Supper was venison stew and brown bread from the bakery in Nordby, and a jar of lingonberries that Arne set on the table with a kind of shy ceremony, as if he had been saving it. He talked about the herring, and a moose that had stood in the cove in August eating weed. He did not talk about Nils, or Paul Strand, or 1986, or Karl. Thorsen let him, and watched the big hands break bread.
On the door of the new refrigerator, under a magnet shaped like a walleye, there was a business card. SUPERIOR TITLE & ABSTRACT, and under it, smaller, Paul D. Strand, Examiner. Thorsen read it while Arne was at the stove, and said nothing.
At nine o’clock Arne showed him the spare room at the top of the stairs. It had been Karl’s room, and there was still a University of Minnesota pennant on the wall, faded to pink.
“I’ll sleep in the van,” Thorsen said.
Arne looked at him.
“It’s going to freeze tonight, Danny.”
“I’ve got a good bag.”
Arne went on looking at him a moment longer. Then he nodded, as though Thorsen had said something that made sense, and turned off the light in Karl’s room and closed the door on it.
The kerosene lantern still hung on its hook by the kitchen door, and Thorsen’s hand went past it to the latch as if it had never been away. He told himself the van was habit; the bunk knew the shape of him now. It was also true that he had sat in that kitchen for three hours feeling the way he had felt at the top of the ladder in the fish house: like a man standing on a floor that he could hear, somewhere underneath him, giving.
It was minus four by the thermometer on Arne’s porch when he went out to the van at six, and the grass crunched white under his boots. The bag had done what the boy in Flagstaff said it would. Across the yard the tarp on Nils’s trailer had frozen into ridges, and the pickup beside it had a skin of frost on the windscreen, untouched. Nobody had driven it since they took Nils away.
The Baptism County Law Enforcement Center had been built in the nineteen-seventies by somebody who had been told to make it look like a fortress and had been given a budget for a post office. Low brown brick, a flagpole, three tan cruisers with green stripes and a big black Tahoe with SHERIFF in gold letters on the door.
Thorsen went in at eight. Plastic chairs, a bulletproof window, a bulletin board with notices about firearms permits and a church supper and a missing dog called Duke. A young woman in a deputy’s tan uniform sat behind the glass. Her name tag said NOVAK. She looked up and her eyes widened very slightly, and then she put it away and was polite.
“I’d like to see the sheriff,” Thorsen said. “And I’d like to visit Nils Thorsen.”
“Visiting’s at ten.” She glanced past him at nothing. “The sheriff — I’ll see if he’s in.”
He was in. He came out himself.
Curt Hollister was sixty-five or close to it, as tall as Thorsen and heavier, with a big soft-looking body that Thorsen did not trust for a moment to be soft, and a broad pink face. He came through the security door with his hand already out and the smile of a man who has been elected six times by people who know where he goes to church.
“Mr. Thorsen. Curt Hollister. Well, isn’t this something. Come on back. Kayla, get the man a coffee.”
In his office, among the plaques on the wall behind the desk, one framed photograph was larger than the rest: a row of people in new white hard hats in front of a banner, LAURENTIAN COPPER — ARROWHEAD PROJECT. In the middle, the governor. On her left, a lean, tanned man in his late fifties in a fleece vest. On her right, Hollister, beaming.
Hollister sat down behind the desk and laced his fingers on his stomach.
“I’d like to know what you’ve got on my cousin,” Thorsen said.
Hollister’s smile did not go anywhere. It settled in, the way a heavy man settles into a chair.
“I know what you did down there in LA, and I admire it. But this isn’t LA. This is a bar fight that went too far. It’s the saddest thing in the world. But it’s not complicated.”
“Strand had his head broken at the back.”
“That’s right.” A tiny pause, which Hollister filled by unlacing his fingers. “Arne told you that, I guess.”
“He said you told him.”
