Ancient Shores Page 5

  “No way to know,” she said. “It’s hard to say how you’d date this kind of thing. I’m not sure you could.” She was on her feet.

  “Would it wear out?” Max asked.

  “Oh, sure. Everything wears out. Eventually. But this stuff would be pretty tough. And it’d be easy to clean because other elements won’t stick to it.”

  Max thought about the haze with its rainbow effect.

  “Why don’t I go with you?” he said. “I’ll fly you up.”

  A light blue government car pulled into Lasker’s driveway, swung around the gravel loop at the front of the house, navigated past a couple of parked cars, and stopped. A middle-aged, thick-waisted man got out. He slid a worn black briefcase out of the trunk, quickly surveyed the scene, and made for the front door.

  “Jeffrey Armbruster,” he announced when Lasker opened up, “Internal Revenue Service.” He produced credentials so smoothly that they appeared to come out of his sleeve.

  Lasker swallowed. “Is there a problem?” he asked.

  “No, no,” Armbruster said easily. “No problem at all.”

  Lasker stood away from the door, and Armbruster thanked him and came in.

  “Cold day,” said Lasker, although by local standards it wasn’t.

  “Yes. Yes, it is.” Armbruster unbuttoned his coat. “I understand you’ve recently had a piece of good fortune, Mr. Lasker?”

  Tax implications. He had never thought of that. “You mean the boat,” he said.

  “Yes.” Armbruster nodded. Their eyes met briefly. It occurred to Lasker that this was not a man who enjoyed his work. “Yes, that’s right. You’ve begun proceedings to establish your claim.”

  Lasker offered a chair by the coffee table. “That’s true,” he said. “I have.”

  “If that happens, Mr. Lasker, please be aware that the item will be taxable as ordinary income.”

  “How much?”

  “I really can’t say. The first step in the process would be to get an appraisal.” He opened his briefcase. “You should complete these.” He pushed some forms across the table.

  Lasker looked at the documents.

  “No hurry,” said Armbruster. “However, if you do acquire title to the boat, you will be required to make an estimated payment.” He produced a card. “Call me anytime, and I’ll be happy to advise you.”

  Out in the laundry room Ginny started the washer, and the house began to vibrate. “I’m surprised,” said Lasker, “that you were on top of this so quickly. I hadn’t even thought about taxes.”

  “It’s my job, Mr. Lasker.” He closed his case and got up.

  There was a sadness in the man’s manner. Lasker wondered what it was like to have a job that probably involved continual confrontation. “How about some coffee?” he asked.

  Armbruster looked pleased. “Yes,” he said. “If you have it ready. I wouldn’t want to put anyone to any trouble.”

  “It’s no trouble.”

  The tax man followed him into the kitchen, where they were joined by Ginny. She put on a fresh pot and broke out a cherry cheesecake. Armbruster told them how much he admired the house.

  “My father built it,” said Lasker proudly. “I was about twelve.”

  It was spacious, with hardwood floors, a big wraparound porch, and thick carpets that Ginny had bought in St. Paul. The living room had a cathedral ceiling, rare in that harsh climate. They sat for almost an hour, talking about the yacht. Armbruster thought it was no coincidence that it had been found a mile south of the border. “Somebody trying to get away with something,” he said. But he couldn’t explain what they might be trying to get away with.

  Eventually the conversation turned to Armbruster’s job. “People usually get nervous when they find out who my employer is,” he observed. “My wife doesn’t tell anyone who I work for.” He smiled.

  Tax collectors have no friends, thought Lasker. Except other tax collectors.

  “Nobody is as abused as tax collectors,” Armbruster continued. “It’s always been that way. But by God, we are the people who held Rome together. And every other place that was ever worth a damn.”

  With that he looked momentarily embarrassed. Then he thanked them both, swept up his briefcase and coat, made his good-byes, and strode out the door.

  Minutes later Will pulled up out front with Max and April Cannon. Max did the introductions, but the woman had a hard time keeping her eyes off the boat.

  “You wanted to take a look, Dr. Cannon?” said Ginny.

  “Please. And call me April.”

  “What’s going on?” said Lasker. “What did we find out?”

  Max, who enjoyed playing with a mystery as much as anyone, suggested that Ginny give April the tour while he brought Tom up to date. The men went inside and threw another log on the fire.

  The women were gone almost an hour, and they looked half frozen when they came back. Lasker poured a round of brandy.

  “Well, April,” said Max, “what do you think?”

  April sipped her drink. “You really want to know? I don’t see how anyone could have built that yacht.”

  Max listened to the fire and watched April struggle with her thoughts.

  “I know how that sounds,” she said.

  “What exactly do you mean?” asked Max.

  “It’s beyond our technology. But I knew that before I came here.”

  “Our technology?” said Lasker.

  “Way beyond.”

  “So you’re saying, what?” said Max. “That the boat was built in Japan? Or on Mars?”

  “Maybe Mars. Or a pre-Native American super-high-tech civilization in North Dakota.”

  Max glanced at Ginny to see how she was reacting. She looked skeptical but not surprised. They’d had at least part of this conversation outside.

