We let go at half past seven, light or not. Five minutes.”
Thorsen went up.
The rungs were rimed with frost. He had left his gloves on the seat of the truck without thinking, and the skin was still coming off his fingers in long white peels the way Pat had promised, and the aluminium took hold of the raw places and burned them like a stove. He went up anyway, one rung and then the next, with the black water smoking under the net and the steel wall going past his face, and at the top the mate put out a hand and took him by the forearm and pulled him over onto the deck.
“Aft,” the mate said. “On the fantail. He’s been there since four.”
It was a long way aft. The deck was two hundred yards of steel with the hatches down, white with frost, and the smoke came up over the side and blew across in rags. He walked down the middle of it, past the hatches one after another, with his raw hands in his armpits and the cold in his chest like a fist, and the stern house came up slowly out of the grey with its lights on.
He went round the side of it, along a narrow alley between the house and the rail, and came out onto the after deck.
There was not much to it: a space of steel deck behind the stern house, with the mooring winches either side, and a low rail all round it, and beyond the rail the smoke. A single line went out from a winch drum on the starboard side, up over a fairlead and away down through the grey to a bollard on the dock. Somewhere below, the screw was turning very slowly, and the water under the stern was moving, and the smoke over it moved too.
Nils was standing at the rail on the port side with a duffel bag at his feet.
He had his hands on the rail and he was looking down at the water. He did not have a hat on. His hair was white with frost, and his beard, and the shoulders of the duck jacket, as if he had been standing there long enough to be snowed on, and there was no snow.
Thorsen did not go to him. He stopped by the starboard winch, ten feet off, where Nils could see him without turning round, and put his own hands on the rail. It was so cold it did not feel like anything.
“It doesn’t give anything back,” Nils said, to the water. “Dad used to say that. When I was little. When I wanted to go in.”
“He said it to me too.”
Nils nodded slowly.
“I knew you’d come,” he said. “Kenny rang me at ten. At the Point. Said Travis Kline was in the Legion telling everybody the BCA had my flashlight.” He looked at the water. “So I knew. I sat on the cot a while. Then I got in the truck. I meant to drive to Nordby. I got to the bottom of the hill by the LEC and kept going.” His hands moved on the rail. “My legs’ll take me to a boat. They wouldn’t take me to that building.”
“The lab found glass in Paul Strand’s head, Nils. Out of your light. And blood in the threads, where the head screws on. It’s his.”
For a while there was only the diesel, and the water moving under the stern.
“I thought it was a dream,” Nils said.
He told it the way men tell things in the cold, without looking, to the smoke.
“Dad came over about eleven. I told you that. I had the Wild on, the replay. He sat on my step in his shirt, with his arms on his knees. He said it was never ours, son. He said Granddad wanted to give it back in ’86 and he stopped him. He said Leonard Lacourse didn’t drown. I did that, he said. Like he was telling me the furnace was out.”
He breathed out, and the breath went away white.
“He said the man from Duluth was coming at midnight, and he was going to tell him. And show him where. And then it’s done. He said the sale was done too, he was sorry, it was my money he was giving away. He’d told the fella to give him an hour, so he could tell me first. Because it was mine too.” His mouth moved. “He said sorry. Like it was a boat payment.”
“What did you say?”
“Dad, no. A few times. He put his hand on my head like I was ten and went back to the house, and I saw the lamp go on in the kitchen.” He looked down. “I’d had the beer at the Legion and three more at home and then I had the bottle. I’d always thought that fella worked for somebody. The people in town who’d pay to stop it. And here’s Dad going to hand it all to him, the Point and the money and himself. Stillwater. He’s seventy-six. He’d have died in there.”
The single line creaked on its drum.
“Then a car came down the lane and stopped at the gate. I heard it. I went in the fish house and took the light off its nail. I don’t remember thinking about it. It’s what you do there, going out at night. You take the light.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what I was going to do. Tell him to go home.
“He was coming down the lane with his phone out in front of him, the little light on it. He saw mine and stopped and said, Mr. Thorsen? And I said, Nils. And he said, Your father asked me to come. Polite. Like he was sorry to bother anybody, that time of night.” Nils’s hands closed on the rail. “And I said, He’s out at the end. He’ll show you. I don’t know where I got that. I think Dad said it on the step. Something like it. It just came.”
Dad’s gone out ahead to the rock, to show you where.
Thorsen held the rail and did not move.
“We went down past the house. Along the shore. I kept the light low so he could see his feet. The kitchen was lit up on the shelf over us, the whole room, like a television. I didn’t look. I knew what was in there. I thought, he’s in there waiting with the cups out, and he’s going to say it, and they’ll take him to Stillwater, and it’ll all be gone. Him and the Point and everything. In one night.” He was quiet. “I thought if he never got to the house, Dad wouldn’t say it. Not tonight. And in the morning he’d be Dad again. That’s as far as I got.
