Chapter 5 Names on the Board

By morning Vail had moved the board to the side wall where visitors could not see it, and pinned the fifth card beside the other four. He wrote the names in a column, each with a winter beside it, and then he stood back and looked at what he had made. Aksel Stur. Dead, winter one. Rueben Kask. Dead, winter two. Einar Holm. Dead, winter three. Corwin Muir. Dead, winter four. Soren Vail. Alive. Five names in a column looked like a roster and read like a casualty list, and Vail had stared at both kinds long enough to know the difference. A roster is a thing you carry into a shift. A casualty list is a thing you carry out of one, and he had been carrying this one out of the same building for twenty years. "That's a list," Runa said from the doorway. She had come in early with snow on her shoulders. "Four down the side and one left." "That's one way to read it." "It's the only way to read it." She set her coat on the hook and came to the board. "Somebody decided twenty years ago that five men were responsible for Ivar Sund. Four of them are dead. You're the fifth. Do you understand what that makes you?" "It makes me a witness," Vail said. "And a suspect, depending on who's counting." "You should be off this case." "I should be," he said, "and if I leave it, the next body at the Keld is mine, and there will be nobody left who knows why." He set the chalk down and looked at her. "You have two choices, Quist. You can take this to Havik and watch him file it as weather, or you can work it with a man who has a reason to want it finished, and watch me because of it. I would rather you watched me." "I should be, and if I go off it, the next body at the Keld is mine, and there won't be anyone left who knows why." He pushed a chair toward her with his foot. "So we do it fast. We work the living and we work the dead, and we do not tell Havik any more than he already suspects." Runa sat. She opened her notebook to a fresh page and did not write anything on it for a while. "Then start," she said. "Who are the living that matter?" Vail wrote a second column under the first, names of the still-breathing who had touched the case at the edges. "Marnie Fiske. Deckhand on the Filmer ferry, twenty years ago and this winter too. She pulled Kask's gear out of the river the morning he was found. She was Ivar's cousin by marriage and she never believed the drowning." "Anyone else?" "Rolf Brekke. Sergeant, retired, my training officer. He was the one who told me the report would write itself and I should let it." "And the widow." "Ragna Sund." Vail set the chalk down. "Ivar's wife. She was thirty-five when he died. She runs the gauge crew at the Vendra River Authority now, winter ice watch, the markers on the Traverse. She reads the river for a living." Runa was quiet. "The night the body moves," Vail said, "is a two-day window that only the gauge tells you. The person who reads the gauge is Ragna Sund." They looked at the board together. "That's not evidence," Vail said. "That's a coincidence with a job attached to it. There are six people on her crew." "Then we talk to all six." Runa stood. "Start with the cousin. If Marnie Fiske has been sitting on a lie for twenty years, she may be tired enough to put it down." They drove to Filmer Island, across the two-lane bridge above the Vendra, where the river ran black and open under a sky like wet slate. The ferry landing sat on the island shore with its dock iced in and its boat hauled up on the slip for the winter, and the ice-season work stood waiting in stacks of planking and markers and the long poles the crew used to test the new ice before the Traverse opened. Marnie Fiske was sixty and built like a woman who had spent forty years on a deck. She met them in the ferry office, where a coal stove made the room too warm and a kettle stayed on all day, and she offered them tea before they had said what they came for. When they said the name Corwin Muir, she set the kettle down and did not pick it back up. "So it's a fifth one," she said. "You've been counting," Vail said. "I've been counting since Rueben went under." She sat down across from them and folded her hands, and Vail saw that her knuckles were swollen with cold work. "The paper said drowned. Rueben couldn't swim, that part was true. But he could read the river better than any man alive, and he would not have walked onto new ice in the dark alone, not for anything. He knew what the ice does when it's young." "Did he tell you anything before he died?" Runa asked. "He told me to keep my mouth shut." Marnie looked at the stove. "He came off the ferry in October that last year and he was gray. I asked him what was wrong and he said the past was coming up through the water and he wasn't going to be around for it. I thought he was drinking again. He wasn't." "The past," Vail said. "Ivar Sund." "He was my cousin through my first husband." Marnie poured the tea after all, her hands steady. "Ivar was the best ice fisherman on this river. He carved the decoys himself, little fish, and he would not go out on new ice careless, because he was the one who told everybody else when it was safe. When they said he went out alone and drowned, I said, no, not Ivar, not on new ice. And nobody listened, because nobody wanted to." "Why didn't anybody want to?" "Because the mill paid this town's wages and the Keld kept the river open below its pipes, and a man asking what the mill was putting in the water was a man asking for the mill to close." She looked at Vail then, and her eyes were old and not kind. "You were a constable. You wrote it up. I remember." "I wrote it up," Vail said. "You were young." "That's not a defense." "No," Marnie said. "It isn't." The stove ticked. Outside, a gull walked on the frozen dock and lifted off, and the ice at the landing groaned under a shift of the tide. "One thing," Marnie said at last. "Kask had a box. He kept things in it that he said would prove what happened to Ivar, in case. When he died, his wife burned most of his papers, the way you do when you're ashamed of a dead man's debts. But the box wasn't in the house. It was on the ferry. He kept it under the bench in the office here, and after he died I put it in the boathouse on the point, because I couldn't bring myself to burn it and I couldn't bring myself to open it either." Vail set down his cup. "Where's the boathouse?" "East end of the island, off the Traverse road." She stood and walked them to the door. "If you find something in it, Sergeant, do the one thing you didn't do twenty years ago." "Which is?" "Say the man's name out loud where it counts." She opened the door onto the cold. "That's all Ivar ever wanted. He wasn't one for revenge. He just wanted the water to tell the truth." They walked back to the car across the frozen yard, and Vail did not look at Runa, because he knew what her face would be doing. "That's a statement," she said, when they were in the car. "About a box, about what a dying man said." "It's a lead." He started the engine. "And it tells us something else." "What?" "That the four dead men each knew something was coming." He turned the car out of the yard. "Which means this didn't start with Stur, four winters ago. It started twenty years ago, and it waited." ---