Chapter 18 The Bell Buoy

She heard the bell before she saw the light. The channel north of Nine Mile was marked by an old bell buoy, one of the last on the lake, a steel hull with a bell inside that rang when the swell moved it. It had been frozen in place for weeks, canted and locked in the ice, and its bell had been silent since the freeze. But now it was ringing, two strikes, then two strikes, then two, and Nessa stopped in the trees and stood very still, because that was the rhythm she had learned as a girl, the two-two-two her brother used to sound on the station bell when he wanted her to come down to the dock. She turned toward the water. A snow machine came out of the dark along the shore ice with its single lamp on, and behind it, riding a sled, was Vesta Skale, and beside Vesta, lashed in and bundled, a coil of rope and a first aid kit and a can of fuel. Nessa stepped out of the trees and stood in the snow and did not move. Vesta cut the engine and climbed down and came to her, and stopped a meter away, and looked at the cut on her arm and the way she held her ribs and said nothing for a long moment. "I heard the bell," Nessa said. "You rang the bell." "I set the pin loose and let the swell ring it." Vesta's voice was steady and old and tired. "It was the only signal I could think of that you would know and they would not." The bell rang twice more in the wind, and then the wind found a new angle and the bell stopped, and the silence came back down over the ice like a lid. She looked at the old woman in the snow machine light and made herself stand still and look, because she had spent twenty years learning to read a face before a decision, and what she saw in Vesta Skale's face was fear, yes, but under the fear something that had been waiting a long time to be said. "You sold the list." "I sold the list." "You sent us to Larkspur knowing it was on it." "I did." Vesta did not flinch. "And it was the worst thing I have ever done, and I did it because I was afraid, and I have been afraid for twenty years, and fear makes small people of us all. I am not asking you to forgive it. I am telling you I am here, and I have a machine and fuel and rope, and the provincial police are on the road with a vehicle, and there is a boat of mine in a shed at the north end of this bay that no one has used in three years. What do you want to do with all that." Nessa looked at her for a long moment, and the cold went on doing its work in her chest and her arm, and she weighed it, and she found that she could not hate Vesta and could not trust her and could do the job anyway, which was the only lesson the lake had ever given her that mattered. "He went north along the shore with the case. There is a road at the head of the bay. Varek has two men on it." She started toward the snow machine. "We go north. Now." They found the case at the second culvert, where the shore road crossed a small creek, hidden in the mouth of the pipe under the snow, the way a man hides a thing he cannot carry and will come back for. Nessa saw the tracks first, his boots coming down off the shore to the road, and then the second set, two men, and then the truck tracks where they had turned around on the frozen gravel and gone south, back toward Nine Mile and the boats. There was blood on the snow by the culvert. Not much. Enough. "They took him," she said. "They took him, and they left the case, which means they did not know it was here, which means he never told them." Vesta knelt and pulled the case out of the pipe and handed it up. "He walked to the road and hid the thing that mattered and then he stood in the road and let them see him, so that they would stop and take him and not find it. That is not a coward. That is a man who learned one good thing from you." She had known men like Vesta all her life, the old-timers who had done a thing they could not undo and had spent the rest of their lives being useful as a way of not looking at it, and she had learned that you could not save such people and you could not fix them, and that the best you could do was give them a rope and let them hold it, and watch to see whether they held. Nessa held the case and looked south along the road, toward the dark, toward the water, toward the boats. Her ribs ached. Her arm had stopped bleeding and started going numb, and a numb arm was worse than a bleeding one, and she knew it, and she did not have time to care. "They will take him out on the water tonight," she said. "They will put him on a boat and they will take him somewhere quiet and they will finish it. Where do they stage from?" "There is a barge anchored in the deep water off the south cape. The fuel dock sold it diesel two days ago. It has been there a week, and no one has moved it, and no one can say who owns it." Vesta stood. "You cannot fly at night with a dead engine, and the police are two hours out, and if we wait two hours he is a body." "Then we do not wait." Nessa opened the case and looked at the drive inside it, the small black rectangle that had cost so much, and closed it again. She thought about the drive in its case, and about Marlon Tarn in his office with the money in an account, and about the two agents in the road, and about the man she had left in the water under the ice of Nine Mile harbor, and she understood that she had become a person who made a list of things to settle and then went down the list without stopping. She did not know whether that was the water's lesson or the water's price. She suspected it was both. "Wake the boat," she said. "And tell me everything you know about the barge." ---