Ishmael sat inside for a brief time with his coat wrapped tightly around him. He listened to the world turned silent by the snow; there was absolutely nothing to hear. The silence of the world roared steadily in his ears while he came to recognize that he did not belong here, he had no place in the tree any longer. Some much younger people should find this tree, hold to it tightly as their deepest secret, as he and Hatsue had. For them it might stave off what he could not help but see with clarity: that the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty.
He got up and walked and came out of the woods and into the Imadas’ fields. The way was clear between the rows of buried strawberries and he followed it with the starlight striking off the snow, bathing everything in an aqueous light. And finally he was on the Imadas’ porch and then in the Imadas’ living room, sitting with Hatsue and her mother and father where he had never been before. Hatsue sat beside him, just beside him, close, wearing a nightgown and her father’s old bathrobe, her hair awash in light along her back, falling in cascades around her hips, and he reached into his pocket and unfolded the notes Philip Milholland had written on September 16, and Ishmael explained what the shorthand meant and why he had come at ten-thirty in the night to speak to her after all these years.
32
There was no way to call Lew Fielding with the news because the phones were all dead along South Beach. So the four of them, cups of green tea in hand, the barrel stove murmuring and clicking in its corner, spoke quietly about the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto, which was for them the only subject possible, as it had been for many days. It was late now, the room very warm, the world outside frozen and bathed in starlight, and Ishmael told Hatsue and Hisao and Fujiko that as a reporter who had covered the courthouse in Seattle he felt comfortable offering a present conjecture: that Philip Milholland’s notes would force Judge Fielding to call for retrying the case. That the judge would declare a mistrial.
Hatsue recalled that in the course of his testimony the sheriff had described finding a coffee cup – tipped on its side, the sheriff had explained – on the floor of Carl Heine’s cabin. It meant, she said, that Carl’s gill-netting boat had been rocked by a freighter in the middle of the night – something had knocked that coffee cup down, and since Carl had never picked it up it had-to be that the very same something had knocked him down as well. It had to be, she repeated. Her husband’s case should be thrown out.
Spilled coffee didn’t really prove very much, Fujiko urged her daughter to see. Hisao shook his head in agreement. There had to be more than spilled coffee, he said. Kabuo was facing something very large. He would need more than a coffee cup tipped onto its side to get him out of jail.
Fujiko refilled Ishmael’s teacup carefully and asked how his mother was faring. She said she had always thought highly of his family. She complimented Ishmael on the quality of his newspaper. She brought a plate of butter cookies and pleaded with him to eat one. Finally Hatsue’s baby began to whimper – they could hear him plainly from one of the back rooms – and Fujiko disappeared.
Just after midnight Ishmael took his leave, shaking hands with Hisao and thanking him for the tea and asking him to thank Fujiko, too. Then he went out. Hatsue followed him onto the porch, wearing rubber boots and her father’s old bathrobe, her hands deep in her pockets now, the fog of her breath streaming out of her mouth and billowing over her nose and cheeks. ‘Ishmael,’ she said. ‘I’m grateful.’
‘Look,’ he replied. ‘When you’re old and thinking back on things, I hope you’ll remember me just a little. I – ’
‘Yes,’ said Hatsue. ‘I will.’
She moved closer then, and with her hands still buried deep in her pockets kissed him so softly it was like a whisper against his cheekbone. ‘Find someone to marry,’ she said to him. ‘Have children, Ishmael. Live.’
In the morning his mother roused him at six-fifty, saying that the wife of the accused man was here, waiting for him in the kitchen. Ishmael got up and splashed cold water against his face and put on his clothes and brushed his teeth. When he came down his mother was standing by the cookstove and Hatsue was at the table sipping coffee, and when he saw her he remembered once again how softly she had kissed him the night before. ‘Do you want me to leave?’ his mother asked from her place in front of the woodstove. ‘I’ll leave, of course, so you can talk.’
‘We’ll go in the study,’ answered Ishmael. ‘Why don’t we try the study, Mrs. Miyamoto? Why don’t we go in there?’
‘Take your coffee,’ his mother suggested. ‘I’ll top it off for you first.’
They made their way to the study, Ishmael leading. The first light of morning – a wintry orange hue dappling the sky – appeared high and far in the distance above the salt water, faint beyond the leaded windows. The rhododendrons were all loaded down with snow; icicles hung from the eaves. Everything looked seized by a white stillness.