  “That’s crazy,” said Lasker.

  “Crazy or not, nobody alive today could duplicate the materials in that boat.” She finished off her drink. “I don’t believe it, either.”

  “It looks like an ordinary yacht to me,” said Ginny.

  “I know. Maybe if it didn’t look so ordinary—” She shook her head.

  “April,” said Max, “think about it. Do you really believe they’d manufacture sailboats like that on Mars?”

  “The fire feels good.” She dragged her chair closer. A log broke, and sparks flew. “Look,” she said, “it wouldn’t really matter whether you were building it out at Alpha Centauri. There are only a few designs for a practical sailboat. Somebody somewhere built this, and I can guarantee you it wasn’t anyone we’ve ever heard of.”

  The wind sucked at the trees. A couple of automobile engines started. “I wish I could have seen it before you took it out of the ground,” said April. “Before it got washed.”

  “Why?” asked Lasker.

  “We might have been able to make some inferences from the clay. But maybe it won’t matter.” She took a white envelope out of her pocket.

  “From the mooring cables,” Ginny explained to Max and her husband. “We found some splinters.”

  “What good will that do?” asked Max.

  April got a refill of her brandy. “I usually go pretty light on this kind of stuff,” she said. “But today I feel entitled.” She turned to Max. “Each of the cables has a loop at one end and a clip at the other. The clips still work, by the way. I don’t know much about yachts, but this part is simple enough. When you’re tying up, you secure the loop over one of the cleats on the boat. And you tie the other end, the end with the clip, to the pier.”

  “So what does it tell us?” asked Max.

  “We should be able to figure out what it’s been tied to. And maybe that’ll tell us where it’s been.” She put the envelope back and looked at Lasker. “Tom, was the boat upright when you found it?”

  “No,” he said. “It was lying on its starboard side. And angled up.”

  “How much?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe thirty degrees.”

 
; “Okay.” April seemed pleased. “The slope of the ridge is close to thirty degrees.”

  “Which means what?” asked Max.

  “Probably nothing,” she said. “Or maybe that’s where it came to rest.”

  “Came to rest?” Lasker was having trouble following the conversation.

  “Yes,” said April. “When it sank.”

  6

  Where lies the final harbour, whence we unmoor no more?

  —Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  April had almost changed her mind about flying with Max when he showed her the P-38 he intended to use. Although designed as a single-seat fighter, the Lightning could accommodate a second seat behind the pilot. Many of the aircraft purchased by collectors after the war had been modified in this way. White Lightning was among these.

  Now, on the return trip, she was too excited even to think about the plane, and she climbed in without a murmur. Max taxied out onto the runway, talking to Jake Thoraldson, who was Fort Moxie’s airport manager and air traffic controller. Jake worked out of his office.

  “Max?” she said.

  He turned the plane into the wind. “Yes, April?”

  “I’d like to take a look at something. Can we go back over the Lasker farm?”

  “Sure.” Max checked with Jake. No flights were in the area. “What did you want to see?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said.

  When they were in the air, he leveled off at three thousand feet and headed west. The day was beginning to turn gray. He had a strong headwind, and the weather report called for more rain or possibly sleet by late afternoon. Probably rain along the border and snow in the south, if the usual patterns held.

  The fields were bleak and withered. They had been given up to the winter, and their owners had retired either to vacation homes in more hospitable latitudes or to whatever other occupations entertained them during the off-season.

  It was impossible to know precisely where the Lasker property began. “Everything north of the highway for several miles belongs to him,” Max explained. Usually houses were set more or less in the middle of these vast tracts of land. But when Lasker’s father had rebuilt, he’d opted for a site at the southwestern edge of the property, near the highway, and in the shadow of the ridge in which Tom had found the yacht. The idea had been to gain a degree of protection from the icy winds that roared across the prairie.

  Beyond the ridge the land flattened again for several miles and then rose abruptly to form the Pembina Escarpment.

  The escarpment consisted of a spine of hills and promontories and peaks. Unlike the surrounding plain, they were only very lightly cultivated. Their tops were dusted with snow, and they ran together to form a single, irregular wall. There were occasional houses along the crests and narrow dirt roads that tied the houses to one another and to Route 32, which paralleled the chain along its eastern foot.

  “Ten thousand years ago,” April said, “we’d have been flying over water. Lake Agassiz.”

  At her direction, Max banked and followed the chain south. She was looking alternately at the crumpled land and at the valley, which was flat all the way to the horizon.

  “Where was the other side?” asked Max. “The eastern shore?”

  “Out toward Lake of the Woods,” she said. “A long way.”

  Max tried to imagine what the world had been like then. A place of liquid silence, mostly. And Canada geese.

  “It only lasted about a thousand years,” she continued, “scarcely an eyeblink as such things go. But it was here. That’s all lake bottom below us. It’s why Tom can raise the best wheat in the world.”

  “What happened to it?” asked Max.

  “The glaciers that formed it were retreating. They finally reached a point where they unblocked the northern end.” She shrugged. “The water drained away.”

  They were beginning to run into a light drizzle.

