The Arrowhead Project Open House was on the Friday evening in the gym of the Nordby School, and by a quarter to seven there was nowhere left to park.
Arne drove them in his truck, an old green Chevrolet with a plough mount on the front and a rifle rack in the back window with an umbrella in it. He had put on a clean wool shirt and a tie, a thin brown knitted thing that might have been bought for Marit’s funeral and not worn since, and he had wet his hair and combed it flat, and it had dried standing up in front anyway. When they pulled into the school car park and saw the cars, and the people walking in from the road with their hands in their pockets, and the sheriff’s black Tahoe parked across the end of the bus lane, he sat for a moment without turning off the engine.
“I didn’t want to come,” he said. “I’ve signed. There’s nothing for me to say. But they’ll look for me. If I’m not here, they’ll say I’m ashamed of it.” He turned off the engine. “I’m not ashamed of it, Danny. It’s a lot of money for an old fisherman. It’s Nils’s whole life.”
“I know.”
“They’ll look at you too.” He glanced across. “You know that.”
“I know that too.”
Two hundred folding chairs had been set out in rows on the basketball floor, under a mural of a Viking longship and the words NORDBY NORSEMEN a foot high, and they were full, and people were standing three deep along the side walls under the climbing ropes. On the stage there was a long table with a blue cloth and a row of microphones, and behind it the same banner as in the photograph on Hollister’s wall. Three women from the Lutheran church stood behind trays of lemon bars at the side, defending them.
It was loud when they came in. It got quieter. Heads turned in the back rows and turned away again.
Arne walked through it like a man walking into a wind. People said Arne as he went past. An old woman in a red coat held his sleeve and said something to him in a low voice, and he bent his head to her and nodded. A big man in a Steelworkers jacket clapped him on the back, hard, and said Good for you, Arne, good for you. A younger woman with a toddler on her hip turned her back as he passed, deliberately, so that he had to step round her.
They found two places standing along the wall at the back, under the basketball hoop, and Arne leaned against the brick with his arms folded and looked at the floor.
Thorsen looked at the room. Union jackets and Laurentian fleeces at the front. At the back, farmers, families, two rows of people from the Band sitting together, older women with grey braids and younger ones with their phones out, filming. A television camera from Duluth.
Deputy Novak stood by the fire door at the side of the stage, with her thumbs in her belt. She saw him and looked away.
Claire Lacourse was against the opposite wall, at the very back, on her own, in a dark wool coat with her braid over one shoulder. She was not looking at the stage. She had seen him come in. He knew that from the way she was not looking at him.
And at the end of the second row on the aisle, a big man in a black canvas jacket was sitting sideways on his chair with one arm over the back of it, not looking at the stage either. He was looking at Thorsen.
He was forty-five or so, and heavy, with the kind of heaviness that is mostly muscle with a layer of beer over it, and a thick neck, and a red face, and fair hair cut so short it was barely there. He had a goatee, trimmed. He had the stillness of a man who has been told that he is intimidating and has worked on it. When Thorsen met his eyes he did not look away. He smiled a little, without any warmth in it at all, and lifted two fingers off the back of the chair in a kind of salute.
“Who’s that?” Thorsen said.
Arne looked, and his mouth set.
“Pruitt,” he said. “That’s him.”
At seven o’clock exactly Sheriff Hollister went to the microphone in the middle of the table and tapped it, and the room went quiet.
“Well, good evening, everybody. Isn’t this something. I don’t think I’ve seen this many people in this gym since the Norsemen went to state in ’94.” A warm laugh from the front rows. “I’m just here to remind everybody that we’re all neighbours, whatever we think about all this, and we’re going to be neighbours tomorrow. So let’s keep it Minnesota, okay? Let’s keep it nice. And with that, a man who doesn’t need any introduction on this shore. Bryce Hale.”
Hale came up the steps two at a time. He was the man in the photograph on Hollister’s wall, and he moved like a man who has played a lot of tennis and won most of it. He did not stay behind the table. He took the microphone off its stand and came to the edge of the stage, close to the front row, the way a preacher does who has been to a seminar about it.