Hatsue had plaited her hair into a long braid, glistening, dark, and thick. She wore a thick-ribbed woolen sweater, a pair of navy dungarees, and a pair of calf-high fisherman’s boots, and she stood now looking at the portrait of Arthur from long ago, in his logging days. ‘You look just like him,’ she said to Ishmael. ‘I always thought you looked like your father – the eyes especially.’
‘You didn’t walk over here in the dark and snow just to tell me that,’ answered Ishmael. ‘What do you have on your mind?’
‘I thought about it all night,’ said Hatsue. ‘Do you remember when my husband testified? He said that Carl had a lantern up. A kerosene lantern lashed to his mast. That he’d put it there because his lights weren’t working. He’d lashed a hand-held kerosene lantern high up on his mast.’
Hatsue rubbed her hands together, then separated them again, lightly. ‘My idea,’ she said to Ishmael, ‘is that if that lantern’s still up there, right now, wouldn’t it mean his batteries really were dead? Supposing you looked up Carl’s mast and saw a kerosene lantern lashed up there, just like Kabuo said. Wouldn’t that tell you something? That his lights were out and he’d lashed up a lantern as a sort of emergency measure? Don’t you think that would prove something?’
Ishmael sat down on the edge of his father’s desk, scratched his chin, and thought about it. Art Moran’s report, the way he recalled it, hadn’t said a word about a kerosene lantern lashed up high in Carl’s mast, but on the other hand Art could have missed it. Such a thing was possible. At any rate, it was worth finding out.
‘All right,’ said Ishmael. ‘Let’s go into town. Let’s go in and have a look.’
They took the DeSoto over snow-dazzled roads decorated with cracked and fallen branches and with the green twigs of cedars and hemlocks. The storm had passed and on the west side of Lundgren Road five children stood at the crest of the hill with sleds and inner tubes at their feet, looking down at the run-out below, a bowl surrounded by slender alder trees and a thicket of low bare vine maple. Ishmael turned west on Indian Knob Hill Road, and they passed the Masuis’ strawberry fields and then the Thorsens’ milk cow barn and Patsy Larsen’s chicken houses. Hatsue sat with her mittens in her lap and her hands held close to the car heater. ‘We ought to go to see my husband first,’ she said. ‘We ought to tell him what’s going on. I want to show him the coast guard notes.’
‘The jury reconvenes at eight,’ answered Ishmael. ‘If we can get a look at Carl’s boat first, we can go to the courthouse with everything. We can put a stop to the whole business. We can end it all,’ he said.
She was silent for a long time, watching him. She looked at him closely and pulled her braid down over her shoulder so that it lay against the front of her sweater. ‘You knew about that freighter,’ she said finally. ‘It wasn’t something new, was it.’
‘A day,’ answered Ishmael. ‘I sat on it for a day. I didn’t know what I should do.’
She said nothing in the face of this and he turned toward her silence to see what it might mean. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s inexcu
sable.’
‘I understand it,’ answered Hatsue.
She nodded and rubbed her hands together, then looked out at the sun-dappled snow. ‘Everything looks so pure,’ she said. ‘It’s so beautiful today.’
‘Yes, it is,’ agreed Ishmael.
At the sheriff’s office in Amity Harbor they found Art Moran hunched down at his desk beside an electric heater. When Art saw the two of them come through the door, he dropped his pen at the edge of his desk blotter and stood and covered his eyes with his hands. ‘Wait a minute, let me guess,’ he said. ‘You people are on a mission.’
Hatsue brought out the coast guard notes and, smoothing them down with the palm of her hand, laid them in the center of his desk.
‘Mr. Chambers discovered these,’ she said. ‘He brought these to me last night.’
‘And?’
‘A freighter out there,’ said Ishmael. ‘The night Carl Heine died, a freighter came through Ship Channel Bank, just like – ’
‘You playing detective?’ Art said. ‘You trying to be Sherlock Holmes? We got the mooring rope and that fishing gaff with Carl’s blood on it – those things speak for themselves, don’t they? What else does a body need?’
