One Roof

The heater under the window of room 6 knocked all night, and Kaisa lay under the brown cover and listened to it.

She had spent Sunday afternoon over the map and learned nothing new from it. At dusk she had rolled it up, eaten a gas-station sandwich, and gone to bed in her clothes. On Monday morning she walked the dog down Sheridan Street in a hard frost. The sign on the bank said 7:10 and 24 degrees. The outfitter two blocks down had canoes chained to a rack and a card in the door that gave its October hours: closed Sunday and Monday, open Tuesday at nine. Under the card a paper sign listed what could still be rented. She read it without interest and went back to the room.

The eighteen thousand dollars lay on the table, where she had left it. The truck was packed, and nothing kept her in Ely but the three nights she had paid for.

At twenty to ten her phone rang. The area code was 406.

“You’re alive,” Naomi Whitcomb said. “Good. That saves me a form.”

“I’m alive.”

“You said a month. It’s been a month and two days, and I’ve been very patient, so now I’m going to be a nuisance. Have you got a minute?”

“I’ve got a lot of them.”

Naomi heard that and let it go by. In Whitefish it was twenty to nine, and she would have been at her desk for an hour, with her glasses pushed up into her hair.

“The commissioners moved the meeting up to Wednesday the fourth. That changes nothing for you. I still need your answer by Monday the second. But I had a call on Friday from a handler in Missoula who’s heard about the position. He’s got two certified dogs and a master’s degree, and he wants me to know he’s available.”

“Is he any good?”

“He’s fine. He starts at the top of the drainage with everybody else.” Paper moved on Naomi’s end. “I’m not telling you to hurry. I’m telling you there’s a man standing behind you in the line. I had three callouts while you were gone, Kaisa. We found two. The third was a hunter up Stryker Ridge, and I put the dogs where I guessed, and I guessed wrong for a day and a half. He lost four toes. I kept thinking that you’d have told me where the air was going.”

Kaisa sat down on the edge of the bed. Tansy put her chin on the cover beside her.

She could see all of it from where she sat. There were the two rooms over the garage, and somebody else’s horses. There was a desk with a budget, and a hay field with six volunteers in it learning to watch the wind. It was sixty-eight thousand dollars a year, in a county that had never once struck anyone’s name from anything. The people there were glad when she drove in.

She could be there on Wednesday night. She had done the drive in two days with a worse reason.

“Naomi,” she said.

“Yes?”

Her mouth was open. The word was in it, and it was a short word. She had been put off a piece of ground in front of a hundred people, for the second time. The man who did it had stood beside her truck and told her why, and he had believed every word of it. Nobody could have blamed her for saying it.

“Did you find them?” Naomi asked. “The two kids.”

Kaisa shut her mouth.

“No,” she said after a moment. “There are three now.”

“Three.”

“A third one went last week. He’s twelve.”

“And you’re still looking.”

“The contract ended yesterday. They paid me in full.”

“That isn’t what I asked you.” Naomi’s voice was dry and not unkind. “I’ve sent you out sixty-three times. I’ve had you come back with nothing, and I’ve had you come back with bad news. I have never had you come back while somebody was still out there. I had to order you off Bald Mountain in a lightning storm, and you argued with me over the radio for ten minutes.”

“Eight.”

“It was ten, because I logged it. So tell me where you are.”

“In a motel. Nineteen miles from where I ought to be.”

“Why?”

“Because somebody decided I’d be safer here.”

“Huh,” Naomi said. She thought about it, as she always did. “Did they ask you?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m asking. Do you want the job? You can say yes this minute and I’ll have the paperwork on your kitchen table by the time you’re home. Or you can say you’ll tell me on the second. Those are the two things I’m able to hear this morning. I won’t take a yes from a woman in a motel if she’s only saying it because she’s angry at somebody else.”

Kaisa looked at the map tube leaning in the corner by the door.

“I’ll tell you by the second,” she said.

“On the Sunday night, I suppose.”

“Probably.”

“Go find your three, then. And Kaisa, whoever decided for you...” Naomi stopped. “No. It’s none of my business. Check in when you’re out of the woods. I mean that literally.”

She hung up. Kaisa held the phone a while longer. Her hand was not quite steady, and the dog was the only one there to see it.

“That was close,” she told her.

Tansy thumped her tail once.

Kaisa got up, took the tube from the corner, and unrolled the pencilled sheet on the bed again. She weighted the corners with her boots, the logbook and the motel’s glass ashtray. Then she knelt on the carpet beside it with a pencil and the notepad from the nightstand.