“Out along the rail. He went ahead of me. He stopped at the end where it drops off and stood there and looked out. There was cloud down on the water and the moon somewhere behind it. You couldn’t see a thing out there. But he stood and looked, like there was something to see. Where the rock is. Like Dad was going to be standing on the water.”
He looked at his hands.
“I don’t remember deciding. I had it in both hands. That’s all I’ve got. I had it in both hands, and then I didn’t have anything in front of me.” His voice did not change at all. “He didn’t make a sound, Danny. He just went.”
The smoke went past between them.
“I didn’t shine it down. I didn’t want to see. I turned it off and walked back in the dark, and by the root, where the rail bends, I went into it. That’s my mouth. I told you the step. Some nights it was the step.” He touched his lip with the back of one finger. “I hung the light on its nail. Because that’s where it goes. Then the chair. I woke up once and the smoker was going, the little window, and I thought, Dad, he does that since Mom.
“In the morning my beard was stuck. I thought I’d been in a fight at the Legion. I took the light to go up the lane, and there was something on the end of it, and I wiped it on my jeans like you’d wipe a knife, and hung it back. I went up the lane to see was the car there. If it wasn’t there it was a dream.” He shut his eyes. “It was there. So I went out to the end, and he was there too. I called them myself. I thought if I called them it’d be a man who fell.”
“And then the house.”
“Dad said what happened to your mouth, and I said I fell. And I said, I didn’t touch him, Dad. Not out there. I don’t know why I said out there. And Dad looked at me and said, You were in your chair all night. And I said, I was in my chair.” He opened his eyes. “Then he made me eggs. I couldn’t eat them. He sat and ate them himself, slow, every bit, like it was a job. We never talked about it after. Not one time.”
“The jeans,” Thorsen said.
“Under the bed in the trailer. I never washed them. I couldn’t touch them.”
The deck winch on the starboard side clanked and took a turn. Far up the ship a voice called something, and another answered.
“Dad knew,” Nils said. “Didn’t he.”
“He was afraid of it. He never let himself know. He sat at that table in November with your chair empty and believed it was Hale.” Thorsen looked at the rail under his hands. “When he couldn’t any more, he wrote it all down.”
“So they’d let me out.”
“Yes.”
“And you came and found it anyway.”
“Yes.”
Nils nodded slowly, as though Thorsen had told him what a part would cost.
“I knew where he was at midnight,” he said. “Wally read me the letter in the car on Monday. I met him in the lane with the lantern. I knew he was in the kitchen. I knew he never met anybody in any lane.” His hands were white on the rail. “I let them open the door anyway. I let you hold me up in the car park. Four days. I went out to the Point and took the paint off her. I thought, when I’ve got her clean I’ll go in. When I’ve got all of him off her.” He looked down at the water. “She’s half done. Tell Claire. Give her to the Band, clean, and let them say what she is.”
“I’ll tell her.”
“Dad always said you’d fix it.”
“I don’t fix things, Nils.”
“I know.” He looked round at Thorsen for the first time. “You find out what happened.”
Then he took his hands off the rail.
He did it slowly, the way you put down a tool you mean to leave, and he stood there with nothing in his hands, a big man with frost in his hair, and looked at the water a while longer. Thorsen did not move. He could feel the whole length of the ship under his boots and the screw turning somewhere under that, and the two yards of black water along the dock that nobody came up out of, and he kept his hands on the rail and his feet where they were and did not say anything at all.
Nils put his hand inside the duck jacket and brought out a photograph.
An old colour print, gone orange and soft, with a crease across one corner. Two boys on a dock in the sun, in cut-off jeans, squinting. The bigger one, blond, skinny, eleven or nearly, was holding a lake trout up by the gills in both hands, and the fish was nearly as long as his body, and he was not smiling; he was looking at it with a kind of serious astonishment, as though it had told him something. The smaller one, white-haired, with a gap in his teeth, was holding the tail and grinning at the camera as if the whole thing had been his idea. At the edge of the picture, out of focus, a man’s big hand rested on the dock post. Just the hand.
“It was on the fridge,” Nils said. “Mom’s. Uncle Karl took it. Summer of ’86. That’s Dad’s hand.” He held it out across the ten feet, and Thorsen came and took it. “I can’t have it where I’m going. Keep it dry.”
Thorsen put it inside his coat, against his shirt.
“I’ll keep it dry.”
The horn went.
