Straight to the Water

Elsa Hautala had the coffee made before Kaisa knocked.

It was ten minutes to seven on Sunday morning, grey and still, with mist lying on the lake. The Hautala cabin was the fourth one north of the lodge. A child’s bicycle leaned against the porch rail, with a towel still draped over the handlebars to dry.

“Sit,” Elsa said. “I’m not going to cry, so you can stop looking careful. I cried for a week. Now I just want somebody to ask me a question I haven’t already asked myself.”

She was thirty-eight, a nurse at the hospital in Ely, with brown hair scraped back in a clip and the flat steady voice of a woman who gave bad news for a living. She had been nine years ahead of Kaisa at every gathering, one of the big girls. Her hands shook when she poured.

Kaisa left Tansy lying on the porch and sat down at the kitchen table with her notebook.

“Then I’ll start at the beginning. When did Pia first shift?”

“The full moon. Thursday the twenty-seventh of August.” Elsa sat across from her. “She was right on time. She’d been itchy and bad-tempered for a month, and then it took her out behind the woodshed with half the lake standing round, and she got up on four legs and fell over her own feet. She’s brown. Dark brown, with a lighter mask. She was so proud she wouldn’t shift back till morning.”

“And the week after?”

“She was happy.” Elsa’s voice cracked on the word, and she steadied it. “That’s the thing I keep coming back to. She ate like a wolf and slept like the dead and went on the young ones’ runs. She was full of herself. She was full of secrets too, but she’s twelve. I thought it was a boy.”

Kaisa wrote secrets and put a small box around it.

“Who runs the young ones?”

“Stefan, same as always. He takes the new ones out in the evenings and teaches them their manners. He was out looking for her before I’d finished telling him.”

“Tell me about the Saturday.”

“I worked a day shift. I was home by four. We had supper, and she did the dishes without being asked, which I should have noticed. She went to bed at half past nine. I looked in at six and the bed was empty.” Elsa turned her cup round on the table. “Her nightshirt was on the floor. The back door was shut, and it wasn’t latched.”

“What about her boots? Her jacket?”

“Both still here. So were her phone and her backpack.”

“Any food gone?”

“Not that I could tell.”

“Was the bed slept in?”

Elsa stopped turning the cup. “The covers were pulled back. I don’t know if she slept.”

“So she took off her nightshirt in her room, and she walked out the back door on her own feet and closed it behind her. Then she shifted outside.” Kaisa kept her tone plain. “A wolf can’t work that door handle. She was thinking, Elsa. Nobody carried her out of here, and she didn’t bolt in a panic. Whatever she did, she did it on purpose.”

“Is that better or worse?”

“It’s better for me. I can follow a child who was thinking.”

Elsa looked at her for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, and got up. “You’ll want her room.”

The room was small and smelled of girl and wolf pup. There were swim ribbons on the wall and a jar of lake glass on the sill. Elsa had not changed the bed. Kaisa took a clean bag from her pocket, turned it inside out over her hand like a glove, and drew the pillowcase off the pillow without touching the cloth. She sealed it and wrote the name, the date, and the time on the label.

“That’s all?” Elsa said.

“That’s the best thing in the house. She had her face on it eight hours a night.”

When they came out, there were more people on the porch. Urho Niskanen stood at the bottom of the steps with his arms crossed. Beside him was a thin fair woman of about forty with a boy’s T-shirt folded in her hands. She was holding it too tightly.

“Sanna Niskanen,” Elsa said. “Oskar’s mother.”

“I brought this.” Sanna held out the shirt. “It was on his floor. Stefan said you’d want something.”

“I do. Don’t hand it to me. Drop it in here.” Kaisa held a second bag open, and Sanna dropped it in. “Thank you. That saves me a trip.”

Tansy had got to her feet and was wagging at everyone. Urho looked down at her and then at Kaisa.

“I’ll ask it, since nobody else will,” he said. It was quieter than last night, but it was still Urho. “We put our four best noses on those trails. Now you’re going to do it over with a house pet. And you’re a wolf. Why aren’t you on four legs?”

It was a fair question, and all three of them were waiting for the answer.

“I will be on four legs,” Kaisa said, “at night. I’ll tell you why I split it. Your noses are good, and I’m not saying they aren’t. But every wolf on this lake knows Pia and Oskar and loves them, and they ran those trails frightened, in a bunch, and then they ran the shores. They were looking for the child. I need something that only looks for the scent.” She touched the bag with the pillowcase. “I give Tansy this, and she’ll follow that one smell and nothing else for six hours. She doesn’t get ideas about where a child ought to be. And she’s on a line, so I’m walking behind her on two legs with a map and a pencil, and I can write down everything she does. I can’t do that as a wolf. I’ve got no hands and no voice, and by the time I’ve shifted back I’ve forgotten half of it.”