She had never walked off a search with a child still out. This time there were three, and a front was coming on Thursday. She had her own hours now and nobody’s leave to ask.

“All right,” she said aloud. “I’m done looking for where they are. Tell me what he does next.”

She began with what she had, as she would have begun with any trail. On the notepad she wrote the three camps down the left side, and across the top she wrote what she had found at each.

Kettle Island had a shelf to land on at the south end, and the bed was on the southeast side, behind a boulder. At Tern Rock the fish slick lay off the south end and the hollows were in a crack no shore could see. The pocket on Burnt Point was walled on three sides and open to the south. She put a tick in each square. Every one of the three had its landing on the south, and at every one the northwest wind went over the top. That was the wind that had blown on four days out of five since the middle of September.

“He isn’t choosing them the way a pup would,” she said to the dog. “A pup lies down where it’s soft. He’s choosing them like a man who’s sat out weather in a boat. He wants his back to the northwest and a place to come in from the south where nobody upwind hears him.”

She laid her pencil along the line she had ruled in the canoe shop a week ago. It ran from Hirvi to Sumu to the west bay of Ukonvesi, and it went northeast every time, and each step was longer than the last.

Then she sat back on her heels and thought about Stefan Zalar.

She had spent five days hating him, and it had told her nothing. She put it aside now as she would have put aside a volunteer’s opinion. What had he actually done?

He had carried pasties to an island, in foil, more than once. On a point with no firewood he had built a fire ring out of eight stones, and he had set a flat one at the back to throw the heat forward onto a boy with no clothes. A man who wanted a child hurt did not bother about where the heat went. He had sat on a drift log half the night and talked to that boy. Before any of it, he had stood for thirty years in the current below the stones at a creek crossing, so that somebody else’s children would fetch up against him if they slipped.

He was not cruel. She was nearly sure of that, and it frightened her more than cruelty would have. A cruel man would have been simple to predict.

“He’s cornered,” she said. “He hid two, and it was meant to be over by now, whatever it was. Then I turned up. Then the glove went wrong in front of forty people. He took a third, so that somebody would have to be blamed, and it worked. Now he’s got my father under a hasp and me in a motel, and he’s still got three children on a rock that he can’t bring home without saying where they were.”

She wrote THU 22 on the notepad and drew a box round it.

On Thursday there would be snow and wind and a low of nineteen degrees. Pia would be all right in it, and that was the cruel part. She had a wolf’s coat, and she no longer missed anything else. Mikko could stay on four legs and be cold and frightened. But Oskar was the one who carried the orders, and to hear them he had to stand up on two bare feet. A thirteen-year-old could not do that on open ledge in blowing snow for longer than it took to say a sentence. A fire would not do it either. On a rock the wind took a fire apart.

“So what does he need?” she asked. The dog raised her head. “He doesn’t want them dead. Suppose he wants them alive and able to listen for six more days, until the moon. A lee and a perch bed won’t do that for him. He needs walls and a roof. What else would?”

She looked at the map. Her line ran up the long body of Ukonvesi and off the top corner of the paper onto the bedspread.

She knew the lake went on. She had known it in the canoe shop, when Anders said six more miles and islands. She had been thinking of beds in moss then. She had not been thinking of roofs, because nobody in his right mind built anything out there.

Somebody had, though, once.

It came back to her whole, with the weather in it. It was the August she was ten. Her father had finished the hiding game with that summer’s pups, and no search had come in for two weeks. He had put her in the bow and gone north for three days with a tarp and a frying pan. On the second afternoon they crossed a mile of open water toward an island with tall red pines on it, and he ran the canoe into a notch on its south side, where the rock made a cove the size of a kitchen.

“Ukko Island,” he had said. “Come and see something.”

It stood forty steps up from the cove, in the pines. The logs were black with age and the door was low. The roof was cedar shakes, with a strip of tarpaper along the ridge. Inside there was a rusted tin stove, a pole bunk, and a window with no glass. A date was cut into the lintel with a knife, and she had read it out to him. It said 1931.

“A trapper built it. He was nobody’s friend, and he’s long dead,” Reino had said. “The old men keep the roof up. Stefan Zalar and I waited out a three-day blow under it once, before you were born. A tracker should know every roof within three days of home, standing or fallen. Some night somebody’s going to need it.”

He had taken her round to the north side then and pointed across the water. There was a line of dark shore half a mile off.

“That’s Canada,” he had said. “Don’t swim to it.”

Kaisa stayed still on the motel carpet with the pencil in her hand.