It came out of the funnel over their heads, one long blast, so loud and so low it was less a sound than a blow, and it went out across Agate Bay into the smoke and came back off the town. When it stopped the mate was at the corner of the stern house with his radio in his hand.
“We’re going, Nils,” he said. “Or you’re not.”
Nils looked at him. Then he bent and picked up the duffel by its strap and put it on his shoulder.
“Sorry, Mike,” he said. “I’m not.”
They went forward together along the two hundred yards of frosted deck, not talking, with the hatch crane going by overhead and the smoke blowing across. At the ladder a deckhand was standing by to haul it in. Nils went down first, the duffel on his back, the way he would have gone down a ship’s side in any weather, and Thorsen went after him with his raw hands burning on the rungs, and the black strip of water smoking under the net.
Novak was at the foot of it on the ice, alone, with her hands out of her pockets.
“Mr. Thorsen,” she said.
She was the only one of them who had ever called him that.
“Kayla,” Nils said. “I’ve come in.”
Behind them the ladder went up the side of the ship and was swung in over the rail. On the dock a man threw the last stern line off its bollard and it went up the hull dripping, and the red wall beside them began, very slowly, to move. They stood on the apron and watched it go: the hull, and the white letters, and the stern house with its lights, and the water churning white under the counter and smoking as it churned. The Hjalmar Lindgren went out past the end of the ore dock into Agate Bay, and the smoke took her a piece at a time, until there was only the sound of her, and then not that.
Wally’s grey Ford had come down the apron with its lights off and stopped behind Novak’s cruiser. Wally got out and stood by the open door in his corduroy coat and overshoes, and looked at the three of them, and then at his watch.
“Seven fifty-six,” he said.
At the Law Enforcement Center Megan Ostrowski was standing in the corridor beyond the inner door in her coat, with a file under her arm, as if she had been there some time. She looked at Nils, and at Thorsen behind him.
“Mr. Thorsen,” she said, “you’ll want your lawyer.”
That was all she said to him. Nils nodded. He looked round once at Thorsen. Then Novak put her hand on his elbow, not hard, and they went down the corridor together, and the steel door at the end of it opened, and shut.
Ostrowski came out into the lobby and let the inner door close behind her.
“I’m charging murder in the second degree,” she said quietly, “because the facts carry it. Manslaughter in the first in the alternative. I’ll tell his lawyer this afternoon I’m open to a plea to the manslaughter.”
“Because he was drunk.”
“Because he was drunk out of his mind. And because he got off a boat and walked down a ladder to my deputy.” She shifted the file. “I can’t tell you what a judge does. I’ve never seen one not take that. We’ll want those jeans.”
“Under the bed in the trailer. He never washed them.”
She looked at the steel door. “Your uncle wrote three pages to keep him out of here.”
“Yes.”
“And you brought him in.”
“He brought himself in,” Thorsen said.
She nodded, and went back through the door.
He stood in the lobby under the bulletin board with the photograph against his shirt.
At twenty to one that night, with his guest forty minutes late, the old man had taken the lantern off its hook and put his boots on and gone up the lane to see. He had found the car at the gate with its keys in it, and then the end of the Point. He had not seen a light, or a son. He had seen a dead man on the boulders with a notebook in his coat that would say come at midnight, and a car full of paper that ran straight back to a dock in 1986. He had burned it to bury Leonard Lacourse, and in burning it he had burned the only thing that said who Paul Strand had walked down that lane to meet. Then he had sat in his kitchen till morning and let his son go out to the nets, and not let himself think why. I’m a heavy sleeper. I never saw him that night. He had seen him dead. Don’t tell Nils, he had said at his table in November. Let him have one of us. He had told Nils himself, on a trailer step, six weeks before, and sat across from Danny hoping the bottle had taken it back.
And in October he had stood at a kitchen wall phone and rung Los Angeles, twice, working up to it. He had not called a detective to bury a killing. He had called one because he could not bear to find out who had done it himself. He had bet that Danny would find somebody else, and that a boy who was eleven in 1986 would not remember the dock. Both bets were against the same man, and he had lost them both.
Bring Nils home, his father had said on the porch in San Pedro, with his hand on the back of Thorsen’s neck.
The notice about the dog was still on the board, curling at one corner. Nobody had found Duke.
Claire’s truck was at the kerb outside with the engine running.
He got in. She drove down the hill through Nordby and out along the shore, and did not say anything for a mile.
“My father,” she said. “And now him.”
“Yes.”
The lake went by on the left, grey, the smoke lifting off it now in the first of the sun.
“There’s no one left up there.”
“No.”
He took the photograph out of his coat and looked at it, and put it back.
“I have to ring my father,” he said.
“Tonight. From my kitchen.” She did not look round. “Not from that van.”
She drove him to Stone Bay.