“She can’t follow a wolf,” Urho said. “A dog can’t.”

“She can follow this one. A person has one scent under both shapes, Mr. Niskanen. Tansy learned that from me when she was ten weeks old.”

Urho grunted. It was not agreement, and he did not argue.

“What’s the night for?” Sanna asked. It was hardly more than a whisper.

“The night is for what daylight can’t give me. In that shape I can smell where a wolf lay up a week ago, and I can hear across water. I’ll go where the dog has told me to go.” Kaisa looked at each of the two mothers. “I won’t promise you anything, because I never do. I’ll tell you what I find when I’m sure of it and not before. That’s going to be hard on you, and I’m sorry. It’s how I work.”

“Hilja said you’d found thirty-eight,” Elsa said.

“Thirty-eight out of sixty-three.”

“I’d rather have the real number,” Elsa said. “Go on. Do it.”

Kaisa clipped the long line to the harness. She knelt, opened the first bag under the dog’s nose, and let her take three deep breaths of it.

“Find her,” she said.

Tansy dropped her head, swung once across the porch boards, and went down the steps.

She did not go toward the lake. Kaisa had half expected the dock, which was fifty yards away in plain sight. The dog went round the back of the cabin and past the woodshed. She cut into the trees and came out on the old footpath that ran north behind the row of cabins. It was a deer trail the children had widened, and Kaisa had walked it a thousand times. Not one window looked onto it.

The scent was fifteen days old, with a quarter inch of rain on top of it. In a dry open field Tansy would have had nothing. Here the path was moss and needles under heavy cedar, shaded all day and damp every night, and the dog worked it slowly, with her nose an inch off the ground and her tail going in a steady flat sweep. Kaisa paid out line and watched her.

A lost child’s trail was a scribble. It went out and back and round a stump and off after a noise. A dog on that kind of trail was forever stopping, casting, and circling a patch where someone had stood and turned and stood again.

Tansy did not circle once. For half a mile the trail ran north as straight as the path allowed. Where the path forked toward the gravel road, the dog passed the fork without lifting her head.

Kaisa made a mark on the map every hundred yards and felt the back of her neck go cold.

They had company. She had seen them at the first bend. They were two of the pack’s noses, on four legs, pacing through the trees thirty yards off the path. The big brindled male she did not know. The rangy tawny female could only be a Lund, with those ears. Stefan must have told them to stay near in case they were wanted. They kept their distance. Whenever Tansy stopped to sneeze and shake her head, they stopped too, and they stood with their heads high and their ears half back. They wore the look of two master carpenters who had been made to watch a child use a hammer.

Tansy noticed them once. She dropped her front end in a play bow and wagged. The brindle turned his face away to study a tree.

“Ignore them,” Kaisa told her. “They’re jealous. Find her.”

The path came down through a stand of cedar to Otter Rock.

It was a ledge of pink granite, twenty feet across, that sloped into the lake at an easy angle and then dropped off into deep water. Kaisa had learned to dive from it. A small point of land to the south hid it from the cabins. Trees came down close on both sides. Out in front lay open water and the far shore, a mile off in the mist.

Tansy trailed down the ledge to the waterline and stopped. She cast left along the edge and then right. She came back up the rock and worked a slow circle on a flat place near the top, round and round, with her nose down. It was the first circling she had done all morning. Then she went back to the water, looked at the lake, looked at Kaisa, and whined.

“I know,” Kaisa said. “Good girl. That’s the end of it.”

She paid the dog with a handful of dried liver and stood on the ledge with her map.

Pia had left her house by the back door. She had taken the one path that nobody could see from a window, and she had not hesitated once in half a mile. At the top of this rock she had stood still, or sat, long enough to leave a pool of scent that a dog could still find after two weeks. Then she had gone to the water’s edge.

Kaisa thought the child had been waiting for something. She thought it, and she did not write it down. She wrote the time, 8:14, and the words straight line, one scent pool at top of ledge, ends at waterline.

The two wolves sat in the cedars and watched her write.
***
The Niskanen house stood behind the lodge. Tansy took Oskar’s trail off the porch at a pull that nearly had Kaisa running.

This one was five days old and strong. It went down the side of the yard, behind the gear sheds with their green doors, and south along the shore away from every cabin. It was the same kind of trail. There was no scribble in it. The boy had kept to bare rock wherever there was any, and Kaisa noted that as well. A thirteen-year-old who walked on rock in the dark was a boy who knew a little about being followed.

