Black Water at Marron

Chapter One: Nine Days Left

The shed leaked in three places, and Louise Cavender had learned to work around all of them.

The first drip landed in a five-gallon bucket beside the door with a sound like a slow clock. The second ran down the inside of the north wall and pooled under the workbench, which was why the good tools lived in a plastic bin on a shelf. The third came through directly over the spot where her father had once kept his chair, and she had never moved anything under it, so it fell on bare concrete and made a dark spreading circle that never quite dried between rains.

It was the second week of November on the Keweenaw Peninsula, and rain was not going to be the problem much longer.

She had the compressor's head off and spread out on a bath towel, valves lined up in order, and she was cleaning the second stage of a fill whip when Travis Nagel came in with his hood up and his hands red from the wind.

"Barge survey's done," he said. "I burned the video to two cards. Insurance guy wants stills of the port bilge keel, so I pulled eleven and put them in a folder with his name on it."

"Did you label them?"

"Frame number, depth, timestamp. Same as always." He pulled his hood back. He was seventeen, all elbows, with hair he cut himself and a way of standing that suggested he expected to be told he'd done it wrong. "He's going to pay in thirty days, isn't he."

"He's going to pay in sixty and apologize on day sixty-one."

Travis dropped onto the upturned crate that served as the shed's second chair. "We've got nine days."

"I know how many days we've got."

Nine days until the water turned. That was the number that mattered up here. After the third week of November the lake stopped being weather and started being a decision, and small operators like Louise hauled out, drained everything, and went looking for winter work plowing driveways or wiring garages or, in Travis's case, stocking shelves at the hardware store in town.

Nine days, and two payments behind on the Iron Mary.

The boat was forty-two feet of welded steel with a wheelhouse forward and an open afterdeck, built in 1974 as a fish tug and converted three times since. She had a hydraulic A-frame at the stern, a davit, a dive ladder, a chamber-sized deck locker full of tanks, and a name painted in white letters that Louise touched up every spring with a brush and a steady hand. Iron Mary had been her grandmother's name. The boat had been her father's.

Most of what was aboard had been her father's. The side-scan sonar was ten years old and worked better than machines twice its price because Louise knew every quirk of it. The remotely operated vehicle they called the Bug was a beat-up little thing with two thrusters that had been rebuilt so often that nothing on it was original except the frame. The mixed-gas gear — the regulators, the manifolds, the aluminum stages with their faded tape labels — had come down to her the way a farm comes down to a farmer's kid. So had the reputation.

Half her work was insurance. Sunken pleasure boats, dropped outboards, breakwater damage, dock cribs, an occasional truck that had gone off the end of a ramp in the spring. That half paid, slowly, in paperwork.

The other half was people.

When someone went into the water on this coast and did not come out, the sheriff's department dragged, and the state sent a team when a team was available, and after four days or six days or nine days the families started calling around, and eventually somebody said the name Cavender. Her father had done it for thirty years. Louise had been doing it for eleven. She had brought home a man who went through the ice on Portage Lake in front of his brother. She had brought home a woman whose kayak was found upside down two miles from her car. She had brought home a young father from a hundred and ninety feet of water in an inland lake where no one else would go, and she had sat with his wife on a picnic table for an hour afterward and answered every question honestly, which was the part nobody trained you for.

Recovery work paid almost nothing. Families offered what they had, and she took some of it and forgave the rest, and that had been fine while her father was alive to keep the books, because he had not really kept the books either.

She was good at it. She was better at it than anyone on this shore. And she was seventeen thousand dollars behind on a boat note, sitting in a leaking shed with a compressor in pieces on a towel, doing arithmetic she'd already done four times that week and getting the same answer.

"You want me to check the tow fish cable?" Travis said.

"I want you to go home and do whatever it is you're behind on."

"I'm not behind."

"You're behind on the physics."

"That's due Friday," he said, which meant he was behind on the physics.

He stayed anyway. He always stayed. Travis Nagel had turned up at the shed two summers ago asking whether she needed somebody to solder things, and it had turned out that she did, badly. He had a genius for wire. He could take the Bug's dead umbilical, find the break, splice it, and pot it in epoxy in ninety minutes, and he could reprogram the sonar's topside unit to log in a format that insurance adjusters didn't complain about. He was saving for community college in Marquette — electrical tech, two years, and then a real job with a real union — and he had four thousand two hundred dollars in an account at the credit union, and he told her the balance every time it changed, as if she were a witness he needed.

She paid him what she could and taught him what she could and had made herself two promises about him. She would not let him dive deep. She would not let him get hurt on her boat.

The rain got louder. Down the hill, the harbor lights came on — a string of them along the town dock, and the green flash out at the end of the breakwater, and a mile and a half offshore, the low white wink of Iron Point Light on its slab of rock.

"Truck coming," Travis said.

Louise didn't look up. "Everybody's got a truck."

"Not one like that."

She looked up.

It was a rental. Nobody rented a vehicle to come to Slate Bay in November. It was a gray crossover with mud sprayed up the doors and a barcode sticker in the corner of the windshield, and it came down the gravel at the speed of a person reading numbers off a mailbox, and it stopped in front of the shed with its wipers going.

A woman got out. Fifties, maybe. Short pale hair, a good waxed-cotton coat that had been bought new for this trip, and boots that were about to be ruined. She had a folder under her arm, held against her body the way you hold something you do not want rained on.

She came to the doorway, looked at the bucket catching the drip, stepped around it, and put out her hand.

"Ms. Cavender? My name is Marlene Craddock. I'd like to hire your boat."

Louise wiped her fingers on the rag, and shook the woman's hand, and felt the way the woman's grip closed — brief, dry, businesslike, the grip of somebody who had done a lot of hiring.

"Season's about over," Louise said.

"I know. That's part of why I've come now." Marlene Craddock glanced at Travis, then back. "May I sit down? I've been driving since Green Bay."

Travis got up off the crate without being asked, and the woman sat on it in her good coat, on the wet concrete floor, under the third leak, and set the folder on her knees.

And Louise, who was very tired and nine days from having no income until April, said, "Tell me what you want."