‘Look, Art,’ Ishmael answered. ‘I suggest that if you’re capable of reading shorthand you take a look at those notes there. I think they ought to make you consider at least going down to take another look at Carl’s boat, okay? See if there’s anything that’s been missed, Art. In light of what’s on your desk there.’
Art nodded. He nodded at Hatsue, too, for just a moment, and then he sat down beside the electric heater again and took the coast guard notes between his fingers. ‘I kin read shorthand,’ he said.
He was in the middle of reading the notes to himself, Ishmael and Hatsue watching him, when Abel Martinson came through the door in a pair of knee-high logger’s caulk boots and a military issue polar parka, its fur-lined hood pulled tight around his head, his nose and chin a deep red. ‘The phones are up,’ he announced to the sheriff. ‘They just got ’em up, about half the island. Town’s got phones and south from there, all the way out to the lighthouse.’
‘Listen,’ replied the sheriff. ‘Listen here, Abel. We’re going down to Beason’s Cannery dock, to Sommensen’s warehouse, okay? You, me, Ishmael here, the lady’ll wait at the cafe or something, get herself a breakfast. Can you get yourself a breakfast or something? ‘Cause you’re a little too close to all of this. You’re a little too close to this already. I don’t like the smell of it, okay?’
‘It’s me,’ said Ishmael. ‘It isn’t her. This comes from me all the way.’
‘Just the same,’ said Art Moran. ‘Go get yourself some eggs, Mrs. Miyamoto. Read the papers, maybe.’
Abel blew his warm breath against the lock before opening Sommensen’s warehouse – a mildewed barn built of creosoted timbers, put up more than fifty years earlier. Even in the snowstorm it smelled of salt and tar and more faintly of diesel fuel and rotting lumber. Its sea doors opened onto the harbor so that boats could motor in and then out again once repairs were made. Its tin roof kept island rains out; with its two hoists, scaffolding, and wide-elbowed piers, it was a good place to overhaul a boat in winter. For the past two and a half months the sheriff’s department had rented it from Arve Sommensen for the purpose of sequestering the Susan Marie and the Islander in berths side by side. It had been padlocked and on occasion patrolled by Abel Martinson, who kept the key in his pocket. Nothing, he insisted, had been tampered with. The boats had sat in the warehouse untouched since the seventeenth of September.
Abel opened the sea doors wide and a gray light flooded in. Ishmael looked immediately at the Susan Marie’s mast and then all along her cross spar. No lantern hung anywhere.
They went into Carl Heine’s cabin. Ishmael stood in the doorway looking out while the sheriff ran a flashlight across everything – the cased sausage beside the binnacle, the short bunk, the ship’s wheel, the battery well. ‘You know,’ said Ishmael, ‘when you were testifying, Art, you mentioned a coffee cup on the floor here, remember? Where was that exactly, the coffee cup? Do you remember exactly where it was?’
‘I picked it up,’ said Abel Martinson. ‘It was right there, in the middle of the floor.’
‘Everything else was neat and clean? Just the cup, that’s all?’
‘Like you see it,’ said Abel. ‘We didn’t change anything – just the cup. I picked it up; a habit, I guess. Something’s on the floor, a mess, I pick it up. Can’t help myself.’
‘Next time, help yourself,’ said Art Moran. ‘You’re making a sheriff’s investigation, don’t change anything a-tall.’
‘Okay,’ answered Abel. ‘I won’t.’
‘The cup,’ said Ishmael. ‘A cup on the floor. Doesn’t it suggest this boat got waked? Don’t you – ’
‘There’s no other evidence,’ cut in Art Moran. ‘A guy gets waked hard enough to go overboard, you’d expect maybe more ’n a coffee cup on the floor. Everything’s so neat and clean.’
They went out and stood just to port of the cabin door while Ishmael maneuvered a flashlight beam up and down the mast. ‘You remember that business about the lantern?’ said Ishmael. ‘How Carl hung a lantern up there? Did you guys take that down?’
‘Hold your flashlight still,’ answered Abel. ‘Just above the cross spar. There.’
He shone his own flashlight upward then, so that two beams shone against the mast now. There were cut lashings of net twine visible there, loose ends dangling, ten or twenty figure eights, cut through cleanly on an angle.
‘That’s where his lantern was hung,’ said Ishmael. ‘He’d hung a lantern up there, lashed it up, because all his lights were dead. That’s where Carl hung his lantern.’