A quarter mile south of the lodge the trail came to the old ice house.

Nobody had cut ice on Vaara Lake since before Kaisa was born. The building was a windowless log box with a sagging roof, and the ground around it was still soft with rotted sawdust. Below it a shelf of grey rock ran down into the water, where the blocks had once been hauled up on a ramp. A thick screen of alder had grown up on the lodge side. Standing on the shelf, Kaisa could not see a single roof.

Tansy went to the water and stopped. She cast both ways and came back and sat.

This was the second landing where a boat could come in unseen. One child had walked to hers on a calm clear night, and the other had come here on a dark and windy one. Both had gone straight to the water with nobody chasing them.

“Good girl,” Kaisa said absently, and gave her the liver. Then she got down on her knees at the waterline, because that was where her father would have started.

Wet rock showed nothing. She worked up from the edge a hand’s width at a time, with her cheek near the stone so that the flat morning light would show her any mark. Two feet above the water she found one.

It was a scrape eighteen inches long and no wider than her thumb, running straight up the slope of the shelf. The lichen was scoured off, and the rock under it was pale and clean. It was a fresh mark, a few days or a week old. Something narrow and hard had been run up onto this rock with weight on it, and Kaisa thought of a keel.

Along one side of the scrape there was a faint smear of colour. At the top end, where the mark crossed a crack in the stone, a single flake of paint had caught. It was the size of a lentil. It was deep glossy green.

Kaisa stayed very still, looking at it.

Then she moved, casually, so that her back was to the trees. She took out her phone and photographed the scrape with her pencil beside it for scale. She took tweezers and a small bag from her vest and lifted the flake. She sealed the bag and put it in her inside pocket, and stood up, and stretched like a woman with a stiff back.

The brindle wolf was sitting by the corner of the ice house, forty feet away. He was watching the dog.

She did not know what the flake meant. An aluminum canoe left a silver smear on rock, and every rental canoe at the lodge had been aluminum when she left. This was paint. But she had driven past two towboats and a dozen shed doors last night, all in this same green. Half the pack must own a brush that had been in that can. The flake could have come off an oar, or a boat trailer. It could have come off a rowboat some fisherman had dragged up here to eat his lunch.

It could also have come off the boat that Oskar Niskanen had stepped into on Tuesday night.

She was not going to say so to a frightened old man with a loud voice, or to anyone else. Evidence she did not yet understand stayed in her pocket and in her log. She had been hired from outside. For the first time since Thursday she thought that was a very good place to be standing.

“That’s enough for one morning,” she said aloud, for the wolves to hear, and took her dog back up the shore.
***
She spent the afternoon on Stefan’s lists. They were as careful as he had promised, four pages in a neat sloping hand, and she marked every searched mile of shoreline on her map in pencil. By dusk her eyes ached. She had told her father she would come and walk his shore today, and it was dark now, and she had not gone. She would go tomorrow, after the water.

Guide Cabin 3 was one room with a bunk, a table, and a good stove. Someone had filled the woodbox and left clean sheets before she arrived on Saturday. She had not asked who.

At eleven she sat at the table and wrote her log by lamplight. Under Sunday, Sept. 20 she set down the two trails and the times. She wrote Item 1: paint flake, green, approx. 4 mm, from keel scrape on rock shelf, ice-house landing. Photographed. Not disclosed. She taped the little bag to the page and closed the book on it.

She blew out the lamp and lay down. Tansy turned round three times on the rug and groaned.

Kaisa had not seen him all day, and all day she had known where he was. The thing in her chest had kept track of him without her leave. He had been at the lodge in the morning and on the water for an hour at noon. Since supper he had been forty yards to the east, and he had not moved.

Now she could hear him, too.

The sound came through the wall of the cabin, across the dark between the buildings. It was a long soft rasp, then a pause, then the rasp again. Someone was working a hand plane down a length of cedar. Each stroke ran out smooth to the end and finished with a small lift. He was good at it. She had grown up near enough to that shop to know good work when she heard it.

She turned her phone over. It was twenty past midnight.

A man who was easy in his mind did not plane cedar at twenty past midnight.

Kaisa lay on her back with the heel of her hand pressed under her breastbone and listened to it. In six hours she would get into the bow of a canoe, and he would be behind her where she could not see him, close enough to touch. She told herself that this was a job. Then she thought of the flake of green paint in her logbook, and of two children who had walked straight to the water. Stroke after stroke came through the wall, and she did not sleep.
***