第7章 Cold Storage

The boathouse on the east point of Filmer Island stood at the end of the Traverse road, where the ice road left the shore and struck across the frozen river toward the far bank. Vail and Runa came at it on foot from the road, because the driveway was drifted and because a car in the yard would have been seen from the island. The boathouse was locked. Vail cut the hasp with the bolt cutters he had brought, and the door came open with a crack of ice along its bottom edge, and the cold inside hit them like a wall. On the floor along the wall, under a bench, sat a wooden box the size of a crate of bottles, and on top of it, folded, a green wool sweater with a hole at the elbow. "Two things in one room," Vail said, standing in the door with the cold coming past him. "The box a dead man packed and the sweater a living one wore. That is either the worst luck in this town or the most deliberate evidence anyone has ever handed me." "Which is it?" Runa asked. "I don't know yet," he said. "A person who hides a box does not lay a sweater on it, and a person who wants to be caught does not keep either one. Somebody has been leaving this room ajar for a visitor, and the visitor is four winters late." "Machine-spun," Runa said, lifting it with a gloved hand. "Commercial dye. Same wool as the thread from Muir's hands." "Bag it." Vail knelt by the box. "And photograph the room before we touch anything else." They worked it slowly. The box held a bundle of papers in a man's hand, and on the papers were dates and figures and a rough drawn map of the mill's outfall, with arrows showing where the pipes left the pipes and where they reached the river, and at the bottom of the map a single line in a hard pressed hand: The water is wrong. Someone should test it. "He was going to report them," Runa said. "Ivar." "He was going to ask me to come see it." Vail set the papers on the bench. "This isn't Kask's box. It's Ivar's. Kask kept it and gave it to Marnie and Marnie kept it for twenty years." Under the papers lay a small bundle wrapped in oilcloth, and inside the oilcloth lay four carved wooden decoys, ice-fishing fish, each with the same notched painted eye and the same deliberate flaw along the belly. Runa photographed each fish before Vail touched them, and while she worked he stood over the bench and read the shape of the set. Four fish, cut in one winter by a man who was dead by the next, and each one carrying the same flaw in the belly, the flaw the carver refused to fix. A set made as gifts and never given. A set kept in a box under a bench in a boathouse for twenty years and then carried, four of it, to four different banks. Whoever had done the carrying had not sold them and had not thrown them away. They had used them, one a winter, the way a person uses the last thing a dead man made. "Four," Runa said. "One for each, or one for the four who are already dead." Vail counted them without touching. "There were five on the ice. There should be five." "There are four." "So the fifth is still out there, waiting for its man." He stood. "That's how we know we have time. There is one decoy left to be put in someone's hands, and the someone is not Muir." They photographed the box and the papers and the decoys, and then Vail did something the manual did not require. He read the map again and understood why the outfall had a name that was older than the mill. The Keld was not an accident of geology. It was the mill's own warmth, kept open by the pipes, and the town had built a story around the one place the mill could not hide. He said it out loud, and Runa wrote it down, and then they carried the box to the car through the snow that had started again, and left the boathouse sealed with tape. On the drive back the snow thickened and the wipers fought it and the heater ran hot, and neither of them said anything for a mile, because they had both understood the same thing at the same time without putting it into words. A man does not keep a dead man's box for twenty years and then hand it to the first officers who ask unless he has decided the truth is worth more to him than the quiet, and a person who hands over the truth that easily is telling you something about how long everybody else has been waiting. Back at the station the lab ran the sweater against the thread from Muir's hands, and by late afternoon the report came back the way they both had known it would: it was a match, the same dye lot, the same knit, a work sweater of the make sold in the co-op on Ostvik Row, of a size that fit a man. "Not a man," Runa said, reading the report over his shoulder. "A size that fits a man. A woman can wear a man's sweater." Vail did not answer. He was looking at the board, at the fifth card, at the empty pin beside it where no decoy had yet been fixed. "Where does the green sweater live?" Runa asked. "Who buys the co-op sweater and wears it onto the ice at the Keld and leaves wool under a dead man's nails?" "Someone who works outside in winter and does not want to be seen doing it." He took his coat off the hook. "Someone who can buy the sweater in a town that notices everything and still be one of the regulars doing it." He stopped at the door and looked back at her. "Muir was held in cold storage for weeks," he said. "Not in a cellar. In a room that freezes and thaws and gets opened and closed. A commercial cold room, the kind a mill keeps for its samples, or a plant keeps for its fish." "Or a ferry keeps for its catch," Runa said, and Vail nodded, because that was the thing he had been walking around all day without saying. The ferry hold was the one cold room in this city that sat on the water. It could be reached from the island shore without a road. It could be opened by any key on the marker crew's ring. And it held a temperature a man could survive for a night and not for a week, which is exactly what Vail had seen written in the tissue. He stood at the car with his hand on the door and let all of it settle: whoever had kept Corwin Muir for a month had a freezer, a key, a boat, and a reason to be on the river at night, and this town had spent twenty years teaching itself not to put those four things in one sentence. The ferry ran a fish hold. The hold had a door and a floor drain and a coil and it sat on the water, moving with the river, unseen in the dark. And the woman who had worked that boat, and its hold, and its ice, for forty years was Marnie Fiske. Vail did not want the sweater to be hers. He had spent twenty years learning to distrust what he wanted, and what he wanted now was for the clean hold and the keys and the wool to point at somebody he did not have to sit across a kitchen table from. He put that want away the way he put away everything else that fitted the case too well, and he got in the car and drove back toward the bridge with the heater on and the river black on both sides of the road. ---