The Ledger

"Somebody's scared of them," Caleb says. "That's good."

He's sitting on the tailgate of his truck in a clearing off the Tote Road, a mile into the woods, turning the note over in his long fingers. In daylight he looks even less like a man who should be living out of a pickup. The morning sun picks out gold in his stubble and silver in the scar. He hasn't slept. You can tell from the bruised look under his eyes.

"Good how?"

"Scared people talk." He hands the note back. "Who in that room looked scared?"

You think about it. "Amias Vanderslice. He left during the toast."

Caleb's face does something complicated and then goes blank. "The son."

"He was nice to me."

"I'm sure he was," Caleb says, very evenly, and hops off the tailgate.

The Ninebark Public Library is a single room above the post office with creaking floors and a radiator that bangs like someone is trapped inside it. You go alone, in uniform, and ask for local history.

"Local history," says the woman behind the desk, "is me."

She's tiny, close to eighty, in a lavender cardigan with bifocals on a chain and white hair cut short as a boy's. Her name tag says VOLUNTEER: EULALIE. Her eyes are bright and black and absolutely missing nothing.

You show her the note.

She reads it twice. She doesn't ask where you got it. She takes off her glasses and lets them drop on their chain, and her hands, you notice, have started to shake.

"My grandson Eino was twenty-four," she says. "Four years ago he told me he'd found out something about the Families and he was going to drive to the state police post in Negaunee in the morning. He went out to the boat launch that night to clear his head. That's what his note said. Clearing my head, Mummu." She swallows. "Reino Hagedorn told me he'd run off to Minneapolis with a girl. Eino didn't know any girls in Minneapolis. Eino didn't know any girls anywhere. He was shy."

"Mrs. Pelletier. I'm so sorry."

"Eulalie." She looks at your name tag, then hard at your face. "You're not one of them, Ava."

"No, ma'am."

"Before he went, Eino said the Families keep a book. Old as the town. He said they keep it where God can watch them write in it." She puts her glasses back on. "There's only one church in Ninebark, Deputy. And only one place in it nobody goes."

Ninebark Lutheran is white clapboard with a squat square bell tower. At midnight the fog is in and the streetlights on Front Street are smeared halos. You park two blocks away. Caleb is already waiting in the churchyard, a black shape among the gravestones.

"You understand this is breaking and entering," you whisper.

"You understand you're holding the crowbar."

The side door has a lock older than both of you. Caleb gets it open in about twelve seconds with something from his pocket, and you decide not to ask.

Inside, the church smells of lemon polish and old hymnals. Your flashlights skate over the pews. Behind the organ, a narrow door, and behind that a ladder bolted to the wall, going up into the dark.

You climb first. Caleb doesn't argue. You like him a little more for that.

The belfry is cramped and freezing, open to the fog on four sides through wooden louvers. The bell hangs above you, black iron, huge. Pigeon feathers on the floor. And in the corner, half under a moth-eaten tarp, an iron strongbox with a padlock.

The padlock is new.

The crowbar takes care of it. The lid groans.

Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, is a ledger.

It's enormous, bound in cracked black leather, the pages thick and yellowed. Caleb holds the flashlight. You open it on your knees.

The first page is written in brown ink in a hand with long, looping capitals.

In the starving winter of 1891, the camp of Ninebark having buried eleven of its own and having no bread, we the undersigned do covenant with the Tenant of the Lake. To it, a name each Hunter's Moon, given into the water with a thing of theirs. To us, the luck of the lake: fish and timber and a full purse, and no more death in winter.

Three signatures. Urho Hagedorn. Gertrude Vanderslice. Hilma Sundquist.

"Hagedorn," you breathe. "Vanderslice. Sundquist."

"Keep going, Ava," Caleb says. His voice sounds strange.

You turn pages. A name every year, in different hands as the decades pass. 1892. 1893. 1894. Drifters. Lumberjacks. A peddler. A schoolteacher. Forty-six years of names, and beside each one, three sets of initials.

Then 1937. Then a line drawn across the page in heavy ink, and beneath it, in a different hand: The dam is built. The old town is under. Let it sleep.

Blank pages. Dozens of them.

And then fresh ink. Blue ballpoint. Nine years ago.

The initials beside it are E.V. A.S. R.H.

Evert. Alma. Reino.

You don't need the flashlight to know how many lines there are. You count them anyway. Your finger is shaking on the page. Nine. Saima Aho. A lodge cook. Eino Pelletier. A woman whose husband said she left in her nightgown.

And at the very top of the new pages, the first name, written by Evert Vanderslice's careful hand nine Octobers ago.

Nola Underhill. Seasonal staff. Silver ring.

The flashlight beam jerks.

You look up. Caleb is standing very still in the cold, the light pointing at the floor now, his face gone white under the stubble. He's staring at the page like it's a wound. The scar through his eyebrow stands out pale as bone. His other hand has gone, without him seeming to know it, to his chest, where you can see the outline of something on a chain under his shirt.

A ring.

"Caleb?"

The fog moves through the louvers. Far out on the lake, so faint you could be imagining it, a bell rings once under the water.

"That's my sister," Caleb says, very quietly. "That's Nola."