“I did. I’ve known Arne Thorsen all my life and he’s a good man, and he was entitled to know. Here’s what we’ve got, Mr. Thorsen. We’ve got your cousin telling Paul Strand in front of twenty witnesses that if he came near the Point again he’d go off it. We’ve got Strand’s car at the Point gate that night. We’ve got your cousin home alone, drunk, no alibi, with his boot prints all over that path. We’ve got Strand dead at the bottom of the rocks. That’s a story with a beginning and a middle and an end. There’s nobody else in it.”
“There’s whoever Strand went up there to see.”
Hollister spread his hands. “He went up there to snoop. Nils caught him at it. That’s who he saw.”
“Have you had BCA look at it?”
The friendly eyes stayed friendly.
“The state offered,” Hollister said. “I said we could handle a bar fight. I don’t need a team from St. Paul to tell me a drunk man pushed another man off a rock.” He leaned forward. “I know Nils. I’ve arrested Nils four times since he was nineteen. Drunk and disorderly. Drunk and disorderly. A fight at the Legion. Another fight at the Legion. I’m not saying he’s a bad man. I’m saying I know what he does when he drinks.”
“Can I see the scene photographs?”
“No,” Hollister said pleasantly. “You’re not a police officer, and you’re not his lawyer, and you’re a family member of the accused.” He stood up. “But I’ll tell you what you can do. You can go see your cousin at ten and tell him to listen to his lawyer. And you can enjoy the fall colours, because they’re beautiful this year.” He came round the desk and put his hand out again. “Your dad delivered my sister’s first baby, you know that? In the back of a car on Highway 61 in a snowstorm, the winter of ’70. He was home from medical school. She named the baby Karl. Small world.”
“Small world,” Thorsen said.
The visiting room was a row of four booths, each with a stool and a pane of scratched plexiglass and a telephone handset on a steel cord. Thorsen sat in the end booth and waited.
They brought Nils in through a door on the other side.
He was very large. Thorsen had kept him nine years old in his head, and the man who came through the door in an orange jumpsuit was as tall as Thorsen and wider, gone soft round the middle, with a beard the colour of straw, red-rimmed eyes, and the round face of the boy who had cried over the herring, grown up and been hit by things.
He sat down on the stool and looked at Thorsen through the glass, and it was a long while before he picked up the phone.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “Look at you. Dad said. I didn’t believe him.”
“Hello, Nils.”
“Danny.” Nils shook his head slowly. “Danny Thorsen. You know I’ve got a picture of us? On the dock with a lake trout, you holding it and me holding the tail. My mom kept it on the fridge till she died.” He rubbed his face with his free hand. It was shaking. “That’s the kid I’ve got in my head. Not the guy on the TV.”
“It’s the same guy.”
“Yeah.” Something that might have been a laugh. “Yeah, I guess it is.”
“Tell me about the Legion.”
Nils did not dress it up. He had been drinking since six with two of the men from the Hjalmar Lindgren, the ore boat he crewed on when they had a berth for him. Strand came in at nine and sat at the bar on his own with a notebook, and by then the notebook looked like an insult.
“I went over and I asked him what he was writing. He said it was work. I said what work, and he said he couldn’t talk about it. I said he’d been talking about it all over my dad’s place. He said he was sorry if he’d upset anybody.” Nils’s mouth twisted. “Polite little guy. Glasses. That made it worse. I put my hand on his shoulder, and he took it off, and then I said it.” He looked down. “Come near the Point again and you’ll go off it. And everybody heard. And I went back to my table, and he finished his beer and left, and I felt like an asshole. That’s the truth. I felt like an asshole the minute I said it. I nearly went after him to say sorry.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I’m an asshole.” He said it without any self-pity at all, as a plain fact, like his height. “I had two more and went home.”
“What time?”
“Ten thirty. Maybe quarter to eleven. I drove. Don’t tell Hollister.” A ghost of a grin, which went out at once. “I had three more beers in the trailer and watched the Wild lose a preseason game and went to sleep in my chair.”
