Thursday, 9:15 a.m.
She was out of the truck by the time I reached the yard, standing with one hand flat on the hood as if it might leave without her: a big woman in a canvas coat gone pale at the seams, gray in her hair, a face weathered to the color of a saddle. She was lighting a cigarette off the end of another one. Through the windshield I could see a cardboard tray of gas-station coffee, all four cups empty. I had never seen her in my life, and I would have known her in a crowd of a thousand. She had his chin.
"Stop there," I said.
She stopped, and looked at the pole, and the needle, and me, with forty feet of my own gravel between us.
"You're Hanne."
"Where is he?"
"I was going to ask you that." Her voice came out dry, four hours of cigarettes in it. "Off the boat at four. On the road at five. Came out of the dead country at the county line and my phone went off like a slot machine. Your message. Your message again. Nothing from him. You said he was going to ask someone. Ask who?"
"You."
"Me what?"
"He thinks it's you. Or somebody you've told. Someone has been on my phone since Tuesday night saying they have him." I heard how it sounded and kept the needle up. "There was an engine behind your voicemail."
"There's always an engine behind my voicemail. It's a tug." She took a step and I moved the pole, and she stopped. "The Inga R., forty-two feet of diesel and a barge of road salt, and I was on her from Tuesday noon until four this morning with a deckhand named Petey and a cook who'll swear to it. Mid-lake at midnight, I wrote you two lines. That's Cal. Don't tell him I asked. You think I'd write that if I had him?"
"Why the second one?"
"Because I hadn't laid eyes on him in twenty-four years, and I asked his wife for a picture like I was asking to have somebody identified, and I'd sooner have cut off my hand than let him know." She wiped her mouth with the back of a wrist. "That isn't somebody who has him. That's a coward."
Her hands were shaking and the nails were bitten to the quick, and she wasn't lying.
"What did Cal say?"
"That there was a girl. Twenty-five years ago this March. Her name was Wren."
The cigarette stopped halfway to her mouth.
"He told you her name."
"He said it in his sleep."
"Christ," said Dagny Reeve. She looked at the barn, and the sky over it, and then, finally, past the needle to my face. She put the cigarette out on her boot heel and dropped the butt into her pocket. "You've somewhere to be."
"Noon. I don't know where."
I lowered the pole.
"Then walk," she said. "I'll talk while you do."
* The mudroom. The foal box lives on the shelf above the boot rack, an orange tackle box with a red cross on the lid: a bag-valve mask, rinsed and hung again, two sizes of tube, a bulb syringe, a laminated card in my own hand. I took it down. I took the wool blanket off the peg beside it and stood the pole in the corner behind the boot rack, and Dagny stood in the door with her hands in her jacket and looked at my kitchen. The table. The eleven cards in their years.
"He never opened them," she said.
"I did. I'm sorry."
"Don't be." She didn't look away from them. "A March. Three days of thaw, in the fifties, everybody half out of their minds with it. Party at a cabin on the north shore. Cal was nineteen. Four, five beers, and Wren was with him. Everybody told him not to. Ice over the old channel was rotten, you could hear it. He took Dad's truck. Dad was two years dead. Said it was a shortcut."
I had the lid up and my hand on the mask. I closed it.
"Go on."
"Not in here," she said, and went out ahead of me into the light.
* My truck stood where I'd left it. I laid the foal box on the seat and the blanket on top and moved the Antisedan, the half-empty vial, and a fresh syringe from my jacket to my breast pocket, next to the pen. Dagny leaned on the fender and watched my hands.
"Eleven fifty-two," she said. "Call came in. There's a tape. The truck went through the channel. Cab filled in under a minute. He got out the driver's window. Glass laid his lip open."
"A fence rail," I said. "That's what he told me."
Something came out of her, short and ugly.
"He went back down. Twice. The second time he got his hand on her door handle and it wouldn't turn. When the divers got the truck up, his blood was on the handle. The inside of it. That's how they knew."
The Antisedan was cold through my shirt. I stood with my hand over the pocket. If you ever go in. The window. Not the door. It had come out of him once, at a kitchen tap, in one sentence, with the water running.
I went into the barn, and she came after me with her hands in her pockets.
* The aisle was cool and dim after the yard, and it smelled of horse and shavings and the long night. Pilot swung her head over her door and looked at me. Beside her, Rook shifted in his stall and blew through his nose.
