Day Four. Ice: one and a half inches.
Nine degrees at the kitchen window, on the thermometer screwed to the outside of the frame. A wind had come up in the night out of the northwest and was still coming, steady, low, pushing across the ice with nothing to stop it. The lake had been black and now it was black with a kind of dull polish on it, scoured, and everywhere the wind had swept it the ice had gone a little lighter, the way a floor goes lighter where people walk.
I went out with the auger on my shoulder and my face in my collar.
The ladder out. Eleven paces. On my belly, rung by rung, the wind going over my back like water over a rock. At the foot of it I drilled and the auger went through on the fourth turn now, not the third. I measured three times. One and a half. I said it into the hole.
"One and a half, Teddy."
Then I looked up, past the foot of the ladder, toward the landing.
There was a hole out there.
Two long steps past mine, farther out than the ladder reached. Not round. Not drilled. A ragged thing about the size of a boot, a black mouth in the gray, the edges broken in jags, like somebody had kept hitting the same place until it gave. It had skimmed over since. The new skin on it was dark and thin. Around it, nothing. No chips this time. No tracks, no scrapes, no marks of any kind on the ice anywhere between my ladder and that hole, or past it. The wind had been over all of it, all night, and polished it clean.
I lay there and looked at it for a long time.
My hole from Day Two had been opened up. That was one thing. Something comes up through a hole that's already there; fine. This wasn't my hole. Nobody had drilled this. This had been made, out on the bare ice, where there was nothing before, two steps past the foot of my ladder. It had edges like a broken plate.
It was close enough that if I'd stood up at the foot of the ladder and taken two big steps I'd have put my boot in it. I didn't stand up.
I made myself think it through, plain, like a call.
A person couldn't have done it. A person would have had to walk out there, at night, on an inch and a half of ice, which nobody does who wants to see the morning. And from where? From the landing, six-tenths of a mile of it? From my dock, past my ladder, while I slept fifty yards away? There were no tracks. There was nothing. There was one woman on this island and she'd been in bed with the lamp off, listening to a wall.
So not a person. Something lighter than a person, that lived in the water and wanted air.
That's where I left it. I pulled myself back along the ladder, rung by rung, and didn't look behind me until I was on the dock, and then I did, and it was still there, a dark ragged mouth past the foot of my ladder.
◆
I sent the night first, two knocks at eleven forty-five and two at eleven fifty-five, my room, by the radiator. Then I wrote the rest and read it out at the north window.
"Message to Wade. Ice: one and a half. There's a second hole two steps past mine. Chopped, not drilled. Not mine."
Under a minute.
Otters. They keep breathing holes open at freeze-up. Ignore it.
I read it out. Otters.
"Otters, then," I said, to the kitchen.
I wrote it in the log. Second hole, two steps past mine, chopped edges. Otters (W.O.). I underlined otters. That's as close as I get to arguing with anybody.
The edges kept coming back to me all morning anyway, the jags of them. I let them.
◆
Wade wrote again before noon. I was at the stove. The phone rattled on the tin shelf and I picked it up and took it to the window and read it out.
When you get a chance, the big bedroom closet. Box the clothes for the church sale. Boxes are in the shed. Just box them.
I stood there with that one a while.
Then I went out to the shed for the boxes.
They were the flattened ones I'd seen against the wall on Day Two, tied with twine. I cut the twine with my pocketknife and counted them out, six, and while I was doing that I looked up at the wall over the ladder, and there were two long iron hooks up there, high, a long way apart, and nothing on them. Between them the boards were cleaner than the rest, a pale stripe where something tall had hung for years and kept the weather off. Gil, I figured, or Wade before he left. Whatever it was, it had been long. I took the boxes and went.
The big bedroom was the coldest room upstairs. The radiator in there was shut off at the valve. The bed was made up tight with a white chenille spread, and the dresser had the man's watch on it and the hairbrush with the short dark hairs, and I didn't look at either. I opened the closet.
It was a deep closet, a walk-in, older than the rest of the room, with a light on a string. I pulled the string. Her clothes were on the left and his were on the right, or had been. His side was mostly empty hangers. Her side was full.
I put the boxes together on the bedroom floor and taped the bottoms and started.
You fold things. That's all boxing clothes is. You take a thing off a hanger and fold it and put it in. Flannel shirts, a lot of them, red and green and a blue one worn white at the elbows. Jeans. A gray wool sweater with a darned cuff, darned in brown thread because she hadn't had gray. A church dress, navy with small white flowers, one dress, the only one, on a padded hanger. Long underwear. A pair of snow pants patched at both knees with duct tape. I folded each thing and laid it in and didn't think about the woman who'd put the tape on.
I thought about her. I'd seen her in the photograph squinting into the sun with her arm around her girl. These were the clothes of somebody who worked outside and fixed her own things and owned one dress.
