第20章 Open Water

The sun came up on a lake gone flat and silver, and by midmorning the whole cove at Nine Mile was full of boats and lights and men in jackets with letters on the back, and the road at the head of the bay was full of vehicles, and the case was in the hands of someone with an office in the capital and a badge Nessa had never seen before, and it was over. Almost over. She sat on the stern of the Shrike with a blanket around her shoulders and her arm bandaged and her ribs taped, and she watched them load the last of the men off the barge and into the police launch. Varek went by in cuffs with his coat still on and his hands still in his pockets, and he did not look at her this time, and she understood that he would be someone's problem now, and that people like him were always some of someone's problem, and that she would not be there when he stopped being one. Isaak came along the dock with his shoulder in a sling and his head stitched and a man from the capital's office walking beside him with a clipboard, and when he saw her he stopped and the man with the clipboard went on and then came back and waited a few steps away. "You are going," she said. "Tonight. They fly me out of the capital and I do not know where after that, and this time I do not get to know." He stood at the edge of the dock and looked down at her. "They say six months, maybe a year, and then the trial, and then a new name and a new life somewhere with a coast, because apparently the Bureau thinks accountants who like water should live near it." "That is the Bureau being kind." "That is the Bureau being funny." He was quiet for a moment. "I have something for you." "You do not owe me anything." "I owe you the whole of a week and the whole of my life, and I am going to be honest about that and not pretend it is small." He reached into his coat and brought out a small brass bell, the kind that had once hung on a channel marker, and put it in her hand. "It was on the buoy. Vesta lifted it for you and gave it to me to give to you, and she said to tell you that a pilot should always have a landmark that never moves, and that you are hers." Nessa looked at the bell in her hand and did not trust her voice for a moment. "Tell her I got it," she said. "I will tell her myself." "You will." He looked at the man with the clipboard, and then back at her, and for the first time since the barge his face was not careful. "I am going to ask you something, and you are allowed to say no, and I will not think less of it." "Ask." "When this is done," he said, "when the trial is over and the name is changed and the coast is chosen, I am going to send a letter to a rescue station in the north to a pilot I know. I am not asking you to answer it. I am asking you to know that I will send it." Nessa stood up, slowly, with the blanket falling off her shoulders and the bell in her hand, and the lake behind her lay flat and silver and calm the way it did after a storm, and somewhere out past the point the deep cold channel moved under the water with its patient, uninterested weight, holding her brother and all the lake had ever taken. She did not know, standing there, whether she would answer the letter. She had spent a year learning that the water took what it took and gave back what it chose, and she had never learned to count on anything but her own hands and the aircraft and the crew. But there was a thing she had learned in the last two weeks that she did not have a word for, which was that a person could be seen without being read, and held without being saved, and that both of those were possible even on the coldest water north of anywhere. "Send it," she said. He nodded and walked away down the dock, and the man with the clipboard fell in beside him, and Nessa stood on the stern of the Shrike with a brass bell in her hand and watched him go, and did not cry, because the water did not have that from her either. It was two days later, on the road north, that she found out that it was not over. She was driving Vesta's old truck back to Kettlehead, with Vesta asleep in the passenger seat and the bell on the dash, when her phone—the one they had given her back—buzzed with a number she did not know. She almost did not answer it. She answered it. "Nessa Ahlgren." A woman's voice, flat and careful and familiar in a way she could not place. "My name is not important. I work in the same office as the man who took your case, and I am calling because you should know that the case is not the only one, and Isaak Sayer is not the only witness, and the shipping company that your accountant spent two years writing down has a second set of books, kept by a second accountant, somewhere in your lake country, and that accountant is very much alive, and very much afraid." A pause. "Also, your chief's old list from twenty years ago had more than one name on it. One of the names is a rescue station. The other is a school. I would look at the school." The line went dead. Ahead of her the road ran north along the shore of Lake Omiskwa, and the lake lay under the winter sky the color of steel, and somewhere out past the islands the deep water moved and held what it held, and Nessa Ahlgren drove on with her hands steady on the wheel and a brass bell ringing faintly on the dash and a name she did not yet know running ahead of her into the cold. ---