  “Some of it is still here,” she continued. “Lake of the Woods is a remnant. And lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba. And a lot of the Minnesota lakes.”

  Max’s imagination filled the prairie with water, submerging Fort Moxie and Noyes in the north, Hallock over on Route 75, and Grand Forks and Thief River Falls and Fargo to the south.

  “You can find all kinds of evidence in the soil if you look. Remains of shellfish, plankton, whatever.” Her eyes were far away. “I suppose it might come back, for that matter. During the next ice age.”

  It suddenly occurred to Max where this was leading. “You think the boat is connected with the lake, don’t you?”

  She was silent.

  April arrived at Colson Laboratories toward the end of the afternoon, in a downpour. She was met at the front doors by a swarm of employees headed out. “Let’s go,” Jack Smith told her, taking her arm and turning her around. “You need a ride?”

  Ride where? It took her a few moments to recall: retirement party for Harvey Keck.

  She liked Harvey, but she didn’t want to go. Her samples were all she cared about at the moment. She could claim she had a rush assignment. Had got behind. Wasn’t feeling well. But she owed a lot to Harvey.

  Damn.

  She locked her samples in the safe, told herself it would be just as well to tackle it in the morning when she was fresh, and went back downstairs to her car. Forty minutes later she pulled into the parking lot at the Goblet.

  Celebrations were encouraged at Colson. When a big contract came in, when someone won a major award, when somebody found a better way to do things, they celebrated. The Goblet was more or less traditional for these kinds of affairs. It was a midpriced family restaurant with a good bar. They called it Colson West, and for each event they hung corporate logos and banners around its Delta Room. On this occasion, a blowup of Keck’s management philosophy, which advocated taking care of the help as well as the customers, was mounted behind the lectern. Also adorning the front of the room were his potted rubber tree and a hat rack on which hung the battered Stetson he’d worn during most of the last three decades.

  Most of the employees were there when April arrived, and a substantial number were already well into the mood.

  She picked up a rum and Coke and sat down with several of her friends. But the routine conversations, detailing struggles with kids, complaints about one or another of the bosses, problems with reports coming back from various subcontractors, seemed extraordinarily dull on this night. She had a major mystery on her hands, and she was anxious to get working on it.

  Everyone liked Harvey. It looked as if the entire work force had turned out for his farewell. He was stepping down as associate director, a post that April had set her sights on. She wasn’t in position yet. The new AD would be a temporary appointment, Bert Coda, who was himself close to retirement. As things now stood, April would have the inside track when Coda retired. The position, if she got it, would mean a salary increase of $25,000; and she would still be young enough to aspire to the top job. Not bad for a kid who had started out washing dishes.

  But tonight she just didn’t care. Compared to what she had in her safe, the directorship was trivial. It was all she could do not to seize the lectern and announce what she had found. Hey, listen up. We’ve been visited. And I’ve got proof!

  When she’d first come to the Dakotas, as an undergraduate at the University of North Dakota, April had attempted a weekend automobile tour that was to include the Black Hills. But western states tend to be a lot bigger than eastern states, and she’d run out of patience with the endless highways. She’d circled back and encountered the Sioux reservation along the south shore of Devil’s Lake. (The north shore was occupied by a prosperous prairie town named for the lake.)

  Subsequently she became interested in the tribe, made some friends, and in time acquired what she liked to think of as a Sioux perspective: I would live where the sky is open, where fences are not, and where the Spirit walks the earth.

  One of the friends was Andrea Hawk, a Devil’s Lake talk show host, who captured for
April the sense of a people bypassed by history. April was saddened by the poverty she saw on the reservation and by Andrea’s frustration. “We live too much on the largesse of the whites,” Andrea had told her. “We have forgotten how to make do for ourselves.” Andrea pointed out that Native-American males die so young, from drugs and disease and violence, that the most prosperous establishment on many reservations is the funeral home.

  April’s own life was hedged in by fences. A marriage had gone sour. She wanted both family and career but had been unable to balance the needs of a husband with the long hours her job required. She was in her mid-thirties now, and she had no sense of satisfaction from all the activity. Accomplishments, yes. But if she died tonight, her life would not have counted for anything. She would leave nothing behind.

  At least, that was how she had felt until running the test on Max Collingwood’s piece of cloth. Curiously, she had been only vaguely aware of her dissatisfaction until the test results came in and she realized what she had in her hand.

  The tributes for Harvey were moving. Several people described how much they had enjoyed working for him, how he had inspired them, why he was a good boss. Two former employees of Colson who had gone on to greater things attributed their success to his inspiration. The first principle of his credo, said one, had carried her through dark days: Do the right thing, regardless of consequences. That was Mary Embry, who had become an operations chief with Dow. “It’s not always a path to promotion,” she said. “But it made me realize that I had to be able to respect myself before others would.” She smiled warmly at Harvey, who looked embarrassed.

  The director added his own praise. “Forty years is a long time,” he said. “Harvey always said what he thought. Sometimes I didn’t want to hear it.” Laughter. “Sometimes I really didn’t want to hear it.” Louder laughter. “But you never ducked, Harv. And I’m grateful for that.” Applause.