Day Three. Ice: one inch.
Somebody had been at my hole.
I saw it from the end of the dock before I'd even slid the ladder out. Eleven paces out, where I'd drilled the morning before, there should have been a round plug of new ice, flush with the rest, the size of a coffee can lid. There was a round plug. But it was the wrong color. The lake around it was black, and the plug was black, and between them, around the whole plug, there was a ring of gray, like a scar that hadn't closed. And around that, scattered out on the bare ice, little white chips. A dozen of them. More. Thrown out in a spray.
No snow anywhere, so no tracks. The ice was clean as a plate except for the chips.
I slid the ladder out along the same line and went out on my belly and lay at the foot of it and looked.
The hole had been opened in the night. Not drilled. Opened, broken through, and then left, and it had skimmed back over in the cold, but the skim was new and thin and lighter than the black around it. I put my mitten on it and it flexed. My hole from yesterday had been an inch of good black ice by now. This was a quarter, maybe. Something had broken it open from one side or the other a few hours ago, and the chips were lying on the side toward the dock.
Otter, I thought. Mink. They need air. That's what you'd think, and I thought it.
I drilled a new hole a foot to the left and measured. One inch, three times. I said it down into the new hole.
"One inch, Teddy."
Then I lay there a while longer with my chin on a rung, looking at the old hole, the gray ring, the chips. It wasn't the hole that bothered me. It was the chips. They'd been thrown out onto the ice. Up and out. Something had come up through it, or something had gone down.
I logged it when I got in. Time, place, nature. I didn't send it. Wade had asked me for the ice and the knocks, and I sent him the ice and the knocks, all three of last night's, in the order they came, the wall and the wall and the floor below. He didn't write back. There was nothing in them to ask about.
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It was cold in my room in a way it hadn't been.
I came up to change my socks, which were wet from the ice, and the room was the same as it had been, the geese, the purple ribbon, NORA H. in pencil on the wallpaper, and it was colder. Not much. A draft. I could feel it on my ankles when I stood by the bed, a thin stream of cold, steady, like a cat going past your legs over and over.
It was coming from the radiator.
I got down on my knees. The radiator was warm; you could feel the heat off it on your face. But under it, behind it, low down, the cold was coming out past the heat like a breath. I put my hand down behind the radiator, between it and the wall, and the cold came onto my fingers in a stream.
The baseboard had come away from the chimney wall there. Where the white-painted pine of the chimney wall met the floor, behind the radiator, the baseboard had pulled out a few inches and left a gap. A slot. Long and dark. The cold came out of the slot, and when I put my face close to it the cold went into my eye and made it water, and it smelled of brick and old dust and something else, something like the inside of a mitten.
There was something in the slot.
I got my fingers on it and drew it out. It came slowly; it had been pushed in hard. A composition book. Black-and-white marbled cover, the kind you buy at Kwik Trip in August for a dollar. Old. Soft at the corners. On the front, a white label, and on the label in a kid's capitals, careful, pressing hard:
NORA H., GRADE THREE
I sat back on my heels with it on my knees.
The front pages were spelling lists. A third grader's, in pencil, a column of words down the left and the same words copied out again down the right. Because. Neighbor. Island. Answer. A star by some of them. On one page, a drawing of this house, I'd have known it anywhere: two stories, the chimney in the middle, smoke coming out of the chimney in a big curly scribble, a dock, a lake done in blue crayon with a blue sun over it. Somebody had colored the sun blue. I liked her for that.
Then about halfway through, the pages went blank. And I flipped through the blank ones, and at the very back there was writing again, upside down.
I turned the book over. Somebody had started at the back cover and written forward, the other way, so the back cover was a front cover for them. Pencil. A different hand. Bigger, rounder, younger than the spelling lists, and it didn't press as hard.
I read it out loud. I read everything out loud.
> Day One. Mama says knock twice if I need her. I am not aloud to knock first.
My voice went funny on "knock." I kept going.
> Day Four. Mama sleeps by the warm bricks. I count the jars. Sixty one.
There was more after that. A few more, each with a day number at the top. I saw pencil and didn't read it. I turned back to the first page and sat there.
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I worked it out the way I'd work out a call. Slowly. Out loud, under my breath, because otherwise I'd skip something.
There was a girl in the hall photograph. Red hat. Squinting. Hazel. This was her mother's book, from when her mother was a girl, and the girl had found it, or been given it, and started her own diary in the back. Kids do that. You give a kid a notebook with half of it blank and she'll fill it.
Day One. Not a date. A day number. A kid starts counting on the day something happens. The day something happens to you that you need to count from.
Gil had said it in the boat. Sixth of November, at dusk.
Her Day One was the day of the canoe. That made today her Day Twenty-Four. Her days weren't mine.
Mama says knock twice if I need her. I am not aloud to knock first.
I'd knocked first. Last night, at a quarter past one, lying in the dark because I couldn't stand not knowing, I'd reached out and knocked twice on that wall, first, before anything asked me to. And something had answered. Right away. So close the second knock came up through the board into my hand.
On her Day Four, three days after the canoe, she'd been somewhere warm enough that her mama could sleep by the bricks. Counting jars.
I looked at the chimney wall. Painted pine. Knotty. Under my hand, when I'd put my hand on it the first night, warm. The warm bricks were behind it.
I'm not a person who believes in things. You don't last on a console if you do. But I sat there on the floor of Nora Haldane's girlhood bedroom with her daughter's diary on my knees, and I thought it. I let myself think it through to the end, once. Whatever counted jars by the warm bricks on Day Four had counted them after the lake. Either she'd started that book in the water, or.
I didn't finish it.
