第10章 The Widow of the Vendra

The Vendra River Authority kept its winter operations in a low concrete building on the bank above the Keld, where the gauge house sat on stilts over the water and the marker crew stacked its poles and planking in a yard scraped free of snow. Ragna Sund came out to meet them in a green wool sweater with the sleeves pushed up, and Vail noted it and said nothing, because half the crew wore the same sweater and the co-op sold a hundred a season. She was fifty-five and moved like a woman who had spent her life on ice, careful and unhurried, and she shook their hands and led them into the office and poured coffee without being asked, the way people did on this river. "I read the paper," she said. "Muir. It's a terrible thing." "It's the fourth terrible thing," Vail said. "It's the fourth drowning." She sat down across from them. "I've watched this river for twelve years since I took the job, and every November it takes something. That's what the ice does." "The ice takes what is on it and what is under it, and it does not announce which," Ragna went on. "I have worked three of your four bodies out of the marker line myself, with my own crew, because the Authority is called first and the police second. Ask your Superintendent which officer stood on the bank in the dark and held a light while my men sledded a body off the Keld. It was you. You have been first to every one of them and I have been second to every one of them, and we have both known exactly what we were looking at and said nothing for four winters. So I would like to know why it is my silence you have come to question and not your own." "The ice doesn't restrain a man's wrists for weeks and hold him in cold storage and then place him at the Keld on the one night the current gives him back." Vail watched her face. "A person does that." Ragna looked at him over her cup and did not blink. "Then you'll want my crew roster," she said. "There are six of us on the ice watch and we all have the same access, and we've all been on that island, and anyone with a key to the yard can read the gauge. I'll print it for you." She turned to a filing cabinet and began to pull the roster, and Vail watched her hands. They were steady. Nothing about her hurried and nothing about her ran, and a woman who had nothing to hide would move like that, and a woman who had spent twenty years learning not to move any other way would move like that too. "Where were you the night before the body came up?" Runa asked. "Here, in the gauge house." Ragna set the roster on the desk. "I log every reading in the ice season. The sheet is in the cabinet and it has my name and the hour on every line, and the night you're asking about I was on watch until midnight and home by one and my daughter can tell you the rest." "Your daughter." "Hedda. She lives in town, works at the care home on Ostvik Row. She was home that night." Ragna sat back down. "It's a small town, Sergeant. You'll find the whole of my night accounted for and I'll help you do it." "That's the thing about accounts," Vail said. "A careful person keeps good ones." Ragna met his eyes and something passed across her face that was not guilt and was not anger and was, for a moment, something closer to relief, as if she had been waiting a long time for someone to finally count. "You were the constable," she said, quietly. "The one who wrote it down." "I was." He had waited twenty years for somebody to say those words to his face, and now that a woman he had helped wrong had said them without heat, he found that there was no defense to make and no need of one. She was not asking him to be sorry. She had long ago stopped expecting that from anybody. She was only putting the fact on the table between them, the way she put the gauge readings on the table, exact and unarguable, and letting him decide what to do with it. "Ivar waited for you that morning." She said it without heat, the way you say a fact you have carried so long it has worn smooth. "He went out to the shanty to meet you and show you what he'd found, and he told me you were coming, and you didn't come. And then the ice took him, and you wrote that he went out alone." She picked up her cup again. "I've read your report perhaps a thousand times, Sergeant. I know it better than you do. And I have never once been able to find the part where you explain why you didn't come." The office was quiet. Out on the water the gauge house lamp burned against the coming dusk, and the Keld breathed its one warm breath into the cold. "I don't have that part," Vail said. "I've never had it." "Then you and I are in the same boat," Ragna said. "Both of us have spent twenty years with a hole in the middle of the story." She stood and showed them to the door. "Find the hole, Sergeant. I'd like to see it filled before I die. That's the only thing I've ever wanted." On the way out, across the yard, a young woman in a nurse's coat was waiting by a small car with the engine running, and Ragna raised a hand to her and the woman raised one back. Hedda Sund. Twenty-seven, dark under the eyes, a nurse's keyring on her belt. She looked at Vail for a moment with her mother's steadiness and then looked away, and the car pulled out of the yard and turned for town, and Vail stood in the cold and watched the taillights go. "She drives her home every night her mother is on watch," Runa said, watching the taillights go. "That is not an alibi. That is a person being kept close." "Or a daughter who does not want her mother alone in a cold house in November," Vail said. "Which is the same thing from the outside, and neither of us can say which it is yet. Remember that when we go back to the station. The first thing a lazy officer does is decide the daughter is a liar because the daughter is the daughter." "That was the alibi," Runa said. "That was the alibi," Vail agreed. "And it's a good one." "It is the kind of alibi a person builds on purpose," Runa said. "Or the kind a person has because she has done the same job on the same river for twelve years and the job is real," Vail said. "We have nothing that puts her at the water. We have something that puts her at the gauge, on the nights her job is at the gauge, and that is not the same thing, and I will not build this case out of the same nothing that closed it the last time." They walked to the car. The snow had stopped and the temperature was falling hard, and the forecast on Runa's phone said the river would be solid by the weekend, all of it except the Keld, which would stay open the way it always stayed open, the way it had stayed open for a hundred years, patient as a wound. ---