"Every hour," Dagny said, behind me. "On the radio, on the ice, every hour, the same thing. Has she been found yet. I was twenty-three. I had the loudest voice on the shore, so they gave me the handset. I was the one saying it. Friday midnight to Sunday noon, and every hour the dispatcher said no."
I took the halter down from the nail and took my time about it.
"Her father stood on the ice road the whole time." She had come up beside me. "Dr. Tessier. The dentist. Everybody called him Dr. T. Thirty-six hours in the same dark coat, and I never once saw him sit down."
Dr. T. The fourth card, on the table in my kitchen.
"Noon Sunday," Dagny said, "they brought her up. He knew her by her teeth. She was missing two in the back, two that never grew. She had baby teeth in there yet. He was going to fix them that summer." She rubbed her face. "He said so, right there on the shore, to a cop. Not to anyone. I was going to fix her teeth."
Retained lower baby molars. No premolars forming beneath them.
I had held those films to my own bedroom light. I had laid them on my husband's sleeping jaw.
"There was a picture," I said. "April, 2001. Callum on some stone steps. The caller sent it to me, and it was backward."
Dagny went still. Then she took her wallet out of her back pocket, a fat old thing, cracked at the fold, and opened it on the shelf by the feed-room door and took from behind her license a square of newsprint folded into eighths. It was soft as cloth. She opened it a crease at a time, holding her breath, and laid it flat on the shelf beside the thermos and the udder balm.
KETTLE COUNTY RECORD, and the date at the top, April 2001. Halftone dots gone gold. A young man on some stone steps with his head down and his mouth set, a building behind him, a sign with its letters all the right way round.
The part in his hair was on the left. The bend of his nose went the way his nose goes. The scar showed on the left side of his lip, a bright thread through the dots.
It was the picture the caller had sent me, the right way round this time, and whole. They hadn't only flipped him. They had cut him off at the right-hand edge.
Beside him, close enough to touch him, stood a man in a dark wool coat. Not cropped. A tall man, forty-six or seven, with a long jaw and a long upper lip, his head thrust forward on his neck, looking at the boy at his side with no expression at all.
I had watched that head bend over Pilot's near fore. I had watched it yesterday afternoon, in this aisle, with a canvas cap held against its chest.
"That's him," Dagny said. "Behind Cal. The day of the inquest. He said it to Cal on those steps, standing that close, and the reporter got it. I hope you live a long, long time."
"That's Paul Aubrey."
"Who?"
"Paul Aubrey. He's had a mare in my barn since Tuesday."
"Aubrey," Dagny said slowly. "That was his middle name. Paul Aubrey Tessier, D.D.S. It was on the door." She flattened the paper with the side of her hand. "Somebody at the post office two springs back said an old man had been asking for Cal's address. A polite one. A friend from home. And I knew who. I said nothing. I wrote a card." She looked at me. "A card, Hanne. And in May the parish newsletter from home had him on the sick list. Pancreas. No treatment, by his own wish. I read that on the boat and thought, well, that's the end of it."
"He told me that himself," I said. "Yesterday. Standing where you are."
My legs went, not all at once; I felt them decide. I sat down on the upturned bucket by the feed-room door with my hands hanging between my knees, and the aisle went on around me, the shavings and the mare and a fly working at the window glass.
He had stood on that spot with his cap in his hands and told me he was dying as if it were a small thing he'd been meaning to mention. He had asked me for a stall. And I had liked him so much that I'd stood in my own barn with the whole of it in my mouth, the stair and the voice and the cards, ready to hand it to him.
"No," I said. "He was on the road with me last night. When it called. He had the pony on one rope and the paint on the other, ten feet from me, and I could hear him talking to them in my other ear while it was talking in this one."
Dagny didn't argue. She waited, as you wait on someone coming round.
It had talked over me. On the road, at twenty to nine, for the first and only time, the voice had talked straight over the top of me, and I had thought it had heard enough. It hadn't heard anything, because a recording can't.
I knew how, because I pay for one every month. The calling service rings three hundred of my clients in Marit's voice at whatever hour she sets, from a computer somewhere in Minneapolis, and it shows them whatever number the account holds, ours for us, and it goes right on talking whatever they say to it. You say it once into a phone. You pick the hour. Then you go and stand in the road with a rope in each hand, where the one woman who matters can see you. I apologized to a recording for the best part of a minute, he'd said to me in this aisle, and I had laughed.
