Chapter 15 The Lamprey

The Lamprey sat at the end of Ostvik Row where the old millhands had drunk for a hundred years, a low brick room with a coal stove and a long bar and a window that looked down the hill to the river. Vail knew it and Runa did not, and he took her there because the town talked in that room and did not talk anywhere else. Liv Rourke kept the bar. She was fifty and had a flat, careful way of pouring that came from years of listening, and she set two coffees in front of them without being asked because in the ice season everyone drank coffee after dark. "You'll want the millhands," Liv said, before they spoke. "They come in here. They've been quiet this month and I know why." "Why?" "Because four of their own have drowned at the same hole, and the fifth was one of the men who used to sit on that end." She nodded down the bar. "That's where Muir sat. Every Friday for years. And the week before he went under, he came in and drank a whole bottle alone and told me he'd been seeing a light on the river at night, out at the Keld, where no light belongs." "A light," Vail said. "A parked light, he said. A light that went out when a car came down the road." Liv wiped the bar. "He was scared, Sergeant. He'd been scared since November started, and he wouldn't say of what, and the next week he was in the water." "Did he say who he was scared of?" "He said the past had come back and it wanted to talk to him." Liv looked at Vail. "And he said there was one man left who could stop it and that man wouldn't pick up the phone." Vail looked around the room and saw a hundred evenings of the same men in the same chairs, and he understood that he had been in this bar on and off for thirty years and had never once sat down and asked what anyone had seen. A town like this one does not answer questions it has not been asked, and it does not ask questions it has already decided not to want the answers to, and he had been as much a part of that as the millhands. The stove ticked. Runa wrote. "Who else comes in here?" Vail asked. "The marker crew, after a day on the Traverse. They drink at that table by the door." Liv nodded. "The men, mainly. Not her. Sund's widow doesn't drink, and she doesn't small-talk, and she leaves with her crew and drives them back. That's how I know she's careful. A woman who doesn't drink with her men is a woman who wants her own head clear." "Or a woman who knows that if she drinks with them one of them will ask her why she is out on the ice in November at three in the morning," Runa said. "You learn the river fast," Liv said, and poured them a second coffee neither of them had asked for. "You have been here a week and you know more about this town than most of them know about each other, and that is either your job or your funeral." "She was in here this month?" "The last Thursday before the freeze. Whole crew, same table, and they were quiet too." Liv set down her cloth. "And on the way out she stopped at the door and looked up the hill at the river for a while, and I remember thinking she looked like a woman saying goodbye to something." They finished the coffee and Vail stood at the window and looked down the hill at the Keld, dark in the white, and thought about a woman saying goodbye to something and a man in a good coat and a light that went out when a car came down the road. "There's a darkroom," he said. Runa looked up. "What?" "The perch on the bank. The tripod dents. Anyone who watches a spot four winters running has to put the record somewhere." He turned from the window. "Somewhere warm. Somewhere she can develop film. Nyman's Mill had a photographic office for the sample archive, and it's the one room in the old block that Kelso's renovation hasn't touched, because nobody renovates a darkroom." They drove out to the mill in the dark and found the photographic office on the second floor of the old block, its door intact, its window blacked from the inside, and inside, when Runa's torch swept the wall, a line of prints clipped to a wire, drying in the dark. Four winters of them. Photographs of men, taken close, at night, on the bank at the Keld. Muir, sitting against a willow, awake, looking at the camera. Kask, slack against a post. Holm. Stur. And a fifth photograph, clipped and empty of a subject, held at the end of the wire by two wooden pegs, waiting for a face it had not yet caught. The four faces on the wire looked back at him in the torchlight, each one photographed awake, each one set against a willow trunk or a post like a man waiting for something he had been told would be explained. He had spent four winters reading reports about these men and had never once seen their faces in the year they died. The woman in the darkroom had seen them all, close up, and had pressed the shutter herself, and had kept the negatives in a sleeve marked for a report nobody would write. Vail reached for the last peg and stopped. "Don't touch it," he said. "Photograph it. Then we take the whole room." They worked the darkroom by torchlight and bagged the prints, and on the bench under the enlarger lay a stack of negatives in a paper sleeve, and on the front of the sleeve, in the hard pressed hand, a single line. For the report nobody would write. "That is what she has been doing," Vail said, reading it aloud. "All of it. Every print, every negative, every mark on the wall of that cold room. She has been writing the report the county refused to write, in the only language this town understands, which is a photograph of a man who is about to die." Runa read it and looked at Vail, and in the cold room with the blacked window and the drying wire of dead men, neither of them said anything for a while. "She's not just killing them," she said at last. "She's keeping a record. She wants the record found." "She wants it published." Vail bagged the sleeve. "She wants it in a file with a case number and a court and a verdict, and she's been building the evidence as she went, because the one thing this river never gave her was a body and a court, and she has decided to build both out of the men who took them from her." He looked at the empty photograph at the end of the wire. "And the last frame is reserved," he said. "For the last man on the list." Runa looked at the empty clip at the end of the wire and then at him, and she did not say the obvious thing, which was that the last frame was a chair and the last man was standing in the room, and he was grateful for the silence the way a man is grateful for a doctor who does not say the diagnosis out loud in front of the patient. ---