“Did you hear anything? In the night?”
Nils was quiet for a moment.
“A car,” he said. “On the lane. Late. I don’t know what time. I woke up in the chair and the TV was on the menu and I heard a car come down the lane and stop. Up by the gate. I thought, kids. They come down sometimes to drink on the Point. Or that Strand, come back to snoop. I thought, I’ll deal with it in the morning.” He swallowed. “If I’d got up. If I’d just got up out of the chair.”
“Did you tell the sheriff that?”
“I told him. He wrote it down. He said, so you knew he was there.” Nils’s face crumpled for a second and then straightened. “That’s what he said. Like I’d told him something.”
Thorsen let a moment go by.
“You talked to Strand on the dock. The second time he came. What did he ask you?”
“Old stuff. Granddad’s stuff. Did Granddad ever keep a diary. Did he ever talk about how we got the land. I said, how the hell would I know, I was seventeen when Granddad died, he didn’t talk to anybody about anything.” Nils frowned. “And he asked me if I’d ever heard of a man called Lacourse.”
“Lacourse.”
“I said, there’s Lacourses all over Stone Bay, there’s one runs the welding shop out on the Stone Bay road. He said no, an older one. A long time ago. I said I don’t know any old Lacourses, and he wrote something down and said thank you and left.” Nils shrugged, a big slow shrug that moved the orange jumpsuit like a tent. “Why? Does it mean something?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Nils looked at him through the scratched glass. Then he leaned closer to it, and lowered his voice, though there was nobody in the room but a deputy at the door looking at his phone.
“Dad says you’ll fix it,” he said.
“I don’t fix things, Nils. I find out what happened.”
“Same thing, isn’t it?”
Thorsen thought about Ray, in a garage, with a pen on the wrong side of the bench. He thought about Denise, holding a folded sheet of paper against her chest.
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
Nils looked down at the steel shelf under the glass. Then he nodded, slowly, as if he had been told something he had known for a long time and been hoping not to hear.
“Well,” he said. “Find out, then.” He put his big hand flat against the plexiglass. “I didn’t do it, Danny. I’m a lot of things. I didn’t do that.”
The Legion was next door to the hardware store, a flat-roofed building with glass bricks for windows and a field gun out front, painted green and pointing at the lake. Inside it was low and brown and smelled of fryer oil and old beer. At noon on a Monday there were four old men eating soup by the window and one big man at the far end of the bar with his back half turned.
The woman behind the bar was in her sixties, with a grey perm and reading glasses pushed up into it and the forearms of somebody who had been lifting cases of beer for thirty years. DONNA, said a badge on her cardigan. She poured him a coffee before he asked for one.
“You’re Arne’s nephew,” she said. “I’ve told the sheriff. I’ll tell you. It won’t take long. Nils came over to the bar and stood over that poor man and said, Come near the Point again and you’ll go off it. Those words. I was standing where I’m standing now. Then he went back to his table.” She set the pot down. “Nils is a sweetheart sober. Drunk, he says things. I’ve never seen him hit anybody in here who didn’t hit him first.”
“When did Strand leave?”
“Twenty to ten. I’d just done the meat raffle.” She wiped the bar in front of him, which did not need it. “He was a nice man. Before any of that started he asked me how to find old Walt Erickson’s place. I said the last house before the Thorsen lane, you can’t miss it, there’s a woodpile the size of a church.” Her eyes went down the bar and came back. “Gary was sitting right there.”
The man at the end of the bar turned round on his stool.
Thorsen knew him from yesterday: a big grey-haired man in the yard of the last house, straightening up with a maul on his shoulder to watch the van go by. He was in his sixties, broad and heavy, with a face that had been out in a lot of weather and a quilted brown jacket with ERICKSON’S LAKESIDE CABINS stitched over the pocket.