"He rang Osric," I said. "After. So I wouldn't be on my own."
Dagny crouched in front of me, her knees cracking, and put one hard brown hand on my wrist and left it there.
"Hanne. Where's my brother."
I stood up, and Pilot put her nose over the door between us and blew. Her pupils were still wide, black edge to edge in the brown, and I had told myself on Tuesday night it was the lamp. I've taught that pattern to students. Atropine, and not much of it: enough to stop a gut and open an eye and leave the heart alone, a dose worked out by someone who knew to the tenth of a milliliter what eleven hundred pounds of old mare would stand. I'd have drawn it that carefully myself. And Tuesday night I'd been on my knees in that stall for the better part of an hour with the lamp in my eyes, and my truck had stood in the yard with the box on it, and a man who had just unloaded a mare had all the time in the world and nobody watching.
Her papers were on the shelf past the udder balm, where I'd put them at ten on Tuesday night and not touched them since, a manila folder he'd handed me at the trailer. In it were her Coggins, a laminated care sheet for her feed and her feet, and a white envelope, sealed, with my name on it. I tore it along the end.
If anything happens to me, Dr. Sorley will know what to do with her.
Neat, upright block capitals, small as print. He had asked me yesterday, with his cap in his hands, as though the answer were still mine to give. It had been sealed in her papers since Tuesday night. Dagny read it over my arm and didn't say a word.
"The caller knew where your mother's photographs went," I said.
"The burn barrel." She didn't have to think. "The summer after. He carried Ma's shoeboxes out and burned every one with his face in it, and she stood there in her apron and let him. Nobody knew that but me and Cal."
"Then Cal told him."
Her mouth went thin. "He'd have told the one man he thought had a right to hear it," she said. "That's Cal."
"He has him," I said. "He said noon."
"Where?"
"I don't know where. The water. That's all I have." I folded the clipping along its old creases, and my hands did it without me, gently, and I gave it back to her. "Oh-three-one-one. It's the number on his phone. The eleventh. Noon."
"The day they brought her up," said Dagny.
She was already pulling herself up straight. Something went out of her face as I watched, and behind it were the hard bones of someone who had been ready for twenty-five years to walk out onto ice.
"Dr. Sorley."
Emil Tiede stood in the aisle door with the light behind him, hatless, out of breath, a green notebook held against his chest in both hands like a hymnal. He had crossed the road at a run, at seventy-one, and it had cost him.
"You went before I could show you," he said. "The bandsaw. He came through on the thing on my windowsill. The first winter I had it, a man was breathing in my kitchen in the middle of the night, with a little click at the top of each breath, and I turned it off. Yesterday afternoon he came back, on a couch, and you moving about, and I sat and listened the better part of an hour." He looked at the floor of my aisle. "I've been a widower three years. It's a great deal of company, a man breathing. I'm ashamed of it."
"What's in the book, Emil?"
"What stops where nothing has business. A culvert. A mailbox. A gate." He opened it with his thumb and held it out, and I read it standing next to my mare, in his small upright printing, one day to a page.
Tuesday the sixteenth, 11:31 PM. Pickup at Sorley culvert, lights off. Departed north, 12:07.
Wednesday the seventeenth, 7:58 PM. Silver pickup, big, T on the grille, at Sorley pasture gate. Departed south, 8:14.
8:37 PM. Same, back from the south. Stopped on road. Horses out.
Under Thursday, the culvert again at half past twelve, and Callum's truck going north at five past four.
"At eight, while you sat in my kitchen with my shortbread," Tiede said. "I saw it from the sink. Sixteen minutes at your gate, and I took him for a client come to see to a horse. Then back inside the half hour, from the south, with a rope." His finger shook on the page. "I saw him catch your pony from my front window. I thought, what a kind man."
"So did I."
"Emil. Don't call anyone. Not the sheriff. Not anyone."
"My dear. I have listened to your house for three days." His mouth did something rueful. "I am extremely good at not saying things."
He backed out of the aisle door as if leaving a church, and then his shoes broke into a trot on the gravel.
"His place is on Sawlog Lake," I said, and opened the stall.