The radiator ticked. I sat down on the floor with my back against it. It was warm through my shirt, and I was cold, colder than I'd been on the ice, and I sat there between the warm iron and the cold coming out of the slot and held the book shut with both hands.
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Rule four. Anything that looks lived in, photograph it where it is. Don't move it.
I'd already moved it. So I put it back. I slid it into the slot as far as it had been, the corner sticking out as I'd found it, and lay down on the floor with my cheek on the boards and took a picture of it there, behind the radiator, the marbled corner and the dark gap. Then I took it out again and photographed the cover, NORA H., GRADE THREE, flat on the quilt, and the first page at the back, the pencil, upside down.
I took the phone downstairs to the north window. I typed and read it out.
"Message to Wade. Found this behind the radiator in my room. Kid's composition book. Writing in the back. Want me to box it?"
I attached the pictures. I watched it go.
He wrote back in under a minute.
Old. My wife's. Put it back.
I read it out loud to the kitchen. Old. My wife's. Put it back.
I went upstairs and put it back.
I slid it deep into the slot this time, past where it had been, until the cover was flat against whatever was in there and my fingertips were in the cold. I didn't read any more first. I didn't open it again. I got up off my knees and wiped my hands on my jeans and went downstairs and put a split of birch in the stove.
Then I went out and split wood, because the woodbox was low and because I needed to hit something.
There was a chopping block on the back porch, an old stump gone gray, and a maul with a taped handle. I set a round of birch on the block and swung and it split clean and fell off both sides, and the crack of it went out over the ice and hit the far shore and came back. Late. A beat behind. Like Gil's plates, like somebody over there splitting wood too.
I split another. The echo came back. I split another, and another, and got a rhythm, and the echo kept time with me from across the lake, crack and crack, and after a while I couldn't tell which was mine, and I stopped with the maul over my shoulder to make it stop.
It stopped.
I stood there breathing. My breath hung in front of me and didn't go anywhere. I was humming, two notes, back and forth. I made myself quit. Up above me, under the eaves, was the window of my room, and I kept looking up at it, at the window seat, the way you look at a house you've just driven past to see if a light's come on. Nothing. A window. The reflection of the pines in it, and the white sky.
I carried the wood in, three trips, and stacked it, and the box was full, and it was two in the afternoon and there was nothing else to do.
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Six years ago, a little after three in the morning, on a Tuesday, on the console in Superior. A room with no windows and six screens and the coffee gone to tar in the pot. A headset with foam on the earpieces that smelled like other people. You sit in that room twelve hours and the whole county comes in through your ears, one voice at a time, and you put each one in a box on the screen. Time. Place. Nature. I was twenty-five. I'd been doing the job four years and I was good at it. I want that on the record. I was good at it.
The call came in and I said what you say. Nine-one-one, what's the address of your emergency. And a woman's voice, so close to the phone I could hear her lips, whispered: Someone's in the house.
Then the line went dead.
An open line drops, you call back. That's protocol. I called back. It rang four times, and a man answered.
He was calm. He sounded tired, and a little embarrassed, like a man who's bothered you for nothing. He said, Sorry about that. Kid got hold of the phone.
I asked if everything was all right. He said everything was fine. He said, Sorry, again, and laughed a little, at himself, at three in the morning. He had a nice voice. It was a nice laugh.
I believed him. I logged it. Accidental. Child with phone. Callback made, no emergency. I closed it.
Her name was Joanna Ferris. They found her two days later, when she didn't come in to work. There had never been a kid in that house.
There was a review. They played the tape. Everyone sat around a table and listened to the woman whisper and the line drop and the man on the callback, and me say, Okay, sir, you have a good night. The review said the callback was within protocol, but. That was the word they used. But.
They let me go eight months later for something else. Overtime, a missed shift. Everybody knew what for.
I don't play it back much. It plays itself.
I stood at the stove a long time with the door open, feeding it, until the kitchen was hotter than it needed to be.
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It came at eleven forty-five.
Two soft knocks. By the radiator. Low. Right where the slot was, I knew that now, right where the cold came out.
I didn't knock back.
I lay on my back with my hands flat on the quilt and the picks on my chest and I didn't move. Wade had said the pipes. Wade had said the old line runs up beside the chimney. Wade had said put it back, and I'd put it back. I lay there and was a person who'd put it back.
The house waited with me.
I watched the phone. Eleven forty-six. Eleven fifty. Eleven fifty-three. The radiator ticked. The lake, outside, made a long low groan, like a door in another part of a building, and stopped. My heart wouldn't slow down. My feet were cold under three blankets.
At eleven fifty-five it came again.
Two soft knocks. Quieter this time. Softer than before, and a little slower, with a space between them that hadn't been there. Not a knock on a door, exactly. More like a question. Like somebody who'd said your name and was waiting, and wasn't sure you'd heard, and was afraid to say it any louder.
I lay there with that.
Mama says knock twice if I need her.
I reached out of the blankets and found the pine and knocked twice back.
The house went still all through. Then, after a while, it ticked, and settled, and the sawdust shifted somewhere low, and that was all.
I turned on the lamp and logged it, because that's what I do.
Twenty-three forty-five. My room, chimney wall, by the radiator. Two soft knocks. No answer from me. Twenty-three fifty-five. Same place. Two soft knocks, softer. I knocked back.
I looked at what I'd written. No answer from me. I'd written it like it was the wall's fault.
I turned off the lamp. I lay on my side facing the chimney wall, a foot from it, in the dark. Behind the radiator, behind the baseboard, in the cold, the book was lying where I'd pushed it, with the pages I hadn't read. I could feel it there. Not the cold. The book.
I'd put it back. I'd done what he said.
I lay there and looked at the dark where the slot was and knew I wasn't going to leave it there.