It was thirteen miles from the lodge, and six down Ukonvesi from the Step Portage. The island was too far out for a wolf on the mainland to wind, and the cove was on the south side. It was the next step northeast along a line she had drawn herself, and it had four walls and a stove.

“He knows it,” she said. “He slept in it.”

She did not write it on the notepad. She got her jacket and walked to the gas station on the corner. They kept a wire rack of canoe-country maps by the register, the waterproof kind, and she paid fourteen dollars for the sheet that showed the whole of Ukonvesi. Back in room 6 she laid it over the top of her own map and matched the shorelines.

The island was there, with its name beside it in small type. A dot of an island lay three hundred yards east of it, called Little Ukko. She set the pencil on her three crosses and ran the line on. It passed a hair west of the big island. She had seldom had a guess land as close as that.

“That’s where I’d be,” she said. “On Thursday night, with three children and a conscience. I’d be under that roof.”

She made herself try to knock it down. He might bring them home instead. If he did, they were safe, and she had lost nothing but a day’s paddle. He might have another roof, one she didn’t know. Her father would have known it, and he had shown her only this one. Or Pia might refuse to go under a roof at all. That one was real, and she wrote it in the logbook. A girl who had moved the length of a point away from a fire might not follow a boy through a door. If so, she would be lying up somewhere on the same island in the open, and that was still one island instead of six miles of them.

It held. She went over it twice more and could not make it fall.

Then she looked at the bottom of the map.

The pack’s ground was the south and east shores of Vaara Lake. Her father had said so through an inch and a half of plank, with Eino Saari ten feet away studying the water. He had called it a small piece of country when you looked at it on a map. She had understood then that he was telling her something, and she had been too angry to work out what.

Everything the pack used ran north from its own dock. Nobody on Vaara went to Ukonvesi any other way, because they had no need to. But the gas-station map showed the whole county. Six miles beyond the Vaara turnoff, a spur left the Fernberg Road and ended at a public landing on Moose Lake. From there a chain of small water went northwest, with two portages marked in red, and came out through a narrows into the east side of Ukonvesi. She walked it off with the pencil against the scale. It was about eight miles from the landing to the island, and not a yard of it was Vaara land.

“Thank you, Isä,” she said.

The rest was a list, and she was good at lists.

She needed a boat. The paper sign in the outfitter’s door had offered Kevlar solo canoes at thirty-two pounds. She could carry that over two portages with a pack on her back and never set it down. It would hold her, a forty-pound dog and four days of food. She would be at that door when it opened at nine tomorrow.

Tomorrow was no good for starting, though. By the time she had the canoe on the truck and had driven out, it would be noon. She would be making a mile of open crossing at dusk toward an island where a man might be sitting with his lantern out. She would not do that to the dog or to herself. On Wednesday at first light she would have ten hours of day and a cold calm, and the front would still be a full day behind her.

She would be alone in the boat. On her first night in the council lodge she had said she could not paddle stern, work a dog, and read a shoreline all at once, and it had been true. This time there would be no shore to read. She knew where she was going.

She did not think about the best paddler on the lake. She found she had to keep not thinking about him.

In the afternoon she bought food, a second headlamp, and a box of the wooden kitchen matches. She paid with a hundred-dollar bill from the bank envelope and took a small sour pleasure in it. She checked every buckle on Tansy’s harness. She filled the thermos and set it by the door.

There was one thing left. No searcher went into the bush without telling somebody where, and she had taught that to six volunteers in a hay field. If she went through the ice on a portage pond, someone had to know which pond.

She could not tell her father, and she would not tell the council. She had no intention of telling Anders.

Britta had put her own number into Kaisa’s phone on the thirteenth, for the night watches. Kaisa sat on the bed and wrote a message that ran to nine lines. She deleted it. She wrote four lines and deleted those. A person reading it ought to be able to tell at once where she was, and when, and why, and ought not to be able to read anything else into it.

Ukko Island. Going in Wednesday. For the kids.

She looked at the last three words for a while. They were true, and Britta could show them to anyone she liked.

She sent it.

The heater knocked. Out on Sheridan Street a truck went by with a deer in the back. She had the gas-station map folded to the right panel and her boots by the bed when the phone buzzed against the table.

Good, Britta had written. Take matches.

Kaisa laughed, once, out loud, and it surprised the dog.

She set the alarm for five. Under her breastbone the pull lay due east, toward a lake and a man, as steady as it had been all day. On Wednesday she would be going northeast. She checked the two bearings against the map, to be sure they were different, and turned out the light.
***