‘We never took no lantern down,’ said Art. ‘What are you talking about?’
Abel Martinson hoisted himself on top of the cabin, propped one foot against the cowling, and shone his flashlight upward one more time. ‘Mr. Chambers is right,’ he said.
‘Listen,’ said the sheriff. ‘Climb up there, Abel. Haul yourself up there and take a closer look. And don’t touch anything.’
‘I’ll need to push off your hands,’ said the deputy, shoving his flashlight in his pocket. ‘Give me a boost and I’ll go up.’
The sheriff gave Abel Martinson a boost, and he lunged in his polar coat toward the cross spar. He wrapped one arm over it and hung there, the boat rocking, while his other hand fished for the flashlight. ‘Looks like a rust streak ’crost these lashings,’ he said. ‘Like it could be off the handle of a lantern, maybe. Where the handle rubbed against them, maybe.’
‘Anything else?’ said the sheriff.
‘You can see where the lashings been cut,’ observed Abel. ‘Somebody took a knife to ’em. And hey – something else – this stuff on the mast? It looks like it might be blood.’
‘From his hand,’ said Ishmael. ‘He cut his hand. It was in the coroner’s report.’
‘There’s blood on the mast and the spar pole,’ said Abel. ‘Not much, but I think it’s blood.’
‘He cut his hand,’ repeated Ishmael. ‘He cut his hand making room for Kabuo’s battery. Then he got his power back up. Then he climbed up there to take his lantern down because he didn’t need it anymore.’
The deputy slid down and landed hard. ‘What’s with all this?’ he said.
‘Something else,’ said Ishmael. ‘You remember Horace’s testimony? He said Carl had a shuttle of twine in one pocket and an empty knife sheath knotted to his belt. You remember Horace saying so, sheriff? How the knife sheath was empty, unbuckled? A shuttle of twine and an empty knife sheath. I – ’
‘He climbed up to take his lantern down,’ said Abel. ‘That freighter came along and knocked him from the mast. The knife and the lantern went overboard with him – the knife and the lantern were never found, right? – and – ’
‘Pipe down a minute, Abel,’ said Art Moran. ‘I can hardly hear myself think.’ r />
‘He hit his head on something,’ said Abel. ‘The freighter wake hit, the boat rolled over, and then he fell and hit his head on something and slid on out of the boat.’
Ten minutes later, in the port side gunnel just below the mast, they found a small fracture in the wood. Three small hairs were embedded in the crack, and Art Moran carved them free with his pocketknife and tucked them into the sheath in his wallet that also held his driver’s license. They looked at the hairs in a flashlight beam and then they all fell silent. ‘We’ll take these up to Horace,’ decided Art. ‘If they end up to be from Carl Heine’s head, the judge will have to take things from there.’
At ten o’clock Judge Fielding sat down with Alvin Hooks and Nels Gudmundsson. At ten forty-five the jurors were told that they were released from any further duties; the charges against the accused man had been dismissed; new evidence had come to light. The accused man himself was set free immediately and walked out of his cell without leg irons or handcuffs; standing just outside its door, he kissed his wife for a long time. Ishmael Chambers took a photograph of this; he watched their kiss through his viewfinder. Then he went back to his office, turned up the heat, and loaded paper in his typewriter. And he sat staring at it for some time.
Ishmael Chambers tried to imagine the truth of what had happened. He shut his eyes and exerted himself to see everything clearly.
The Susan Marie had gone dead in the water – the bolt shook loose in her alternator pulley bracket – on the night of September 15. In a drowning fog, impatiently drifting – and too proud to just lay hard on the air horn he carried in anticipation of times such as these – Carl Heine must have cursed his misfortune. Then he lit his two railroad lanterns, slipped his twine shuttle into his back pocket, and hauled himself up to the cross spar on the mast, a lantern slung temporarily down his back, his rubber bib overalls slipping. The cotton twine he used for mending net bound the lantern to the mast easily, but Carl put in extra lashings anyway, figure eights laid one over the other, pulled taut and finished crisply. He hung for a moment, his armpit against the spar, and knew that his light was futile against the fog; nevertheless he adjusted the flame higher before clambering down. And he stood in the cockpit listening, perhaps, with the fog closed in around him.