“You’re Karl’s boy,” the man said. “I remember you. You were scared of my motorbike.”
And then Thorsen did remember: a red motorbike coming down the lane too fast, a young man with long hair on it, and his aunt Marit on the porch shouting at her little brother to slow down before he killed somebody. Uncle Gary, Nils had called him. Which made Walt Erickson, in the last house before the lane, Marit’s father. Nils’s grandfather.
“Gary,” Thorsen said.
“That fella,” Gary Erickson said, as if Thorsen had not spoken, “was going round the courthouse putting a cloud on every title from the Kettle to the Point. Mine included.”
“Yours?”
“I’ve got eight cabins on twelve acres of shore my granddad bought off old Anders in 1938. You go and ask the bank what that’s worth with a cloud on it.”
One of the old men by the window put his spoon down.
“I’m sorry he’s dead,” Gary said. “But he didn’t come up here to do anybody on this shore any good.”
“You went out right behind him, Gary,” Donna said. She said it mildly, the way she might have mentioned that he had left his hat.
Gary looked at her for a moment.
“I went home,” he said. “It’s two miles.” He put a five on the bar, and stood, and zipped the cabins jacket to his chin. On his way to the door he stopped beside Thorsen’s stool, close, and looked at him with pale eyes that were very like Marit’s.
“Nils is my sister’s boy,” he said. “Don’t you make this worse for him.”
The door let in a slab of cold air and closed on it. Through the glass bricks a tan shape that was probably a pickup pulled away from the kerb.
“Why did Strand want Walt?” Thorsen said.
“He didn’t say. People who want old things go to Walt. He’s ninety-one and he remembers what everybody’s grandmother paid for her stove.” Donna picked up a glass to polish. “Gary looks after him. It’s not an easy thing. You’d think it’d make a person softer.”
Thorsen drank his coffee. The last house before the Thorsen lane. Strand had asked the way to it, and the man who lived there had followed him out of the door.
Nordby Hardware & Bait had a stuffed lake trout over the door and a sign in the window that said LIVE MINNOWS — LEECHES — CRAWLERS — KEYS CUT, and it smelled of rubber and cold water from the minnow tanks. An old man in a cardigan sat behind the counter doing a crossword in pen.
Thorsen told him what he needed. A heater for a van. Something that would run all night with the engine off.
The old man put his pen down and looked past him through the window at the Econoline at the kerb.
“You going to winter in that?”
“I might.”
The old man looked at him the way another man might have said God help you.
“You want a diesel,” he said. “And you want Claire Lacourse. Out on the Stone Bay road, four miles past the turn. Lacourse Marine and Welding.” He picked up his pen again. “She’s good,” he said, to the crossword. “She’s real good.”
“Lacourse,” Thorsen said.
“That’s right.” The old man did not look up. “Steel building. You can’t miss it, there’s a boat on a pole.”
There was a boat on a pole. It was an old wooden fishing tug, painted red and white, mounted twenty feet up on a steel column at the side of the road like a weathervane, pointing out at the lake. Under it a sign: LACOURSE MARINE & WELDING — EST. 1979.
Behind it stood a big steel building with three roll-up doors and boats on stands all round it, shrink-wrapped in white for the winter. A shepherd-cross dog lay in the open middle door, and lifted his head when the van pulled in, and did not get up.
Inside it was warmer, loud with a country station, and it smelled of hot metal and cutting oil. A woman was standing on a step-ladder at the back of it in a canvas welding jacket with the sleeves pushed up, looking down into the hull with a torch.
“Be with you,” she said, without turning round.
He waited. She did something inside the hull with her other hand. It made a clank. She said something under her breath, short and heartfelt, and climbed down.
She was small. She came up to the middle of his chest. Fifty, perhaps, with black hair going grey in two long streaks from the temples, worn in a thick braid down her back, and a broad brown face with lines at the corners of her eyes made by squinting at things and laughing at them in about equal measure. Reading glasses on a cord round her neck. Forearms scarred with small white burns.
