Chapter 12 The Council's Answer

The council met on the Thursday and the river was in the room before Vail got through the door. Mayor Perpetua Grieve sat at the head of the table with the Winterway proposal open in front of her and the town's budget behind her and the press in the front row, and she smiled at Vail the way a person smiles at weather they have already decided to ignore. "Sergeant Vail," she said. "We're told you have four deaths and no arrests." "We have four deaths and one pattern." Vail stood at the end of the table. "Every one of them at the Keld, in the first week of first ice, and every one of them a man who was on the river the night Ivar Sund drowned twenty years ago." The room made a sound, small and collective, the sound a room makes when a name it has agreed to forget is said out loud. "Ivar Sund drowned," Grieve said. "That is a matter of record." "It's a matter of a report," Vail said. "I wrote it. I'm here to tell you it was wrong." The room stirred again, and somebody in the third row said a name and stopped. Vail let the silence go on longer than was comfortable, because comfortable was the one thing this town did too well, and then he said the part he had not planned to say. "Four men have died at the Keld in four winters. Every one of them stood on the ice the night Ivar Sund went under. Every one of them was ruled a drowning by a coroner who never opened the chest. I am telling this council what I know because in twenty years I have never told anyone, and because if I keep telling it the way I have always told it, there will be a fifth body, and this time there will be no one left to sign the paper." Behind him Havik shifted in his chair, and Vail did not turn around. "This is irregular," the Mayor said. "Superintendent, is this irregular?" "It's very irregular," Havik said. "The Sergeant has been asked to take leave from the case." "He has been asked by you," Vail said. "He has not been asked by me, and I'm telling this council that a serial killing has been running on this river for four winters and has been filed as weather four times, and if it is filed a fifth time it will be because this town preferred a check to a man." The press wrote. The Mayor's smile did not move. Vail understood that he had just lost the room and possibly the case, and that a man who says the true thing in a room that has already decided against it pays for the saying in a currency he has not yet counted. He walked out into the corridor and found Runa waiting at the top of the stairs, and she did not ask him how it had gone, because she had heard through the open door and because a person who has heard the answer does not need to ask the question. "You will forgive me, Sergeant, if I say that a man who signed the original report is the last witness I would trust on the subject." She turned a page. "The Winterway breaks ground in the spring, on schedule. The river is a resource, not a graveyard. If you have evidence, bring it to the Superintendent, and if you have a suspect, arrest them, and if you have neither, I would suggest you consider how this looks for a man with your name on the file." "It looks like a man who is trying to stay in a room he should have left," Vail said. "I have considered that for twenty years. But a man with my name on a false report is the only person alive who can stand in this room and say it is false, and I would rather look like a suspect than let four murders be filed as weather. That is all I came to say. The council can do with it what it likes, and I will read about it in the paper like everyone else." Vail looked at her for a long moment. "That's the first true thing anyone's said in this room," he said. "It looks terrible for me. I've known that for twenty years. I'm only sorry it took four bodies to make the rest of you see it." He walked out into the corridor, and Havik followed him and caught his arm at the stairwell. "You've made this personal," Havik said. "It was always personal." "Then you know what I have to do." Havik let go. "Leave. Hand the files to Quist. If you don't, I'll take them from you, and you'll have no case and no badge and no way to help anyone." Vail looked at the Superintendent and thought about the fourth man in the water and the fifth decoy still waiting in its box. "All right," he said. "I'll hand them over." He walked down the stairs and out into the cold and did not hand anything over, because there was another way to end a case that the council did not control, and it was the way a man with nothing left to lose could still take: the truth, said out loud, to the one person on this river who had been waiting twenty years to hear it. He walked to the car and did not go up to his desk. The files were in his head and in Runa's notebook, and a file that exists in two places is a file that cannot be handed over, and both of them knew it and neither of them had said it out loud. He understood that he had just become, in the eyes of the council and the force and probably the town, the man who was solving a case to save himself, and that there was no way to be seen as anything else, and that he would have to do it anyway. He drove to Filmer Island through the dark with the snow coming on, and at the boathouse on the east point he found the tape still on the door and the lock still cut and the box still gone, and on the frozen step, new since the morning, a single carved decoy with the notch along its belly, laid where he would find it, facing the water. The fifth fish. He picked it up with a bare hand, and it was cold as the river, and on the underside, cut into the wood, were two letters: S.V. He stood on the step with the fish in his hand and looked out at the Keld and understood that in twenty years of trying not to be the man at the center of this story he had been made the center of it anyway, by the one person on this river who had never once forgotten that he had been there. He put the decoy in a paper bag and put the bag in his coat against his ribs where it would not show, and he did not call the station, because a decoy left on a step with his own initials on it was not evidence he could hand to a Superintendent who had just told him to leave. It was a message, and messages are for the man who receives them, and he was the man. ---