Chapter 9 Lucky Decoys

Anders Roos had carved fish for sixty years and could tell one hand from another the way other men told one voice from another, and when Vail set the four decoys on his workbench under a lamp, he did not have to look twice. "Ivar Sund," he said. "The whole set. I'd know the knife anywhere." "How?" "See the belly line." Roos turned a decoy over with two fingers. "Every carver has a flaw he can't fix, and most of us hide it. Ivar left his. He said a fish that looks too perfect swims like a lie. There's a notch on the belly of every decoy he ever cut, and if I showed you a hundred fish and one was Ivar's, I'd find the notch in a minute." "So these four are his." "These four are his, and they're from the set he cut the winter before he died." Roos set the fish down and looked at Vail. "He cut five that year. He told me he was making one for each of the men he fished with, a gift, so they'd have a lucky fish of their own. I asked him who, and he laughed and said the men at the mill. Five of them." Vail looked at the four decoys on the bench and did not need to ask where the fifth had gone. "Five gifts," he said. "One for each man who was on the ice." "That's what he said." Roos wiped his hands on a rag. "I never saw them after he died. His wife came and took his tools and his bench and everything in the shop, and I didn't ask her for any of it, because a widow has a right to her husband's things." Ragna had taken the bench, the tools, the set. The killer had kept Ivar's knives for twenty years and used them to cut the marks that named the men who had let him die. There was a cruelty in that which Vail had not let himself name until now. Whoever was doing this was not only avenging Ivar. They were using his hands. The knives that had cut a man's gifts were cutting a man's marks, and the bench where he had shaped the fish he meant to give away was the bench where the rest were finished, in the years after he was gone, in a town that had decided he was gone by accident. Ragna had kept the set and the tools and the trade, and she had kept them the way a person keeps a language, so that she could go on speaking to a man the river would not give back. Vail asked the one question he had come to ask. "When you cut a decoy, and you know the man it's for, do you mark it for him?" Roos was quiet. Then he went to a drawer in the bench and took out an old order book, the pages soft as cloth, and opened it to a page near the back and turned it to the lamp. "Ivar kept his own order book," he said. "He left it with me the last fall, said he'd pick it up after the ice. He never did. Look at the back pages." On the last written page, in a hand that pressed hard into the paper, were five names in a column, each with a small drawn fish beside it, and beside each fish a crude mark, a tally, and beside one of the names a circle. Aksel Stur. Rueben Kask. Einar Holm. Corwin Muir. S. Vail. The circle was around S. Vail. "He circled yours," Roos said. "I never understood it. I thought maybe it meant you were his best friend, or you'd paid for it. Now I think I understand it." Vail looked at his own initials in the dead man's hand and felt the room go very cold for all the shop was warm. "What does it mean to you?" "He circled the man he trusted." Roos closed the book. "If you're the one he circled, Sergeant, you're the one he was going to ask for help." Runa, who had been standing at the bench with her hands folded, spoke for the first time since they had come in. "Or the one he meant to spare," she said. Vail looked at his own initials in the dead man's hand for a long minute and then closed the order book himself and put it in the evidence bag, and his hands were steady and the steadiness cost him something he could not have explained. He had spent twenty years calling Ivar Sund a name in a report. The dead man's own hand had just told him that Ivar had picked one man out of five and drawn a circle around him, and a circle like that is not a name in a report. It is a trust, and he had spent twenty years failing it. Roos looked at her, and then at Vail, and said nothing, because there was nothing to say to a thing like that. They took the order book and photographed every page and left Roos with the four decoys in an evidence bag and a promise to bring them back when the case closed. And on the drive back to town Runa read the list of names aloud twice, softly, the way you read something to make sure it is real, and on the second reading she stopped at the circle. "Five gifts and five names," she said. "A man who was going to give every one of them a lucky fish. He never got to give them, so somebody gave them for him." "He did not give them because he died first," Vail said. "Somebody finished the giving for him, and finished it in the order he would have finished it, and used the fish he cut, and kept the set in the box he packed. Whoever that is has been in the same house as those knives and that bench and that oilcloth for twenty years, and has spent four winters walking them one at a time to the water." He looked at the list of five names on the order book page. "That is not a stranger. That is a person who never left the room where he left off." "Somebody is finishing his gifts," Vail said. "One winter at a time. And when the last fish is delivered, the list is done." He drove to the constabulary and filed the order book and sat at his desk in the dark with the board beside him, and he looked at the fifth card and the empty pin and thought about a man under the ice who had trusted him and a woman above it who had not. Runa stood in the doorway with her coat still on and watched him sit with the board, and she did not come in, and after a while she said the thing neither of them had put into words. "If the fifth fish is for you, then you are the only witness and the last name at the same time, and there is no version of this where you get to keep both." "I know." "Then stop pretending the case is something you are working," she said. "The case is something you are inside of, and the only way out of it is the same way the man under the ice got out, which is that somebody finally tells the truth about it." He did not answer, and she left him there with the board and the dark, which was, he understood, her way of saying she would stay on the case even if he could not. ---