She looked up at him. A long way up. Her mouth twitched, as if he were funny and she had decided not to say so.
“You lost?”
“The man at the hardware store sent me. I need a heater put in a van.”
“Bert.” She wiped her hands on a rag. “Bert’s been trying to get me married off since 2009. What van?”
He showed her. She walked round it once, slowly, with her hands in the pockets of the welding jacket, the way he walked round a scene. She opened the bonnet and pulled the dipstick and wiped it and put it back.
“Huh,” she said.
“What?”
“Whoever’s been looking after this knew what they were doing.” She shut the bonnet. “Twenty years old and I wouldn’t be ashamed of that engine.” She looked at him. “Not you, I’m guessing.”
“No. A friend.”
“Good friend.”
“He was.”
She heard the was. She did not say anything about it. She went round the back and opened the rear doors and looked in at the bunk and the bins and the slit foam mattress, and then at him.
“Somebody cut your bed,” she said.
“Somebody was looking for something.”
“Did they find it?”
“No.”
“Huh,” she said again. It seemed to be a word that did a lot of work for her. She shut the doors. “Okay. You need a diesel heater on its own tank. A second battery. Walls, floor and roof insulated, or you’re just heating the parking lot. A roof vent. A block heater. And a CO alarm, and you need to not be stupid about it.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “Ten days for parts. It’s not cheap.”
“That’s fine.”
She went inside to the bench by the door and came back with a work order pad and a pencil, and put the reading glasses on the end of her nose, and looked at him over them.
“Name?”
“Thorsen.”
The pencil stopped.
She did not look up straight away. She looked at the place on the pad where she had been about to write. The radio played. Out on the road a truck went by with its exhaust brake hammering.
Then she took the reading glasses off and let them fall on their cord, and looked up at him.
“From the Point,” she said.
It was not a question. He answered it anyway.
“It’s my uncle’s place.”
“Arne’s.” Her voice had not changed. That was what told him. It had been dry and quick and amused, and it was still dry and quick, and all the amusement had gone out of it as if a valve had closed. “You’re the one from Los Angeles. On the TV. Karl’s son.”
“Yes.”
She put the pad down on the bonnet of the van. Very carefully, square to the edge.
“My father went out to your family’s dock,” she said, “on the fourteenth of August, nineteen eighty-six. In his own boat. To see your grandfather. It was a flat calm night, I remember it, I was ten years old and I was sitting on our porch waiting for him to come back and there wasn’t a breath of wind on the water. And in the morning they found his boat upside down off Gull Rock, and they never found him. The sheriff said a squall. There wasn’t any squall. They closed it in four days.” She looked at him steadily. Her eyes were very dark and very still. “So you’ll understand if I don’t feel like putting a heater in a Thorsen’s van.”
He stood there.
And it came to him, not the way the window in the loft had come, all feeling and no content, but clear and small and bright, like a photograph found in a drawer. A dock in the sun. A girl about his age, in cut-off jeans, brown as a nut, with a black braid down her back, skipping flat stones out across the cove. Seven skips. Eight. Him trying to match it and getting four, and her laughing at him, not unkindly. And his uncle Arne coming down the path from the house, big and red-bearded, with a smoked fish in a sheet of newspaper, and Thorsen giving it to the girl because his mother had told him to share, and the girl taking it in both hands and saying thank you very seriously, as if it were treasure.
A man behind her on the dock. Tall and quiet, with black hair under a cap, talking to Arne. Her father.
That summer. That last summer.
“I remember you,” he said.
Something moved in her face, quickly, and was gone, like a fish turning under ice.
“You can freeze, Thorsen,” Claire Lacourse said. “Go to Duluth.”
She picked up her pad and walked back into the building, and the dog got up and followed her, and the roll-up door came down behind them both with a long steel rattle and met the concrete with a bang.