I didn't go through the pockets. They weren't mine to go through. A couple of times I felt something in one, a crumple of tissue, a hair elastic, the small hard shape of a chapstick, and I folded right over it and put it in the box with the rest.
Box the clothes for the church sale. I knew what that was. Three weeks after, and he's giving her flannel shirts to the church ladies, and the church ladies are going to unpack them in the basement at St. Olaf's and hold them up and say, Oh, that poor man. It's for the town, I figured. So the town can see him do it.
At the back of the rail, last, there was a parka.
A green canvas parka, the farm kind, with a fur ruff on the hood gone stiff and gray. It hung on a hook on the closet's back wall, not a hanger, the way you'd hang a coat you wore every day and took down without thinking. I lifted it off the hook.
It was heavy. It smelled of woodsmoke, and of outside, and under that it smelled of somebody. Skin. Hair. Not perfume. Just a person, the warm, close, particular smell of the inside of a coat somebody has worn for years. My eyes stung. The hood had been hanging up and back, and it still held the shape of a head. Pushed out at the back where the back of a head had been, every day, for years, until the canvas remembered it. I held it up by the shoulders and the hood stood up off the collar on its own, empty, round, facing me.
I stood in the closet with it, under the bulb on the string.
Then I folded it, which took some doing, and pressed the hood down flat with both hands, and it came back up a little, and I pressed it down again and put the next box on top of it.
◆
The phone, while I was taping the last box shut.
The back of that closet. Is the panel tight or does it move.
I read it out, standing in the bedroom. My voice sounded like somebody else's in there.
I went back into the closet. Now that the clothes were out of it I could see the back wall properly. Old beadboard, painted cream, and in the middle of it, about waist high, a square panel set into the boards, a foot and a half across, with a little lip of molding around it. An access panel, for a pipe maybe. I put my palms on it and pushed. Nothing. I pushed at each corner. I rapped it with a knuckle in the middle, once, and it gave back a flat sound, solid, no echo.
Dust on the lip of the molding, an even gray fur of it, undisturbed. On the closet floor, against the back wall, one shoe. A woman's sneaker, the left one, with a knot in the lace that had never been undone.
I photographed the panel anyway. Rule four. Then the shoe, where it was. Then I typed and read it out.
"Tight. Doesn't move. Dust on it."
I sent the pictures with it. I didn't ask why. He knew his house. I'd decided that on Day Two.
The boxes went down the front stairs one at a time, and I stacked them in the front hall under the photograph, because that's where the door was, and then I stood there and looked at what I'd done. Six boxes, taped. Her whole side of the closet. Under her picture.
◆
That night I broke a rule.
Not one of his seven. One of mine. I'd put it back, and I'd meant to leave it, and at ten o'clock I was on my knees by the radiator with my hand in the slot.
The cold came onto my fingers. The book was there, deeper than I'd pushed it, I thought, but I couldn't have said for sure. I got it out.
I sat on the bed with the lamp on and opened it from the back. Day One. Day Four. I didn't read those again. I turned the page.
> Day Nine. Mama says tie your hat on or the lake takes it. I tie everything.
I read it out loud and then I sat there with my hand flat on the page.
Tied on the thwart, Gil had said. Tied on, like somebody wanted it found.
Every kid on this lake gets told that. Tie your hat on, or the lake takes it. Every kid on every lake. My mom told Teddy, and Teddy tied his hat on, every time, with the strings under his chin in a bow, and it was still on him when they brought him up.
So she tied it. A careful little girl, the kind who ties everything, who'd been told, and listened. She tied her hat to the thwart of her grandpa's canoe in November so the lake wouldn't take it, and then the lake took everything but the hat.
That was what I had. It was a sad, plain story and it fit. I put my hand on the next page to turn it.
Two soft knocks.
By the radiator. Low. A foot from my knee. I hadn't heard anything first, no creak, no tick. Just the knocks, close, while the book was open in my lap.
I didn't move. The page was half turned under my fingers.
I looked at the slot. Black. The cold coming out of it. I looked at the book, at Day Nine, at the pencil, at the word everything.
I closed it. I reached out and knocked twice on the pine, and my knuckles were stiff and it came out uneven. Then I got down on my knees and slid the book back into the slot, deep, and stayed there on the floor with my hand on the baseboard.
The house stopped, as it did now when I answered. Then it started again. Ticks. Sawdust. The radiator.
I logged it. Twenty-three fifty. My room. Two soft knocks. I knocked back.
I didn't tell Wade I'd read it. He'd told me to put it back. I didn't want to explain why I hadn't.
I lay down with my back to the wall for once, facing the door, and I left the lamp on, and I didn't think about the next page. I thought about the hood. How it had stood up on its own. How I'd pressed it down, and it had come back up.