He talked for twelve minutes. A great-grandfather with an axe and the first sawmill on the Baptism River; the mill closing, and the school that had once had four hundred students and now had a hundred and nine; copper and nickel under the forest, which the world needed for batteries, and which Minnesota could dig up carefully or leave for China.
“Six hundred jobs,” he said. “Good jobs. Union jobs. With pensions. For thirty years.” He let it sit. “I want my grandchildren to grow up on this shore. I want yours to. That’s all this is.”
Half the room stood up and clapped. The other half sat very still.
While the clapping went on Hale let his eyes go along the back wall to where Arne was standing, and rest on him, and then move on to Thorsen, and rest on him for slightly longer. There was nothing in the look. It was the look of a man counting the house.
After Hale a woman from Laurentian in a navy suit spoke for twenty minutes about liner systems and zero discharge, in the careful voice of someone who has been shouted at in gyms like this one before. Then they opened it to questions, and a line formed at the microphone in the aisle, and the back of the room cheered and the front booed, and then the other way round.
The Chairwoman of the Stone Bay Band, a small, formidable woman of seventy with a beaded medallion on her chest, spoke very quietly, so that the room had to go silent to hear her. She spoke about the treaty of 1854, and the wild rice beds downstream on the Kettle, and the sulphate that would kill the rice. The Band would see the company in court. They had been in court before, she said, and they were patient. The Band rows stood up for her, all of them, without a sound.
And then a man at the back of the line, an old man in a Korean War veteran’s cap and a parka, who had been waiting a long time, was helped up to the microphone by his son. It was Gary Erickson, in the cabins jacket, and he looked as though he would rather be anywhere else. He tried to take the microphone away from his father before the old man had said a word. The old man held on to it with both hands and said, in a high quavering voice that carried right to the back wall:
“There’s a man dead out on that Point. And nobody up there’s said one word about it.”
The room went still.
“Fella from Duluth,” the old man said. “Worked for the title people. Looking into the land. And he winds up at the bottom of the rocks, and they’ve got my grandson in the jail, Arne Thorsen’s boy, and the sale’s still going right on through like nothing happened.” Gary reached for the microphone again, and the old man turned his shoulder on him. “And I want to know, Bryce, I want to know from you, what was that fella looking at? What did he find?”
There was a sound in the room that Thorsen had heard before, in courtrooms. Not a murmur. An intake.
Everybody looked at the back wall. At Arne. Arne stood with his arms folded and his chin on his chest and did not move.
Hollister was already at the microphone.
“Now, Walt,” he said, gently, warmly, the voice of a man soothing a horse. “Walt, I know you mean well, and I know it’s your grandson. But that’s a criminal case, and it’s before the court, and it wouldn’t be fair to anybody to talk about it here.” He looked round the room. “That’s a sad, sad thing that happened out there. It’s got nothing to do with what we’re talking about tonight. Next question.”
Gary had his father by the elbow and was steering him back up the aisle, saying something into his ear that the old man did not seem to hear.
Hale was standing at the side of the stage with the microphone held loosely at his side, looking at the old man in the veteran’s cap with an expression of grave, courteous sympathy. He did not look at the back wall. He was the only person in the room who did not.
At the end of the second row Jarrett Pruitt had not looked at the old man either, or at Arne. He was looking at Thorsen. He had been looking at Thorsen for most of an hour.
Across the room Claire Lacourse had lifted her head and was looking at Hale, with a face like a closed fist.
At a quarter to nine Hollister thanked everybody for keeping it nice, and the room broke up into loud knots round the coffee tables and the door. Arne said, “I’m going,” and went, pushing through the crowd with his big shoulders down.
Thorsen stayed under the basketball hoop with his back to the brick and watched Pruitt get up from his chair and stretch, slowly, like a man who has sat through a film, and walk up the side of the gym. He came along the back wall. He stopped in front of Thorsen, a little closer than people stand, and looked up at him, because he was four inches shorter and that was the only direction to look.
“Big fella,” Pruitt said pleasantly.
Thorsen said nothing.
“You’re going to like it up here,” Pruitt said. “Friendly people. Lake’s real pretty this time of year.” He nodded slowly. “Gets real cold, though. Quick. People from California, they’re not used to it. They go out on the ice, they don’t know how thick it’s got to be. They drive the back roads at night, they don’t know where the ditches are. They go walking out on the rocks.” He let a beat go by. “Things happen.”
“Do they,” Thorsen said.
“All the time.” Pruitt smiled. It was a good smile. It had been practised in a mirror. “You have a good night now.”
He went out through the double doors into the dark.
Thorsen looked across the gym for Claire. She was gone.
He went out after Pruitt. The car park was a field of frost under three sodium lights, with engines starting all over it and people calling to each other across the roofs of their cars. Near the doors Gary Erickson was getting his father into the passenger seat of a tan GMC, one hand on the old man’s head the way a deputy puts a man into the back of a cruiser. Pruitt went past them without slowing and clapped Gary on the shoulder.
“Your check’s coming, Gary,” he said. “Soon as it closes.”
Gary shrugged the hand off as if it were something that had landed on him. He shut his father’s door, and went round the truck, and got in, and the GMC pulled out of the lot too fast.
Pruitt watched it go. Then he walked on to a black pickup parked by itself at the end of the row, and a big diesel started, and a pair of headlights swung round, high, with a bar of driving lamps on the roof of the cab and a plough mount on the front. As it turned under the car park light Thorsen saw its right front wing. It was not black. It was the dull flat grey of fresh primer, a new panel, not yet painted.
Arne was sitting in the truck in the dark with the engine running and the heater on and the lights off, looking out through the windscreen at nothing.
Thorsen got in. Arne drove out of the car park and turned north on 61 towards the Point.
“Walt,” Arne said, a mile on. “Marit’s dad. He was my father’s friend before he was anything else to me. He used to fish with us. He taught me to set a gill net.” His hands tightened on the wheel. “He’s ninety-one. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
“He knew what he was saying.”
Arne drove.
“Pruitt told Gary his check was coming,” Thorsen said. “Soon as it closes.”
“Gary’s got his troubles.” Arne did not take his eyes off the road. “We don’t talk, Gary and me. Not since Marit.” A mile went by. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “About what I told you. About Pruitt’s truck.” He did not look across. “I said I wasn’t sure what night. I’ve been lying awake. I’m sure now. It was the Wednesday. The last night of September. The night the fellow died.”
Thorsen turned his head and looked at him.
“I got up for water,” Arne said. “I’m seventy-six, I get up two, three times a night. About eleven o’clock. I was standing at the kitchen sink with a glass, and I looked out the window, and there were lights up at the gate. High ones. A big truck, turning round. I could see the plough mount in the yard light, the shape of it. Black. It was his, Danny. It was Pruitt’s.” He swallowed. “Then it went away. And I went back to bed. And in the morning Nils came up the house white as a sheet, and with all that, I forgot. I didn’t put it together. Not till tonight, when I saw him sitting there looking at you.”
“Eleven o’clock.”
“About eleven. Maybe a bit after.”
“Strand came later than that. Nils heard his car.”
“Maybe Pruitt was waiting for him. Maybe he turned round and parked somewhere up the road, and walked back. I don’t know.” Arne’s voice was low and rough. “I don’t know, Danny. I’m just telling you what I saw.”
“Did you tell Hollister?”
“I told him a black truck. That week. Like I told you.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’ll tell him now. I’ll ring him tonight.”
Thorsen looked out at the road.
Five days ago, in the kitchen, with the egg coffee: I’m a heavy sleeper, Danny. You could drive a train through this house. And: It might’ve been the Wednesday. And now an old man who could sleep through a train had got up for a glass of water at eleven o’clock and seen a plough mount up at the gate, four hundred yards off through the spruce, from a window that looked at the lake.
Witnesses got better as time went on, most often the ones who had been lying awake thinking about what would help. It did not mean the old man was lying. It meant that Arne wanted very badly for the black truck to be at the gate at eleven o’clock on that Wednesday, and had found, lying awake, that it had been.
“Okay,” Thorsen said.
Arne glanced across at him, quickly, and then back at the road, and Thorsen saw his big hands ease a little on the wheel.
They turned in at the mailbox. The truck lurched down the lane between the spruce, and the headlights caught the steel gate standing open, and the chain hanging from its post, and the place at the side of the gravel where, a little over two weeks ago, a little grey Subaru had been parked with its keys in the ignition and its door unlocked.
Neither of them looked at it.